Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

She was a small lumpy kind of kid but there was a spark of something in her eyes. Life perhaps. Cracked but not broken. Yet. What chance did this kid have with Kelly as her mother? Realistically? Kelly was still holding the kid’s hand, not so much holding it as gripping it in a vice as if the kid was about to fly up into the air.

  A bus was approaching, indicating, slowing down.

  Something gave inside Tracy. A small floodgate letting out a race of despair and frustration as she contemplated the blank but already soiled canvas of the kid’s future. Tracy didn’t know how it happened. One moment she was standing at a bus stop on Woodhouse Lane, contemplating the human wreckage that was Kelly Cross, the next she was saying to her, ‘How much?’

  ‘How much what?’

  ‘How much for the kid?’ Tracy said, delving into her handbag and unearthing one of the envelopes that contained Janek’s money. She opened it and showed it to Kelly. ‘There’s three thousand here. You can have it all in exchange for the kid.’ She kept the second envelope with the remaining two thousand out of sight in case she needed to up the ante. She didn’t need to, however, as Kelly suddenly meerkatted to attention. Her brain seemed to disassociate for a second, her eyes flicking rapidly from side to side, and then, with unexpected speed, her hand shot out and she grabbed the envelope. In the same second she dropped the kid’s hand. Then she laughed with genuine glee as the bus drew to a halt behind her. ‘Ta very much,’ she said as she jumped aboard.

  While Kelly stood on the platform fumbling for change, Tracy raised her voice and said, ‘What’s her name? What’s your daughter’s name, Kelly?’ Kelly pulled her ticket out of the machine and said, ‘Courtney.’

  ‘Courtney?’ Typical chav name – Chantelle, Shannon, Tiffany. Courtney.

  Kelly turned round, ticket clutched in her hand. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Courtney.’ Then she gave her a puzzled look, as if Tracy was a Polo short of a packet. Started to say something, ‘But she’s not—’ but the bus doors closed on her words. The bus drove off. Tracy stared after it. Gormless, not adenoidal. She registered a sudden spike of anxiety. She had just bought a kid. She didn’t move until a small, warm, sticky hand found its way into hers.

  ‘Where did Tracy go?’ Grant asked, scanning the bank of monitors. ‘She just disappeared.’

  Leslie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Keep an eye on that drunk outside Boots, will you?’

  ‘Someone should do something.’ Tilly was surprised to find herself speaking out loud. And so loud too. Resolutely middle-class. Resonate! She could hear her old voice coach at drama college exclaiming, Resonate! Your chest is a bell, Matilda! Franny Anderson. Miss Anderson, you would never call her anything more familiar. Spine like a ramrod, spoke Morningside English. Tilly still did the voice exercises Miss Anderson had taught them – ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar – every morning, first thing, before she even had a cup of tea. The flat she lived in, in Fulham, had walls like paper, the neighbours must think she was mad. Over half a century since Tilly was a drama student. Everyone thought life began in the sixties but London in the fifties had been thrilling for a naïve eighteen-year-old girl from Hull, straight out of grammar school. Eighteen then was younger than it was now.

  Tilly had shared a little place in Soho with Phoebe March, Dame Phoebe now of course – hell to pay if you forget the title. She’d been Helena to Phoebe’s Hermia at Stratford, oh God, decades ago now. Started off on an equal footing, you see, and now Phoebe was forever playing English queens and wearing frocks and tiaras. She had Oscars (supporting) and Baftas coming out of her ears, while Tilly was stuffed into a pinafore apron and slippers pretending to be Vince Collier’s mother. Hey-ho.

  Not really an equal footing. Tilly’s father had owned a wet fish shop in the Land of Green Ginger – a street more romantic in name than in reality – whilst Phoebe, although she called herself a ‘northern girl’, was really from the landowning classes – house designed by John Carr of York near Malton – and she was the niece of a cousin of the old king, huge house on Eaton Square that she could repair to if things got tricky in Soho. The stories Tilly could tell about Phoebe – Dame Phoebe – would make your hair curl.

  Miss Anderson would be long dead now, of course. She wasn’t the kind to rot messily in the grave either. Tilly imagined she would have become a parched mummy, eyeless and shrivelled, and as weightless as dead bracken. But still with perfect diction.

