Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘She’s passing Workout World,’ Grant said.

  ‘Tracy’s OK,’ Leslie said.

  ‘She’s a Nazi.’

  ‘No she’s not.’ Leslie had her eye on a group of hoodies lurching past Rayners’ Opticians. One of them was wearing some kind of Halloween fright mask. He leered at an old woman who flinched at the sight of him. ‘We always prosecute,’ Leslie murmured, as if it was a private joke.

  ‘Ey up,’ Grant said. ‘Tracy’s going into Thornton’s. Must need her daily rations topping up.’

  Leslie liked Tracy, you knew where you were with her. No bullshit.

  ‘She’s a right fat pig,’ Grant said.

  ‘She’s not fat, just big.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what they all say.’

  Leslie was small and delicate. A cracking bird if ever there was one, in Grant’s opinion. Special. Not like some of the slags you got round here. ‘Sure you don’t want to go for a drink after work?’ he asked, ever hopeful. ‘Cocktail bar in town. Sophisticated place for a sophisticated laydee.’

  ‘Ey up,’ Leslie said. ‘There’s some dodgy kids going into City Cyber.’

  Tracy Waterhouse came out of Thornton’s, stuffing her forage into the big, ugly shoulder bag that she wore strapped, like a bandolier, across her substantial chest. Viennese truffles, her midweek treat. Pathetic really. Other people went to the cinema on an evening, to restaurants, pubs and clubs, visited friends, had sex, but Tracy was looking forward to curling up on her sofa with Britain’s Got Talent and a bag of Thornton’s Viennese truffles. And a chicken bhuna that she was going to pick up on the way home and wash down with one or two cans of Beck’s. Or three or four, even though it was a Wednesday. A school night. More than forty years since Tracy left school. When had she last eaten a meal with someone in a restaurant? That bloke from the dating agency, a couple of years ago, in Dino’s in Bishopsgate? She could remember what she’d eaten – garlic bread, spaghetti and meatballs, followed by a crème caramel – yet she couldn’t recall the bloke’s name. ‘You’re a big girl,’ he said when she met him for a drink beforehand in Whitelock’s.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Want to make something of it?’ Downhill from there on really.

  She ducked into Superdrug to pick up some Advil for the Beck’s headache she would wake up with tomorrow. The girl behind the till didn’t even look at her. Service with a scowl. Very easy to steal from Superdrug, lots of handy little things to slip into a bag or a pocket – lipsticks, toothpaste, shampoo, Tampax – you could hardly blame people for thieving, it was as if you were inviting them. Tracy glanced around at the security cameras. She knew there was a blind spot right on Nailcare. You could have taken everything you needed for a year’s worth of manicures and no one would be any the wiser. She placed a protective hand on her bag. It contained two envelopes stuffed with twenties – five thousand pounds in all – that she’d just removed from her account at the Yorkshire Bank. She would like to see someone trying to snatch it from her – she was looking forward to beating them to a pulp with her bare hands. No point in having weight, Tracy reasoned, if you weren’t prepared to throw it around.

  The money was a payment for Janek, the workman who was extending the kitchen in the terraced house in Headingley that she’d bought with the proceeds of the sale of her parents’ bungalow in Bramley. It was such a relief that they were finally dead, dying within a few weeks of each other, minds and bodies long past their sell-by date. They had both reached ninety and Tracy had begun to think that they were trying to outlive her. They had always been competitive people.

  Janek started at eight in the morning, finished at six, worked on a Saturday – Polish, what else. It was embarrassing how much Tracy was attracted to Janek, despite the fact that he was twenty years younger and at least three inches shorter than she was. He was so careful and had such good manners. Every morning Tracy left out tea and coffee for him and a plate of biscuits wrapped in cling-film. When she returned home the biscuits were all eaten. It made her feel wanted. She was starting a week’s holiday on Friday and Janek promised everything would be finished by the time she returned. Tracy didn’t want it to be finished, well, she did, she was sick to death of it, but she didn’t want him to be finished.

  She wondered if he would stay on if she asked him to do her bathroom. He was champing at the bit to go home. All the Poles were going back now. They didn’t want to stay in a bankrupt country. Before the Berlin Wall came down you felt sorry for them, now you envied them.

