Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  In the Merrion Centre he had come to the aid of a confused old woman that a security numpty was trying to haul away. ‘Are you OK?’ he had asked her. ‘Do you want some help?’ Jackson voiced his personal mantra, ‘I used to be a policeman,’ which seemed to act as a reassurance. There had been something familiar about her but he couldn’t put his finger on it. She was wearing a wig which had slipped to an unfortunately jaunty angle. Jackson hoped someone would put him down before he got to that stage. He supposed he would end up having to put himself down. He planned to go out on the ice (I may be some time), lie down with a bottle of something as old as himself and drift off into the big sleep. He hoped global warming didn’t scupper this plan.

  His final stop had been Roundhay, a leisurely stroll, he thought, some sunshine and fresh air away from the urban crowds. He had not expected to walk away as a dog owner. The interrupted journey, the unexpected gift, the unforeseen encounter. Life had its plots.

  Later, looking back, Jackson could see that his failed appointment with Linda Pallister was the moment when it all started to go wrong. If she had kept their rendezvous he would have spent a constructive hour or so, would have felt satisfied and purposeful, and might quite possibly have undergone another evening in a hotel, eating a roomservice meal and watching a bad pay-for-view movie, instead of spending a restless time, blacking out for large portions of it and having meaningless, promiscuous sex. For want of a nail. Blame Linda Pallister. In the end everyone else would.

  Tracy phoned in sick to cover her tracks. ‘Bit of a tummy bug, I think, I’m just going to go home early,’ and Leslie said, ‘No problem, I hope you feel better soon.’ Then Tracy sneaked back into the car park to pick up her Audi A4 and drive with Courtney to a Mamas and Papas store in Birstall Shopping Park where she bought a car seat that cost an arm and a leg. She spent the entire drive to the retail park waiting to be arrested for lack of the said car seat and in a fit of paranoia had got the kid to lie down on the back seat, just like a proper kidnap victim. Tracy felt as if there were a neon sign on the roof of the car that screamed, ‘This isn’t the mother!’ She gave the kid the Greggs sausage roll to keep her occupied. There was a plaid blanket in the boot and Tracy wondered if the kid would freak out if she covered her with it. Probably. She decided against it.

  An uneasy tour of the Mamas and Papas store revealed what Tracy had always suspected – children were mind-blowingly expensive. She should know, she’d just bought one, even if it was at a bargain price. Kids were all about retail. If you weren’t buying and selling the kids themselves, you were buying and selling on their behalf. Tracy felt a sudden twitch of anxiety. The two thousand pounds that remained in her bag weighed heavy. She should have handed over the full five thousand pounds to Kelly Cross. Buying the kid cheap felt like a mistake now.

  Tracy left the car seat in the shop while she walked towards Gap, Courtney plodding along beside her like a doped-up dog. The kid had been pretty vocal in the Merrion Centre, yelling her head off, but now she was taking her cues from Helen Keller.

  Tracy was acutely aware of all the security cameras. She imagined the pair of them on Crimewatch, Courtney’s face a blanked-out blur and her own magnified for a viewing public. Have you seen this woman? She abducted a child from outside a shopping centre in Leeds. She had stepped over the thin blue line, from the hunter to the hunted in one easy move.

  What would she say if she was stopped – ‘It’s OK, I bought the kid fair and square’? Yeah, that would go down well when they hauled her off to the nick. She was the Childcatcher, the Bogeywoman, every mother’s nightmare. But not Kelly’s. Kelly probably saw her as her saviour. Kelly certainly wasn’t the first mother to sell her own kid. But what if . . . what if Kelly wasn’t actually the kid’s mother? Tracy had lost track of how many kids Kelly had spawned. Were they all in care? What if she was minding Courtney for someone else? In that case, Tracy reasoned to herself – already working up arguments for the social workers, the police, the courts – whoever her mother was, she hadn’t cared enough about Courtney to put her in a safe pair of hands. Handing your kid over to Kelly Cross was like handing her over to a pit bull. Bottom line – the kid was at risk.

  She remembered Kelly Cross standing on the bus platform before the doors closed, the puzzled look on her face as she said, But she’s not— Not what? Not my kid? Tracy closed the bus doors in her mind. Put big metal security shutters down. She hadn’t heard anything. Thought instead about that little warm hand slipping into hers.

