When Will There Be Good News? (5 page)

Dr Hunter came into the kitchen and the woman took a card from her bag and, showing it to Dr Hunter, said, 'Can I have a word?' and Dr Hunter said to Reggie, 'Can you look after the baby for a few minutes, Reggie?' even though the baby was doing his suicidal starfish thing, his little plump arms held out to Dr Hunter like he was asking to be rescued from a sinking ship, but Dr Hunter just smiled at him and led the woman away into the living room and shut the door. Dr Hunter never ignored the baby, Dr Hunter never took anyone into the living room -people always sat at the big table in the comfY kitchen. For a minute Reggie worried that the woman had something to do with Billy. She would be revealed as the sister of Bad-Boy Billy and would be cast out. Reggie had never mentioned to Dr Hunter that she had a brother. She hadn't lied, she had simply left him out of the story of her life, which was what he did to her, after all.

The dog tried to follow but Dr Hunter shut the door in her face without saying anything to her, which was so not Dr Hunter, and an exiled Sadie sat down outside the door and waited patiently. Ifa dog could frown she would have frowned.

After the woman left, Dr Hunter had a funny, tight look on her face as ifshe was trying to pretend that everything was normal when it wasn't.

Now there was a new card on the noticeboard. It was embossed with 'Lothian and Borders Police', a phone number and a name, 'Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe'.

Reggie fed the baby a yoghurt, not regular yoghurt but a special organic baby yoghurt, no additives, no sugar, nothing artificial. She finished it off for him when he lost interest in it.

Outside, it was cold and damp but in the kitchen it felt cosy and safe. There were no Christmas decorations up yet, just the Advent calendar they had bought on the baby's birthday, but Reggie could imagine the scent of pine and clemen tines and log fires and all the other good smells that she was sure Dr Hunter would fill the house with any day now. It would be Reggie's first Christmas with Dr Hunter and the baby and she wondered if there was any way she could go about suggesting that she should spend Christmas Day itself with them rather than on her own or with the Hussains. Nothing against the Hussains or anything but they weren't herfamily. And Dr Hunter and the baby were.

Sadie waited patiently at the side
of the
high-chair. Every time the baby dropped any food she licked it off the floor. Sometimes she managed to catch it in mid-air. She had a lot of dignity for a dog hustling for scraps. ('She's starting to get old,' Dr Hunter said sadly.)

Reggie gave the baby a finger of wholemeal toast to chew on while she washed his bowls, by hand because she didn't trust the dishwasher with them. The baby's dishes were real china in an oldfashioned pattern. His toys were tasteful wooden ones -nothing garish or noisy -and his clothes were all expensive and new, not handed down or bought in second-hand shops. A lot of them were French. Today he was wearing the cutest-ever navy blue and white striped all-in-one ('his matelot outfit' Dr Hunter called it) that reminded Reggie of a Victorian bathing suit. He had a Noah's Ark rug in his room and a nightlight in the shape of a big red and whitespotted fairy toadstool. His sheets were embroidered with sailboats and there was a framed sampler above his bed with his date of birth and his name 'Gabriel Joseph Hunter' in pale blue chain stitch.

The baby wasn't afraid of anything except unexpected loud noises (Reggie wasn't too keen on those either) and he could clap his hands ifyou said, 'Clap your hands,' and ifyou said, 'Where's your red ball?' he would crawl to his toy box and find it. He had just yesterday taken his first wobbly but unaided step. (,One small step for mankind, one giant leap for a baby,' Dr Hunter said.) He could say the word 'dog' and the word 'ball' and 'banky', which was his word for his most precious possession -the little square cut from a blanket that had been bought for him before he was born by Mr Hunter's sister, a pale green ('moss', Dr Hunter said) blanket to suit either sex. Dr Hunter told Reggie that 'actually' she had known what sex the baby was but she hadn't told anyone she knew, not even Mr Hunter, because she 'wanted to keep the baby all to herself for as long as possible'. Now the green blanket ofwhich the baby was obsessionally fond had been cut down to make it more manageable. 'His Winnicottian transitional object,' Dr Hunter said mysteriously. 'Or perhaps it's his talisman.'

It had been his first birthday a week ago and, to celebrate, the three of them (not Mr Hunter, he was 'all tied up' and anyway 'it's not as if he knows it's his birthday, Jo ') had driven to a hotel near Peebles for afternoon tea and the waitress had made a big fuss of the baby because he was so gorgeous and so well-behaved. He had a small dish of pink ice-cream. 'His first ever! Imagine!' Dr Hunter said. 'Imagine eating ice-cream for the very first time, Reggie.' The baby's eyes almost popped out of his head with surprise when he tasted the pink ice-cream.