  When Tracy was on the force her fellow officers – male and female – all assumed she was a dyke. She was over fifty now and way back when she had joined the West Yorkshire Police as a raw cadet you had to be one of the boys to get along. Unfortunately, once you’d established yourself as a hard-nosed bitch it was difficult to admit to the soft and fluffy woman you were hiding inside. And why would you want to admit to that anyway?

  Tracy had retired with a shell so thick that there was hardly any room left inside. Vice, sexual offences, human trafficking – the underbelly of Drugs and Major Crime – she’d seen it all and more. Witnessing the worst of human behaviour was a pretty good way of killing off anything soft and fluffy.

  She’d been around so long that she had been a humble foot soldier when Peter Sutcliffe was still patrolling the streets of West Yorkshire. She remembered the fear, she’d been afraid herself. That was in the days before computers, when the sheer weight of paperwork was enough to swamp the investigation. ‘There were days before computers?’ one of her younger, cheekier colleagues said. ‘Wow, Jurassic.’

  He was right, she was from another era. She should have gone sooner, only hanging on because she couldn’t think how to fill the long empty days of retirement. Sleep, eat, protect, repeat, that was the life she knew. Everyone was fixated on the thirty years, get out, get another job, enjoy the pension. Anyone who stayed on longer was seen as a fool.

  Tracy would have preferred to have dropped in harness but she knew it was time to go. She had been a detective superintendent, now she was a ‘police pensioner’. Sounded Dickensian, as if she should be sitting in the corner of a workhouse, wrapped in a dirty shawl. She’d thought about volunteering with one of those organizations that helped mop up after disasters and wars. After all, it was something she felt she’d been doing all her life, but in the end she took the job in the Merrion Centre.

  At her farewell piss-up they had given her a laptop and two hundred quid’s worth of spa vouchers for the Waterfall Spa on Brewery Wharf. She was pleasantly surprised, even flattered, that they imagined she was the kind of woman who would use a spa. She already had a laptop and she knew the one they gave her was one of those that Carphone Warehouse gave away for free, but it was the thought that counted.

  When she took the job as head of security in the Merrion Centre Tracy thought ‘fresh start’ and made some changes, not just moving house but getting her moustache waxed, growing her hair into a softer style, shopping for blouses with bows and pearl buttons and shoes with kitten heels to wear with the ubiquitous black suit. It didn’t work, of course. She could tell that, spa vouchers or no spa vouchers, people still thought she was a butch old battleaxe.

  Tracy liked getting up close and personal with the punters. She strolled past Morrisons, the gap where Woolworths used to be, Poundstretcher – the retail preferences of the lumpenproletariat. Was there anyone in the entire soulless place who was happy? Leslie perhaps, although she kept her cards close to her chest. Like Janek, she had a life somewhere else. Tracy imagined Canada was a good place to live. Or Poland. Perhaps she should emigrate.

  It was warm today. Tracy hoped the weather would last for her holiday. A week in a National Trust cottage, lovely setting. She was a member. That was what happened when you grew older and had nothing fulfilling in your life – you joined the National Trust or English Heritage and spent your weekends meandering around gardens and houses that didn’t belong to you or gazing in boredom at ruins, trying to reconstruct
them in your mind – long-gone monks cooking, pissing, praying inside walls of cold stone. And you spent your holidays on your own, of course. She’d joined a ‘singles social club’ a couple of years ago. Middle-aged, middle-class people who didn’t have any friends. Rambling, art classes, museum visits, all very sedate. She joined thinking it might be nice to go on holiday with other people but it hadn’t worked out. Spent all her time trying to get away from them.

  The world was going to hell in a handcart. The Watch Hospital, Costa Coffee, Wilkinson’s Hardware, Walmsley’s, Herbert Brown’s (‘Lend and Spend’ a fancy rhyme for a pawnbroker, eternal friend of the underclass). All human life was here. Britain – shoplifting capital of Europe, over two billion quid lost every year to ‘retail shrinkage’, a ridiculous term for what was, after all, straightforward thieving. And double that figure if you added the amount of stuff that the staff nicked. Unbelievable.

