When Will There Be Good News? (18 page)

'What aunt?' Reggie puzzled. 'She's never mentioned an aunt.'

'Well, I don't expect Jo tells you everything,' Mr Hunter said.

'So everything's definitely OK with Dr Hunter and the baby?' Reggie said. 'They're not ill or anything?'

'Of course not,' Mr Hunter said. 'Why should they be?'

'When did Dr Hunter leave?'

'She drove down last night.'

'Down?'

'To Yorkshire.'

'Where inYorkshire?'

'Hawes, since you must know every detail.'

'Whores?'

'H-a-w-e-s. Can we stop this catechism now? Tell you what, tak
e
a wee holiday, Reggie
. J
o will be back in a few days. She'll phone you then.' Why hadn't Dr Hunter phoned her, that was the question. Dr Hunter always had her mobile with her, she called it her 'lifeline'. She used it for everything -the house phone 'belonged to Neil', she always said. But then perhaps she had been driving, in too much of a hurry to get to this mysterious aunt to stop and call Reggie. Bu
t
Dr Hunter wasn't the kind ofperson not to call you. It made Reggie feel dismissed, a bit like a servant. When had she left? 'Last night,' Mr Hunter said.

It would have been darkest dark when she drove away. Reggie imagined Dr Hunter ploughing through the night, through the rain, the baby asleep in the car-seat in the back, or awake and noisily distracting Dr Hunter from the road ahead while she scrabbled in the baby-bag for a mini-oatcake to keep him quiet while the Tweenies' Greatest Hits (the baby's favourite) added further to the potential accident scenario. It was funny that Dr Hunter had driven down to Yorkshire while at the same time the train hurtled away from it into disaster, into Reggie's life.

Reggie had an aunt in Australia -her mother's sister, Linda. 'Neve
r
close, Linda and me,' Reggie's mother used to say. When Mum died
,
Reggie had to endure an awkward phone call with Linda. 'Neve
r
close, your mum and me,' Linda echoed. 'But I'm sorry for your loss,'
a
s if it wasn't her loss at all, but Reggie's alone to bear. Before th
e
phone call Reggie had wondered ifLinda would invite her to com
e
over to Australia to live or at least to stay for a holiday (Oh, you poo
r
thing, come here and let me look after you), but clearly this thought ha
d
never even entered Linda's mind (,Well, take care of yourself then
,
Regina.'). The day suddenly stretched emptily ahead. 'It'll be nice for you to have some time off,' Mr Hunter said but it wasn't nice at all, Reggi
e
didn't want time off. She wanted to see Dr Hunter and the baby, she wanted to tell Dr Hunter about what had happened last night -the train crash, Ms MacDonald, the man. Especially the man because, if you thought about it, the fact that the man was alive (if he was still alive) was all down not to Reggie but to Dr Hunter.

All night -or what little was left ofit by the time she got to bed -Reggie had tossed restlessly in the unfamiliar surroundings of Ms MacDonald's back bedroom, going over the events of the last hours and bursting with excitement at the idea of retelling them to Dr Hunter. Well, perhaps excitement was the wrong word, terrible things had happened on that railway track, but Reggie had been involved in them, a witness and a participant. People she knew had died. People she didn't know had died. Drama -that was a better word. And she needed to tell someone about the drama. More specifically she needed to tell Dr Hunter about it because Dr Hunter was the only person she knew who was interested in her life now that Mum had gone.

Dr Hunter would have led her into the kitchen where she would have switched on the coffee machine and made Reggie sit down at the nice big wooden table and when, but only when (Strict house rules, Reggie), they had mugs ofcoffee and a plate ofchocolate biscuits in front of them, Dr Hunter, face bright with anticipation, would have said, 'Right, Reggie, come on then, tell me all about it,' and Reggie would have taken a deep breath and said, 'You know the train crash last night? I was there.'

And now because of some aunt, an aunt who lived in H-a-w-e-s, Reggie had no one to tell. Although, of course, Dr Hunter would have been at work by the time Reggie arrived and there would only have been Mr Hunter (What's your story, Reggie?) who was an unsatisfactory audience at the best of times.

