When Will There Be Good News? (3 page)

Reggie wouldn't have employed herself. Sixteen and no experience of children, even though she had great character references from Mr Hussain and Ms MacDonald and a letter from Mum's friend Trish saying how good she was with children, based on the fact that in exchange for her tea she had spent a whole year of Monday evenings with Grant, Trish's eldest muppet of a son, trying to coax him through his Maths Standard Grade exam (a hopeless case if ever there was one).

Reggie had never actually had a close encounter with a one-yearold child before, or indeed any small children, but what was there to know? They were small, they were helpless, they were confused and Reggie could easily identify with all of that. And it wasn't that long since she had been a child herself although she had an 'old soul', a fortune teller had told her. Body of a child, mind of an old woman.

Old before her time. Not that she believed in fortune tellers. The one who told her about her old soul lived in a new brick house with a view of the Pentlands and was called Sandra. Reggie had encountered her on a hen night for one of Mum's friends who was about to embark on another disastrous marriage and Reggie had tagged along as usual, like a mascot. That was what happened when you had no friends of your own, your social life consisted of outings to fortune tellers, bingo halls, Daniel O'Donnell concerts ('Pass the Revels along to Reggie'). No wonder she had an old soul. Even now that Mum was gone, her friends still phoned her up and said, 'We're going over to Glasgow for a shopping trip, Reggie, want to come with us?' or 'Fancy seeing Blood Brothers at the Playhouse?' No and no. Our revels now are ended. Ha.

There had been nothing unearthly about fortune-telling Sandra. A plump legal secretary in her fifties, she wore a rose-pink cardigan with a shawl collar pinned by a coral cameo brooch. In her bathroom all the toiletries were Crabtree and Evelyn's Gardenia, lined up a precise inch from the edge of the shelves as if they were still on display in the shop.

'Your life is about to change,' Sandra said to Mum. She wasn't wrong. Even now, Reggie thought that she could sometimes catch the sickly sweet smell of gardenias.

Dr Hunter was English but had trained to be a doctor in Edinburgh and had never gone back south of the border. She was a GP in a practice in Liberton and had a morning surgery at half past eight so Mr Hunter did 'the early shift' with the baby. Reggie took over from him at ten 0'clock and stayed until Dr Hunter came home at two (although it was usually nearer to three, 'Part-time but it feels like full-time,' Dr Hunter sighed) and then Reggie stayed on until five o'clock, which was the time of the day that she liked best because then she got to be with Dr Hunter herself.

The Hunters had a 40-inch HD television on which she watched Balamory DVDs with the baby, although he always fell asleep as soon as the theme tune began, snuggled into Reggie on the sofa, like a little monkey. She was surprised Dr Hunter let the baby watch television but Dr Hunter said, 'Oh, heavens, why not? Now and again, what's the harm?' Reggie thought that there was nothing nicer than having a baby fall asleep on you, except perhaps a puppy or a kitten. She'd had a puppy once but her brother threw it out of the window. 'I don't think he meant to,' Mum said but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing you did accidentally and Mum knew that. And Reggie knew that Mum knew that. Mum used to say, 'Billy may be trouble, but he's our trouble. Blood's thicker than water.' It was a lot stickier too. The day the puppy went flying through the window was the second worst day of Reggie's life so far. Hearing about Mum was the worst. Obviously.

Dr and Mr Hunter lived on the really nice side ofEdinburgh, with a view of Blackford Hill, quite a distance in every way from the third-floor shoebox in Gorgie where Reggie lived on her own now that Mum was gone. Two bus journeys away in fact, but Reggie didn't mind. She always sat on the top deck and looked into other people's houses and wondered what it was like to live in them
. T
here was the added bonus now of spotting the first Christmas trees in windows. (Dr Hunter always said that simple pleasures were the best and she was right.) She could get quite a lot ofschool work done as well. She wasn't at school any more but she was still following the curriculum. English Literature, Ancient Greek, Ancient History, Latin. Anything that was dead really. Sometimes she imagined Mum speaking Latin (Salve, Regina), which was unlikely, to say the least.