  She knew someone who could find out more for her. Linda Pallister. She was still in fostering and adoption, wasn’t she? If she hadn’t retired yet, she could find out the status of Kelly Cross’s kids.

  Tracy couldn’t remember when she had last seen Linda Pallister. It must have been at Barry Crawford’s daughter’s wedding, three years ago. Detective Superintendent Barry Crawford,Tracy’s ex-colleague. Linda’s daughter, Chloe, was best friends with Barry’s daughter, Amy, and was the chief bridesmaid, a fright in burnt-orange satin. ‘I had “bronze” in my head for their dresses, you know,’ Amy Crawford said ruefully to Tracy. Nothing in the poor girl’s head but mush now that she inhabited the land of the living dead. Her own dress had been the usual overblown white garment, her bouquet made up of raffish orange and yellow flowers. The men’s buttonholes were a single orange gerbera, like something a clown would squirt water out of. (‘I wanted something a little bit different,’ Amy said.)

  ‘Very cheerful,’ Barbara Crawford, mother of the bride, had commented, wincing at the gaudiness of it all. Barbara herself tastefully overdressed in turquoise silk (‘Paule Vasseur,’ she murmured to Tracy as if it were a secret). It had been no parish tea affair for Barry and Barbara’s one and only, but a lavish case of overspend. Politely, no one mentioned that the bride’s belly was already straining at her wedding dress.

  The bridesmaids’ shoes were burnt orange too, their pointy feet poking out from beneath jaundiced dresses that looked like the sunset at the end of the world. Their bouquets hung from their arms on ribbon-like handbags, big pomanders or perhaps colourful cannonballs. ‘I tried to suggest something different, I really did,’ Barbara Crawford said in the loudest sotto voce that Tracy had ever heard. ‘Amy was always so headstrong.’

  Amy’s husband was called Ivan. Ivan the Terrible, Barry always called him, naturally. ‘Ivan? What kind of a name is that?’ he said to Tracy after Amy’s engagement was announced. ‘Bloody Russian.’

  ‘Actually, I think it’s because he had a Norwegian grandfather,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Norwegian?’ Barry said incredulously, as if she’d just announced that Ivan’s family came from the moon. Ivan was a financial adviser, Tracy had consulted him when she was wondering where to stash her annual ISA. ‘Pop in and have a chat, no charge for a friend of Barry’s,’ he said to her at the wedding. He seemed a nice enough chap, pretty harmless on the whole, which was about the best you could hope for from a human being, in Tracy’s opinion. Unfortunately, he went bankrupt shortly afterwards and lost the business. No one wanted financial advice from a man who couldn’t even keep his hands on his own money. Barry implied there was fraud involved but when Tracy went to see Ivan to retrieve some paperwork he explained that he had lost a flash drive with all his clients’ details on it. ‘Must have slipped out of my pocket,’ Ivan said miserably to Tracy. Most of his clients took away their business after that. ‘I would have done the same,’ Ivan said.

  ‘Not even a traditional fruit cake,’ Barbara fretted, coming across Tracy forking up the chocolate sponge and butter cream wedding cake.

  ‘Well, at least it’s not orange,’ Tracy said.

  Of course, Tracy was in no position to make style notes about anything. Uncomfortable in a powder blue, polyester-mix two-piece that was giving off so much static she worried she would spontaneously combust before they got to the cutting of the cake. She’d bought a hat but didn’t wear it because it made her look like a man in drag. Tracy could count the
number of weddings she’d been invited to on the fingers of one hand, whereas the funerals she had attended in her time were stacked to the rafters. Murder victims mostly. Never been to a christening. Said something about your life, didn’t it?

  The burnt orange had been a particularly unfortunate choice for Amy’s friend Chloe Pallister with her mousy hair and tallow complexion. ‘Mother of the bridesmaid, never mother of the bride,’ Linda Pallister said, sidling up to Tracy, smiling hopefully. She didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Linda Pallister’s own wedding clothes, a black velvet T-shirt and a skirt that seemed to have been made out of tiedyed cobwebs, couldn’t have been more out of place. Linda was also sporting a large assortment of silver rings and bracelets as well as an enormous crucifix on a leather shoestring. The crucifix looked more like penance than religion. Linda had become a Christian in the eighties, an unfashionable decade for evangelism, although Linda had gone, uncharacteristically, for straight-down-the-middle C of E. No sign at the wedding of Linda’s eldest, Jacob. Tracy had heard a rumour that he was a bank manager.

