When Will There Be Good News? (22 page)

She gave a little cry, a small wounded animal. This was her home, this was Mum's home, and it was wrecked. Desecrated. It wasn't as if it was much to begin with but it was all Reggie had.

Then a hand gave her a hefty shove and she went sprawling into the shower, pulling down the curtain as she flailed. An unfortunate few frames of Psycho played in her mind. She banged her forehead when she fell and she wanted to cry.

Two men
. Y
oungish, thuggish. One ginger-haired, one a bleached blond, his face pitted with old acne scars like orange peel. She hadn't seen either of them before. The blond one was holding a sawtoothed knife that looked as if it could slice open a shark. Reggie could see a scrap of Mum's pink broderie-anglaise downie cover attached to one
of the
teeth. Her insides melted. She was worried she would wet herself, or worse. I'm not a child, she'd said to the policemen last night but it wasn't true.

She thought of her mother laid out on the side of the pool in her unflattering orange lycra costume. Reggie didn't want to be found dead, sprawled in an undignified heap in the shower in Ms MacDonald's horrible clothes. She didn't even have any underwear on. She could feel the pulse beating uncomfortably hard in her neck. Were they going to kill her? Rape her? Both? Worse? She could think ofworse, it involved the knife and time. She had to do something, say something. She had read that it was important that you talk to an attacker, get him to see you as a person, not just an object. Reggie's mouth was dry as if she'd been eating sandpaper and forming words was a real effort. She wanted to say, 'Don't kill me, I haven't lived yet: but instead she whispered, 'Billy's not here. I haven't seen him for ages. Honestly.'

The men exchanged a puzzled look. Ginger said, 'Who's Billy? We're looking for a guy called Reggie.'

'Never heard of him. Sweartogod.'

*

Unbelievably, the men made to leave. 'We'll be back,' the blond on
e
said. Then the other, carroty one said, 'Got a present for you: an
d
pulled a book from his pocket -unmistakably a Loeb classic -an
d
tossed it to her like a grenade. She didn't even attempt to catch it
,
imagined it exploding in her hands, didn't believe it could onl
y
contain something as harmless as words. She heard Ms MacDonald'
s
voice in her head saying, 'Words are the most powerful weapons w
e
have.' Hardly. Words couldn't save you from a huge express train beari
ng down on you at full speed. (Help!) Couldn't save you from ned
s
bearing gifts. (No thanks.)

'Hasta la vista, baby,' Ginger said and they both left. They were idiots. Idiots with Loeb classics.

She picked up the Loeb, a green one, that had flopped open, face down in the shower tray, like a grounded bird. The first volume of the Iliad. How was that a message? She picked the book up and read the faded pencil inscription on the flyleaf, Moira MacDonald, Girton College, 1971. Funny to think ofMs MacDonald being young. Funny to think of her being dead. Even funnier to think of one of her missing Loebs being in the hands of Billy's enemies.

Trojan horses had surprising insides and so did Ms MacDonald's Iliad. When Reggie opened the pages she found it had been the subject of razor-sharp surgery, its heart cut out in a neat square. A casket for something. A casket and a grave. A perfect hiding place. For what?

Reggie thought they had gone but then the blond one suddenly stuck his head back round the door. Reggie screamed.

'Forgot to say: he said, laughing at the horror on her face. 'Don't go to the police about this wee visit or, guess what?' He made the shape of a gun with his finger and thumb and pointed it at her. Then he left again.

Reggie surprised herself by suddenly vomiting up all her toast into the toilet. It took her a while to stop shivering, she felt as if she was going down with flu but she supposed it was just horror.

She stumbled down the tenement stairs, drenched in cold sweat and her heart hammering. She barged back into Mr Hussain's shop.

'All right?' Mr Hussain asked and she mumbled, 'No, halfleft,' which was a poor joke of Billy's when he was small. He wasn't funny, even then. Should she tell Mr Hussain? What would happen? He would make her a cup of sugary tea in the back of the shop and then he would phone the police and then the men would come back and shoot her with an imaginary gun? Kill her with words? They looked exactly like the types who had real guns. They looked exactly like Billy.

