When Will There Be Good News? (7 page)

He wanted a son. He wanted a son so he could teach him all the things he knew, as well as how to learn all the things he didn't know. He couldn't teach his daughter anything, she knew more than he did already. And he wanted a son because he was a man. Simple as that. He suddenly recalled the surge of emotion he had felt when he touched Nathan's head. That was the kind ofthing that made a strong man weak for life.

And anyway, he had said to Josie, since when was twelve a teenager? ' "Teen" is the clue -thirteen, fourteen, etcetera. She's only twelve.'

'Double figures count; Josie said casually. 'They start earlier thes
e
days.' 'Start what?' Jackson had passed through his teens without ever being aware o
f
them. He had been a boy at twelve and then he had joined the army at sixteen and become a man. Between the two he had walked in the valley of the shadow of death, with no comfort to hand.

He hoped his daughter would have a sunny passage through those years. He had a crumpled postcard from her in the pocket of his jacket from when she had been on a school trip to Bruges in her half-term. The postcard showed a picturesque view of a canal and some old red-brick houses. Jackson had never felt the need to go to Belgium. He had transferred the card from his old leather jacket to the North Face jacket -his disguise -although from no clear motive, only that a message from his daughter, banal and dutiful though it was (,Dear Dad, Bruges is very interesting, it has a lot of nice buildings. It is raining. Have eaten a lot of chips and chocolate. Missing you! Love you! Marlee XXX'), seemed like something you shouldn't just throwaway. Did she really miss him? He suspected her life was too full to notice his absence.

A ragged-looking sheep, long-in-the-tooth mutton, stood foursquare in the road ahead, like a gunslinger waiting for high noon. Jackson slowed to a stop and waited it out for a while. The sheep didn't move. He hooted his horn but it didn't even twitch an ear, just continued chewing grass laconically like an old tobacco hand. He wondered if it was deaf. He got out of the car and looked at it threateningly.

'Are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle "Dixie"?' he said to it. It looked at him with a flicker of interest and then went back to its incessant chewing.

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 was 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 ofpunching it. He backed off a few step
s
to rethink his tactics. Finally he tried pushing its front legs from beneath it but he ended up losing his own balance and found himself sprawled on his back on the road. Across the pale winter sky an even paler cloud floate
d
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
. W
hen 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 home-made 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 metres.

He cast a wary eye at the sky, he wouldn't like to get stuck in a drif
t
up here, no one would ever find you. He would have to dig in unti
l
spring, fleece a couple of sheep for blankets. No one knew he wa
s
here, he hadn't told anyone he was leaving London. If he was lost, i
f
something happened to him, there was no one who would kno
w
where to come and look. If someone he loved was lost he woul
d
stalk the world for ever looking for them but he wasn't entirely sur
e
that there was anyone who would do the same for him. (J love YOli
,
she said, but he wasn't sure how tenacious an emotion that was fo
r
her.)

He passed a fence post that had a bird of prey, a hawk or falcon, perched on top ofit 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. TY=hen thou from hence away art past, every nighte and aile, to TY=hinnymuir 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 was catechizing him. He could smell the coal, feel the heat on his legs, bare in the grey 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 each other. Maybe it was something to do with the bad mix ofScots 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 dulling up his own sex.
i
f hos'nand shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane, every nighte and aile, the whinnes shall 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 alleJire and fleet and candle-lighte, and Christe receive thy saule. Jackson shivered and turned the heate
r
up.

*

It seemed he was not alone on the road to nowhere after all. There was someone else ahead, on foot, walking towards him. It 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-grey hair in a bob, something
of the
librarian about her. Did librarians live up to their cliche? 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 'ye lost in the middle ofnowhere, not ifthey 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 rear-view 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 ifit 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 ifthe shadow of death.

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

She Would Get the Flowers Hersel
f
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 glasshouses 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 jeweller, '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 orthopaedic surgeon and was used to being i
n
charge. 'Orthopaedics is just hammers and chisels really, a superio
r
form ofjoinery,' he joked when he first met her but he was at th
e
top of his field and could probably have been making a fortune in private practice but 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 saloon, two baby seats crammed in the back, the mother driving, her teenage sister in the passenger seat
. T
he car had been stationary in a queue at temporary traffic lights at some roadworks. The driver hadn't seen the signs for the roadworks, hadn't seen the queue of traffic, and only caught the briefest glimpse of the little three-door saloon 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).