  ‘Your Chloe looks lovely,’ Tracy lied.

  If Tracy phoned Linda Pallister and started asking about Kelly Cross’s kids she’d be flagging herself up, wouldn’t she? What, one of Kelly Cross’s children missing? Why only the other day Tracy Waterhouse was asking me to count them! Tracy had nicked a kid. Didn’t matter how much you paid, didn’t matter how much you dressed it up with righteousness, it didn’t make it legal.

  She took the kid for lunch in Bella Italia. Kid worked her way through her own weight in penne and Tracy nibbled on some garlic bread. She had lost her appetite. The kidnapper diet. Tracy had done them all in her time – grapefruit, F-Plan, cabbage, Atkins. Selfinflicted torture. She’d been a big baby, a big child, a big teenager, it seemed unlikely that she would suddenly become a small, postmenopausal woman.

  In Gap, Tracy bought clothes for Courtney, holding them up against her to gauge their fit, rather than going by the labels which didn’t seem to relate to the kid’s actual size. ‘How old are you, Courtney?’

  ‘Four,’ Courtney said, more of a question than an answer. She fitted the ‘2–3 year’ clothes easily. ‘You’re small for your age,’ Tracy said.

  ‘You’re big,’ Courtney said.

  ‘Can’t argue with that,’ Tracy said. Unsure of the rules of engagement with a small child, Tracy had decided it worked best if they both pretended they were grown-up and conversed accordingly.

  She bought more clothes for Courtney than she had intended, but they were so nice and pretty, the kind of clothes Tracy never had when she was a little girl. Half a century ago her mother had dressed her in limp pinafore dresses and nylon jumpers with brown lace-up Clarks shoes, a look which even a cute kid, let alone Tracy, would have had trouble pulling off. Her parents had been over forty when Tracy was born, already old before their time. ‘We’d given up,’ her mother said, as if it had been a relief to do so. ‘And then you came along.’

  Her parents had been too much at war with each other to bother with their child. They had battled passively, locked together in silent hostility while Tracy lived in the solitary confinement of the only child. Tracy thought of herself as a war baby even though the war was long over when she was born.

  Courtney wiped her ever-present trail of snot on the sleeve of her grubby pink top. Tracy would have to buy tissues, tissues were the kind of thing that people who looked after kids carried in their bags at all times. There must be a caravan of kid-related supplies that she needed but Tracy had no idea what they might be. It would be helpful if kids came with instructions and a list of requirements.

  Tracy’s final purchase for Courtney was a red duffel coat in the sale, a garment that a younger Tracy, dreary in brown gabardine, had always coveted. The duffle coat had a soft plaid lining and real wooden toggles. It was an article of clothing that said someone cared. If it hadn’t been so warm in the shop she would have suggested the kid wear it straight away but Tracy could feel the sweat trickling uncomfortably down her back and the kid looked positively overcooked.

  Tracy was flagging. She had read somewhere that shops and museums were the most tiring places for people. The kid looked dog-weary. ‘Do you want a carry?’ Tracy said.

  Her knees almost buckled under the weight. Who knew a tiny kid could be so heavy? She had the gravity of a small, dense planet. Tracy staggered back to Mamas and Papas with Courtney in her arms and retrieved the car seat and fixed it in the Audi. She’d had the kid less than three hours and she felt mangled by exhaustion, no wonder the parents she saw in the Merrion Centre walked around like zombies.

  She helped Courtney into the car seat, was surprised when the kid strapped herself in. Should they be able to do that? If you could fasten a buckle it meant you could unfasten one as well. ‘Don’t undo that,’ she advised the kid. ‘There are a lot of bad drivers on the road.’ The kid murmured a kind of assent. Her eyelids were blue with tiredness and she had the stunned look that Tracy had seen on abused kids. You had to wonder. It would hardly be a surprise, more likely than not, in fact. The things people did to kids could make your brain hurt. Hot needle, et cetera. Or maybe, like Tracy, the kid was just worn out with the turn the day had taken. It was four o’clock in the afternoon but time had become elastic, stretching out the day to infinity.