  Tilly knew her outrage was impotent, she wasn’t going to be the one to tackle the fearsome tattooed woman. Too old, too fat, too slow. Too frightened. But someone should, someone braver. A man. Men weren’t what they used to be. If they ever had been. Agitated, she glanced around the shopping centre. Dear God, this was an awful place. She would never have come back but she had to pick up her new specs from Rayners’. She wouldn’t have come here at all but a production assistant, nice girl, Padma – Indian, all the nice girls were Asian now – had made the appointment for her. There you go, Miss Squires, anything else I can do to help? What a sweetheart. Tilly had sat on her old specs. Easy thing to do. Blind as a bat without them. Difficult driving the old jalopy when you couldn’t see a thing.

  And after all this time buried in the country she had fancied being in a city. But perhaps not this one. Guildford or Henley perhaps, somewhere civilized.

  They had her holed up in the middle of nowhere for the duration of her filming. Guest appearance on Collier, twelve-month contract, her character killed off at the end of it, not that she knew that when she took it on. Oh, darling, you must, all her theatre friends said. It’ll be amusing – and think of the money! You bet she was thinking of the money! She was more or less living hand-to-mouth these days. Nothing in the theatre for three years now. Scripts were tricky, the old memory not what it was. She had awful trouble learning her lines. Never used to have a problem, started off in rep when she was eighteen. The ingénue. (Rote learning at school, of course, out of fashion now.) Different play every week, knew all her lines and everyone else’s as well. She had once, long ago, just to prove she could, learned the whole of The Three Sisters by heart, and she was only playing Natasha!

  ‘Senile old bat,’ she heard someone say yesterday. It was true everything was dimming. The lights are going out all over Europe. Suffer the little children. Should she find a policeman? Or phone 999? It seemed an awfully dramatic thing to do.

  The last thing she’d done for the telly was a Casualty where she’d played an old dear who had manned an ack-ack gun in the war and who’d died of hypothermia in a high-rise flat, which led to a lot of hand-wringing from the characters (How can this happen in this day and age? This woman defended her country in the war. Et cetera). Of course she wasn’t really old enough to play the role. She was still a child during the war, could only remember certain awful things about it, Mother harrying her into the shelter in the middle of the night, the smell of damp earth inside. Hull took a terrible beating.

  Flat-footed Father was given a desk job in the Army Catering Corps. Not much fish to sell during the war anyway, trawlers requisitioned by the navy. The ones that kept on fishing were blown out of the water, fishermen’s bodies coiling down into the cold, icy depths. Those are pearls that were his eyes. She had played Miranda at school. Have you thought about the stage, Matilda? Her headmistress didn’t think she was much good for anything else. Not exactly academically inclined, are you, Matilda?

  Tilly wished she had been old enough to fight in the war, to be a bold girl on an ack-ack gun.

  The producers of Collier had seduced her in the Club at the Ivy over a cocktail called the Twinkle, rather disturbing nomenclature for Tilly as that was the name her prudish mother assigned to female genitalia. Tilly had always rather liked the word ‘vagina’, it sounded like a swotty girl or a new found land.

  When she had first spotted her, the little girl was skipping along, singing, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. The anthem of children everywhere. Made Tilly think of her mother again. The little girl made fists of her hands (so tiny!) a
nd every time she sang the word ‘twinkle’ she opened them out, like little starfish. The girl was in tune, perfect pitch, someone should have told her mother that the little thing had a gift. Someone should have said something.

  When Tilly saw them again, ten minutes later, the poor child was no longer singing. The mother – a brutal woman with crude tattoos and a mobile phone clamped to her ear – was yelling at her, ‘Would you just shut the fuck up, Courtney, you’re getting on my tits!’ She was furious, pulling her along and shouting at her. You knew what happened to children like that when they got home. Behind closed doors. Child cruelty. Snipping off all the little buds so that they could never blossom.

  A little black thing among the snow. That was Blake, wasn’t it? Not that the ‘Twinkle,Twinkle’ little girl was black. Quite the opposite, as if she never saw the sun. Crying ‘weep! weep!’ in notes of woe. It was surprising more children didn’t have rickets. Perhaps they did. Tilly’s grandmother had had rickets, there was a photograph of her as a child, the only photograph of her, taken in a studio in some bleak, flat part of the East Riding. I by the tide of Humber would complain. Her grandmother, three years old if she was a day, had little bowed legs in boots, your heart wept for the past. You can’t change the past, only the future, and the only place you could change the future was in the present. That’s what they said. Tilly didn’t think she’d ever changed anything. Except her mind. Ha, ha. Very droll, Matilda.

