When Will There Be Good News? Read online

  He tried to shift it bodily. It resisted, leaning its stupid weight against his. Shouldn’t it be frightened of him? He would be frightened of him if he were a sheep.

  Next he tried moving its hindquarters, to get some grip and torque, but it was impossible, it might as well have been cemented into the road. A headlock also got him nowhere. He was glad there was no one around to witness this absurd wrestling match. He wondered about the ethics of punching it. He backed off a few steps to rethink his tactics.

  Finally, he tried pushing its front legs from beneath it, but he ended up losing his balance and found himself sprawled on his back on the road. Across the pale winter sky an even paler cloud floated overhead, as white and soft as a little lamb. From his prone position, Jackson watched its progress from one side of the dale to the other. When the cold had not only seeped into his bones but had begun to freeze the marrow inside them, Jackson sighed, and getting to his feet, he saluted his opponent. “You win,” he said to the sheep. He climbed back in the car, turned on the CD player, and put on Enya. When he woke up, there were no sheep anywhere.

  He was definitely off the map now. The sky was leaden, threatening snow. Higher and higher, heading for the top and some mysterious summit. The celestial city. It was a gated road and it was laborious having to get out of the car and open and close the gates each time. He supposed it was a way of corralling the sheep. Were there shepherds still? Jackson’s idea of a shepherd was a rough-bearded man wearing a homemade sheepskin jerkin, seated on a grassy hillside on a starlit night, a ram’s-horn crook in hand as he watched for the wolves creeping on their bellies towards his flock. Jackson surprised himself with how poetically detailed and completely inaccurate his image of a shepherd was. In reality it would be all tractors and hormones and chemical dips. And the wolves were long gone, or, at any rate, the ones in wolves’ clothing were. Jackson was a shepherd, he couldn’t rest until the flock was accounted for, all gathered safely in. It was his calling and his curse. Protect and serve.

  Snow poles at the side of the road measured up to three meters. He cast a wary eye at the sky; he wouldn’t like to get stuck in a drift up here, no one would ever find you. He would have to dig in until spring, fleece a couple of sheep for blankets. No one knew he was here, he hadn’t told anyone he was leaving London. If he was lost, if something happened to him, there was no one who would know where to come and look. If someone he loved was lost, he would stalk the world forever looking for them, but he wasn’t entirely sure that there was anyone who would do the same for him. (“I love you,” she said, but he wasn’t sure how tenacious an emotion that was for her.)

  He passed a fence post that had a bird of prey, a hawk or falcon, perched on top of it like a finial. Jackson was no good at the naming of birds. He knew buzzards, though, there was a pair above him, circling idly in a holding pattern above the moorland, like black paper silhouettes. When thou from hence away art past, every nighte and alle, to Whinny-muir thou com’st at last; and Christe receive thy saule. Jesus, where had that come from? School, that was where. Rote learning, still in fashion when Jackson was a boy. The “Lyke Wake Dirge.” His first year at secondary school, before his life went off the rails. He suddenly saw himself standing in front of the coal fire in their little house, reciting the poem one evening for a test the next day. His sister, Niamh, listening and correcting as if she were catechizing him. He could smell the coal, feel the heat on his legs, bare in the gray woollen shorts of his uniform. From the kitchen came the scents of the peasant food their mother was cooking for tea. Niamh slapped him on his leg with a ruler when he forgot the words. Looking back, he was astonished at the amount of casual brutality in his family (his sister almost as bad as his brother and father), the punches and slaps, the hair tweaking, ear pulling, Chinese burns — a whole vocabulary of violence. It was the nearest they could get to expressing love for one another. Maybe it was something to do with the bad mix of Scots and Irish genes that their parents had brought to the union. Maybe it was lack of money or the harsh life of a mining community. Or maybe they just liked it. Jackson had never hit a woman or a child, he restricted himself entirely to duffing up his own sex.

  If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane, every nighte and alle, the whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane; and Christe receive thy saule.

