Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  Tracy decided to stop off at a supermarket to pick up supplies. First she loaded up the trolley with bananas, convenience food for small children. As they trawled the aisles, Tracy’s mind had been divided between worrying about the security cameras and wondering if Courtney was going to get stuck in the shopping-trolley seat – and what she would do about it if she did – when she saw a familiar face coming towards them.

  Barry Crawford’s wife. Barbara. Shit. She would want to know who Courtney was. Of all the supermarkets in all the world . . .

  Barbara Crawford was advancing along the canned-vegetable aisle as if she was walking on pins, treating her shopping trolley like a Silver Cross pram. A zombie in full slap and heels. It didn’t matter what was happening on the inside, Barbara was always rigged out ready for an impromptu invitation to lunch with the Queen. Immaculate nails and make-up. Wool dress, gilt chain-belt, finedenier stockings, her black hair as patent as her shoes. Tracy reckoned if she was grief-stricken she would dress herself in rags, smear coal and mud on her face, let her hair turn into dreadlocks. Each to their own, she supposed. After she married Barry, Barbara spent years as an Avon lady. Ding-dong. Have you thought about blusher,Tracy? It could do wonders for you. It would take more than blusher.

  Barbara was wearing a rigid smile on her face that looked as if she’d put it on this morning and would be damned if she would take it off for anyone. She was the kind of wife you were glad to leave at home. The strict rules-and-duties kind, a creature of routine, married to someone whose job was anything but routine. Drove her crazy. Drove Barry to the pubs and the prostitutes. ‘What any man who loved his wife would do,’ he said. ‘Wives for the missionary position, showed you respected them, and whores for the funny stuff.’ All whores wanted was money, Barry ‘explained’ to Tracy. Wives made you pay with your lifeblood. Made Tracy glad she was no one’s wife. Most days she was grateful for her single state, relieved not to be growing old in the company of someone who looked at her indifferently over the toast and marmalade while she wondered what he was really thinking.

  Those days were over for Barry now though. Lots of things ended the day little Sam died.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Tracy muttered as Barbara drew nearer. It was the anniversary any day now, wasn’t it? Two years. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  Courtney looked at her anxiously, her face suddenly pinched. ‘S’all right, sweetheart,’ Tracy said, ‘I just remembered something, that’s all – Barbara! Hello.’Tracy modified her voice to a more sensitive and compassionate one, suited to the bereaved. ‘How are you?’ Tracy had been with Barry when he took the call, his hand had started to shake so much that he’d dropped the phone. Tracy had picked it up, said, ‘Hello,’ into the receiver, got someone else’s bad news at first hand.

  Barry Crawford was born a miserable old git but they rubbed along. Tracy remembered when Amy was born, remembered wetting the baby’s head in a pub full of coppers. Barry a DC by then, Tracy still in uniform. (Of course.) Not long after the Ripper was caught.

  ‘Women are safe again,’ an inspector said to her over the congratulatory beers and Tracy was so drunk that she had laughed in his face. As if taking one mad, bad bloke off the streets made women safe.

  ‘To my new daughter,’ Barry said, raising his glass of double malt high to the room in general. Must have been about his sixth that night. ‘Better luck next time,’ some joker at the back of the room said.

  When Amy’s own baby, Sam, was born, Amy’s husband, Ivan, was in the delivery room with her, sweating out every minute of the labour. ‘Times have changed,’ Barry said sardonically to Tracy. ‘Now you have to be supportive. Men have to be like women these days, God help us.’

  ‘Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Gloria Steinem. Early feminist.’

  ‘Heck, Tracy.’

  ‘Quote of the day on my quote-a-day calendar. Just saying.’

  Barry sighed and raised his glass. ‘To my grandson. Sam.’ They were in a pub in Bingley. Birthplace of the Ripper. They should put up a plaque. Ancient history now. There were just the two of them toasting the baby this time, dinosaurs left over from prehistoric times. ‘If you don’t evolve you get left behind,’ Barry said.

  ‘If you don’t evolve you die,’ Tracy said.

  Amy wasn’t christened when she was a baby. ‘We’re not really religious,’ Barry said. They had her christened after the accident though, while she lay on life support. ‘Just in case,’ Barry said. Clutching at straws. Amy came off life support, Sam didn’t. Ivan himself was on another ward, strung up in traction like a fly in a web. Barry and Barbara only went to visit him once, when they had to talk to him about turning off all those nice shiny machines and consigning Sam to eternity.

