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

by Kate Atkinson

(“Twenty-five million sperm needed to fertilize an egg,” his ex-wife used to say, “because only one will stop to ask directions.”)

Reggie didn’t like the idea that you could be walking along as blithe as could be and the next moment you simply didn’t exist. Walk out of a room, step into a taxi. Dive into the cool blue water of a pool and never come back up again.

We can do some strapping of wrists and arms, a basic head bandage, but you don’t need anything more complicated than that. Really, you just need to know how to save a life.”

If her own child died, Louise wouldn’t keep on going, she would take herself out, something nice and neat, nothing messy for the emergency services to deal with afterwards.

Really, every time a person said good-bye to another person, they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much so.

Strangers on a train. If there was an emergency, would they help one another? (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.

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.

because the Last Judgment couldn’t occur until every last thing on the planet had been destroyed, every tree, every flower, every river. Every last eagle and owl and panda, the sheep in the fields, the leaves on the trees, the rising of the sun, and the running of the deer. Everything.

There were days that really surprised you with the way they turned out.

On a couple of previous occasions when Jackson had found himself facing the possibility of death, he had clung on to life because he considered himself too young to die. Now it struck him that that wasn’t really the case anymore, he felt plenty old enough to die.

“Live your life, Louise,” Patrick said, “don’t endure it.”

She didn’t add that Ms. MacDonald was rapture ready, that she embraced the end of all things and was expecting to live eternally in a place that when she described it sounded a bit like Scarborough.

Drinking the Yankee dollar. “Someone has to make money for the evil capitalists,” she said to the girl, buying her a latte and a chocolate muffin. “Some days it’s you and me. This is one of those days.”

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. Not a Boney M song but Psalm 137. 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.

For I am wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife.

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

“I have no idea how to love another human being unless it’s by tearing them to pieces and eating them.”

He had already left, he was just waiting for them to say good-bye. To infinity and beyond.