When Will There Be Good News? (13 page)

*

Reggie did the washing-up and cleaned the worst bits of the kitchen. The sink was disgusting, decaying food in the trap, old teabags, a filthy cloth.

Noone seemed to have told Ms MacDonald that cleanliness was next to godliness. Reggie poured neat bleach into the tea-stained mugs and left them to soak. Ms MacDonald had mugs that said things like 'It's All About Jesus' and 'God Is Watching You' which Reggie thought was unlikely, you would think he would have something better to do. Mum had a Charles and Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself. Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. 'Gone,' she said, shaking her head in disbelief. 'Just like that. All that exercise for nothing.' Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion. If Reggie had to choose a religion she would go for Diana too, the real one -Artemis, pale moon goddess of the chase and chastity. Another powerful virgin. Or flashing-eyed Athene, wise and heroic, a warrior virgin.

You would have thought that with her background in the Classics, Ms MacDonald would have chosen from a more interesting pantheon -Zeus throwing bolts oflightning like javelins or Phoebus Apollo driving his fiery horses across the heavens. Or, given her mushrooming tumour, Hygeia, goddess of health, and Asklepios, god of healing.

Reggie separated the rubbish into the red, blue and brown bins. Ms MacDonald didn't recycle anything, she was possibly the least green person on the planet. There was no point in preserving the earth, Ms MacDonald explained in a kindly tone, because the Last Judgement couldn't occur until every last thing on the planet had been destroyed, every tree, every flower, every river. Every last eagle and owl and panda, the sheep in the fields, the leaves on the trees, the rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Everything. And Ms MacDonald was looking forward to that. ('It's a funny old world,' Mum would have said.)

Reggie was definitely going to start up her own religion, one where things were cared for, not destroyed, one where the dead were reborn -and not in a symbolic way either -without everything els
e
having to die. Then her mother would be back on the sofa, watchi
ng Desperate Housewives and working her way through a packet o
f
tortilla chips. No Gary sitting there pawing her though, just Mu
m
and Reggie. Together for ever.

It had been just Mum and her for so long, well Billy too, but Bill
y
wasn't the kind of person who sat around and ate and chatted an
d
watched TV Gust what he did do was hard to say) and then the ManWho-Came-Before-Gary came along who turned out to be 'a tota
l
arse', according to Mum (not to mention married) and then the 'rea
l
deal' came along in the form of Gary and Mum started saying 'm
y
boyfriend this' and 'my boyfriend that' and suddenly she was havin
g
sex and all her friends wanted to come round and talk about it. He
r
mother preening and giggling, 'Three times in one nightl' an
d
her friends shrieking with excitement and spilling their wine.

Unlike the Man-Who-Came-Before-Him, Gary wasn't evil, he was just a big lump who, until he met Mum (after he met Mum as well actually), spent his time sitting around all day in his greasy denims at the back of the bike shop with a load of Gary clones talking about the Harley-Davidson 883L Sportster he was going to buy when he won the lottery. He courted Mum with cheap hothouse roses from the Shell Shop and boxes of Celebrations and when Reggie protested at this cliched attitude to romance her mother said 'You won't hear me complaining, Reggie,' fingering the thin silve; chain of the heart-shaped locket he had bought her for her birthday.

Gary was going to take her to Spain for two weeks ('Lloret de Mar -how nice does that sound, Reggie?'). Reggie's mother hadn't been on a 'proper grown-up' holiday since she went to Fuerteventura in 1989 so he could have taken her to Budin's in Skegness and she would have been impressed. Mum had taken Reggie and Billy to S~arborough for a week once but it was rather spoiled when Billy dIsappeared from their Band B one night and was brought back by a policeman the next morning after being found wandering along t~e Prom smashed out of his mind on lager. He was twelve at th
e
tIme.