  ‘You can’t understand,’ Barbara Crawford had said when Tracy had offered her condolences at the crematorium. ‘You don’t have children, grandchildren. If only it could have been me instead.’

  Tracy wondered if her own parents would have been willing to sacrifice themselves to save her. Her mother had lingered on after Tracy’s father died and in her final days gave the impression that she wasn’t going unless she could take Tracy down with her. Her mother had the DNA of a scorpion, built to outlast a nuclear winter. The cancer got her in the end though. Nobody lasted for ever, not even Dorothy Waterhouse. The diamonds and the cockroaches were free to inherit the earth now she was gone.

  Barbara Crawford was right, of course. Tracy had never experienced that feeling. Overwhelming, gut-wrenching, lay-downyour-life kind of love. Except perhaps for that one time before with Carol Braithwaite’s kid in that hellish flat in Lovell Park. And now – with this scrap of a human being sitting in a supermarket trolley. Tracy wasn’t even sure that love was the right word for this feeling, but whatever it was it made you want to weep, whether your kids were alive or dead.

  Barbara and Barry’s daughter, Amy, was neither alive nor dead but floating somewhere in between. In a ‘facility’. Tracy wondered how often Barbara visited Amy. Every day? Every week? Did it become less and less frequent as time went on?

  Tracy had been to see her once. Could only think of Disney – Snow White, Sleeping Beauty. Seemed a rubbish frame of reference. Tracy wanted to end it for her, do Barry and Barbara the favour they couldn’t do for themselves. Tracy never went back for a second visit. She could still see Amy, dancing with her father on her wedding day, the huge skirt of her white dress crushed against his dark suit, the comedy flower in his buttonhole. Now Amy was suspended for ever, a sleeping fairytale princess without an ending, happy or otherwise. What had Barry said? And then you die and there’s nothing else. Of course it turns out you don’t even need to be dead for that.

  Sam was dead though. Torn up in a car crash, the car driven by his own father, Ivan. Nearly three times over the limit, ‘driving like a maniac’, according to a witness. He’d turned out to be Ivan the Terrible, after all. Why had Amy got in the car with him, with a child? No saying, now, too late. Ivan was given a short custodial sentence, judge considered that he had ‘already paid a heavy price for a day he would regret for the rest of his life’. ‘Bollocks,’ Barry said.

  Tracy could hardly bear the sight of Barry Crawford walking up the aisle of the church, staggering under the weight of the small white coffin. ‘Heavy,’ he said afterwards to Tracy, ‘for such a little thing inside.’ Red eyes washed with whisky. Poor bugger. Same aisle that he had taken his daughter up a year before. Ivan would be getting out some time soon. Tracy wondered if Barry would kill him as he stepped into the free daylight. Sometimes Tracy wondered about doing it for him, something covert. She was pretty sure she could pull off the perfect murder if she had to. Everyone had a killer inside them just waiting to get out, some more patient than others.

  ‘How am I?’ Barbara Crawford said as if it was a question that needed serious consideration rather than a polite greeting. ‘Oh, you know,’ she said vaguely, picking up a ca
n of peas and scrutinizing it as if an alien had just handed it to her and told her, This is what we eat on our planet. She was drugged up to the eyeballs, of course. Well, why wouldn’t you be? She didn’t even remark on Courtney’s presence in the shopping trolley, didn’t even seem to notice her. Tracy had been all ready with some patter – Foster kid, thought I’d do something useful now that I’m in an easier job – but it wasn’t called for.

  Barbara put the can back on the shelf and wafted her hand in the air as if she was trying to say something but couldn’t think of the words. ‘Well,’ Tracy said, breaking away, ‘good to see you, Barbara. Give my best to Barry.’ She didn’t say, I talked to Barry on the phone last night. He was with a dead woman. He had said to Tracy once that he preferred them dead, they couldn’t talk back. ‘Joking, Tracy,’ he said. ‘Jesus, what’s wrong with women? Don’t you have a sense of humour?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ she said to Barbara, ‘must be getting along.’

  ‘Yes,’ Barbara murmured. Her gaze suddenly fixed on Courtney and she recoiled slightly.