  Think how many starving kids you could feed and educate with all that missing money. But then it wasn’t money, was it, not real money. There was no such thing as real money any more, it was just an act of the collective imagination. Now if we all just clap our hands and believe . . . Of course, the five thousand pounds in her bag wasn’t going to benefit the Inland Revenue either but modest tax evasion was a citizen’s right, not a crime. There was crime and then there was crime. Tracy had seen a lot of the other sort, all the p’s – paedophilia, prostitution, pornography. Trafficking. Buying and selling, that’s all people did. You could buy women, you could buy kids, you could buy anything. Western civilization had had a good run but now it had pretty much shopped itself out of existence. All cultures had a built-in obsolescence, didn’t they? Nothing was for ever. Except diamonds maybe, if the song was right. And cockroaches probably. Tracy had never owned a diamond, probably never would. Her mother’s engagement ring had been sapphires, never off her finger, put on by Tracy’s father when he proposed, taken off by the undertaker before he put her in her coffin. Tracy had it valued – two thousand quid, not as much as she’d hoped for. Tracy had tried to squeeze it on to her little finger but it didn’t fit. It was somewhere at the back of a drawer now. She bought a doughnut in Ainsleys, put it in her bag for later.

  She clocked a woman coming out of Rayners’ who had a familiar look about her. Resembled that madam who used to run a brothel out of a house in Cookridge. Tracy had raided it when she was still in uniform, long before she was exposed to the full horrors of Vice. All home comforts, the madam offered her ‘gentlemen’ a glass of sherry, little dishes of nuts, before they went upstairs and committed degrading acts behind the lace curtains. She had a dungeon in what used to be her coal cellar. Made Tracy feel squeamish, the stuff that was down there. The girls were indifferent, nothing could surprise them. Still, they were better off in that house, behind the lace curtains, than they would have been on the streets. Used to be poverty that drove women on the game, now it was drugs. These days there was hardly a girl on the streets who wasn’t an addict. Shopmobility, Claire’s Accessories. In Greggs she bought a sausage roll for her lunch.

  The madam was dead a long time ago, had a stroke at the City Varieties when they were filming The Good Old Days. All dressed in her Edwardian finery and dead in her seat. No one noticed until the end. Tracy had wondered if they’d caught it on camera. They wouldn’t have shown a corpse on TV in those days, these days they probably would.

  No, not the ghost of the dead madam, it was that actress from Collier. That was why the face looked familiar. The one who played Vince Collier’s mother. Tracy didn’t like Collier, it was a load of crap. She preferred Law and Order: SVU. The actress who resembled the Cookridge madam looked older than she did on screen. Her makeup was a mess, as if she’d put it on without a mirror. It gave her a slightly unhinged air. The woman was obviously wearing a wig. Perhaps she had cancer. Tracy’s mother, Dorothy Waterhouse, died of cancer. You get to over ninety and you’d think you would die of old age. They talked about treating it with chemo and Tracy had objected to wasting resources on someone so old. She had wondered if she could sneak a DNR bracelet on to her mother’s wrist without anyone noticing but then her mother had surprised them all by actually dying. Tracy had waited so long for that moment that it felt like an anticlimax.

  Dorothy Waterhouse used to boast that Tracy’s father had never seen her without make-up, Tracy didn’t know why as she gave the impression of never having liked him. She put a lot of effort into being Dorothy Waterhouse. Tracy instructed the undertaker to leave her mother au naturel.

  ‘Not even a bit of lippie?’ he said.

  Electricity everywhere. All the bright shiny surfaces. Long time since everything was made from wood and lit by firelight and stars. Tracy caught sight of herself in the plate glass of Ryman’s, saw the wild-eyed look of a woman falling over the edge. Someone who had started out the day carefully put together and was slowly unravelling during the course of it. Her skirt was creased over her hips, her highlights looked brassy and her bulging beer belly stuck out in a mockery of pregnancy. Survival of the fattest.

  Tracy felt defeated. She glanced down and picked some lint off her jacket. Things could only get worse. Photo Me, Priceless, Sheila’s Sandwiches. She could hear a child crying somewhere – part of the soundtrack of shopping malls the world over. It was a sound that was still capable of piercing the shell like a red-hot needle. A group of listless teenage hoodies were hanging around the entrance to City Cyber, jostling and shoving each other in a way that passed for wit amongst them. One of them was wearing a Halloween fright mask, a plastic skull where his face should be. It unnerved her for a moment.

