Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  Dawn was just cracking open the sky. It was good to get a march on the day. Time was a thief and Jackson felt he gained a small triumph by stealing back some of the early hours. He had a feeling it was Thursday but he wouldn’t have sworn to it.

  The nameless woman lying next to him muttered something unintelligible in her sleep. She turned her head and opened her eyes, they had the same blank quality as the dead. When she saw Jackson her eyes came to life a little and she murmured, ‘Christ, I bet I look rough.’

  She did look a bit of a dog’s breakfast but Jackson bit down on his unfortunate compulsion for honesty and, smiling, said, ‘Not really.’ Jackson didn’t often smile these days (had he ever?) and it tended to take women by surprise. The woman in the bed (surely she must have told him her name at some point?) squirmed with pleasure and giggled and said, ‘Gonna make me a cuppa tea then, lover boy?’

  He said, ‘Go back to sleep. It’s still early.’ Strangely obedient, the woman closed her eyes and within minutes was snoring gently. Jackson suspected that he might be punching below his weight.

  He had a memory – vague at first but growing unfortunately clearer now – of dropping into a bar in the town centre, intent on casting off his golden years. He seemed to recollect that he had been looking for a pastis, a warm billet in a cold city, but the place turned out to be some kind of cocktail joint containing a job lot of clapped-out men who were easily outnumbered by the hordes of brash women. A gang of them had descended on him, feverish with alcohol and eager to pick him off from the herd of homely suits. The women seemed to have started drinking some time last century.

  They were celebrating the divorce of one of their pack. Jackson thought that divorce was possibly an occasion for a wake rather than a knees-up but what did he know, he had a particularly poor track record where marriage was concerned. It surprised him to discover that the women all seemed to be teachers or social workers. Nothing more frightening than a middle-class woman when she lets her hair down. Who were those Greek women who tore men to pieces? Julia would know.

  Despite it being midweek, the women were all drinking shooters with ridiculous names – Flaming Lamborghini, Squashed Frog, Red-Headed Slut – and Jackson felt faintly disturbed by the sickly contents of their glasses. God only knew what kind of faces they would have on them when they turned up for work the next morning.

  ‘I’m Mandy,’ one of the women said brightly.

  ‘Go on, love – fly her,’ another one said, her throat filthy with years of smoking.

  ‘This is how it goes,’ Mandy said, ignoring her friend. ‘I say, “My name is Mandy,” and you say . . .?’

  ‘Jackson,’ Jackson said, reluctantly.

  ‘What’s “Jackson”?’ one of them asked.’ A first name or a last name?’

  ‘Take your pick,’ Jackson said.

  He liked to keep conversations simple. There wasn’t much you couldn’t convey with ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Do’ and ‘Don’t’, anything else was pretty much ornamental, although throwing in the occasional ‘please’ could get you a surprisingly long way and ‘thank you’ even further. His first wife had deplored his lack of small talk (‘Jesus, Jackson, would it kill you to have a meaningless conversation?’). This was the same wife who, at the beginning of their courtship, had admired him for being ‘the strong, silent type’.

  Perhaps he should have found more words to give Josie. Then she might not have left him, and if she hadn’t left him he wouldn’t have taken up with Julia who drove him to distraction and then he certainly wouldn’t have met the false second wife, Tessa, who had fleeced him and robbed him blind. For want of a nail. ‘Good wife, bad wife,’ Julia said. ‘You know in your heart which one you really prefer, Jackson.’ Did he? Which? No one, not even Tessa, had ever messed with his mind the way Julia did. ‘The Black Widow,’ she said with relish. ‘You were lucky that she didn’t eat you.’

  Women were often drawn to Jackson – to begin with, at any rate – but he didn’t set much store by looks any more, either his own or (it seemed) those of the opposite sex, having witnessed too often the havoc wrought by beauty without truth. Although there was a time when, no matter how drunk, he would not have been attracted to someone like the woman he had woken up to this morning. Or perhaps standards simply fell as you grew older. Of course, Jackson, as faithful as a dog at heart, had spent a lot of his adult life in monogamous relationships where these problems had been merely hypothetical.