  A whinny was a thorn, he remembered that. Trust his school to set a dirge for its first-year pupils to learn, for God’s sake. What did that say about the Yorkshire character? And not just a dirge, but the journey of a corpse. A testing. As you sow, so shall you reap. Do as you would be done by. Give away your shoes in this life and you’ll be shod for your hike across the thorny moor in the next life. This ae nighte, this ae nighte, every nighte and alle, fire and fleet and candle lighte, and Christe receive thy saule. Jackson shivered and turned the heater up.

  It seemed he was not alone on the road to nowhere after all. There was someone else ahead, on foot, walking towards him. The sight was so unexpected that for a moment he wondered if it was a kind of mirage brought on by staring for too long at the road, but no, it wasn’t a phantom, it was definitely a human being, a woman, even. He slowed down as he approached her. Not a walker or a tourist, she was dressed in a longish cardigan, blouse and skirt, moccasin-type shoes. Her only concession to the weather was a hand-knitted scarf twined casually round her neck. Fortyish, he guessed, brown-to-gray hair in a bob, something of the librarian about her. Did librarians live up to their cliché? Or were they indulging in uninhibited sex behind every stack and carrel? Jackson had not set foot inside a library for some years now.

  The walking woman had no distinguishing marks. No dog either. Her hands were thrust into her cardigan pockets. She wasn’t walking, she was strolling. From nowhere to nowhere. It felt all wrong. He came to a stop and rolled down the window.

  As the woman neared the car she gave him a smile and a nod. “Can I give you a lift?” he asked. (“Don’t ever take lifts from strangers, not even if you’re lost in the middle of nowhere, not if they say they know your mother, that they have a puppy in the back, that they’re a policeman.”)

  The woman laughed in a pleasant way — no fear or suspicion — and shook her head. “You’re going the wrong way,” she said. Local accent. She gestured with her arm in the direction he had just come from and said, “I’ve not got far to go.”

  “It looks like snow,” Jackson said. Why wasn’t she wearing a coat, did they breed them to be more hardy up here? She contemplated the sky for a moment and then said to him, “Oh, no, I don’t think so. Don’t worry about it,” before giving him a kind of half wave and carrying on with her unseasonable saunter. He could hardly pursue her, either on foot or in the car, she would think he was a psycho. She must be heading for a farmhouse that he had missed. Perhaps it was in a dip, or over the brow of a hill. Or invisible. “As we say in this part of the world,” he said to the Discovery, “there’s nowt so queer as folk.”

  The day was dimming down and he wondered how dark it would be when the winter sun finally gave up the struggle. Country dark, he supposed. He switched on his lights.

  In his rearview mirror, he watched the woman growing smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the gathering dusk. She never looked back. In her shoes, in her librarian moccasins, he would definitely have looked back.

  He was a man on the road, a man trying to get home. It was about the destination, not the journey. Everyone was trying to get home. Everyone, everywhere, all the time.

  It was dark now. He drove on, just a poor wayfaring stranger. Was he progressing from this world to that which was to come? “You’re going the wrong way,” she had said. She had meant he was going the wrong way for her. Hadn’t she? Or was there a message in her words? A sign? Was he going the wrong way? The wrong way for what? The road had to end up somewhere, even if it was where it began. “Don’t,” he said out loud to himself. “Don’t get into that existential crap.” (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of deat
h.)

  Just when he had decided that they were lost forever in the Twilight Zone, they drove over the brow of a hill and he saw the glittering lights of vehicles on the A1 down below, the lost highway, a great gray artery of logic, helping to speed cars from one known destination to another. Alleluia.

  She Would Get the Flowers Herself

  She would drive into town and go to Maxwell’s in Castle Street and get the florist to put something together for her, something elegant. Blue, for the living room — a flat-backed basket arrangement for the fireplace — would he have delphiniums? Was it too late for delphiniums? Of course, it didn’t matter what the season was, florists didn’t get their flowers from gardens, they got them from greenhouses in Holland. And Kenya. They grew flowers in Kenya, where there probably wasn’t enough drinking water for the people who lived there, let alone for irrigating flowers, and then they flew the flowers over in planes that dumped tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It was wrong but she needed flowers.