'Aw, bless,' Reggie said.

Reggie and Dr Hunter ate a whole plate of cakes between them. 'I think I have a fat person inside me trying to get out,' Reggie said and Dr Hunter laughed and then nearly choked on a miniature coffee eclair, which would probably have been OK because Reggie had asked Dr Hunter to teach her the Heimlich manoeuvre for exactly this kind of occurrence.

'I'm very happy,' Dr Hunter said when she'd recovered and Reggie said, 'Me too.' And the nice thing was that they really were because it was surprising how often people said they were happy when they weren't. Like Mum with the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary.

That was on the first day ofAdvent and Dr Hunter said that was a nice day to have a birthday on even though she wasn't religious. They bought the Advent calendar in Peebles. Peebles was full of all the kinds of shops that old people liked. Reggie liked them too, she supposed it was something to do with her old soul.

The Advent calendar had chocolates behind every door and Dr Hunter said, 'Let's put it up in the kitchen and you can open a door every day and have the chocolate.' Which is what Reggie did, what she was doing now, holding the melting Santa-shaped chocolate in her cheek to extend its life while she dipped the baby's Bunnikins dishes in the sink, squirting Ecover washing-up liquid into the hot water. Dr Hunter didn't use any products that weren't ecological washing powder, floor soap, everything. 'You don't want harmful chemicals around a baby,' she said to Reggie. The baby was precious, he was as valuable as the most valuable object. 'Well, I had to go to a lot of trouble to get him,' Dr Hunter laughed. 'It wasn't easy.'

Dr Hunter had to be careful because she had asthma (Physician heal thyself, she said) which she got 'from my mother'. She was always getting colds as well, which she said was because a doctor's surgery was 'the unhealthiest place on earth to work -full of sick people'. Sometimes, if Reggie was standing close to Dr Hunter, she could hear a wheezing in her chest. The breath of life, Dr Hunter said to Reggie. The baby didn't seem to have inherited any of Dr Hunter's problems with her lungs. ('Dickens had asthma,' Ms MacDonald said. 'I know,' Reggie said. 'I've read round the subject.')

There was no obvious evidence of Mr Hunter's sticky patch. The Hunters had a lovely house, two cars, a fridge full of expensive food and the baby wanted for nothing.

Some mornings when Reggie arrived Mr Hunter behaved like a runner in a relay race, handing the baby over to Reggie so quickly that the baby's little mouth and eyes went completely round with astonishment at the speed
of the
changeover. Then Reggie and Sadie listened to the mesmerizing sound of the huge Range Rover roaring away from the house in a crunch and spit of gravel as if Mr Hunter was a getaway driver. 'He's like a bear in the morning sometimes,' Dr Hunter laughed. Living with a bear didn't seem to bother her. Water off a duck's back.

Mr Hunter and Sadie didn't have much ofa relationship. The most Mr Hunter said to her was, 'Out of the way, Sadie,' or 'Get off the couch, Sadie.' She was 'part of the package', he said to Reggie. 'You don't get Jo without Sadie.'

'Love me, love my dog,' Dr Hunter said. 'A woman's best friend.' Timmy, Snowy, Jumble, Lassie, Greyfriars Bobby. Everyone's best friend. Except for poor Laika, the spacedog, who was no one's friend.

On other mornings, Mr Hunter stayed at home and made endless phone calls. Sometimes he went outside so that he could smoke while talking. He wasn't supposed to smoke, in or out of the house, but the phone calls seemed to drive him to it. 'Don't tell,' he winked at Reggie as if Dr Hunter wouldn't smell the smoke on his clothes or notice the cigarette butts nestling amongst the gravel.

Reggie couldn't help but overhear Mr Hunter because he always spoke very loudly to the unseen people at the other end of the phone. He was 'exploring new avenues' he told them. He had 'very interesting prospects on the horizon' and'opportunities opening up'. He sounded brash but really he was pleading. 'Jesus, Mark, I'm fucking bleeding out here.'