  She glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that Courtney was already asleep, making little buzzing sounds, like a large bee.

  Jackson wondered what a dog might need. Food and a bowl to eat it out of, he supposed. He found both in a shop called Paws for Thought. He sensed he was entering deep into unknown territory. He had a new role. He knew who he was, he was a dog owner. He found it hard enough coping with having a son, the dog felt like even more of a stretch.

  ‘Lovely Border terrier you’ve got yourself there,’ the woman behind the counter said.

  ‘Is it?’ Jackson said, studying the dog. He had assumed it was some kind of mongrel, not a breed. It certainly looked like a mongrel, and not a particularly prepossessing one either. There were traces of blood on the dog’s snout and on his fur and the woman said, ‘Oh dear, has he been in a fight?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Jackson said.

  The woman gave the rope around the dog’s neck a disapproving glance and said, ‘What’s the poor little chap’s name?’

  Jackson ran through a mental list of names that might be more suitable than the one the dog already had and came up with nothing, apart from Jess, but that name was owned for ever by the Atwells’ sheepdog.

  ‘The Ambassador,’ he finally owned up. ‘He’s called The Ambassador.’ The dog’s ears perked up attentively. Jackson wondered where the dog had got its name from. He tried to imagine its big, ugly owner – ex-owner – shouting ‘Ambassador!’ into the depths of a field. In Roundhay it had been a torrent of expletives that had flowed from Colin’s mouth. He supposed it was a joke, imagined someone saying, ‘The Ambassador needs brushing’ or ‘The Ambassador’s asleep in his basket.’

  The pet-shop woman raised sceptical eyebrows and said, ‘The Ambassador? I would have thought that was a name for a bigger dog.’

  ‘He’s big inside,’ Jackson said defensively.

  The woman swept her hand around the shop and said, ‘Anything else? How about a coat? For the dog,’ she added when Jackson looked at her blankly. It seemed to Jackson that nature had given the dog a perfectly good coat so he said no but bought a leather lead and left before he got carried away by, say, the small four-legged sailor uniform that was hanging behind the counter, complete with jaunty little hat.

  Jackson took out his Swiss Army knife and, showing it to the dog, said, ‘Man’s best friend.’The dog sat passively while Jackson cut through the tightly knotted rope around its neck. ‘Good dog,’ Jackson said.

  When Jackson first encountered the dog it had seemed unruly but now seemed merely full of spirit, walking nicely on the lead, no pulling or messing about, and appeared delighted to be in Jackson’
s company. He wondered if he looked foolish striding along the streets with a small dog on a lead trotting purposefully by his side. He wondered how women felt about men with small dogs. Would they think he was gay? Would they find him more trustworthy than a man without a dog? (Hitler liked dogs, he reminded himself.)

  He found himself pausing at traffic lights. He would normally have made a heroic dash across the road (or a lunatic dash, depending whose side you were on – Jackson’s or most of the women in his life) but now he was waiting stoically for the green man, suddenly transformed into a parent again by being in charge of something smaller than himself.

  Back in the vicinity of the Merrion Centre (he wondered how the confused old woman had got on, he had trusted the Canadian girl not to call the police) he checked into a somewhat unsightly Best Western and asked for a double room because he didn’t like to think of himself as a single man in a single room. (‘You seem to be living the life of a travelling salesman,’ Josie said.

  ‘Let’s hope you don’t turn into a giant insect,’ Julia laughed.

  ‘Eh?’ Jackson said.)

  The hotel gave him a twin-bedded room, which seemed worse, the unoccupied bed like a reproach somehow.

  Jackson was a naturally frugal traveller. ‘Tight as a tic’s arse’ is what his brother would have said. He had been brought up on prudence and thrift – or to put it another way, in poverty – and the older he got the more he found himself reverting to parsimony. That didn’t mean that he was beyond the occasional startling largesse, to Betty’s waitresses, for example.

  Jackson had stayed in some of the best hotels in the world but now he found himself quite content to sleep within the bland budget walls of the Travelodges and Premier Inns that he encountered along his nomadic route. They were places where you paused and moved on and nothing stuck to you. Waking in the middle of the night there was something comforting to be found in the drone of the engine of the hotel as it sailed on into the morning. He knew who he was in a hotel, he was a guest.