Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  It was a beautiful day again and the crowds in Roundhay were already out in force, half-naked white bodies lying like corpses on the green grass, people desperate to get some rays and some fresh air. That’s what parks had always been, breathing spaces for the poor who lived six long days a week in factories. All those little kids, slaves to the machines, their tiny helpless lungs full of damp wool fibres.

  Perhaps it was insanity to be out like this, they were exposed to the world and his wife, but then – what better place to hide a child than in plain sight, in a play park surrounded by parents and little kids? People took kids from parks, they didn’t take them to them. And as a bonus Roundhay was not the kind of place that Kelly Cross came to in daylight hours. Plus, Tracy reasoned against reason, it was good for her to practise being a parent in public. Sooner or later she was going to have to come out to the world (and his wife) as a mother, so here she was, Imogen Brown, pushing her little girl Lucy on swings, twirling her on roundabouts and helping her negotiate a variety of apparatus that Tracy couldn’t even give a name to, most of it unrecognizable from the uninspired parks of her own childhood.

  Tracy was relieved when Courtney clambered off a giant chicken on springs and announced, ‘I’m hungry.’ Tracy checked her watch, they had been in the play park barely fifteen minutes. It felt like hours. She handed over a banana.

  ‘OK?’ she asked when it was finished and Courtney gave her a solemn silent thumbs-up sign. She was economical with language, and why not? Perhaps when you were little you thought you might use up all your words at the beginning and not have any left for the end.

  Tracy wiped away the green maggot of snot emerging from one of Courtney’s nostrils and congratulated herself on remembering to buy tissues in the supermarket. From her bottomless bag Tracy scavenged the corpse of the doughnut she’d bought in Ainsleys a million years ago, tore it in half and shared it with the kid, sitting on the grass. (‘Cake? Before lunch?’ she heard her mother’s voice say and Tracy answered silently, ‘Yes. What are you going to do about it, you old cow?’)

  When Courtney had finished her half of the doughnut she licked each finger religiously before giving another silent thumbs-up to Tracy, and then she took out the contents of the little pink backpack and laid each item, one by one, on the grass for perusal:

  the tarnished silver thimble

  the Chinese coin with a hole in the middle

  the purse with a smiling monkey’s face on it

  the snow globe containing a crude plastic model of the Houses of Parliament

  the shell shaped like a cream horn

  the shell shaped like a coolie hat

  the whole nutmeg

  a pine cone

  The pine cone, Tracy noted, was new. She wondered where it had come from. It was like that game they used to play at children’s parties where you had to remember the objects on a tea-tray. They probably didn’t have parties like that any more. Pin the tail on the donkey, pass the parcel – someone’s dad standing by the record player and lifting the needle on ‘The Runaway Train’ or ‘They’re Changing Guard At Buckingham Palace’. Nowadays they all went to ‘indoor soft play areas’ – Rascals and Funsters – and ran amok. Tracy had been called to one of those places in Bradford once. They thought a kid had disappeared, turned out it was at the bottom of a ball pool and nobody could see it. It was fine, alive and kicking, literally. Paedophile heaven.

  Tracy picked out the cream horn-shaped shell and rolled it in her palm. When she was a child her father used to pick up a box of three cream horns from Thomson’s cake shop in Bramley every Friday evening on his way home from work in the town hall. Tracy couldn’t remember when she had last eaten a cream horn, couldn’t remember the last time she had stuck a shell to her own shell-like and listened to the sea. Tracy realized that at some point in this reverie Courtney had surreptitiously retrieved the shell and was packing her treasure away again.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Tracy sighed. ‘How about we have our picnic? Heaven forfend that we should go more than ten minutes without eating.’

  Tracy had lugged with her an old plaid blanket from the boot of the car. She rolled it out and spread out the picnic fodder they’d bought in the supermarket – tuna rolls, cartons of apple and orange juice, packets of crisps and a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate, the latter neutralized – in Tracy’s mind anyway – by a small bag of carrot sticks. It was the kind of picnic (possibly minus the carrot sticks) that she would have liked when she herself was a child, instead of the cold hard-boiled eggs that her mother used to pack, alongside flabby white-bread sandwiches that had been spread thinly with meat paste before being wrapped – for some arcane reason – in damp lettuce leaves. They had taken these meagre provisions with them on Sunday drives in the family Ford Consul – to Harewood House, to Brimham Rocks or to ‘Brontë country’ – as her mother always familiarly called it, even though she had never read a book by a Brontë, or indeed any book unless it had been helpfully condensed first by the Reader’s Digest. The nearest they ever got to the parsonage was when they once stopped in Haworth village so her father could buy a pack of cigarettes.

