When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson Page A

Well, no, that wasn't strictly true, but Jackson wasn't quite ready to go all Zen and divest himself of his worldly assets. ('Then quit whining,' his ex-wife said.)
    Jackson had managed to get an uncomfortable seat at a table for four, near the end of the carriage. Next to him, at the window, was a man in a tired suit, intent on his laptop. Jackson expected the screen to be full of tables and statistics but instead there were screeds of words. Jackson looked away, numbers were impersonal things to cast an eye over but another man's words had an intimacy about them. The man's tie was loosened and he gave off a faint smell of beer and perspiration as if he'd been away from home too long. There were two women seated on the other side of the table: one was old and armed with a Catherine Cookson novel, the other, leafing indifferently through a celebrity magazine, was a fortyish blonde, buxom as an overstuffed turkey. She was wearing siren-red lipstick and a top to match that was half a size too tight and which burned like a signal fire in front ofJackson's eyes. Jackson was surprised she didn't have 'Up for It' tattooed on her forehead. The old woman looked blue with cold despite wearing a hat, gloves and scarf and a heavy winter coat. Jackson was glad of the North Face jacket that he'd donned as part of his disguise and then felt guilty and offered it to the old woman. She SHuled and shook her head as ifsomeone long ago had warned her not to speak to strangers on trains.
    The suit next to him coughed, an unhealthy, phlegmy noise, and Jackson wondered if he should offer up his jacket to him as well. Strangers on a train. If there was an emergency would they help each other? (Never overestimate people.) Or would it be every woman for herself? That was the way to survive in a plane or a train, you had to ignore everyone and everything, get out at any cost, gnaw off a limb -someone else's if necessary -climb over seats, climb over people, forget anything your mother ever taught you about manners because the people who got to the exit were the people who, literally, lived to tell the tale.
    The aftermath of a bad train crash was like a battlefield. Jackson knew, he'd attended one at the beginning of his career in the civilian police and it had been worse than anything he'd seen in the army.
    There'd been a small child trapped in the wreckage, they could hear it calling for its mother but they couldn't even begin to get to it beneath the tons of train.
    After a while the crying stopped but it continued in Jackson's dreams for months afterwards. The child -a boy -was eventually rescued, but strangely that didn't mollifY the horror of recalling its sobs (Mummy, Mummy). Of course, this was not long after Jackson himself had become a parent to Marlee, a condition that had left him torn and raw and completely at odds with his pre-natal preoccupations which had mainly revolved around choosing a pram with the kind ofmasculine attention to specs that he would normally have afforded a car (Lockable front swivel wheels? Adjustable handle height? Multi-position seat?). The mechanics of fatherhood turned out to be infinitely more primitive. He fingered the plastic bag in his pocket. A different pregnancy, a different child. His. He remembered the surge of emotion he had felt earlier in the day when he had touched Nathan's small head. Love. Love wasn't sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn't patient, love wasn't kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.
    He hadn't seen Julia in her later stages. Short and sexy, he imagined that in pregnancy she would be ripely voluptuous, although she told him that she had piles and varicose veins and was 'almost spherical'. They had maintained a low-grade kind of communication with each other, he phoned her and she told him to sod off, but sometimes they spoke as though nothing had ever come between them. Yet still she maintained the baby wasn't his.
    He had visited her in the