Reggie went downstairs to Ms MacDonald's kitchen, flicked on the kettle and spooned instant coffee into an 'I Believe in Angels' mug. While she waited for the kettle to boil she bundled her disgusting clothes from last night into the washing machine, after which she found half a stale sliced white loaf in the breadbin, made a Jenga tower of toast and jam from it and turned on the television in time to catch the seven o'clock headlines on GMTV.

'Fifteen people dead, four critical, many severely injured,' the newsreader said with her best serious face on. She handed over to a reporter who was 'live at the scene'. The man, who was in a trench coat and was clutching a microphone, was trying to look as ifhe wasn't freezing cold, as if he hadn't raced through the night like a ghoul to get to Scotland, high on adrenalin at the idea of a disaster. 'As dawn begins to break here you can see that behind me there is a scene ofutter devastation,' he intoned solemnly. Across the bottom of the screen it said'Musselburgh Train Crash'.

In the arc-lit background, people in fluorescent yellow jackets moved around the wreckage. 'The first of the heavy lifting gear is beginning to arrive,' the reporter said, 'as the investigation into the causes of this tragic accident begins.' The noises of engines revving and machinery clanking were the same sounds that Reggie could hear from Ms MacDonald's living room. If she had stood on tiptoe at the bedroom window she could probably have seen the reporter.

After Mum died a journalist had come round to the flat. She had been a lot more dowdy and a lot less perky than any of the reporters that you saw on TV. She had brought a photographer with her, 'Dave,' the woman said, indicating a man lurking in the stairwell as if waiting for a cue to come up on stage. He gave Reggie a sheepish little wave as if even he, battle-hardened veteran of a hundred local tragedies of one kind or another, could understand why a girl who had just lost her mother might not want to be photographed at eight in the morning with her eyes red-raw from weeping. 'Fuck off,' Reggie said and shut the front door in the reporter's face. Mum would have been horrified at her language. She was pretty horrified herself.

The reporter wrote the piece anyway. 'Local woman in holiday swimming-pool tragedy. Daughter too upset to comment'.

Banjo, lying on the sofa next to her like a deflated cushion, whimpered in his sleep, his paws moving as if he was chasing drea
m
rabbits. He hadn't wanted to wake up last night, hadn't shown an
y
interest in anything, so Reggie had put him on the sofa, covered hi
m
up with a blanket and -because she could hardly leave him all alon
e
-had herself slept in Ms MacDonald's inhospitable guest roo
m
between brushed nylon sheets, beneath a thin, slightly dam
p
eiderdown.

At home, Reggie now slept in Mum's double bed, pillowed an
d
downy, made up with the pink broderie-anglaise sheets Mum ha
d
liked best and exorcized of all trace of Gary's sweaty, hairy biker'
s
body. Before Spain, Reggie had lain in bed on the other side of th
e
wall, three pillows over her head, trying not to hear the (barely) muff
led laughs and creaks coming from Mum's room. It had bee
n
incredibly embarrassing. No mother should subject her teenag
e
daughter to that.

It was nice when she was lying in Mum's bed in the dark to have the comfort of a streetlamp outside, like a big orange nightlight. It was only the bed that Reggie had taken over the occupation of, on account
of her
own bedroom being a windowless boxroom. The rest of the room was still Mum's, her clothes in the wardrobe, her cosmetics on the dressing table, her slippers beneath the bed, waiting patiently for her feet. Miracle by Danielle Steel was still on the bedside table, the corner of turned down where Mum had left off to go to Spain. Reggie couldn't move it from its final resting place. Mum hadn't taken any books with her on holiday. 'I don't suppose I'll have time for reading,' she giggled.

Mary, Trish and Jean had given up trying to persuade Reggie to give Mum's stuff to charity -they had offered to box everything up and 'get rid of it' -but Reggie went into charity shops herself and imagined herself raking through the second-hand paperbacks and bits of old-lady china and finding one of Mum's skirts or a pair of her shoes. Even worse -a complete stranger pawing Mum's stuff. We go and leave nothing behind, Dr Hunter said but that wasn't true, Mum had left a lot.