  He had not thought of himself as priapic. Since Tessa he had been in an ascetic, almost monkish place, appreciating the lack of necessity in his life. A Cistercian. And then suddenly all the untaken vows had been broken by a muster of the monstrous regiment.

  ‘What brings you to this neck of the woods?’ one of the more sober of the coven asked. (‘My name’s Abi, I’m the designated grown-up,’ a fact that seemed to make her bitter.)

  Jackson wasn’t big on questions and if faced with a choice he would rather be asking than answering them. Teachers and social workers, he remembered. ‘I don’t suppose any of you know Linda Pallister, by any chance?’ he asked. A couple of the women howled like hyenas. ‘You wouldn’t catch Linda dead in a place like this. She’ll be recycling cats or worshipping trees somewhere.’

  ‘No, she’s not a pagan, she’s a Christian,’ someone said. This fact seemed to take them to a new level of hilarity.

  ‘What do you want her for anyway?’ the rather petulant Abi asked.

  ‘I had an appointment with her this afternoon but she was a no-show.’

  ‘She’s in adoption counselling. Were you adopted?’ one of them said, reaching out and holding his hand. ‘Poor baby. Were you an orphan? Abandoned? Unwanted? Come to Mummy, pet.’ Another one said, ‘She’s ancient. You don’t want her. You want us.’

  One of the women moved so close to him that he could feel the heat of her face next to his. She was drunk enough to think that she was being seductive when in a breathy voice she said to him, ‘Would you like a Slippery Nipple?’

  ‘Or a Blowjob?’ another woman shrieked.

  ‘They’re having you on,’ yet another one said, sidling close to him, ‘they’re the names of drinks.’

  ‘To you maybe,’ the first woman laughed.

  ‘Go on, love, give her a shag,’ someone else said. ‘She’s gagging for it, put her out of her misery.’

  What had happened to women? Jackson wondered. They made him feel almost prudish. (Obviously not prudish enough to have resisted the dubious charms of one of them.) More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn’t just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.

  ‘You’re scowling,’ Abi said.

  ‘That’s just the way I look,’ Jackson said.

  ‘Don’t worry, we don’t bite.’

  ‘Not yet,’ one of them laughed.

  Jackson smiled and the temperature around him went up a degree. The treasure here was clearly Jackson. The atmosphere in the bar was so charged that there was a very real danger that these wild women might simply explode with excitement.

  Well, Jackson thought, what happens in Leeds stays in Leeds. Isn’t that what they said?

  ‘I’m not worried,’ he said. ‘But if you’re buying, ladies, I’ll have a Pernod.’

  Time to get the hell out of Dodge. Jackson slipped quietly out of the bed and found his clothes where he must have shucked them on to the floor a few hours earlier. He moved with a certain delicacy. His head felt leaden, as if the weight of it was too much for the fragile stem of his neck. He crept along a narrow hallway and was thankful that he guessed correctly which door led to the bathroom. Treating the house as a recce in hostile territory seemed as sensible an approach as any. It was a better version of the house he had been brought up in, a fact which unnerved him, the way some dreams did.

  The bathroom was warm and clean and had matching bath and pedestal
mats in strawberry pink. The suite was also pink. Jackson couldn’t remember urinating into a pink toilet before. First time for everything. The bath tiles had flowers on them, the supermarket toiletries were lined up neatly at the end of the bath. Jackson wondered about the woman who lived here and why she would sleep with a complete stranger. He could ask himself the same question, of course, but it seemed less relevant. Two toothbrushes stood in a mug on a shelf above the sink. Jackson considered what that meant.

  He washed his hands (he was house-trained, by a line of women that stretched back to the Stone Age) and caught sight of himself in the mirror. He looked about as debauched as he felt. He had fallen. Like Lucifer.