'Got to dash, Mr H. I'm gonna miss my bus.'

If only she had Sadie with her, Reggie thought as she walked as fast as she could to the bus stop. People thought twice about messing with you if you had a big dog by your side. 'It's like the parting of the Red Sea when you're out with Sadie,' Dr Hunter said once, fondling the big dog's ears. 'I always feel safe with her.' Did Dr Hunter need to feel safe? Why? Something to do with her history?

Had they really been looking for her? Made a mistake about her gender (a guy called Reggie)? Why? She had done nothing apart from being Billy's sister. Maybe that was enough. She tried phoning her brother and got a 'the person you are trying to reach is not available' message. She dialled Dr Hunter's number but it rang and rang without answer. Your dead. Without the apostrophe it implied something else, the dead that belonged to Reggie. There were enough of them.

The thing was, when Mr Hunter was speaking to her on the phone Reggie had heard Sadie bark in the background. When she wasn't at work Dr Hunter took Sadie with her everywhere, why would she leave her behind?

'Her aunt's allergic.'

'Aunt Agnes?'

'Yes.'

'Can't Dr Hunter give her something for it? Antihistamine or something? Why isn't she answering her phone, Mr Hunter?' 'Leave Jo alone, Reggie. This is a bad time for her. It's enough the past coming back to haunt her without you hounding her. OK?' 'But-'

'You know what, Reggie?' Mr Hunter said.

'What?'

'Just leave it. I've got a lot on my mind right now.'

'Me too, Mr H. Me too.'

Missing in Actio
n
A LONG TIME AGO, A LONG, LONG TIME AGO, WHEN THE WORLD WAS much younger and so was Jackson, he had his blood group tattooed on his chest, just above his heart. A soldier's trick so that when you are shot or blown up the medics can treat you as quickly as possible. Other guys he was in the army with had extended their skin-ink collections, adding on women and bulldogs and Union Jacks and, yes, indeed, the word 'Mother', but Jackson had never been a fan of the tattooist's art, had even promised his daughter a thousand pounds in cash if she made it to twenty-one without feeling the need to decorate her skin with a butterfly or a dolphin or the Chinese character for 'happiness'. Jackson himself had stuck with the one practical, lower-case message -'Blood Type A Positive', until now no more than a faded blue souvenir of another life. 'A Positive' -a nice common kind of blood shared by roughly 35 per cent of the population. Plenty of donors. And he'd needed them apparently
,
every precious ounce of red blood having been replaced courtesy of a band of blood brothers and sisters who had stopped him being erased from his own life.

'We thought we'd got the artery but you just kept pumping it out. It took a couple of goes,' a cheerful doctor told him. 'Dr Bruce, call me Mike,' he said, sitting on the end ofJackson's bed and grinning at him as if they'd just met in a bar. Call-Me-Mike was too young to be a doctor. Jackson wondered ifthe nurses knew that a boy from the local primary school was loose on the wards.

'Just humour him,' the fuzzy -now less fuzzy -nurse murmured in Jackson's ear. 'He thinks he's a grown-up.'

'Thank you,' Jackson said to him.

'No worries, mate.'

An Australian schoolboy.

The junior registrar, 'Dr Samms -call-me-Charlie,' looked like Harry Potter. Jackson didn't really want to be treated by a doctor who looked like Harry Potter but he wasn't in a position to argue. 'You seem to have taken a bit of a dunt to the head,' wizard-boy said. 'Ever had one before?'

'Maybe,' Jackson said. 'Not a good idea,' wizard-boy said, as if being banged on the head was something you volunteered for.

'Fuzzy,' Jackson said. It was definitely his favourite word. When his daughter was first learning to talk her first word was 'cat'. She used it for everything -ducks, milk, buggy -anything of interest in her life, everything was 'cat'. A one-word world. It made life much simpler, he must phone her and tell her. As soon as he could remember her name. Or, come to that, his own name.

He slept and when he woke again there was another nurse by the side of the bed. 'Who am I?' he asked. He sounded like an amateur philosopher but it wasn't a metaphysical question. Really, who was he?