*

Reggie received a postcard a week into the fortnight so her mother must have written it not long after she'd arrived. It was a photograph of the hotel, a white concrete building that looked as if it had been constructed out of badly stacked blocks, the rooms all at odd angles to each other. At the rectangular heart ofit was the swimming pool, turquoise and empty, bordered by neatly arranged white plastic recliners. There were no people at all in the photograph so it was probably taken very early in the morning, everything as yet unsullied by wet towels and sun cream and half-eaten plates of chips.

On the back, Mum had written, 'Dear Reggie, Hotel very nice and clean, food plentiful, our waiter is called Manuel, like in that John Cleese thingy! Drinking a lot of sangria. Naughty, naughty! Already made friends with a couple called Carl and Sue from Warrington who are a good laugh. Missing you loads. Back soon, love, Mum xxx' Gary had added his name at the bottom in the big round hand ofsomeone still not convinced by the concept ofjoinedup writing. Sangria came from the same Latin root as 'blood'. Blood-red wine. There was a poem they had done in school about a Scottish king drinking blood-red wine but Reggie couldn't remember more than that. She wondered if eventually she would forget everything she'd learned. That was death, she supposed. Reggie wondered if her life would get back on track before she died. It seemed unlikely, every day it felt as if she was being left further behind.

Reggie was working on her own translation for Ms MacDonald ofBook Six of the Iliad, one of her Greek set texts. She thought she might sneak a peek at the relevant Loeb to check what she had so far (,Nestor then called to the Argives, shouting aloud, "Brave friends and Greeks, servants of Ares, let no one now stay behind." '). She wasn't supposed to refer to the Loebs, of course, that was cheating, according to Ms MacDonald. 'Helping,' Reggie would have said.

Volume One of the Iliad had definitely been there last week but when she came to look for it now there was no sign of it. She noticed other gap-tooths in the bookshelf -the first and second volumes of the Odyssey and the second volume of the Iliad, the first of the Aeneid (one of her Latin set texts). Ms MacDonald had probably hidden them. She carried on laboriously, ' "Let us kill men. Afterwards at your leisure you shall strip the bodies of the dead.'" There were an awful lot of the dead in Homer.

After her mother died Reggie always kept the postcard from Spain close, in her bag or at her bedside. She had studied every detail ofit as if it might contain a secret, a hidden clue. Her mother had died right there in the empty space of turquoise water, and, although Reggie had seen her in the undertaker's after she was shipped home, a tiny part of her believed that her mother was still inhabiting that bright postcard world and ifshe scrutinized the picture long enough she might catch a glimpse of her.

Mum had woken up before any other guests were about, she was always an early riser, and, leaving Gary snoring off the previous night's sangria, she had put on her unsuitable swimming costume beneath her pink towelling dressing gown and made her way down to the pool. The pink towelling dressing gown had been dropped where she stood poised at the edge of the deep end. Mum was never one for neatly folding clothes. Reggie imagined her raising her arms above her head -she was a good swimmer and a surprisingly graceful diver -and then plunging into the cool blue ofoblivion, her hair streaming after her like a mermaid. U11e, Mater.

Afterwards, at the inquest in Spain that neither Billy nor Reggie attended, the police reported that they had found her cheap silver Valentine's locket at the bottom of the pool (,Bit of a dodgy clasp,' Gary admitted guiltily to Reggie) and speculated that it had come offwhile she was swimming and that she had dived down to retrieve it. No one could know for sure, no one was there to witness what happened. If only it had been the morning that the postcard photographer was taking his shots of the hotel. Perched high in his eyrie, possibly on the roof
of the
hotel, he would have watched Mum slicing down through the blue water, contemplated putting her into a photograph -prohably decided against it given the orange lycra and the pale plumpness of Mum's northern skin -and then alerted someone (,Holaf') when she didn't come back again. But that wasn't how it happened. By the time someone noticed that her beautifu
l
long hair was trapped in a drain down in the turquoise depths it was too late.