  He was desperate for a shower but more desperate to get out of this claustrophobic house. He went downstairs, keeping to the edge of the steep, carpeted staircase where the boards wouldn’t creak so much. The woman lived with someone who had left a bike parked in the hallway. Probably the same person had carelessly tossed a pair of muddy football boots down by the front door. A skateboard was propped up against the wall. The sight of the skateboard (where was the owner?) made Jackson feel depressed.

  Somehow he would have preferred it if the second toothbrush had belonged to a partner or a lover rather than a teenage son. He felt suddenly unexpectedly grateful that his first wife had remarried, not because she was (apparently) happy, he didn’t give a toss for her happiness, but because it meant that she wasn’t picking up strange men (like himself ) for the night. Strange men who were free to prowl around the house where his daughter was in the throes of an intense and brooding adolescence.

  Jackson didn’t breathe until he had shut the front door behind him and stepped out into the misty early morning air. The day looked as though it could go either way and he wasn’t just thinking about the weather.

  He set his internal compass to ‘Town Centre’ and jogged back into town at a more sedate pace than normal, hoping to outdistance a heroic hangover. Jackson had recently taken up running again. With any luck, if his knees held up, he planned to keep on running right through his golden years and into his diamond ones.

  (‘Why?’ Julia asked. ‘Why running?’

  ‘Stops the thinking,’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘That’s a good thing?’

  ‘Definitely.’)

  As a bonus, on his tour of England and Wales he had discovered that running was a good way of seeing a place. You could go from town to countryside before breakfast and move from urban decay to bourgeois suburb without breaking stride. A great way to evaluate the real estate on offer. And no one took any notice of you, you were just the madman out at dawn trying to prove he was still young.

  Jackson finally reached the Best Western, where he had fully intended to spend the night rather than in the arms of a stranger. It was a long time since Jackson had had a one-night stand. ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ Hopefully not.

  He took the lift up to his floor and thought he might make up some of the sleep he had lost. His appointment with Linda Pallister was at ten o’clock, a stone’s throw from the hotel. Plenty of time for forty winks, a shower and a shave and some breakfast, he thought as he entered the room. A decent cup of coffee. Even an indecent cup would do at this juncture.

  He had completely forgotten about the dog.

  It was waiting anxiously on the other side of the door as if it was unsure who was going to come through it. When it saw that it wasn’t the erstwhile Colin it went wild with tail-wagging. Jackson dropped to a crouch and indulged its happiness for a minute. He felt bad about leaving the dog locked in solitary all night. If he had taken the dog with him last night perhaps it could have monitored his antics, guarded his morals – a friendly paw on the shoulder at some point, advice to think twice, Go home, Jackson. Don’t do it. Just say no.

  He looked around the hotel room to check if any little brown gifts had been deposited and when he found nothing said, ‘Good dog,’ and, although it was possibly the last thing in the world that he wanted to do at that moment, he fetched the lead and said, ‘Come on then,’ and unzipped the rucksack for the dog.

  She had done nothing to help that poor mite. Suffer the little children. She thought of the little girl who had been singing her song of innocence, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, in the Merrion Centre and her horrible bully of a mother. Courtney. Shut the fuck up will you, Courtney. What was wrong with people that they could behave like that? An echo of Father, Children should be seen and not heard, Matilda. He thought they should be neither heard nor seen. There had been another child, a brother, already dead when Tilly was born, his shadow walking ahead of her all of her childhood. All those graveyards in the past, full of little children, their headstones like small broken teeth. Modern medicine would have saved most of them, would have saved her brother. It would take more than medicine to save the little Courtneys of this world though.

  Funny how she could remember the name of a child she didn’t know and had trouble recalling what simple everyday objects were called. Kettle. This morning it had taken her ten minutes to dredge up the word ‘kettle’. ‘The thing for boiling water,’ she said helplessly to Saskia. ‘Billabong. Billy. Billy boiled. You know.’

