When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3)

by Kate Atkinson

Your dead.”) Without the apostrophe it implied something else, the dead that belonged to Reggie. There were enough of them.

Louise was sure that buried deep inside her, lurking in the murky labyrinth of her heart, there was an incredibly well-behaved person wondering when she would ever be let out. Patrick probably wondered the same thing. Patient Patrick, waiting for her to come good. Long wait, baby.

The forgotten dead. Victims faded, murderers lived on in the memory, only the police kept the eternal flame alight, passing it on as the years went by.

independent and dependent at the same time, an eternal maternal dialectic.

you should have nothing in your house that you didn’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

One lie, one truth. They canceled each other out and left the world unchanged.

She had made a terrible mistake, hadn’t she? She had married the wrong man. No, no, she had married the right man, it was just that she was the wrong woman.

My husband. The words were stones in her mouth, a noun and an adjective that belonged to someone else, not Louise.

“My Scandinavian muse,” he called her, but not in a way that was kind.

Martina had given her poetry, but poetry had failed them all in the end.

Joanna was always “she” to her father, not said in a malicious way, he just seemed to find the naming of her difficult. She had been his least favorite of the three of them, and now she was the only one and she still wasn’t the favorite.

Looking back now, Joanna could see that she had not been spared a trial but cheated of her day in court.

He was free. Something ticked over, a click in time, like a secret signal, a cue, implanted in her mind long ago. The bad men were all out, roaming the streets. Darkness now forevermore. Run, Joanna, run.

recognized, as if all along you’d been reversible

We remembered Zion, we remembered our songs, for we could not sing here. The song of the exile. Wasn’t everyone an exile? In their hearts? Was he being mawkish? Probably.

Josie and Julia lived uncomfortably in his brain, conflated into the voice of his conscience, the twin recording angels of his behavior.

When you had a future, a couple of nurses could gang up on you and remove your catheter without any anesthetic, or even any warning, and then force you out of bed, and make you hobble in your flimsy, open-backed hospital gown to the bathroom, where they encourage you to “try and pee” on your own. Jackson had never previously appreciated that such a basic bodily function could be both so painful and so gratifying at the same time. I piss, therefore I am.

Reggie was never going to be a person who didn’t come back.

Red wine was never a good idea, it dragged out the maudlin Scot from the dark tartan-lined pit inside her, where it lived.

The marriage bed was holy, he said, and this from a godless man, although a godless Irishman, which was almost a contradiction in terms.

Louise wondered how many miles she’d have on the BMW’s clock when she finally felt she could stop moving.

She stood in the doorway and held up the card. “Martina left you a note,” she said, and he said, “I know,” and threw the bottle of whisky at her.

He was good at getting rid of women.

The woman who came after the poet (who, in truth, came before the poet, which was one of the reasons Martina lay down with her bottles of salvation) was Chinese, some kind of artist from Hong Kong,

Joanna could never forgive her aunt for not wrapping her in love, the way she would have done in her place.

It was only because she saw an obituary in the newspaper that she knew her own father was dead.

Joanna didn’t believe in God, how could she, but she believed in the existence of the soul, believed indeed in the transference of the soul, and although she wouldn’t have stood up at a scientific conference and declared it, she also believed that she carried the souls of her dead family inside her and one day the baby would do the same for her.

The best days of her life had been when she was pregnant and the baby was still safe inside her. Once you were out in the world, then the rain fell on your face and the wind lifted your hair and the sun beat down on you and the path stretched ahead of you and evil walked on it.

She couldn’t really remember any of them, but that didn’t stop them from still possessing a reality that was stronger than anything alive, apart from the baby, of course. They were the touchstone to which everything else must look and the exemplar compared to which everything else failed. Except for the baby.

her whole life an act of bereavement,

Sometimes in the night, in dreams, she heard their old dog barking and it brought back a memory of grief so raw that it led her to wonder about killing the baby, and then herself, both of them slipping away on something as peacefu...

The slender thread that still connected Reggie to Dr. Hunter was broken. Dr. Hunter’s lifeline. Reggie’s too.

The absence of Dr. Hunter from her own house weighed heavily on Reggie’s heart.

Reggie’s heart wasn’t even in her chest anymore, it was too big and too loud to fit anymore, it was filling the whole of the bedroom. Boom, boom, boom.

Reggie thought her heart was going to explode all over the bedroom and they would find it, like a burst balloon, on the floor of the closet.

his real home, the one he never named anymore, was the dark and sooty chamber in his heart that contained his sister and his brother and, because it was an accommodating kind of space, the entire filthy history of the industrial revolution. It was amazing how much dark matter you could crush inside the black hole of the heart.

Then she was flattered by their attentions, now she’d have them all arrested.

She should have told the truth. She should have told the truth about everything. She should have said, “I have no idea how to love another human being unless it’s by tearing them to pieces and eating them.”

“So I could hit people with a big stick.”

Should you marry a man who liked Wagner?

What Howard Mason never wrote (what he never even talked about) was a novel about a man whose family was murdered while he was off dallying with his Swedish mistress. He missed an opportunity there, it would probably have been a best seller.

All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.

Preserved in the amber of memory, forever young. Forever dead.

“Fine,” she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from “I’m dying in anguish” to “I’m experiencing euphoric joy.” “Fine,” she said, “I’m fine.”

The mug had written on it “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” and she said to him, “Not the mug, obviously, that was washed in Fairy Liquid.”

Jackson couldn’t help but question his right to be on his feet (more or less) when fifteen other people were lying in cold storage somewhere.

What he had felt for most of his life was that he was living on in the aftermath of a disaster, in the endless postscript of time that was his life following the murder of his sister and the suicide of his brother. He had drawn those terrible feelings inside himself, nourished them in solitary confinement until they formed the hard, black nugget of coal at the heart of his soul, but now the disaster was external, the wreckage was tangible, it was outside the room he was sleeping in.

Half child, half unstoppable force of nature.

she had kept her wedding ring on even though it was squeezing her flesh. A penance, like wearing a hair shirt. A hair shirt reminded you of your faith, a wedding ring that strangled your finger reminded you of your lack of it.

This was how teenage girls felt, how Louise had never felt when she was a teenage girl. Patrick was right, she’d never had an adolescence. Making up for it now.