When Will There Be Good News?: The Dogs They Left Behind Summary & Analysis

Mr. Hunter phones Reggie at 6:30 the next morning and tells her that she’s not needed at the Hunters’ today—Joanna has gone suddenly “to see an elderly aunt who’s been taken ill.” Reggie is perplexed and keeps questioning Mr. Hunter, who impatiently explains that Joanna has gone to Hawes, Yorkshire, for a few days. Reggie can’t figure out why Dr. Hunter wouldn’t have phoned her. She always has her mobile phone, her “lifeline.”

Mr. Hunter tells Reggie to enjoy a “wee holiday,” but Reggie doesn’t want one. She longs to tell Dr. Hunter about what happened last night. She’d spent all night tossing and turning, going over the night’s events in her mind. And Dr. Hunter is the only person in her life who’d care to hear about it. She would have insisted that Reggie tell her the full story over coffee and chocolate biscuits, but now she’s gone because of some aunt Reggie has never heard of before.

Reggie makes toast and instant coffee and launders her “disgusting” clothes from last night. She watches the news headlines—15 people dead and many injured in the Musselburgh train crash. Reggie sees heavy machinery moving along the track on the news and can hear its noises from the living room. She’s reminded of her mother’s death, when a reporter and photographer had come to her flat asking for a comment. Reggie had shocked herself by telling them to “fuck off.”

The TV reporter says that the cause of the train crash is unconfirmed, but it’s reported that a vehicle was seen on the track. He doesn’t say that the vehicle had belonged to Ms. MacDonald. The news hasn’t been made public, but the police came and told Reggie last night. They’d asked her lots of questions and thought that Reggie was Ms. MacDonald’s daughter. Reggie was confused and disoriented at the time, having just changed out of her blood-sodden clothes. “The man” had just been taken away in a helicopter, a paramedic told her, “You gave him a chance.”

Reggie tried to convince the policemen that she’s 16, not a child. The police told her that Ms. MacDonald seemed to have driven off the road and onto the track somehow, and they ask her if she had seemed depressed lately. Reggie knows that Ms. MacDonald would have never left Banjo behind. She adds that Ms. MacDonald was “just a rubbish driver.” She tries not to think about what Ms. MacDonald might have gone through in that moment, and she promises to come and identify her body tomorrow.

Reggie turns off the TV and looks at Banjo. She realizes he’s dead. Reggie feels “a great bubble of something like laughter but that she knew was grief” and she is reminded of learning of her mother’s death from a woman who her mother had befriended while on holiday. She wishes she had someone who’d loved her mother and could share memories with her. She hopes to have a dozen children someday so that none of them will ever feel they’ve been left alone in the world.

Though she knows it’s wrong, Reggie feels sadder about Banjo’s death than Ms. MacDonald’s. It feels like everyone is dead—“it was like being cursed.” She wonders if the man she thought she’d saved last night is dead after all—maybe she’d given him “not the breath of life but the kiss of death.” When she’d found him, he was bleeding from an artery. Reggie had used her jacket to put pressure on the wound the way Dr. Hunter had shown her. A moment later, she couldn’t find a pulse. The situation became “a nightmare game of Twister” as Reggie figured out how to keep pressure on his artery while beginning mouth-to-mouth breathing. She begged the man to hang on “for my sake if not for yours.”

Reggie buries Banjo in Ms. MacDonald’s muddy backyard. It reminds her of her mother’s rainy funeral. Reggie takes the bus home to her own flat, drawing looks because of the clothes she’s scavenged from Ms. MacDonald’s closet—garments of synthetic fibers that are much too big for Reggie. She’d had to throw her own blood-saturated clothes in the trash. She held onto a postcard she’d found in the man’s pocket last night, signed by Marlee. She carries it in her pocket now along with the postcard from her mother. She hopes she can return it to him somehow, but when she called the Royal Infirmary that morning, they’d told her that they had no record of a Jackson Brodie.