  Could you need a flower? When they went shopping for her engagement ring in Alistir Tait’s in Rose Street, Patrick said to the jeweler, “This beautiful woman needs a big diamond.” It sounded corny in retrospect, but it had been charming at the time. Sort of. Patrick chose an old diamond in a new setting, and Louise wondered what poor bugger had dug that out of the heart of darkness a long time ago. Blood on her hands.

  Patrick was an orthopedic surgeon and was used to being in charge. “Orthopedics is just hammers and chisels, really, a superior form of joinery,” he joked when he first met her, but he was at the top of his field and could probably have been making a fortune in private practice. Instead he spent his time sticking NHS patients back together with pins. (“That’s where a boyhood playing with a Meccano set gets you.”)

  Louise had never liked doctors, nobody who’d been at university with medical students would ever trust a doctor. (Was Joanna Hunter the exception to the rule?) And how did they choose doctors? They took middle-class kids who were good at science subjects and then spent six years teaching them more science and then they let them loose on people. People weren’t science, people were a mess. “Well, it’s one way of looking at it,” Patrick laughed.

  They had met over an accident, of course. How else did the police meet people? Two years ago, Louise had been on the M8, driving to Glasgow for a meeting with Strathclyde Police, when she saw the crash happen on the opposite carriageway.

  She was first on the scene, arriving before the emergency services, but there was nothing she could do. A sixteen-wheeler had smashed into the back of a little three-door sedan, two baby seats crammed in the back, the mother driving, her teenage sister in the passenger seat. The car had been stationary in a queue at temporary traffic lights at some roadwork. The driver hadn’t seen the signs for the roadwork, hadn’t seen the queue of traffic, and only caught the briefest glimpse of the little three-door sedan before he rammed into it at sixty miles an hour. The truck driver was texting. A classic. Louise arrested him at the scene. She would have liked to kill him at the scene. Or preferably run him over slowly with his own truck. She was beginning to notice that she was more bloodthirsty than she used to be (and that was saying something).

  The car and everyone in it was completely crushed. Because she was the smallest, slimmest person at the scene, Louise (“Can you try, boss?”) had squeezed a hand through what had once been a window, trying to search for pulses, trying to count bodies, find some ID. They hadn’t even known there were babies in the back until Louise’s fingers had brushed against a tiny limp hand. Grown men wept, including the traffic cop who was the family liaison officer, and good old Louise — hard-boiled in vinegar — put an arm round him and said, “Well, Jesus, we’re only human,” and volunteered to be the one to tell the next of kin, which was, without doubt, the worst job in the world. She seemed to be more fainthearted than she used to be. Bloodthirsty yet fainthearted.

  A week later she had attended the funeral. All four of them at once. It had been unbearable but it had to be borne, because that’s what people did, they went on. One foot after another, slogging it out day by day. If her own child died, Louise wouldn’t keep on going, she would take herself out, something nice and neat, nothing messy for the emergency services to deal with afterwards.

  Archie wanted driving lessons for his seventeenth birthday and Patrick said, “Good idea, Archie. If you pass your test, we’ll get you a decent secondhand car.” Louise, meanwhile, was trying to think of ways of preventing Archie from ever sitting in the driving seat of a vehicle. She wondered if it was possible to gain access to the DVLA computer and put some kind of stop on his provisional license. She was a chief inspector, it shouldn’t be beyond her, being police was just the obverse of being criminal, after all.

  The driver of the car in front had been badly injured as well, and it had been Patrick who had spent hours in the operating theater putting the man’s leg back together. The truck driver, who didn’t even have a bruise, was sentenced to three years in jail and was probably out by now. Louise would have removed his organs without anesthetic and given them to more worthy people. Or so she told Patrick afterwards over a nasty cup of coffee in the hospital staff canteen. “Life’s random,” he said. “The best you can do is pick up the pieces.” He wasn’t police but it wasn’t like marrying out. He understood.

