Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  Cap’n Bligh, yes, sir. Or rather, ‘no, sir’, Tilly supposed, given the mutiny. Did you call a naval captain ‘sir’? Or ‘captain’? HMS Pinafore not much help with that. Would Saskia’s Guards lieutenant know? Military was military after all. What was his name? Saskia was the lieutenant’s woman. Tilly had a small part in that film, a servant of some kind. Lyme Regis, lovely place, the young people were all wild to see Lyme. Her favourite Austen. Persuasion. Her brain was like lace, delicate and full of holes. Or a christening shawl. White wool on black skin. Coddling.

  Rupert, that was his name! Like Rupert Bear. She used to love getting those annuals at Christmas. Rupert and his friends. Bill the Badger, Ping-Pong the Pekinese (was that racist in some way?). Couldn’t remember the others. One Boxing Day she had done something that angered Father – who knew what, so many little things made him angry – and he had taken her new Rupert annual and torn the pages out one by one. Oh, dear God, would someone put a stop to all this. The memories, the words. Too many of them.

  The lieutenant was arriving tonight, wasn’t he? That would explain the shepherd’s pie that was sitting mysteriously in the middle of the kitchen table.

  The rain sounded as if someone was throwing buckets of water against the window. There was a grumble of thunder, like a sound effect. On a ship at sea: a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard. She had played Miranda in an open-air production. Home Counties somewhere, couldn’t remember much about it, her heart hadn’t been in it the way it should have been because she was in love with Douglas. She’d been stuck in the wilds of Berkshire or Buckinghamshire, some Home Counties shire anyway, while Douglas was in London directing a play. He was fifteen years older than Tilly. She was only twenty, it was a lovely role – such sweet innocence – she hadn’t realized at the time that she would never play it again. She was Prospero now, poor old Tilly, breaking her staff, about to give it all up. The revels were ending. Sticky toffee pudding ending.

  Of course, that was the summer that Phoebe stole Douglas. He was directing her in Major Barbara, you see. She was the youngest actress ever to play the role on the London stage. The brightest new star of her generation, critics said. The springboard for her glittering career. Tilly had never understood why Douglas hadn’t cast her in the role, she was just as good an actress as Phoebe, certainly no worse. Too late to ask him now. After that Phoebe got all the juicy roles, of course, Cleopatra, Duchess of Malfi, Nora Helmer.

  When Tilly looked again she saw that it wasn’t raining, wasn’t wet outside at all. The rain was inside her head? A tempest in her brain. O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer.

  The shepherd’s pie on the table was defrosting beneath its suffocating cling-film. Miniature green trees of broccoli were all chopped and washed in a colander. Tonight’s dinner on the table at six in the morning. Of course, the lieutenant in the Guards was arriving tonight. Saskia was doing her domestic act. She hadn’t actually made the shepherd’s pie, nice man in catering had done it for her. ‘Make it look authentic,’ Saskia had told him, ‘home-made. As if I’m a good cook, but not cordon bleu.’ Silly girl.

  In a café with Douglas. Near the British Museum. He bought her a rum baba, her favourite, and then put his hand over hers and said, ‘Sorry, Matilda dearest’ – that was how he spoke, he had been brought up on matinee idols. His mother had been a Bluebell Girl before she had him. (And here was Tilly in Bluebell Cottage. Funny that.) No father in the picture for Douglas, his mother was the racy sort, that kind of background was bound to turn a boy’s head. Inhaled greasepaint with his first breath. Made her terribly sad to think of Douglas as a little baby, he had been so racked at the end, nothing more than a skeleton. Aids, of course. Took off a lot of those poor boys. Tilly’s baby had been a boy. Sluiced away. Black. Black as night. She hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. First time she played Juliet was at school. An all-girls school, her Romeo was a girl called Eileen. Wonder what happened to Eileen. Could be dead.