It was a waiter who spotted her, setting up tables for breakfast. Reggie wondered if it was the 'Manuel' of the postcard. He had dived in, in his waiter's uniform, tried and failed to pull the English mermaid free. Then he had climbed out of the pool and run to the kitchens where he grabbed the nearest knife, dashed back to the pool, dived into the water again and sawed through Mum's hair to finally liberate her from her underwater prison. He attempted to revive her -at the inquest he was commended for his attempts to save the poor unfortunate tourist -but of course to no avail. She was gone. No one was to blame, it had been a tragic accident. Etcetera.

'Which it was, after all, Reg,' Gary said. He had attended the inquest and came to see Reggie on his return from Spain, appearing unannounced on the doorstep, a six-pack of Carlsbergs in his hand, 'to toast a wonderful woman'. He had slept through everything. By the time he was woken, bleary and hungover, by 'Carl and Sue from Warrington' hammering on his door, it was all over. He was, he said to Reggie, 'all choked up' about what had happened.

'Yeah,' Reggie said. 'Me too.'

The Spanish police returned the heart-shaped locket to Gary who kept it 'as a souvenir'. No mention was made at the inquest of what had happened to the thick lock of Mum's hair left down in the pool. Or indeed the knife that had cut through it. Did it go in the dishwasher, was it back chopping vegetables for a paella by the time the day was out? Reggie would have liked to have Mum's hair as a memento. She would have slept with it beneath her pillow. She would have held on to it the way the baby held on to Dr Hunter's hair, like he held on to his green blanket. It would have been Reggie's talisman.

'Aye, it just goes to show,' Gary said, turning philosophical after the third Carlsberg. 'You never know what's waiting around the corner.' Reggie sat out this visit of condolence, the nearest thing her mother would have to a wake. She had been to a wake, with Mum, a proper Irish one held by their neighbours, the Caldwells, a couple of years ago when old man Caldwell had died. It had been a cheerful affai
r
with a lot of singing, some of it very bad, and endless bottles o
f
Bushmills produced by the many and various mourners so that Mu
m
had to be carried home by a big Caldwell boy who told everyon
e
next day how Mum had tried to get him to climb into bed with he
r
before throwing up all over him. Still, as Mum said later, it had bee
n
a good send-off for the old man.

Gary left after the fourth Carlsberg and Reggie didn't see hi
m
again until a few weeks later when she ran into him in the superm
arket, where he was browsing the tinned soup aisle in the compan
y
of a woman with too much henna in her hair. Reggie waited to se
e
if he would recognize her but he didn't even notice her, his brai
n
already stretched to breaking point from making the choice betwee
n
Heinz Big Soup BeefBroth and Batchelor's Cream ofTomato. It wa
s
the same supermarket Mum used to work in and it seeme
d
disrespectful to be in it with another woman. Almost like infidelity.

The postcard had arrived through the letterbox at virtually the exact moment (taking into account the time difference between Britain and Spain) that Mum was leaving the planet. Reggie thought about Laika the poor spacedog rocketing into the sky and looking down on earth with eyes as dead as stars. Reggie had thought she might still be up there but no, Dr Hunter said, she fell back to earth after a few months and burned up in the atmosphere. Lassie, com
e
home.

Usually, round about this time of the evening Banjo would sit by the back door and start to whine and Reggie would say to him, 'Come on then, poor wee scone, time for your constitutional,' and Banjo would waddle unsteadily along the street to his favourite gatepost where he would awkwardly lift an arthritic leg. He could just about make it to the gatepost but usually had to be carried back. Reggie was always surprised when she lifted him up in her arms how little he weighed compared to the baby.

Ms MacDonald lived in a housing estate that almost backed on to the East Coast main line. The whole house shook every time an express train hurtled past. Ms MacDonald was so used to trains that she didn't even hear the regular earthquakes they caused, at least not if the trains were running to timetable. Occasionally, over tea, Ms MacDonald would suddenly cock an ear, in much the same way that Banjo used to before he lost his hearing, and say something like, 'That can't be the six-twenty Aberdeen to King's Cross, can it?'