All night -or what little was left ofit by the time she got to bed -Reggie had tossed restlessly in the unfamiliar surroundings of Ms MacDonald's back bedroom, going over the events of the last hours and bursting with excitement at the idea of retelling them to Dr Hunter. Well, perhaps excitement was the wrong word, terrible things had happened on that railway track, but Reggie had been involved in them, a witness and a participant. People she knew had died. People she didn't know had died. Drama -that was a better word. And she needed to tell someone about the drama. More specifically she needed to tell Dr Hunter about it because Dr Hunter was the only person she knew who was interested in her life now that Mum had gone.

Dr Hunter would have led her into the kitchen where she would have switched on the coffee machine and made Reggie sit down at the nice big wooden table and when, but only when (Strict house rules, Reggie), they had mugs ofcoffee and a plate ofchocolate biscuits in front of them, Dr Hunter, face bright with anticipation, would have said, 'Right, Reggie, come on then, tell me all about it,' and Reggie would have taken a deep breath and said, 'You know the train crash last night? I was there.'

And now because of some aunt, an aunt who lived in H-a-w-e-s, Reggie had no one to tell. Although, of course, Dr Hunter would have been at work by the time Reggie arrived and there would only have been Mr Hunter (What's your story, Reggie?) who was an unsatisfactory audience at the best of times.

Reggie went downstairs to Ms MacDonald's kitchen, flicked on the kettle and spooned instant coffee into an 'I Believe in Angels' mug. While she waited for the kettle to boil she bundled her disgusting clothes from last night into the washing machine, after which she found half a stale sliced white loaf in the breadbin, made a Jenga tower of toast and jam from it and turned on the television in time to catch the seven o'clock headlines on GMTV.

'Fifteen people dead, four critical, many severely injured,' the newsreader said with her best serious face on. She handed over to a reporter who was 'live at the scene'. The man, who was in a trench coat and was clutching a microphone, was trying to look as ifhe wasn't freezing cold, as if he hadn't raced through the night like a ghoul to get to Scotland, high on adrenalin at the idea of a disaster. 'As dawn begins to break here you can see that behind me there is a scene ofutter devastation,' he intoned solemnly. Across the bottom of the screen it said'Musselburgh Train Crash'.

In the arc-lit background, people in fluorescent yellow jackets moved around the wreckage. 'The first of the heavy lifting gear is beginning to arrive,' the reporter said, 'as the investigation into the causes of this tragic accident begins.' The noises of engines revving and machinery clanking were the same sounds that Reggie could hear from Ms MacDonald's living room. If she had stood on tiptoe at the bedroom window she could probably have seen the reporter.

After Mum died a journalist had come round to the flat. She had been a lot more dowdy and a lot less perky than any of the reporters that you saw on TV. She had brought a photographer with her, 'Dave,' the woman said, indicating a man lurking in the stairwell as if waiting for a cue to come up on stage. He gave Reggie a sheepish little wave as if even he, battle-hardened veteran of a hundred local tragedies of one kind or another, could understand why a girl who had just lost her mother might not want to be photographed at eight in the morning with her eyes red-raw from weeping. 'Fuck off,' Reggie said and shut the front door in the reporter's face. Mum would have been horrified at her language. She was pretty horrified herself.

The reporter wrote the piece anyway. 'Local woman in holiday swimming-pool tragedy. Daughter too upset to comment'.

Banjo, lying on the sofa next to her like a deflated cushion, whimpered in his sleep, his paws moving as if he was chasing dream rabbits. He hadn't wanted to wake up last night, hadn't shown any interest in anything, so Reggie had put him on the sofa, covered him up with a blanket and -because she could hardly leave him all alone -had herself slept in Ms MacDonald's inhospitable guest room between brushed nylon sheets, beneath a thin, slightly damp eiderdown.

At home, Reggie now slept in Mum's double bed, pillowed and downy, made up with the pink broderie-anglaise sheets Mum had liked best and exorcized of all trace of Gary's sweaty, hairy biker's body. Before Spain, Reggie had lain in bed on the other side of the wall, three pillows over her head, trying not to hear the (barely) muffled laughs and creaks coming from Mum's room. It had been incredibly embarrassing. No mother should subject her teenage daughter to that.

It was nice when she was lying in Mum's bed in the dark to have the comfort of a streetlamp outside, like a big orange nightlight. It was only the bed that Reggie had taken over the occupation of, on account of her own bedroom being a windowless boxroom. The rest of the room was still Mum's, her clothes in the wardrobe, her cosmetics on the dressing table, her slippers beneath the bed, waiting patiently for her feet. Miracle by Danielle Steel was still on the bedside table, the corner of turned down where Mum had left off to go to Spain. Reggie couldn't move it from its final resting place. Mum hadn't taken any books with her on holiday. 'I don't suppose I'll have time for reading,' she giggled.

Mary, Trish and Jean had given up trying to persuade Reggie to give Mum's stuff to charity -they had offered to box everything up and 'get rid of it' -but Reggie went into charity shops herself and imagined herself raking through the second-hand paperbacks and bits of old-lady china and finding one of Mum's skirts or a pair of her shoes. Even worse -a complete stranger pawing Mum's stuff. We go and leave nothing behind, Dr Hunter said but that wasn't true, Mum had left a lot.

Banjo suddenly made an odd grunting noise that Reggie had never heard before. The phone number for the vet, written in black felt tip, was taped to the wall beside the phone. Reggie hoped she wouldn't be the one who would have to call it. She stroked the dog's head absent-mindedly while she finished her toast. She was still ravenous as ifshe'd skipped several meals. It felt like a whole lifetime since she had sat at the dining table with Ms MacDonald, eating her 'speciality' spaghetti. Reggie's stomach did a funny flip at the thought of Ms MacDonald. She was never going to sit at that table again, never eat spaghetti, never eat anything at all. She had had her last supper.

The man live at the scene was still speaking. 'Reports vary as to what actually happened here last night and the police have so far neither confirmed nor denied that at the time of the accident there was a vehicle on the track a few hundred yards from here.' A picture flashed on the screen of a bridge over the railway line. A car had obviously driven off the road and knocked down the wall of the bridge and fallen on to the track below.

The reporter didn't add that the vehicle was a blue Citroen Saxo or that it contained Ms MacDonald, very dead at the scene. These facts hadn't been made public yet, only Reggie knew because the police had come to Ms MacDonald's house last night, after Reggie had got back from the train crash, and asked her lots of questions about 'the occupant of the house' -where was she and what time was Reggie expecting her back? There were two uniformed policemen, one florid and middle-aged (,Sergeant Bob Wiseman'), the other Asian, small and handsome and young and apparently nameless.

For some reason they had their wires crossed and thought Reggie was Ms MacDonald's daughter. ('Has your mother left you alone in the house?') The handsome young Asian PC made her a cup of tea and handed it to her nervously as if he wasn't sure what she would do with it. She was starving then as well and had thought about the Tunnock's Caramel Wafer that she should have been eating with Ms MacDonald at that moment. She supposed it wasn't appropriate to suggest biscuits when the older policeman had just said to her, 'I'm really sorry but I'm afraid we think your mother may be dead.'