  ‘Babysitting,’ Tracy said, doing a three-point turn with the shopping trolley and accelerating down the dairy aisle, plucking cartons of milk and yoghurts as if cows were about to go out of fashion.

  The kid, meanwhile, was quietly demolishing a packet of Jaffa cakes that she had managed to filch from somewhere. ‘Shoplifting’s a crime,’ Tracy said. Courtney offered her the packet. Tracy took two Jaffa cakes and crammed them in her mouth.

  ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Courtney said. Tracy’s heart plummeted. Where had the kid learned manners? It hardly seemed likely that it was from Kelly Cross.

  ‘What would you like to do now?’ she asked Courtney. She looked like a kid who never got to make a choice, Tracy thought she’d give her one. Give the kid a choice. Give the kid a chance. Give them all a chance.

  1975: 21 March

  Eight o’clock in the evening. Kitty was cold and had gone upstairs to fetch a cardigan. It was draughty, the wind was trying to get in the house through any gap it could. The wind has such a rainy sound / Moaning through the town. Who wrote that? Kitty had never been one for literature. She had been the ‘muse’ of a writer for a while. You hardly heard his name any more. He was quite famous at the time, although possibly more famous for his lifestyle than his works. He was unfaithful and drank from breakfast to bedtime. Boozing and whoring, he said, the Rights of Man. She had been one of his trophies, ‘muse’ a fancy word for mistress. He lived in Chelsea but had a wife and three small children tucked away in the country somewhere.

  She had been very young, it was right at the beginning of her career, had been terribly shocked by some of the things he wanted her to do. Never talked to Ian about that part of her life. She shivered. It was chillier in the bedrooms than anywhere else in the house. They kept the radiators off upstairs, Ian thought it was unhealthy to sleep in a warm room. He was always opening the windows wide, Kitty was always closing them. It wasn’t a dispute, just a difference of opinion. After all it wasn’t a subject you could come to a compromise on. A window was either open or closed.

  From a drawer she took out a camel-coloured cashmere cardigan that she draped gracefully over her shoulders. Those were the words in her head, Kitty Winfield draped the cashmere gracefully over her shoulders. Ever since she was a child she had done that. Commented on herself. Stepped outside and watched herself, almost like an outof-body experience. All that ballet, tap, elocution, deportment, her mother told her she was destined for something. A part in the local pantomime every Christmas, there was a sense of promise. Brought up in Solihull, she spent a lot of time losing her accent. When she was seventeen she decided it was time to seek her fortune in London. What ‘promising’ girl would want to stay in the West Midlands in 1962? Newcomer Kathryn Gillespie is destined for great things.

  She came down to the capital, to attend a dance academy as a full-time student, fees paid for her by her mother, and had only been there a week when a man came up to her in the street and said, ‘Did anyone tell you that you could be a model?’ She thought it was a joke, or dodgy, her mother had spent a lifetime warning her about men like this, but it turned out to be kosher, he really was a scout for an agency. And overnight she was no longer Kathryn, she was Kitty. They tried to make it one word, like Twiggy, but it never took off.

  Her mother had died at the beginning of this year. Kitty Winfield stood beside her mother’s grave and wept silently. Lung cancer, awful. Kitty went back to Solihull and nursed her. Didn’t know which was worse, watching her mother die or revisiting her own promising past. She was finding it awfully difficult to get over her mother’s death. Silly really because she hardly ever saw her.

  Modelling was much easier than dancing. All you needed were good bones and a certain stoic temperament. She was never asked to do anything tacky, no nudity. Lots of lovely black-and-white portraits by famous photographers. Big fashion shoots, all the magazines, and once on the cover of Vogue. People called her ‘the face of the sixties’ for a while. People still remembered her name. Sixties’ icon Kitty Gillespie, where is she now? Only last week a Sunday supplement had chased her down, wanting to do an interview with her about her ‘obscurity’. Ian politely fended off the caller.

  It had all been over by ’69. She met Ian and decided to forgo the bright lights for security. For steadfastness. She could honestly say, hand on heart, that she had never regretted the decision.