Mr Hunter was handsome, in a rough, slightly battered kind of way, which actually made him more good-looking than ifhe'd been conventionally attractive. Dr Hunter had met him when she was a senior registrar 'at the old Royal Infirmary', although he wasn't from Edinburgh. He was from Glasgow, 'a Weegie', Dr Hunter laughed, which was generally intended as an insult by people from Edinburgh but maybe Dr Hunter didn't know that, being English. He had courted her for a long time before she 'caved in' and married him. Mr Hunter was 'something in the leisure industry' but exactly what was unclear to Reggie.

Dr Hunter and Mr Hunter seemed to get along pretty well, although Reggie didn't really have anything to compare their relationship to except for Mum and Gary (uninspiring) and Mum and the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary (horrible). Dr Hunter laughed at Mr Hunter's shortcomings and never seemed to get annoyed with him about anything. 'Jo's too easygoing for her own good,' Mr Hunter said. Mr Hunter, for his part, would bang into the house with a bunch ofnice flowers or a bottle ofwine and say, 'Hiya, doll,' to Dr Hunter like a comedy Glaswegian and give her a big kiss and wink at Reggie and say, 'Behind every great woman there's some shite guy, Reggie, don't forget that.'

Most of the time Mr Hunter behaved as if he couldn't see Reggie at all, but then sometimes he would take her by surprise and be really nice to her and tell her to sit down at the kitchen table while he made her a coffee and tried to make rather awkward conversation ('So what's your story, Reggie?') although usually before she could start telling him her (not inconsiderable) 'story' his phone would ring and he would leap up and pace around the room while he talked ('Hey, Phil, howy'are doing? 1 was wondering if we could get together, I've got a proposition I'd like to run by you.').

Mr Hunter called the baby 'the bairn' and tossed him in the air a lot, which made the baby shriek with excitement. Mr Hunter said he couldn't wait until 'the bairn' could talk and run around and go to football matches with him and Dr Hunter said, 'Time enough for all that. Make the most of every second, they're gone before you know it.' If the baby hurt himself Mr Hunter picked him up and said, 'Come on, wee man, you're fine, it was nothing,' in an encouraging but not very sympathetic way whereas Dr Hunter hugged him and kissed him and said, 'Poor wee scone,' which was a phrase she had got from Reggie (who had in turn got it from Mum). When she said Scottish words and phrases Dr Hunter said them in a (pretty good) Scottish accent so it was almost like she was bilingual.

The baby liked Mr Hunter well enough but he worshipped Dr Hunter. When she held him in her arms his eyes never left her face, as ifhe was absorbing every detail for a test he might have to sit later.

'I'm a goddess to him now,' Dr Hunter laughed, 'but one day I'll be the annoying old woman who wants to be taken to the supermarket.'

'Och, no, Dr H.,' Reggie said. 'I think you're always going to be a deity for him.'

'Shouldn't you have stayed on at school, Reggie?' Dr Hunter asked, a little frown worrying her pretty features. Reggie imagined this was how she was with her patients ('You really have to lose some weight, Mrs MacTavish.').

'Yes, 1 should,' Reggie said.

'Come on, sunshine,' Reggie said to the baby, lifting him out of his high-chair and planting him on the floor. She had to keep an eye on him all the time because one moment he'd be sitting contentedly trying to work out how to eat his fat little foot and the next he'd be commando-crawling towards the nearest hazard. All he wanted to do was put things in his mouth and you could be sure if there was an object small enough to choke on then the baby would make a beeline for it and Reggie had to be constantly on the lookout for buttons and coins and grapes -ofwhich he was particularly fond. All his grapes had to be cut in half which was a real chore but Dr Hunter had told her about a patient whose baby had died when a grape got stuck in his windpipe and no one had been able to help him, Dr Hunter said, as ifthat was worse than the dying itself. That was when Reggie got Dr Hunter to teach her not just the Heimlich manoeuvre but mouth-to-mouth, how to stop arterial bleeding and what to do for a burn. And electrocution and accidental poisoning. (And drowning, of course.) 'You could go on a first-aid course,' Dr Hunter said, 'but they do such an awful lot ofunnecessary bandaging. We can do some strapping of wrists and arms, a basic head bandage, but you don't need anything more complicated than that. Really, you just need to know how to save a life.' She brought home a CPR dummy from the surgery so that Reggie could practise resuscitation. 'We call him Eliot,' Dr Hunter said, 'but no one can remember why.'

When Reggie thought about the baby who had choked on a grape she imagined him stoppered up like the old-fashioned lemonade bottle with a marble in its neck that she had seen in the museum. Reggie liked museums. Clean, well-lighted places.