  *

  There was a shepherd’s pie sitting on the table. It seemed strange. She should pop it in the oven. Vince and his boyfriend were coming round tonight, ‘to cheer her up’. They said they would bring food – had they already brought it? Were they already here? Where? Her brain was doing that swimmy thing again, like a television gone wrong. Maybe she was having little strokes, one after the other, that would explain how the weather had got inside her.

  They had made shepherd’s pie in ‘housecraft’ at school. Housecraft classes taught you all the things you would need to run a house, be a good wife—

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ, Tilly! What are you doing? You’re cooking the fucking shepherd’s pie, it’s fucking six o’clock in the morning. You stupid fucking senile bitch!’

  Tilly flapped her hands helplessly in the air. She wanted to say, ‘Don’t shout at me,’ she did so hate being shouted at, made her shrink inside. The great maw of Father’s mouth, the smell of dead fish he carried on his skin. She couldn’t say anything, the words wouldn’t come out properly. Ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar.

  They breakfasted on toast and Marmite, sitting at an oak refectory table made by Robert Thompson, the Mouseman. Tracy had read a leaflet and pointed out the Mouseman’s signature to Courtney, the little carved mouse climbing up the table leg. A set of ten matching chairs ringed the table. Courtney crawled around on hands and knees and counted all the mice on the chair legs.

  Imagine a life too where you ate your breakfast every morning sitting at an oak table, in a Victorian Gothic house, looking out of a window at a herd of deer. The wand rested next to the Marmite jar. Broken now, Courtney had retained the top half with the star, more like a hatchet than a wand. When she finished her toast Courtney hauled out the faithful pink backpack and arranged her swag on the Mouseman table. After three days of witnessing this ritual Tracy thought she knew the catalogue by heart but every time Courtney seemed to have added something new. The current inventory was:

  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 model of the Houses of Parliament

  the shell like a cream horn

  the shell shaped like a coolie hat

  the pine cone

  Dorothy Waterhouse’s engagement ring

  the filigree leaf from the wood

  a few links from a cheap gold chain

  The gold chain was new. Kid was a magpie. She had an obsession with finding, collecting, arranging. She was self-contained. Did it foretell a scientist patiently collating data, an artist absorbed by creation, or was there something autistic about it?

  Tracy cleared the plates away, took them through to the kitchen that was next to the dining room. A minute or two later she heard a noise coming from the other room. It was so unexpected that it took her a moment or two to understand that the sound was that of Courtney singing. ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. The first verse. Tracy peered into the room. Courtney sang the first verse again (Who knew the second verse? No one). On the word ‘star’ she closed her fists and then opened them and made starfish hands. A damaged child that could still sing could be rescued, couldn’t she? Could be taken to pantomimes and circuses, zoos and petting farms and Disneyland. Wasn’t going to end up hanging around Sweet Street West looking for business. Chevaunne. She could have been rescued once. They could all have been rescued, all the Chevaunnes, all the Michael Braithwaites, all the starved and beaten and neglected. If there’d been enough people to rescue them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Courtney. ‘But we have to leave this nice place.’

  *

  She phoned Harry Reynolds. She could hear the sound of ice cubes tinkling in a glass. Seemed early for alcohol. Maybe it was his morning orange juice. She imagined him standing by the phone in his expensive house, wearing his expensive slippers, looking at h
is expensive fish. The ice made her think of diamonds. Diamonds and cockroaches. The end of the world. He answered cautiously. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m coming in,’ she said. She sounded like a Cold War spy.

  Long straight drive took you to the gates, took you to the road to Ripon. Kicked out of paradise, heading east of Eden, driving a stolen car. In possession of a stolen child.

  Before they reached the gates, a car appeared coming from the opposite direction. Grey, nondescript, it travelled slowly towards them. Something about its dismal aura made Tracy’s heart sink. The driver flashed his lights and raised a hand like a traffic cop. The Avensis.

  Tracy had met her nemesis, she felt it in her bones. She was going to have to find out what he wanted sooner or later, she supposed.

