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

and God knew what other activities that seemed entirely alien to Louise. Louise had an MA in literature and she was sure that if she'd had a daughter they would have had great chats about the Brontes and George Eliot. (While what? They baked cakes and did each other's make-up? Get real, Louise.)
    'It's not too late,' Patrick said.
    'For what?'
    'A baby.'
    A chill went through her. Someone had opened a door in her heart and let in the north wind. Did he want a baby? She couldn't ask him in case he said yes. Was he going to seduce her into it, like he'd seduced her into marriage? She already had a child, a child who was wrapped around her heart and she couldn't walk on that wild shore again.
    All her life she had been fighting. 'Time to stop,' Patrick said, massaging her shoulders after a particularly gruelling day at work. 'Lay down your arms and surrender, take things how they come.'
    'You should have been a Zen master,' she said.
    'I am.'
    She hadn't expected ever to hit forty and suddenly find herself in a two-car family, to be living in an expensive flat, to be wearing a rock the size of Gibraltar. Most people would see this as a goal or an improvement but Louise felt as if she might have taken the wrong road without even noticing the turning. Sometimes, in her mor e paranoid moments, she wondered if Patrick had somehow manage d to hypnotize her.
    She had changed their insurance policy when they moved and th e woman on the other end of the phone went through all the standar d questions -age of the building, how many rooms, is there an alar m system in place -before asking, 'Do you keep any jewels, furs o r shotguns on the premises?' and for a moment Louise felt an une xpected thrill at the idea of a life containing those elements. (She' d made a start -she had the jewel.) She had clearly missed her way , parcelled everything up, nice and neat, settled down, when the rea l Louise wanted to be out there somewhere living the outlaw life , wearing jewels and furs, toting a gun. Even the idea of furs didn' t worry her that much. She could shoot something and skin it and ea t it, better than the unfeeling distance between the abattoir and th e soft, pale packages at the Waitrose meat counter.
    'No,' she said to the woman at the insurance company, returning to sobriety, 'only my engagement ring.' Twenty thousand pounds' worth ofsecond-hand bling. Sell it and run, Louise. Run fast. Joanna Hunter had been a runner (was she still?) , a university athletics champion. She had run once and it had saved her life, perhaps she had made sure that no one was ever going to catch her. Louise had read the noticeboard hanging in the Hunters' kitchen, the little everyday trophies and mementoes of a life -postcards, certificates, photographs, messages. Nothing of course about the event that must have shaped her entire existence, murder wasn't something you tended to pin up on your kitchen corkboard. Alison Needler, on the other hand, didn't run. She hid.
    Louise hardly saw Archie now. He had elected to board during the week because he would rather live in a school than with his mother. At weekends he sought out the same boys he spent all week at schoo l with.
    'Stop fretting,' Patrick said. 'He's sixteen, he's spreading his wings.'
    Louise thought of Icarus.
    'And learning to fly.'
    Louise thought of the dead bird she had found outside the flat at the weekend. A bad omen. Little cock sparrow shot by a boy with a bow and arrow.
    'He has to grow up.'
    'I don't see why.'
    'Louise,' Patrick said gently, 'Archie's happy.'
    'Happy?' Happy wasn't a word she had employed in the context of Archie since he was a little boy. How wonderfully, joyously untrammelled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed for ever, didn't realize that childhood happiness dissolves away, because she herself had never known happiness as a child. If she had realized that Archie wasn't going to be that sunny innocent for ever she would have laid up every moment