  She had wanted to be a film star, of course, but, let’s face it, she couldn’t act for toffee. Kitty Gillespie walked on to the set and illuminated it. Unfortunately not. She looked the part but just couldn’t say the words. Wooden, as a board. She’d had a tiny part in a film, one of those edgy, avant-garde jobs starring a controversial rock singer. All very Bohemian. Kitty had been lolling on a sofa, supposedly in some kind of sex-and-drugs haze. One line to say, ‘Where are you going, babe?’ Hardly anyone remembered the film now, and no one remembered Kitty’s performance. Thank goodness.

  The rock star laughed and said to her, ‘Don’t give up the day job, darling.’ They slept together once, it was almost expected. De rigueur, the rock star said. Sometimes she thought that when she was very old and everyone else was dead she might write her autobiography. Of her life during those years anyway. The years after her marriage would make for a very dull book in other people’s eyes.

  She made the film the year after she left the writer. She was under his spell for nearly two years, it was rather like being held hostage. They were the years when she should have been larking around with her friends, enjoying all the things a girl of her age would normally enjoy. Instead she was pouring his drinks and nursing his ego and having to read his tedious manuscripts. People thought it was glamorous and grown-up but it wasn’t. It was like being a nanny who occasionally had to perform sordid sex acts. He was nearly twenty years older than she was, used to get annoyed that most of the time she had no idea what he was talking about.

  *

  Kitty sat down at her dressing-table mirror and took a cigarette out of her silver case. It was engraved with her initials and inside the lid there was another engraving, a birthday message from Ian: To Kitty, the woman I will always love most in the world. The famous writer had once given her a lighter engraved with something obscene in Latin. ‘Catullus,’ he said, translating it for her. Embarrassing. She had never used it in case someone who understood Latin glimpsed the words. She was much more prudish than people imagined. She threw the lighter into the Thames from Victoria Embankment the morning she walked out of his house. Kitty Gillespie was tied naked to a bedpost and degraded. There were limits. And anyway he had grown tired of her, and her place in his bed and at his side had been usurped by a Swedish poet, ‘intelligent woman,’ he said, as if Kitty wasn’t. He suffered a great tragedy not long afterwards and Kitty couldn’t but feel sorry for someone who was so imperfectly equipped to d
eal with any drama that they weren’t themselves the centre of.

  How much better it was now to be a lovely doctor’s wife and live in a lovely house in lovely Harrogate and look in your bedroom mirror and see your lovely white neck, lovely, lovely pearls glowing against your skin. Kitty Winfield tucked a strand of hair behind one of her neatly shaped ears. She sighed. There were times when she just wanted to curl into a ball on the floor and pretend nothing existed. Kitty Winfield opened the bottle of sleeping pills prescribed for her by her husband.

  She stubbed out her cigarette, freshened her lipstick, sprayed a little shot of Shalimar on the delicate, veiny skin on the inside of her wrists. The faintest scars, thready bracelets like white cotton where she had tried to slice through them, a long time ago now.

  Ian was downstairs reading a medical journal, listening to Tchaikovsky. Soon he would go into the kitchen and make them both a cup of something milky. ‘We’re a real old Darby and Joan,’ he laughed.

  Such a great emptiness inside where a baby should be. ‘You can never conceive,’ a consultant obstetrician had told her in London, not long before she and Ian had married. Ian was at Great Ormond Street in those days, Kitty had met him in Fortnum and Mason’s. He was buying chocolates for his mother’s birthday, she was sheltering from the rain and he had invited her to have tea and scones in the Fountain restaurant and she thought, why not?

  ‘Do you want me to have a chat with your fiancé?’ the obstetrician asked. ‘He’s a medical man, isn’t he? Or shall I leave it up to you?’ They were speaking a polite code. Did she want him to explain to Ian how ‘a medical procedure she had undergone when younger had resulted in her being unable to conceive a baby’? But Ian, a doctor, would want to know more and he was sure to understand what that ‘medical procedure’ had been. Kitty Gillespie lay beneath the white sheet and opened her legs.

  After she left the writer, after she threw the obscene cigarette lighter in the Thames, she had realized that she was pregnant. She ignored it, thinking it might go away, but it didn’t. She knew the writer wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in her predicament, and neither did she want him to be. She was five months gone before she had an abortion. Phoebe March had given her the name of a doctor. ‘He’ll fix you up,’ she said. ‘All the girls go to him, it’s nothing, it’s like going to the dentist.’