Of course, not having a computer meant that Reggie had to spend a lot of time in the public library and in internet cafes but that was OK because a person didn't have to listen to someone saying, 'Regina rhymes with vagina,' to them in an internet cafe, unlike the horrible posh school she went to. Until it breathed its last gasp, Ms MacDonald used to have an ancient dinosaur of a Hewlett-Packard that she let Reggie use. It had been bought at the beginning of time Windows 98 and AOL dial-up -and meant that getting on the internet was a grim exercise in patience.

Reggie herself had briefly been in possession of a MacBook which Billy had turned up with last Christmas. No way had he actually gone into a shop and bought it, the concept of retail was foreign to Billy. She had made him spend Christmas with her ('our first Christmas without Mum'). She cooked a turkey and everything, even flamed the pudding with brandy, but Billy only made it to the Queen's speech before he had 'to go and do something' and Reggie said, 'What? What could you possibly need to do on Christmas Day?' and he shrugged and said, 'This and that.' Reggie spent the rest
of the
day with Mr Hussain and his family, who were having a surprisingly Victorian Christmas. A month later Billy came to the flat when Reggie wasn't there and took the MacBook away because he obviously didn't understand the concept of gifts either.

And, let's face it, libraries and internet cafes were better than Reggie's empty flat. 'Ah, a clean, well-lighted place,' Ms MacDonald said. Which was a Hemingway story that Ms MacDonald had made Reggie read ('A seminal text,' she buzzed) even though Hemingway wasn't on the A Level syllabus so wouldn't she, Reggie protested, be better off reading something that was? 'Mzzz MacDonald,' she always insisted, so that she sounded like an angry wasp (which was a pretty good definition of her character).

Ms MacDonald was very keen on 'reading round the subject' ('Do you want an education or not?'). In fact most of the time she seemed keener on the reading-round bit than she did on the subject itself. Ms MacDonald's idea of reading round the subject was more a case of catching a plane and seeing how far you could get away from it. Life was too short, Reggie would have protested, except that probably wasn't a good argument to use with a dying woman. Reggie had chosen Great Expectations and Mrs Dalloway as prescribed texts and felt she had quite enough to do with reading round the subject of Dickens and Virginia Woolf (i
. E
. their entire 'oeuvre' as Ms MacDonald insisted on calling it), including letters, diaries and biographies, without being distracted on to the side road of Hemingway's stories. But resistance was futile.

Ms MacDonald had lent Reggie nearly all of Dickens's novels and the rest she had bought in charity shops. Reggie liked Dickens, his books were full of plucky abandoned orphans struggling to make their way in the world. Reggie knew that journey only too well. She was doing Tivelfth N(!!
. H
t too. Reggie andViola, orphans
of the
storm.

Ms MacDonald used to be a Classics teacher, used to be Reggie's Classics teacher, in fact, at the horrible posh school she once went to, and was now attempting to guide Reggie through her A Levels. Ms MacDonald's qualification for tutoring Reggie in English Literature was based on the fact that Ms MacDonald claimed to have read every book that had ever been written. Reggie didn't dispute the claim, the evidence was all over Ms MacDonald's criminally untidy house. She could have started up a branch library (or a spectacular house fire) with the amount of books she had piled around the place. She was also in possession of every single Loeb Classic that had ever been published, red for Latin, green for Greek, hundreds
of the
m crammed into her bookcase. Odes and epodes, eclogues and epigrams. Everything.

Reggie wondered what would happen to all the lovely Loebs when Ms MacDonald died. She supposed it wasn't very polite to put in a request for them.

The tutoring wasn't exactly free because in exchange Reggie was always running messages for Ms MacDonald, picking up her prescriptions and buying tights from British Home Stores, hand cream from Boots, 'and those little pork pies they have in Marks and Spencer'. She was very specific about which shops you bought things in. Reggie thought that a person at death's door shouldn't really be too fussy about where her pork pies came from. With a little effort, Ms MacDonald could probably have got these things herself as she was still using her car, a blue Saxo that she drove in the wayan excitable and short-sighted chimpanzee might have done, accelerating when she should be braking, braking when she should be accelerating, going slow in a fast lane, fast in the slow lane, more like someone on an amusement arcade simulator than a real road.