  Tracy couldn’t think of these Sunday outings without remembering what it felt like to craze a boiled-egg shell and peel away the membrane from the solid greyish white beneath. Sick-making. She suddenly remembered how her father would sometimes pop an egg whole into his mouth, like a conjuror, and part of the young Tracy had expected a dove or a row of flags to emerge in place of the egg. They had seen something similar once in a summer show in Bridlington. Top of the bill was Ronnie Hilton, long past his heyday but nonetheless a Yorkshireman and therefore someone to be proud of.

  Tracy’s father was a war veteran, the Green Howards, landed on Gold beach on D-Day. He must have seen things but if he had he never said. Sometimes a war was wasted on people. He was born in Dewsbury. Shoddy capital of the world. It said something about a mill town that it couldn’t aspire to even second-rate cloth, weaving instead the lowest quality from rags and shreds. A filthy trade, shoddy. A town where now women drugged and kidnapped their own kids for money. The Ripper was questioned in Dewsbury after being caught in Sheffield. Routine patrol, his luck running out, theirs running back in, late in the day. Tracy remembered being in a corner shop when she heard the news, buying crisps and chocolate for her and her partner. On the beat. The bloke behind the counter had the radio on and when the news came on he yelled, ‘They’ve caught him, they’ve caught your Ripper!’ He was second-generation Bangladeshi and Tracy didn’t blame him for denying ownership of Sutcliffe. She couldn’t remember where she was for all those other newsworthy world events (probably in front of the box, getting the news on the telly), although she was in a TV repair shop buying a new scart lead for her DVD player when she saw the second of the World Trade Center buildings fall. You usually expected Countdown.

  On the day of Charles and Diana’s wedding, an event that Tracy would have liked to watch (although she would never have admitted to it), she was co-ordinating house-to-house after the so-called honour killing of a woman in Bradford. Fairytale wedding.

  Had the kid ever been to the seaside? ‘Have you ever been to the seaside, Courtney?’

  Courtney, mouth stuffed with tuna roll, shook her head and then nodded it.

  ‘Yes and no?’

  ‘Yes,’ Courtney mumbled.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘No.’

  It was an unfathomable exchange. They would go to the seaside. And pantomimes and circuses and Disneyland Paris. They would go to the seaside and paddle in the waves. Cautiously. Before the kid, Tracy would have thought, sea, sand, beach. Now she thought of little kids being swept away like corks by the tsunami. And let’s not forget that on an average British beach, you could expect a hefty percentage of paedophiles to be out and about enjoying themselves. Beware lone men at the seaside, the swimming baths, the school gates. Play parks, funfairs, beaches – the playgrounds of the paedos. Everything that should be innocent
. If people only knew. Did the kid know? Did Tracy need to add a therapist to the list of specialists she’d already mentally lined up for Courtney? Or could fresh air, green veg and Tracy’s love (however amateurish and transgressive) do the trick? Good question. What had Kelly been doing with the kid if she wasn’t her mother? Minding her on behalf of something or someone sinister. Was the kid used to being handed around? Trafficked? Tracy shuddered at the thought.

  She should buy a camera, state-of-the-art digital, so she could start preserving the kid’s new life in inkjet. It would look better if there was evidence of her existence in Tracy’s own life. She had an old camera somewhere, nothing as slick as the ones you got nowadays. There hadn’t been much point in using it, she hadn’t encountered much of anything worth photographing. She mostly went on solitary outings and there was no pleasure to be had from views of landscapes with no people in them. Might as well just buy a postcard.