  Tracy might have followed the youths into the shop but the screaming child was moving closer, distracting her. She could hear the child but she couldn’t see it. Its distress was startling. It was doing her head in.

  Regrets, she had a few. Quite a lot actually. Wished she’d found someone who appreciated her, wished she’d had kids and learned how to dress better. Wished she’d stayed on at school, maybe gone on and done a degree. Medicine, geography, art history. It was the usual stuff. Really she was just like everyone else, she wanted to love someone. Even better if they loved you in return. She was considering getting a cat. She didn’t really like cats though. That might be a bit of a problem. Quite liked dogs – sensible, clever dogs, not stupid little lapdogs that fitted in a handbag. A good big German shepherd perhaps, woman’s best friend. No burglar alarm could better it.

  Oh yeah – Kelly Cross. Kelly Cross was the reason for the screaming child. No surprise there. Kelly Cross. Prostitute, druggie, thief, all-round pikey. A scrag-end of a woman. Tracy knew her. Everyone knew her. Kelly had several kids, most of them in care and they were the lucky ones, which was saying something. She was storming along the main drag of the Merrion Centre, a woman possessed, anger coming off her like knives. It was surprising how much power she radiated, given how small and thin she was. She was wearing a sleeveless vest that revealed some tasteful trailer-trash bruises and a set of prison tats. On her forearm, a crudely drawn heart with an arrow through it and the initials ‘K’ and ‘S’. Tracy wondered who the unlucky ‘S’ was. She was talking on her phone, mouthing off to someone. She had almost certainly nicked something. The chances of that woman walking out of a shop with a valid till receipt were almost zero.

  She was pulling the kid by the hand, wrenching her along because there was no way that the child could keep up with Kelly’s furious pace. Imagine, you’ve not long learned to walk and now you’re expected to run like an adult. Occasionally, Kelly jerked her off the ground so that for a second the kid seemed to fly. Screaming. Nonstop. Red-hot needle through the shell. Through the eardrum. Into the brain.

  Kelly Cross parted the throng of shoppers like an unholy Moses striding through the Red Sea. Many of the onlookers were clearly horrified but no one had the nerve to tackle a berserker like Kelly. You couldn’t blame them.

  Kelly stopped so suddenly that the kid kept running forward as
if she was on elastic. Kelly thumped her hard on the backside, sending her into the air as if she was on a swing and then, without a word, she set off running again. Tracy heard a surprisingly loud middle-class voice, a woman’s, say, ‘Someone should do something.’

  Too late. Kelly had already stomped her way past Morrisons and out on to Woodhouse Lane. Tracy followed her, cantering to keep up, her lungs ready to collapse by the time she caught her at a bus stop. Jesus, when did she get so unfit? About twenty years ago probably. She should haul her old Rosemary Conley tapes out of the boxes in the spare room.

  ‘Kelly,’ she wheezed.

  Kelly spun round, snarling, ‘What the fuck do you want?’ A faint glimmer of recognition on her venomous face as she glared at Tracy. Tracy could see the wheels ticking round until they came up with ‘copper’. It made Kelly even more enraged, if that was possible.

  She looked worse close up – flat hair, grey corpse-skin, bloodshot vampire eyes and a junkie edginess to her that made Tracy want to step back but she held her ground. The kid, tear-stained and mucky, had stopped crying and was staring slack-mouthed at Tracy. Made her seem gormless but Tracy guessed adenoidal. Her appearance wasn’t helped by the green caterpillar of snot crawling out of her nose. Three years old? Four? Tracy wasn’t sure how you told the age of a kid. Maybe it was from their teeth, like horses. They were small. Some were bigger than others. That was about as far as she was willing to go in the guessing stakes.

  The kid was dressed in various shades of pink, with the addition of a little pink rucksack stuck on her back like a barnacle, so that the general impression was of a misshapen marshmallow. Someone – surely not Kelly – had attempted to plait the kid’s stringy hair. The pink and the plaits signalled her gender, something not immediately obvious from her podgy, androgynous features.