  Collier had turned out not to be so ‘amusing’, after all. Certainly nothing amusing about hanging around on set (basically, a big aircraft hangar in the middle of nowhere) at six thirty in the morning, freezing your cockles off. The set had been built in the grounds of a stately home belonging to Earl or Duke somebody-or-other. Bizarre, but then the aristocracy were always looking for money these days. ‘Purpose-built set,’ the producers said to her. ‘Cost millions, shows a commitment to longevity.’ Collier used to be on once a week, now it was three times and they were talking about four. Actors like donkeys, turning a wheel.

  They’d brought Tilly in to play Vince Collier’s mother because they wanted to make the character ‘more human’, more vulnerable. Tilly had worked before with the actor who played Vince Collier, when he was a teenager, and she kept calling him by his real name – Simon – instead of Vince. Seven takes today just to say goodbye to him on a doorstep. Goodbye, Simon six times, the seventh take she just said Goodbye, dear. ‘Thank fuck,’ she heard the director say (a little too loudly). The name (‘Vince, Vince,’ the director muttered, ‘how hard can it be?’) just kept eluding her. It was in her brain but she couldn’t find it.

  Nice boy, Simon. Ran her lines with her all the time, told her not to worry. Gay as a goose. Everyone knew, worst-kept secret in television. You couldn’t say anything because Vince Collier was supposed to be very macho. Simon’s boyfriend, Marcello, was staying with him, rented cottage, nicer than Tilly’s. They’d had Tilly over to dinner, lots of gin and Marcello had cooked a chicken, ‘Sicilian style’. Afterwards they drank some lovely rum that the boys had brought back from holiday on Mauritius and played cribbage. All three of them gloriously tiddly. (She wasn’t a lush like Dame you-know-who.) Lovely old-fashioned evening.

  She thought she’d signed up for the duration (‘My pension,’ she murmured happily over her third Twinkle) and then last week they told her that her contract wasn’t being renewed and she was going to die at the end of her run. She had only a few weeks to go. They hadn’t told her how. It was beginning to worry her in some curiously existential way as if Death was going to jump out at her from round a corner, swinging his sickle and shouting, ‘Boo!’ Well, perhaps not boo. She hoped that Death had a little more gravitas than that.

  Tilly herself was beginning to feel a lack of commitment to longevity. Some days the old ticker felt like a hard little knot in her chest, other days it was like a soft, fluttering bird trying to escape from its ribbed cage. She suspected that her alter ego, poor old Marjorie Collier, was going to meet a sticky end rather than expire gracefully in her bed. And then! Just as she was coming out of Rayners’ she encountered Death, exactly as she’d feared. Thought she was going to drop dead on the spot but it was just some silly boy in a skull mask. Sneering at her, jumping up and down like a skeleton on strings. Shouldn’t be allowed.

  Bluebell Cottage. That was the name of the place she was staying in. A made-up name obviously. Used to be a farm worker’s cottage. Poor peasants, all mud and blood and up at dawn with the beasts in the field. She’d done a Hardy, oh years ago, for the BBC, learned a lot about agricultural labourers in the course of it.

  We’ve got you a lovely cottage, they said, usually rented out to holiday-makers. They had cast and crew stashed everywhere – B and Bs, cheap hotels in Leeds, Halifax, Bradford, rental houses, even caravans. They would have been better off just building a Travelodge on set. Tilly would have liked a nice hotel, three-star would have done her. What they didn’t tell her was that she would be sharing the cottage with Saskia. Didn’t tell Saskia either by the look on her face. Not that she had anything against Saskia per se. All skin and bone, far too thin, lived on fresh air and fags – the Dame Phoebe March diet. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she said to Tilly the first time she produced a packet of Silk Cut. ‘I mean I’ll only smoke in my own room, or outside.’

