When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Mr Hunter was very easygoing about the baby. He said babies were 'virtually indestructible' and that Dr Hunter worried too much, 'but then you can't expect anything else given her history'. Reggie didn't know anything about Dr Hunter's history (imagined herself saying, 'What's your story, Dr H.?' but it didn't sound right). All Reggie really knew was that William Morris sat on the bookshelf in Dr Hunter's living room while her own father was officially declared junk and lived in the old curiosity shop on the top floor. Reggie herself thought babies were extremely destructible and after the grape story she became particularly paranoid about the baby not being able to breathe. But what else could she expect, given her history? (,The breath,' Dr Hunter said, 'the breath is everything.')
    Sometimes Reggie lay in bed at night and held the breath in her lungs until she thought they would burst so that she could feel what it was like, imagining her mother anchored underwater by her hair like some new, mysterious strain of seaweed.
    'How long does it take to die from drowning?' she asked Dr Hunter.
    'Well, there are quite a few variables,' Dr Hunter said, 'water temperature and so on, but roughly speaking, five to ten minutes. Not long.'
    Long enough.
    Reggie placed the baby's dishes in the draining rack. The sink was at the window and overlooked a field at the foot of Blackford Hill. Sometimes there were horses in the field, sometimes not. Reggie had no idea where the horses went when they weren't there. Now it was winter they wore dull green blankets like Barbour jackets.
    Sometimes when Dr Hunter came home early enough, before the winter dark descended, they would take the dog and the baby into the field and the baby would crawl around on the rough grass and Reggie would pursue Sadie round the field because she loved it when you pretended to chase her and Dr Hunter would laugh and say to the baby, 'Come on, run, run like the wind!' and the baby would just look at her because of course he had no idea what running was. If the horses were in the field they remained aloof as if they ran, which they must surely do, in secret.
    The horses were big nervy creatures and Reggie didn't like the way their lips curled back over their huge yellow teeth, she imagined them mistaking the baby's excited fist for an apple and biting it off his arm.
    'Horses worry me as well,' Dr Hunter said. 'They always seem so sad, don't you think? Although not as