  ‘Billabong?’ Saskia repeated doubtfully. You could see she had no idea what that was. ‘“Waltzing Matilda”,’ Tilly said. ‘Which is my name, of course. Matilda.’ She sang a few helpful bars, ‘Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,’ and Saskia said, ‘Oh, um, yes. Of course.’ At least ‘billy’ was in the right area. The first word she had trawled and brought up from the deeps was ‘chicken’. ‘I’ll just pop the what’s-it – chicken – on for a cup of tea, shall I?’ Saskia looking at her as if she’d grown two heads. Silly Tilly. Silly billy Tilly. Yesterday it had been lilies for lamps, Oh, it’s dark, will I turn the lilies on? They toil not, neither do they spin. The lamps are going out all over Europe. And nonsense words for everyday objects, curtains, drawers, cups transformed into pockle, gip, rottle. All her words turning into mush, language disappearing until there would be nothing left except sounds, ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar – and eventually just silence.

  Tilly frightened the girl. The madness of Lear. Poor Ophelia drifting downstream with a handbag of knives and forks – and – just this morning – a spool of red ribbon and a knitting needle, as if she had wandered through a haberdashery department in her sleep. She had played Ophelia in rep. The actor playing Hamlet had been on the short side. The audience had been restless. Tilly had understood, one expected Hamlet to have a little height. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. ‘Have you ever done the classics?’ she asked Saskia the other day. ‘Shakespeare and so on?’

  ‘Oh God, no,’ Saskia said, as if Tilly had suggested something distasteful.

  Saskia was nothing like Padma, Padma was kind, always asking if she could do anything for Tilly. Sometimes Tilly felt like an invalid the way the girl treated her. Invalid. Invalid. Depended where you put the emphasis, didn’t it? Sick or without validity. She was becoming both. Better to be dead than mad. Ophelia knew.

  The little ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ girl was mixed up now with all the other poor mites in the world. Some stuffed baby rabbits in there too. Her own lost baby. All conflated into one small, helpless infant howling in the wind. The name of the ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ girl had slipped away, she’d had it a minute ago and now . . . gone, the way of all kettles. Oh, lord.

  She had wanted to tell the man who said he used to be a policeman about the ‘Twinkle,Twinkle’ girl. Had she said something to the nice girl in the whatever centre? Muckle, mickle, metric, Merrion Centre. She had been so taken up with her own troubles that she had probably said nothing. Evil will prevail when good women do nothing. She still hadn’t found her purse, of course. Julia and Padma had loaned her some money. And even Saskia had given her a fivepound note and said, ‘This’ll tide you over.’ She was sure the girl had a good heart really even though Tilly had heard her complaining to someone on the production team. That old
toad. Filthy habits. I need to live on my own. You’ll be lucky, ducky, they’re a tight-fisted bunch.

  She should have stepped in. She imagined herself snatching the child in her arms and running out of the Merrion Centre with her. She could have put her in the car (if she could have remembered how to start it) and driven off to Bluebell Cottage where she would have fed the poor little mite on coddled eggs and some of those nice Beurre d’Anjou pears that Padma had bought for her. Didn’t know how to coddle an egg, of course. Mother used to make them for her in a little china egg-coddler. Pretty thing. Coddle was a lovely word, like cuddle. If Tilly had a little girl to look after she would coddle her. Or a rabbit, a poor little velvety rabbit running from the fox or the gun. Run, rabbit, run.

  Her thoughts were rudely interrupted by an urgent knocking at the door.

  She couldn’t imagine who it could be at this hour. She opened the door cautiously. A young woman who looked familiar was standing there. She was out of breath, her insubstantial bosom heaving. She was wearing an awful lot of make-up. Beneath the make-up Tilly eventually recognized Saskia. She pushed her way rudely into the house, asking, ‘Is Vince here?’ as if her life depended on it.

  ‘Vince?’ Tilly said. ‘There’s no one here called Vince, dear.’

  Tilly supposed that Bluebell Cottage, being a holiday let, had been occupied by lots of different people. Although why Saskia should be looking for any of them she didn’t know. She suddenly noticed the gun in Saskia’s hand. ‘Oh, my dear,’ Tilly said, ‘what on earth are you going to do with that?’

  ‘Cut!’ someone bellowed.

  Cut? Cut what? Tilly wondered.