  ‘Oh, go ahead, dear,’ Tilly said, ‘I’ve been around smokers all my life.’ (It was a miracle she wasn’t dead.) She wouldn’t want to fall out with her. Tilly hated falling out with people. It was funny because Saskia was such a clean girl (obsessively so, obviously had a problem, conducting germ warfare single-handedly) and smoking was such a filthy habit. Ballet dancers were the worst, of course, lighting up like chimneys the second they came out of class. Lungs like lampblack. Tilly used to live with a ballet dancer. That was after Phoebe left the Soho flat (1960 – turned out to be quite a decade for both of them), moving on and up to live with a director in Kensington. Douglas. He had belonged to Tilly first but Phoebe couldn’t abide Tilly having something that she didn’t. Very handsome man. Batted for the other side as well, of course. Nowt so queer as folk, as they said in the north. Phoebe used him up and left him behind after a year or so. Tilly and Douglas had remained fond of each other to the end. His end anyway.

  Saskia played Vince Collier’s sidekick, DS Charlotte (‘Charlie’) Lambert. Keep it under your hat but she wasn’t the world’s greatest actress. She only seemed to have two expressions. One was ‘worried’ (with the variation ‘very worried’) and the other was ‘grumpy’. Very limited range, poor girl, although, like a lot of them, she looked good on the telly. Tilly had seen her in a play at the National. She was awful, just awful, but no one seemed to notice. Emperor’s new clothes. (Shades of Dame Phoebe again.)

  Now that she had her new specs and could actually see, it was terrifying. Wednesday used to be half-day closing. Her father pulled the shutters down on the shop in the Land of Green Ginger and went off to live his mysterious other life with his fellow Rotarians. He spent a lot of time on the allotment as well, although there were never many vegetables to show for it. No more half-day closing, everything open all the time now, getting and spending we lay waste our powers. And where had all the money gone? You go to sleep living in a prosperous country and you wake up in a poor one, how did that happen? Where had the money gone, and why couldn’t they just get it back?

  She had to get out of this God-forsaken place, make her way to the car park. Should you still be driving? an AD had asked her after she’d failed several times to reverse into her allotted parking space in the car park on set and he’d had to take over from her. Ruddy cheek! And anyway parking wasn’t the same as driving. She was still in her seventies, plenty of life left in the old bird yet.

  Up above the world so high! She was a coward. How could anyone be so horrible to a child? A little scrap of a thing. Poor little mite. It broke Tilly’s wheezy old heart. If Tilly had had a child she would have wrapped it in lamb’s wool and tr
eated it like an egg, fragile and perfect. She’d lost a baby, back in the Soho days. A miscarriage but she never told anyone. Well, Phoebe. Phoebe who had tried to persuade her to get rid of it, said she knew a man in Harley Street. It would be like going to the dentist, she said. Tilly wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that. The baby had lived for nearly five months inside her, a dormouse nesting, before she lost it. It was a proper baby. Nowadays they might have been able to save it. ‘It was for the best,’ Phoebe said.

  It never happened again and Tilly supposed that she had avoided it. Perhaps if she had married or found the right man, if she hadn’t been so concerned with her career. She might have a family around her skirts now, a strapping son or a friendly daughter, grandchildren. She would have a life, instead of being stranded in the middle of nowhere. Although Tilly was from the north (such a long time ago) the place scared her now, both town and country. From the north, like a wind, like a winter queen.

  Tilly could understand why the first people had trekked out of Africa but why they continued on, north of the Home Counties, was beyond her. She was an idiot, she should have gone to Harrogate instead. A little tootle around the dress shops and lunch in Betty’s. Should have known better. No sign now of the tattooed woman and the poor child. You didn’t like to think what kind of home life she had. She should have done something, she really should. Weep, weep, Tilly.

  In a newsagent she bought a Telegraph, a packet of Halls Mentho-Lyptus throat tablets (to keep the old pipes going) and a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut for a treat. Days off meant no set catering. Tilly loved set catering – big fried breakfasts, proper puddings with custard. She was a terrible cook herself, lived off cheese on toast at home.

  She didn’t have enough coins so she gave the girl behind the counter a twenty-pound note but the girl gave her the change on ten.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Tilly said hesitantly, because she hated this kind of thing, ‘but I gave you a twenty.’ The girl looked at her indifferently and said, ‘It was a ten.’