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

sad as dogs.' Reggie thought dogs were pretty happy creatures but of course Dr Hunter saw the potential for sadness everywhere. 'How sad,' Dr Hunter said when the leaves came off the trees. 'How sad,' she said when a song came on the radio (Beth Nielsen Chapman). 'How sad,' when Sadie whined quietly at the sight of her getting ready to leave the house. Even when it had been the baby's birthday and they had all been so happy eating cake and pink ice-cream, afterwards as they drove home Dr Hunter said, 'His first birthday, how sad, he'll never be a baby again.'
    For his birthday, Reggie had given the baby a teddy-bear and a bib embroidered in blue with ducks and the words 'Baby's First Birthday'. First things were nice, last things not so much so.
    Often, after one of her moments ofsadness, Dr Hunter would give her head a little shake as if she was trying to get rid of something from it and smile and say, 'And yet we are not downhearted, are we, Reggie?' and Reggie would say, 'No, indeed we are not, Dr H.'
    'Call me Jo,' Dr Hunter said to Reggie. 'Fiddle dee dee, fiddle dee dee, the fly has married the bumblebee,' she said to the baby.
    Reggie had never told Dr Hunter about her mother, about her being dead, the weight of the sadness ofit might have been too much for Dr Hunter to bear, even without the unnecessary and tragic manner of Mum's going. And every time she looked at Reggie, Dr Hunter would have had the sad expression on her face and that too would have been unbearable. Instead, Reggie made up her mother. She was called Jackie and worked on the checkout at a supermarket in a shopping centre that Dr Hunter never went to. When she was young she had been a champion highland dancer (although you would never have guessed that). Her best friends were called Mary, Trish and Jean. She was always planning the next diet, she had long hair (lovely hair, sadly Reggie had not inherited it) that she said she was going to have to start wearing up because she was getting too old to wear it down. She was thirty-six this year, the same age as Dr Hunter. She was sixteen when she got engaged to Reggie's father, seventeen when she had Billy and a widow at twenty. Reggie supposed it was just as well she had packed everything in early on.
    She took a terrible photograph, made worse by the goofy faces she always pulled the moment a camera was pointed in her direction. One of her favourite sayings was, 'It's a funny old world,' said affectionately, as ifthe world was a mischievous child. She liked reading Danielle Steel and her favourite flower was a daffodil and she made a really good shepherd's pie. Actually all of these things were true. It was just the being alive bit that was made up.
    While Reggie was wiping down the draining board her eye was caught by something moving at the far end of the field. The sun had hardly popped its head up today and it was hard to distinguish anything more than smudged shapes at that distance. Not a horse, this was not a day for horses, they were living their mysterious lives somewhere else. Whoever or whatever it was seemed to scuttle along the hedge, a blur of something black. Reggie glanced at the dog to see if her canine senses were alerting her to anything but Sadie was sitting stoically on the floor next to the baby while he tried to stuff her tail in his mouth.
    'I don't think so, mister,' Reggie said to the baby, gently releasing a fistful offur and lifting him in her arms. She carried the baby over to the window but there was nothing to be seen out there now. The baby clutched a hank of her hair, he was a terrible hair grabber. 'Atavistic instinct, I expect,' Dr Hunter said. 'From the days when I would have been swinging through trees and he would have been clutching on to my fur for dear life.' The idea of Dr Hunter, always so neatly groomed in the little black suit she wore for work, as a primitive tree-dweller was comical. Reggie had to look up 'atavistic'. She still hadn't found an opportunity to