More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 26 - March 3, 2025
He was far too good for her. Too nice. It made her want to behave badly, to see how far she could push him, to smash the niceness.
It was funny how sometimes you could realize you were all alone in a roomful of people.
She was baffled by women who changed their names when they got married—your name was the closest thing to your self.
Sometimes your name was all you had.
There had been another man once. The kind of man she could have imagined standing shoulder to shoulder with, a comrade in arms, but they had been as chaste as protagonists in an Austen novel.
All sense and no sensibility, no persuasion at all.
Let Bridget see that her price might not be above rubies, but she was worth a three-and-a-half-carat piece of ice.
“There’s been a train crash,” he said to her. “A bad one. All hands on deck tonight,” he added
cheerfully. “Coming?”
She could hear a train approaching, the noise muted at first by the wind and then growing louder and louder.
Then another higher-pitched sound, as if a giant hand were clawing a giant blackboard with giant fingernails, and finally a tremendous bang, like an explosive clap of thunder. The apocalypse had come to town. And then . . . nothing.
“A train’s crashed,” a man said to her. “Right out back.” Reggie picked up the phone in the hall and dialed 999. Dr. Hunter had told her that in an emergency everyone presumed that
someone else would call. Reggie wasn’t going to be that person who presumed.
The world wasn’t going to end this night. Not if Reggie had anything to do with it. What larks, Reggie!
He was at ease, in a way that he didn’t ever remember feeling when he was alive. It no longer mattered that he wasn’t in control. He wondered what was going to happen next.
On cue, his sister suddenly appeared, sitting next to him on the bench.
He was experiencing euphoria. It had never happened to him before, even at the happiest times in his life—when he was in love, when Marlee was born—any possibility of clear, uncut joy had been fogged by the anxiety.
His sister moved her face close to his and he thought she was going to kiss him on the lips but instead she breathed into his mouth.
But then he felt himself being pulled out of the tunnel, away from Niamh, and he had to fight to resist.
She stood up and started to walk away. He exhaled the Holy Ghost and shut his mouth so it couldn’t get back in. He stood up and followed his sister.
More than anything in the world, he wanted to follow his sister. Wherever it was, it was going to be the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Tell you what, take a wee holiday, Reggie. Jo will be back in a few days. She’ll phone you then.” Why hadn’t Dr. Hunter phoned her, that was the question.
But Dr. Hunter wasn’t the kind of person not to call you. It made Reggie feel dismissed, a bit like a servant. When had she left? “Last night,” Mr. Hunter said.
She wanted to see Dr. Hunter and the baby, she wanted to tell Dr. Hunter about what had happened last night—the train crash, Ms. MacDonald, the man.
Especially the man, because, if you thought about it, the fact that the man was alive (if he was still alive) was all down not to Reggie but to Dr. Hunter.
More specifically, she needed to tell Dr. Hunter about it because Dr. Hunter was the only person she knew who was interested in her life now that Mum had gone.
Reggie’s stomach did a funny flip at the thought of Ms. MacDonald. She was never going to sit at that table again, never eat spaghetti, never eat anything at all. She had had her last supper.
A car had obviously driven off the road and knocked down the wall of the bridge and fallen onto the track below.
The reporter didn’t add that the vehicle was a blue Citroën Saxo or that it contained Ms. MacDonald, very dead at the scene.
“We think Mrs. MacDonald must have driven off the road and fallen down onto the track somehow. You don’t know if she had been feeling at all depressed lately?”
Reggie imagined Ms. MacDonald nodding serenely at the 125 express train that was charging towards her, saying, “That’ll be God’s will, then.”
She noticed how still the air in the house was, as if someone had breathed out and not breathed in again.
The breath was the thing. It was everything. Breathing was the difference between alive and dead. She had breathed life into a man, should she try and do the same with a dog?
Reggie wished she had a sister, someone else who had known and loved Mum so that she wasn’t all alone keeping her memory alive.
Reggie wanted a dozen kids so that when she was gone they could all get together and talk about her (“Do you remember when . . . ?”), and not one of them would feel they’d been left alone in the world.
Reggie didn’t believe in any of that hocus-pocus, but she believed in keeping the dead alive. There would be more candles to light now.
She knew it was wrong, but Reggie felt more affected by the dog’s death than she did by his owner’s.
“Troubled teen or angel of death?” she said to the dead dog. “You have to
wonder.”
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.
People came to visit him occasionally. His mother, his father, his brother. They were all dead, so Jackson knew he must be too.
The catalogue of the dead seemed full of random choices.
The dead were legion. He wished they would stop coming to see him.
It was exhausting being dead. He had more of a social life than when he was alive.
and a middle-aged woman he had never seen before bent
down to whisper in his ear to ask if he had seen her dog.
He was woken by a small terrier barking at the foot of the bed. He knew he wasn’t really awake, not by any previous definition of the word.
He’d had enough. He was getting out of this madhouse, even if it killed him. He opened his eyes.
She felt drained of her lifeblood, but Patrick, who had operated throughout the night as one accident victim after another was wheeled into theater, was his usual chipper self. Mr. Fix-It.
“Louise didn’t have a rebellious phase when she was a teenager,” Patrick said. “She’s making up for it now, apparently.” He laughed and Louise gave him a long look. Was he patronizing her?