  He was Irish, which always helped. A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn’t. But Patrick was all of those things. “Between wives at the moment,” he said and she had laughed. She hadn’t wanted a diamond, big or otherwise, but she’d ended up with one anyway. “You can cash it in when you divorce me,” he said. She liked the way he took over in that authoritative way, didn’t stand for any of her shit yet was always amiable about it, as if she were precious and yet flawed and the flaws could be fixed. Of course, he was a surgeon, he thought everything could be fixed. Flaws could never be fixed. She was the golden bowl, sooner or later the crack would show. And who would pick up the pieces then?

  For the first time in her life she had relinquished control. And what did that do to you? It sent you completely off balance, that’s what it did.

  Or a centerpiece for the dining-room table. Something smallish, something red. For the red figure in the carpet. Not roses. Red roses said the wrong thing. Louise wasn’t sure what they said, but whatever it was, it was wrong.

  “Don’t try so hard,” Patrick laughed.

  But she was no good at this stuff, and if she didn’t try she would fail. “I can’t do relationships,” she said, the first morning they woke up in bed together.

  “Can’t or won’t?” he said.

  He had broken her in as if she were a high-strung, untamed horse. (But what if he had just broken her?) One step at a time, softly, softly, until she was caught. The taming of the shrew. Shrews were small, harmless furry things, they didn’t deserve their bad reputation.

  He knew how to do it. He had been happily married for fifteen years before a carload of teenage joyriders overtaking on a bit of single carriageway on the A9 had smashed head-on into his wife’s Polo ten years ago. Whoever invented the wheel had a lot to answer for. Samantha. Patrick and Samantha. He hadn’t been able to fix her, had he?

  She still had enough time, time to buy the flowers, time to shop at Waitrose in Morningside, time to cook dinner. Sea bass on a bed of Puy lentils, twice-baked Roquefort soufflés to start, a lemon tart to finish. Why make it easy when you could make it as difficult for yourself as possible? She was a woman, so, technically speaking, she could do anything. The Roquefort soufflés were a Delia Smith recipe. The rise and fall of the bourgeoisie. Ha, ha. Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.

  She was buzzing with tiredness, that was what was wrong with her. (Why? Why was she so tired?) In a former life, before her beauty was measured in the size of a diamond, she would have wound down with a (very large) drink, ordered in a pizza, taken out her conta
cts, put her feet up, and watched some rubbish on television, but now here she was, running around like a blue-arsed fly, worrying about delphiniums and cooking Delia recipes. Was there any way back from here?

  “We can cancel,” Patrick said on the phone. “It’s no big deal, you’re tired.” No big deal to him, maybe, huge deal to her. Patrick’s sister and her husband, up from Bournemouth or Eastbourne, somewhere like that. Irish diaspora. They were everywhere, like the Scots.

  “They’ll be happy with cheese on toast, or we’ll get a takeaway,” Patrick said. He was so damned relaxed about everything. And what would they think if she didn’t make an effort? They had missed the wedding, but then everyone missed the wedding. The sister (Bridget) was obviously already put out by the whole wedding thing. “Just the two of us, in a registry office,” Louise said to Patrick, when she finally gave in and said yes.

  “What about Archie?” Patrick said.

  “Does he have to come?”

  “Yes, he’s your son, Louise.” Actually Archie had behaved well, looking after the ring, cheering in a muffled, self-conscious way when Louise said, “I do.” Patrick’s own son, Jamie, didn’t come to the wedding. He was a postgrad on an archaeology dig in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere. He was one of those outdoor types — skiing, surfing, scuba diving — “a real boy,” Patrick said. In contrast to her own boy, her little Pinocchio.

  They had brought in two people from the next wedding to be witnesses and gave them each a good bottle of malt as a thank-you. Louise had worn a dress of raw silk, in what the personal shopper in Harvey Nichols had referred to as “oyster,” although to Louise it just looked gray. But it was pretty without being fussy and it showed off her good legs. Patrick had arranged flowers or she wouldn’t have bothered — an old-fashioned posy of pink roses for her and pink rosebuds for the buttonholes for himself and Archie.