'Your name's Andrew Decker,' she said.

'Really?' Jackson said. The name rang a tiny, tiny bell somewhere in the dark pit of his abandoned memories, yet he didn't have any relationship with it at all. He didn't feel like an Andrew Decker, but then he didn't really feel like anyone. 'How do you know?'

'Your wallet was in your jacket pocket,' the nurse said. It had a driving licence with your name and address on it
. T
he police are trying to contact someone at the address.'

His ulnar artery had been partially severed, leading to 'profuse and rapid bleeding', the Potter lookalike said. His blood pressure had dropped and he had gone into shock. His brain had been starved of blood, 'Fatigue, shortness of breath, chills?' Australian Mike, the flying doctor, said. He looked as ifhe took more drugs than his patients. 'Nausea, confusion, disorientation, hallucinations? Yeah?'

'I was in a white corridor.'

'Bit of a cliche,' wizard-boy said.

'Don't knock it till you've tried it,' Jackson said.

'You might never remember the accident,' the flying doctor said. 'It was probably never transferred into your long-term memory. But you'll remember just about everything else. After all, you already know you have a daughter.'

Someone had given him first aid, had saved his life at the scene. One more person he would never be able to thank.

A policewoman came and sat by the side of his bed and waited patiently for him to focus on her. Someone had visited the address on his driving licence and the people who lived there had never heard of an 'Andrew Decker'. It was an old driving licence, not a photocard, perhaps he had failed to renew it when he changed address?

Jackson looked at her blankly. 'No idea.' 'Well, early days,' she said cheerfully. 'Someone's bound to come forward and claim you.'

It was strange to be surrounded by the aftermath of a disaster that you had no memory of. He could remember nothing about the train crash, could remember nothing about anything. He was a blank sheet ofpaper, a clock without hands. Now he wished that he hadn't been so sparse with the information that he'd been branded with. Alongside his blood group he should have added his name, rank and number.

'I had my cat chipped,' a nurse said to him, 'it gives me peace of mind.'

'I died,' he said to a new doctor.

'Briefly,' she said dismissively as ifyou had to be dead a lot longer to impress her. Dr Foster, a woman, who didn't seem to want to be on first-name terms.

'But technically .. .' he said, too weak to pursue the argument.

She sighed as ifpatients were always bickering about their dead or alive status. 'Yes. Technically dead,' she conceded. 'Very briefly.'

He'd already been here in another lifetime. How many weeks? 'Eighteen hours actually,' the new doctor said. He'd been to hell and back (or possibly heaven and back) and it had taken less than a day. Quite impressive. When would they let him go home?

'How about when you know where you live?' Dr Foster offered.

'Fair enough,' Jackson said.

He slept. That's what he did. He was the sleeper. He slept for years. When he woke up they told him about the train crash again. A nurse showed him the front page of a newspaper. 'CARNAGE', it said. He couldn't remember what the word meant. Nothing to do with cars, he supposed. He liked cars. He was a man called Andrew Decker who liked cars but who had been travelling on a train, destination unknown. No ticket, no phone, no signs of a life. No one who had noticed that he'd gone and not come back.

Now how long had he been here?

'Twenty hours,' Dr Foster said.

Reggie Chase, Girl Detectiv
e
'[ THOUGHT [ COULD TAKE THE DOG FOR A WALK.'

'The dog?'

'Sadie.'

Mr Hunter sounded hoarse. He hadn't shaved and looked tired. (He's like a bear in the morning.) He smelt
of the
cigarettes that he was supposed to have given up 'ages ago'. The kitchen was already a mess. It seemed he was going to keep her hovering on the doorstep rather than invite her in. Reggie caught sight of a half-empty bottle of whisky on the counter. 'Bachelor's rules apply,' he said. He gave a little laugh, 'When the eat's away the dog will play.' Two empty mugs sat on the big kitchen table, one of them had a smear of lipstick on the rim, pale coral, not Dr Hunter's colour. Did that come under Mr Hunter's bachelor rules too?