Reggie didn't go to the horrible posh school any more because it made her feel like a mouse in a house of cats. Extras, vacations, and diet unparalleled. She had won a scholarship when she was twelve but it wasn't the kind of school where a person arrived halfway through from another planet with nothing but their brains to recommend them. A person who never seemed to be wearing the right bits of uniform, who never had the proper sports kit (who was rubbish at sports anyway, right kit or not), who never understood the secre
t
language and hierarchies of the school. Not to mention a perso
n
who had an older brother who sometimes hung around the schoo
l
gates ogling all the girls with their good haircuts and nice families.

Reggie knew that Billy was dealing to some of the boys (nic
e
families, good haircuts, etcetera), boys who, although destined t
o
follow the genetic code spiralled into their veins and become lawyer
s
in the Edinburgh courts, were, nonetheless, scoring recreationa
l
drugs off Reggie Chase's runty brother. He was their contemporar
y
in years but in every other way he was different.

You could have bought two really good cars a year for the pric
e
of the fees, her scholarship only covered a quarter of that, the arm
y
paid the rest. 'Delayed guilt,' Mum said. Unfortunately there wa
s
nobody to cover all the extras, those bits of uniform she was alway
s
missing, the books, the school trips, the good haircuts. Reggie's fathe
r
was a soldier in the Royal Scots but Reggie never got to know him.

Her mother was six months pregnant with Reggie when he wa
s
killed during the GulfWar, shot by 'friendly fire'. Most people wer
e
out of the womb before they first encountered irony, Reggie said t
o
Ms MacDonald.

'Consigned to history,' Ms MacDonald said.

'Well, we all are, Ms Mac.'

Both Mum and Reggie always had jobs on the go. As well as working in the supermarket Mum did ironing for a couple of Band Bs and Reggie worked in Mr Hussain's shop on Sunday mornings. Even before she left school Reggie had always worked, paper rounds and Saturday jobs and the like. She squirrelled away money in her building society, budgeting down to the last penny for the rent and bills, her Pay-As-You-Go mobile and her Topshop card. 'Your attempts at domestic economy are creditable,' Ms MacDonald said. 'A woman should know how to manage money.'

Mum was from Blairgowrie and when she left school her first job had
. B
een in a chicken factory, keeping an eye on a continually movl
. N
g line of goose-pimpled carcases as they were dipped in scaldmg water. This had set a standard for Mum, ever afterwards, whatever she did, she said, 'It's not as bad as the chicken factory.' Reggie reckoned the chicken factory must have been pretty bad because Mum had had some rubbish jobs in her time. Mum loved meat -bacon sandwiches, mince and tatties, sausage and chips -but Reggie never once saw her eat chicken, even when the Man-WhoCame-Before-Gary used to bring in a KFC bucket and the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary could get Mum to do just about anything. But not eat chicken.

Despite the educational aspects -ten top-grade GCSEs -it was really quite a relief when Reggie forged a letter from Mum saying that they were moving to Australia and Reggie wouldn't be coming back to the horrible posh school after the summer vacation.

Mum had been so proud when Reggie got her scholarship place ('A genius for a child! Me!') but once she was gone there didn't seem much point and it was bad enough leaving for school in the morning with no one to say goodbye to her but coming home to an empty house with no one to say hello was even worse. You would never have thought that two little words could be so important. Ave atque vale.

Ms MacDonald didn't go to the horrible posh school any more either because she had a tumour growing like a mushroom in her brain.

Not to be selfish or anything but Reggie hoped that Ms MacDonald would manage to guide her through her A Levels before the tumour finished eating her brain. Our nada who art in nada, Ms MacDonald said. She was really quite bitter. You might expect a person who was dying to be a little bit resentful but Ms MacDonald had always been like that, illness hadn't made her a nicer person, even now she had religion she was hardly full of Christian charity. She could be kind in the particulars but not in the general. Mum had been kind to everybody, it was her saving grace, even when she was being stupid -with the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary, or indeed Gary himself -she never lost sight of being kind. However, Ms MacDonald had her saving graces too -she was good to Reggie and she loved her little dog and those two things went a long way in Reggie's book.