  Tracy’s father – wore the trousers, wielded the camera – had documented their lives for years. He had been in the habit of taking a photograph of the Christmas tree every year. There were other photographs of the family, opening presents, drinking a decorous sherry, even pulling a cracker, in which parts of the tree, a swoop of tinsel, a drooping branch, might feature but not The tree, the whole tree and nothing but the tree. Not a joke, not even a witticism.

  Most of those photographs were jumbled with others in a box in Tracy’s back bedroom, no way of knowing which Christmas a tree belonged to, only the same uninspiring baubles every year in slightly different arrangements, the tinsel star on top, more like a ragged starfish than a star to guide wise men by, and the exhausted pipecleaner gnomes perching drunkenly at the ends of the branches, the tips of matches for noses and eyes. When Tracy’s parents reached seventy her father ceased buying a tree. ‘Why bother?’ her mother said when Tracy came round on Christmas Day. Cheer and merriment, something lovely, Tracy thought, but too late for any of that.

  If she sifted through the box with an archaeologist’s vigilance, Tracy wondered, would she find some clue as to why her parents had embraced their drab lives with what could only be called enthusiasm?

  Would she find her younger self in that box and be surprised at how far she had come, or be depressed by the distance between? Ronnie Hilton at the Spa Theatre and a lifetime ahead of her. ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’. Pass the parcel. It was funny, Tracy had spent a lot of time trying to put her lacklustre childhood behind her (where it belonged) but ever since she’d come into possession of the kid she kept being reminded of it, shards and chips of memory. The mirror cracked.

  ‘Time to move. Why don’t we go to the lake and feed the ducks?’ There were some crusts left from their picnic, the kid had polished off everything else. Perhaps Tracy had kidnapped a cuckoo, a giant’s child. She would pay for that, imagined the kid growing bigger and bigger, puffing up until she filled the car, the spare room, the whole house, eating up everything in sight, including Tracy. Kidnap what looks like a kid and find out too late that it’s going to be the death of you. Like Greek tragedy. She had been to a production of Medea at the West Yorkshire Playhouse a few years ago. An African production, ‘Nigerian, Yoruba, actually,’ her theatre companion said knowledgeably. The academic from the singles social club again. You had to wonder about the educated classes. He tried to grope her on her doorstep. She felt insulted that he thought she was so desperate she would have even considered it. She kneed him in the balls, showed him the kind of empiricist she was. That was it for the club as far as Tracy was concerned.

  Of course with Medea it was the other way round, she killed her kids, she wasn’t killed by them. As a plot, Tracy didn’t find it shocking, it happened all the time.

  The ducks had no appetite, half of Leeds already seemed to be out, tossing the remains of their sliced whites to the indifferent wildfowl. The rats would be out later to mop up the soggy leavings. Courtney, clearly not one to waste food, ate the crusts herself.

  Courtney was drooping. Kids should come with wheels attached.

  ‘How about an ice cream?’ Tracy said. Courtney gave her the thumbs-up. Tracy wanted to give the kid everything, but all the ice creams in the world weren’t going to make up for Kelly Cross and whatever horrors she represented. Ice cream, ice cream, I scream for ice cream.

  They walked back across Soldier’s Field, both of them clutching a cornet, strawberry for Courtney, mint choc chip for Tracy. The Ripper had attacked two victims in Roundhay, one lived, one died. Luck of the draw. ’76 and ’77. Two years after the Lovell Park murder. They never connected that to the Ripper, but it made you wonder. Wilma McCann, his first victim, was murdered only six months after Arkwright had broken down that door in Lovell Park, and before that Sutcliffe had been practising. Arkwright told Tracy that he had heard that someone had confessed to Carol Braithwaite’s murder in prison and then had died. Seemed a convenient sort of way of clearing up a crime.

  ‘Tracy?’A little voice interrupted her thoughts. It was the first time Courtney had addressed her as anything. It made her want to cry. Could she get her to call her ‘Mum’? What would that feel like? Like flying. Wendy in Peter Pan, Tinker Bell at her heels. Lost girls together.

  ‘Come on,’ Tracy said. ‘There’s a Toys “R” Us in Batley. We’ll have a bit of a drive.’ Because going back to her house in Headingley was disturbing. Alone with a kid in her house. Like a proper parent. How did you do that? Tracy had no idea. She suddenly remembered Janek. No, of course she couldn’t go home while he was there. Looking at Courtney with his sad Polish eyes, questioning who she was, where she had come from.

