When Will There Be Good News?

She checked the pulse in the man's neck again and this time couldn't find one. Her fingers were slippery with his blood, perhaps she was mistaken? She felt herself begi

'Just hang on,' she said to the man. 'Please. For my sake if not for yours.' She breathed in as deeply as she could and put her mouth over his. He tasted of cheese and onion crisps.

Reggie took the bus home from Ms MacDonald's house. Before leaving she had wrapped Banjo's body in an old cardigan of Ms MacDonald's and dug a hole for him in one of the flowerbeds. A little parcel of bones. It had been like the Somme in Ms MacDonald's back garden and it had been a horrible task dropping the small body into the unfriendly, muddy hole. Nada y pues nada, as Hemingway and Ms MacDonald would have said. First things were good, last things not so much so. As Reggie would have said.

It had rained when they buried Mum as well, dropped her into her own muddy hole. There were quite a few mourners at the graveside -Billy, Gary, Sue and Carl from Warrington -which was nice of them considering they hardly knew Mum -a couple of Gary's biker mates, some neighbours, Mary, Trish and Jean, of course, quite a lot of co-workers from the supermarket, the manager himself in black tie and black suit even though the month before he'd threatened Mum with her cards for 'persistently poor timekeeping'. Even the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary turned up, lurking in the cemetery's hinterland. Billy made an obscene gesture at him which caused the vicar to stumble over his intonement.

'Not a bad turnout,' Carl said as if he was some kind of professional funeral inspector.

'Poor Jackie,' Sue said.

In the church beforehand they had sung 'Abide With Me', a hymn chosen by Reggie on the grounds that Mum always cried when she heard it because they had sung it at her own mother's funeral. Reggie had arranged the service with the help ofMary, Trish andJean. Mum wasn't a churchgoer so it was hard to know what she would have liked. 'Aye, hatched, matched and dispatched within a church, like most of us,' Trish said as if she was saying something wise. 'There must be something, when you think about it,' Jean said. Reggie didn't see why there had to be anything. 'We're all alone,' Dr Hunter once said to her. 'All alone and cast adrift in the vast infinity ofspace' (was she thinking about Laika?) , and Reggie said, 'But we have each other, Dr H.,' and Dr Hunter said, 'Yes we do, Reggie. We have each other.'

Quite a few people on the bus had given Reggie fu

'That's a big-boned woman,' Mum said after she met Ms MacDonald for the first time at a parents' evening. Reggie thought of Mum, awkward and ill-at-ease at the horrible posh school, Ms MacDonald rattling on about Aeschylus as if Mum had the foggiest. Now they were both dead (not to mention Aeschylus). Everyone was dead.

Reggie didn't put on Ms MacDonald's underwear, the big pants and stretched grey bras were a step too far. Her own clothes were still drying on a rack in Ms MacDonald's bathroom, except for her jacket which was so saturated with the man's blood that it was past the point of rescue. 'Out damned spot,' she said to the wheelie-bin as she threw the jacket into it. They had done Macbeth for standard grade.

Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

He wasn't that old. Old enough to be her father. His name was Jackson Brodie. She'd had his blood on her hands, warm blood in the cold night. She had been washed in his blood.

As he was being loaded on to the stretcher she had plunged her hand into his jacket pocket, hoping to find some form of identity, and had pulled out a postcard with a picture ofBruges on the front, and on the back his address and a message -Dear Dad, Bruges is very interesting, it has a lot of nice buildings. It is raining. Have eaten a lot ofchips and chocolate. Missing you! Love you! Marlee XXx.

The postcard was still in her bag, muddy and bloody and wrinkled up. She had two postcards now, their bright messages touched with death. She supposed she should hand the man's in to someone. She would like to give it back to the man himself. Ifhe was still alive. The air ambulance doctor told her they were taking him to the Royal Infirmary but when she had phoned this morning they had no record of a Jackson Brodie. Reggie wondered if that meant he had died.

Adam Lay Ybounden NOT DEAD THEN, NOT YET. NOT EXACTLY ALIVE THOUGH. IN SOME mysterious place in between.

He'd always imagined it, ifhe'd imagined it at all, as something like the Hilton in Heathrow Airport -a beige, bland limbo where everyone was in transit. If he had paid more attention during his Catholic childhood he might have remembered Purgatory's purifying flames. They now consumed him continually, a fire with no end as if he was some kind of everlasting fuel. Nor could he recollect any teaching that had ever referred to the continuous radio static in the head and the sensation of giant millipedes crawling allover his skin and the other, even more unpleasant feeling, that large clackety-clack cockroaches were grazing on his brains. He wondered what other surprises God's halfway house was going to present.

It wasn't fair, he thought peevishly. Who said life was fair? his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. (It's not fair, Daddy.) Parents were miserable buggers. It should be fair. It should be paradise.

Death, Jackson noticed, had made him crabbed. He shouldn't be here, he should be with Niamh -wherever that was -the idyllic place where all the dead girls walked, risen up and honoured. Fuck. His head really hurt. Not fair.

*

People came to visit him occasionally. His mother, his father, his brother. They were all dead so Jackson knew he must be too. They were vague round the edges and if he tried to look at them for too long they started to wobble and fade. He supposed he was vague round the edges too.

The catalogue of the dead seemed full of random choices. His old geography teacher, an antagonistic, apoplectic sort who had a fatal stroke in the staff room. Jackson's first ever girlfriend, a nice straightforward girl called Angela who died of an aneurysm in her husband's arms on her thirtieth birthday. Mrs Patterson, an old neighbour who used to sit drinking tea and gossiping with his mother when Jackson was small. Jackson hadn't thought about her in decades, would have been hard put to name her if she hadn't turned up at his bedside, smelling of camphor and carrying an old leatherette shopping bag. Julia's sister, Amelia, came once (as recalcitrant as ever) to sit at his bedside. He wondered ifher presence meant that she had died on the operating table. The woman in red from the train appeared one afternoon, distinctly less vivacious than the last time he saw her. The dead were legion. He wished they would stop coming to see him.