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

said, 'I do.' Patrick's own son, Jamie, didn't come to the wedding. He was a post-grad on an archaeology dig in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere. He was one of those outdoor types -skiing, surfing, scuba-diving -'a real boy', Patrick said. In contrast to her own boy, her little Pinocchio.
    They had brought in two people from the next wedding to be witnesses and gave them each a good bottle of malt as a thank you. Louise had worn a dress in raw silk, in what the personal shopper in Harvey Nichols had referred to as 'oyster' although to Louise it just looked grey. But it was pretty without being fussy and it showed off her good legs. Patrick had arranged flowers or she wouldn't have bothered -an old-fashioned posy of pink roses for her and pink rosebuds for the buttonholes for himself and Archie.
    A couple of years ago, not long after she met Patrick and when Archie's behaviour was at its most worrying, she had gone for therapy, something she had always sworn she would never do. Neve r say never. She did it for Archie, thinking that his problems must be a result of hers, that if she could be a better mother his life woul d improve. And she did it for Patrick too because he seemed to repres ent a chance for change, to become like other people.
    It was cognitive behavioural stuff that didn't delve too deeply int o the murk of her psychopathology, thank God. The basic principl e was that she should learn to avoid negative thinking, freeing her t o have a more positive attitude to life. The therapist, a hippyish, welli ntentioned woman called Jenny who looked as if she'd knitte d herself, told Louise to visualize a place where she could put all he r negative thoughts and Louise had chosen a chest at the bottom o f the sea, the kind that was beloved ofpirates in storybooks -hoope d and banded with metal, padlocked and hasped to keep safe, no t treasure, but Louise's unhelpful thoughts.
    The more detailed the better,Jenny said, and so Louise added coral and shells to the gritty sand, barnacles clinging to the sides of the chest, curious fishes and sharks nosing it, lobsters and crabs crawling all over it, fronds ofseaweed waving in the tidal currents. She became an adept with the locks and the keys, could visit her underwater world at the flick ofa mental switch. The problem was that when she had safely locked up all the negative thoughts at the bottom of the sea there was nothing else left, no positive thoughts at all. 'Guess I' m just not a positive person,' she said to Jenny. She thoughtJenny would protest, pull her to her maternal, knitted bosom and tell her it was just a matter of time (and money) before she was fixed. But Jenny agreed with her and said, 'I guess not.'
    She stopped going to Jenny and not long after she accepted Patrick's proposal.
    Archie went to Fettes now. Two years ago at the age of fourteen he had been on the edge of something bad, it had only been some petty thieving, some bunking off school, trouble with the police (oh, the irony) but she could tell, because she'd seen it enough times in other teenagers, that ifit wasn't nipped in the bud it wouldn't just be a phase, it would be a way of life. He was ready for a change or it wouldn't have worked. She used her mother's life insurance to pay his exorbitant school fees, 'So the drunken old cow's good for something at last,' Louise said. The school was the kind ofplace that Louise had spent her red-flagged life railing against -privilege, the perpetuation of the ruling hegemony, yada, yada, yada. And now she was subscribing to it because the greater good wasn't an argument she was going to deploy when it came to her own flesh and blood. 'What about your principles?' someone said to her and she said, 'Archie is my principles.'
    The gamble had paid off. Two years later and he had gone from Gothic to geek (his true metier all along) in one relatively easy move and now hung about with his geek confreres in the astronomy club, the chess club, the computer club