  Next on his list of tasks was the purchase of a sizeable stock of plastic nappy sacks for the onslaught of dog shit that was inevitably coming his way. Jackson felt more of an upstanding citizen once he was fully equipped. He supposed he should have looked to see if the plastic sacks were biodegradable before planning to weigh the planet down with even more debris, but some days there was only so much a man could do.

  This was followed by a visit to an old-fashioned barber’s that he had spotted earlier, near the Best Western, in order to effect a transformation, courtesy of a number one haircut and hot shave with a straight-bladed razor, from which Jackson emerged half an hour later feeling as shorn as a new-born lamb (or a convict). A boule à zero, the Foreign Legion boys would have called it. He just hoped that no one thought it was anything to do with male pattern baldness. Jackson was relieved to see that the reflection that looked back at him in the mirror looked more like himself than previously.

  The dog had been allowed to accompany him into the barber’s shop and sat watching the proceedings intently, as if storing up an experience that it might need to explain later. The barber turned out to be a dog lover, said he ‘showed pugs’, a statement which Jackson took a little time deciphering.

  He also demonstrated that the dog knew how to shake hands, ‘or shake paws, I should say’, he laughed.

  ‘Right,’ Jackson said.

  ‘We share eighty-five per cent of our genes with dogs,’ the barber said.

  ‘Well, we share fifty per cent of our DNA with bananas,’ Jackson said, ‘so I don’t think that really means anything.’

  Smuggling a dog in and out of places was proving easier than Jackson would have imagined, not that it was a topic he had ever given much attention to before now. He couldn’t believe the number of places that dogs weren’t allowed. Kids – not that he had anything against kids obviously – kids were allowed everywhere and dogs were much better behaved on the whole.

  Next on his list was the Central Library, where he combed the archives of the Yorkshire Post for April 1975. In the paper for the 10th, he finally found what he was looking for, tucked away on an inside page. ‘Police were called to a flat in Lovell Park yesterday afternoon where they discovered the body of a woman, identified as Carol Braithwaite. Miss Braithwaite had been the subject of a brutal attack. Her body had been lying in the flat for some time, a police
spokesman said.’ A byline, ‘Marilyn Nettles’. And that was it, no update on a murder investigation in subsequent weeks, no report of an inquest that he could find. Just one more woman thrown away like rubbish. A woman killed, the murderer never brought to justice, the very echo of Jackson’s own life.

  His rucksack, currently resting on the floor, started wriggling as if it was about to produce an alien life form. A small, muffled bark came from inside and a snout struggled through the opening in the zip. Probably time to go, Jackson thought.

  Even with an updated code the phone number for Tracy Waterhouse had proved a dud when Jackson tried it, long fallen into disuse. Was Tracy Waterhouse a warhorse, still on the force after all this time? Extremely doubtful.

  It seemed to Jackson that if Tracy Waterhouse had been a member of the West Yorkshire Police Force in 1975 then there would be records. And if not records then someone who might recall her, although the chances of someone remembering a humble WPC from the seventies seemed remote. Policewomen in the seventies were still regarded as tea-makers and hand-holders. Life on Mars was only the tip of a sexist iceberg. That world had gone, never to return. (How many men does it take to wallpaper a room? Marlee asked. Jackson waited for the scornful punchline. Four if you slice them thinly. LOL.)

  The dog was restless, despite sharing a ham sandwich with Jackson and having lifted its leg against several walls and the odd scrubby urban tree. It had spent a lot of the day so far confined to prison and Jackson supposed it wanted a good walk. There were very few places for dogs and men to exercise in Leeds, the town centre seemed to be almost devoid of green spaces.

  He decided it might be best not to take it into the police station, so he tethered it to a hitching-post outside Millgarth Police HQ, positioning the dog in the line of fire of a CCTV camera at the entrance. That way if someone stole the dog at least there would be a record of it. ‘Call me paranoid,’ he said to the dog, ‘but you can’t trust anyone these days.’ Millgarth was possibly one of the ugliest buildings he had ever seen, built like a Crusader fortress, some time in the seventies, to keep the enemy at bay.