Banjo suddenly made an odd grunting noise that Reggie had never heard before. The phone number for the vet, written in black felt tip, was taped to the wall beside the phone. Reggie hoped she wouldn't be the one who would have to call it. She stroked the dog's head absent-mindedly while she finished her toast. She was still ravenous as ifshe'd skipped several meals. It felt like a whole lifetime since she had sat at the dining table with Ms MacDonald, eating her 'speciality' spaghetti. Reggie's stomach did a funny flip at the thought of Ms MacDonald. She was never going to sit at that table again, never eat spaghetti, never eat anything at all. She had had her last supper.

The man live at the scene was still speaking. 'Reports vary as to what actually happened here last night and the police have so far neither confirmed nor denied that at the time of the accident there was a vehicle on the track a few hundred yards from here.' A picture flashed on the screen of a bridge over the railway line. A car had obviously driven off the road and knocked down the wall of the bridge and fallen on to the track below.

The reporter didn't add that the vehicle was a blue Citroen Saxo or that it contained Ms MacDonald, very dead at the scene. These facts hadn't been made public yet, only Reggie knew because the police had come to Ms MacDonald's house last night, after Reggie had got back from the train crash, and asked her lots of questions about 'the occupant of the house' -where was she and what time was Reggie expecting her back? There were two uniformed policemen, one florid and middle-aged (,Sergeant Bob Wiseman'), the other Asian, small and handsome and young and apparently nameless.

For some reason they had their wires crossed and thought Reggie was Ms MacDonald's daughter. ('Has your mother left you alone in the house?') The handsome young Asian PC made her a cup of tea and handed it to her nervously as if he wasn't sure what she would do with it. She was starving then as well and had thought about the Tunnock's Caramel Wafer that she should have been eating with Ms MacDonald at that moment. She supposed it wasn't appropriate to suggest biscuits when the older policeman had just said to her, 'I'm really sorry but I'm afraid we think your mother may be dead.'

For a moment Reggie was confused, Mum had been dead for over a year so it seemed a little late to be telling her about it now. Her brain was fudge. She had come in from the train crash, soaked to the skin and covered in mud and filth and blood. The man's blood. She had stripped off and endured an eternity beneath Ms MacDonald's lukewarm shower before putting on her lavender fleece dressing gown which smelt slightly unpleasant and had stains where Ms MacDonald's night-time Horlicks had dribbled down the front. There had still been sirens wailing outside and the sound of helicopters put-puttering in the sky.

They had taken the man away in a helicopter. Reggie had watched it lift offfrom a field on the other side of the track. 'You did well,' the paramedic said to her. 'You gave him a chance.'

'She's not my mother,' Reggie said to the older policeman.

'Where is your mother, hen?' he asked, looking concerned.

'I'm sixteen,' Reggie said. 'I'm not a child, I just look young for my age. I can't help it.' Both policemen studied her doubtfully, even the handsome Asian one who looked like a sixth-former. 'I can show you my ID, if you want. And my mother's dead already,' Reggie said. 'Everybody's dead.'

'Not everybody,' the Asian guy said, as if he was correcting misinformation rather than being kind. Reggie frowned at him. She wished she wasn't wearing Ms MacDonald's grotty dressing gown. She didn't want him to think she dressed like that out of choice.

'We're not releasing these details to the press yet,' the middle-aged policeman said. He looked familiar, Reggie had a feeling he had once come to the flat looking for Billy.

'Right,' Reggie said, trying to concentrate on what he was saying. She was so tired, down to the bone.

'We're not quite sure what happened,' he said. 'We think Mrs MacDonald must have driven off the road and fallen down on to the track somehow. You don't know if she had been feeling at all depressed lately?'

'Mzzz MacDonald,' Reggie corrected him on Ms MacDonald's behalf. 'You think she killed herself?' Reggie was prepared to give this idea consideration -Ms MacDonald was dying after all and might have decided to go quickly rather than slowly -until she remembered Banjo. She would never leave the dog on his own. IfMs MacDonald were going to commit suicide by driving off a bridge and landing in front of an express train she would have taken Banjo with her, sitting up in the front of the Saxo like a mascot.