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

pragmatist, a happy idiot. 'Well, you've got the idiot part right,' he heard his ex-wife Josie's voice say in his head.
    The road stretched tightly over the contours of the land and, apart from the occasional dip, they were climbing the whole time. Although Jackson would have referred to himself in the singular ifhe had been (God forbid) on foot, when he was in a car he became a plural pronoun. They, we, us. The car and me, a bio-mechanical fusion of man and vehicle. Pilgrims on God's highway.
    They were alone. Not another car in sight. No tractors or Land Rovers, no other drifters on the high plains, no fellow travellers at all. No farmhouses or sheep-barns either, only grass and barren limestone and a dead December sky. He was on the road to nowhere.
    There were still a lot of hardy sheep wandering around though, aloof to the dangers posed by a bloody great Discovery bearing down on them . T hey must surely lamb late up here on these wuthering heights. Jackson wondered if they were already carrying next year's lambs. He had never considered the gestation period of a sheep before, it was surprising what a lonely road drove you to. His daughter had recently announced her conversion to the vegetarian cause. In a word association test his automatic response to the word 'lamb' would be 'mint sauce', Marlee's would be 'innocent'. The slaughter of. She was being brought up as an atheist, but she spoke the language of martyrs. Perhaps Catholicism was genetic, in the blood.
    'Becoming a vegetarian seems to be a rite of passage for teenage girls these days,' Josie said, during his last visit to Cambridge at the end of the summer. 'All her friends have given up meat.' No more father-daughter bonding over a burger then.
    'I know, I know, meat is murder,' he said, as they sat down at a table in a cafe of Marlee's choice called something like Seeds or Roots. ('Weeds,' he called it, to her annoyance.) He had had a hankering for a beef and mustard sandwich but settled for a chewy brown roll with an anaemic-looking filling that he guessed to be egg but which turned out -horror of horrors -to be 'scrambled tofu'.
    'Yum,' he said and Marlee said, 'Don't be so cynical, Daddy. It suits you too much.'
    When had his daughter started speaking like a woman? A year ago she had skipped along like a three-year-old on the path by the river to Grantchester (where, if his memory served him rightly, she had eaten a ham salad in the Orchard Tea Room, no guilt at all about ingesting Babe). Now, apparently, that girl had run on ahead out of sight. Turn your back for a minute and they were gone.
    When you had children you measured your years in theirs. Not 'I'm forty-nine' but 'I have a twelve-year-old child'. Josie had another child now, another girl, two years old, the same age as Nathan. Two children united by the common thread of DNA they shared with their half-sister, Marlee. Just because Nathan didn't look like him didn't mean he wasn't his son. After all, Marlee didn't look like him either. Julia claimed that Nathan wasn't his child but when had anyone ever believed anything that his ex-girlfriend said? Julia was born to lie. Plus she was an actress, of course. So when she looked him earnestly in the eye and said, 'Really, Jackson, the baby isn't yours, I'm telling the truth, why would I lie?' his instinct was to say, 'Why change the habit of a lifetime now?' Instead of arguing (I generally only argue with people I like, she had once said to him), she had given him a pitying look.
    He wanted a son. He wanted a son so he could teach him all the things he knew, as well as how to learn all the things he didn't know. He couldn't teach his daughter anything, she knew more than he did already. And he wanted a son because he was a man. Simple as that. He suddenly recalled the surge of emotion he had felt when he touched Nathan's head. That was the kind ofthing that made a strong man weak for life.
    And anyway, he had said to Josie, since when was twelve a