  The Avensis drew level with the Saab and the driver gave Tracy a little salute, like an old-fashioned AA man, and rolled down his window. Tracy rolled down hers.

  ‘What?’ she said, forgoing pleasantries.

  ‘Tracy, mind if I call you that?’ he said. Very chummy. Who the hell was he? ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m very popular at the moment,’ Tracy said. ‘Particularly with men, or morons as they’re sometimes called. Why are you following me?’

  ‘Depends on your perspective, doesn’t it? Some might say that you’re following me.’

  ‘That’s bullshit.’

  He laughed and said, ‘You’re a wag, Tracy.’

  ‘A wag?’ Tracy puzzled. Where did this joker come from, out of a box on a shelf somewhere marked Essex geezer, circa 1943? He proceeded to get out of his car and walk round the front of the Saab. Tracy considered running him over. Like a deer, leaving his carcase on the road for the tourists to find. No CCTV here. Or was there? The National Trust probably had cameras camouflaged in bird boxes. He had reached the passenger side of the Saab before Tracy could decide whether or not to flatten him. He opened the car door and she reached for the Maglite.

  ‘No need for that,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I’m not the person you should be worried about.’ He sat in the passenger seat and sighed as if he’d just settled into a warm bath. ‘Name’s Brian Jackson, by the way.’ He took a thin card from his pocket and handed it to her. Private Investigations it said, and a mobile phone number. You could get cards like that from machines in railway stations. There’s been a bloke down the station looking for you, Barry said. Says his name’s Jackson something or other. Claims to be a private detective.

  ‘It’s lovely here, isn’t it?’ he said conversationally. ‘It’s as if time has stood still. Have you had an opportunity to visit the abbey? It’s a World Heritage site, you know.’

  She stared at him until he put his hands in the air and said, ‘Just making conversation. I’ve been looking for you all week. I found everyone else but you’ve been elusive.’

  ‘Everyone else?’

  ‘Every time I catch up with you, you shoot off. You nearly gave me a heart attack when you whacked into that deer. Could have been nasty. Was for the deer, obviously.’

  ‘That was you chasing me?’

  ‘Following, not chasing,’ he said in a hurt voice. ‘I don’t know why you ran off into the wood like that.’ He opened the glove compartment and rustled around inside and then came up with some kind of small electronic gadget. ‘I’d never have found you without this,’ he said. ‘Tracking device.’ He held it up for her inspection. ‘I had it on your friend, wanted to make sure I could keep up with him. We’re both after the same thing, bit of a tag-team thing going on. Nice coincidence, although I always say that a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Very handy the way it led me to you. Your friend’s very cross about his car, by the way.’

  ‘No friend of mine,’ Tracy said.

  ‘He could be.’

  A sense of defeat fell on her, a leaden cloak. What was the point? She couldn’t run, she couldn’t hide, there was always going to be someone looking for them. Someone sticking tracker devices on them. Satellites up in the stratosphere turned on their every move. Cameras aimed in their direction. Eyes in the sky and camera drones playing I-Spy – someone beginning with ‘T’. The Pentagon and the Kremlin probably had an eye on them too. Aliens had them in an invisible tractor beam. No escape, no way out. Wondered if she could just lay her head down on the steering wheel and go to sleep and when she woke up everything would be different. Maybe the forest would grow around them, a cage of thorns and briars. Should have thought about that before, got the kid to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and they’d be safe. Asleep but safe, like Amy Crawford.

  The man was still rifling through the glove compartment. This time he came up with what looked like a black-and-white humbug. ‘Everton mint,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen one of those in a long time.’ He took out a handkerchief and cleaned the mint up a little and then handed it to Courtney, who received it with the solemn devotion of one accepting a communion wafer.

  The sweet was a cartoon bulge in the kid’s cheek. Tracy imagined her swallowing it, choking on it. ‘Chew on that,’ she warned, ‘don’t suck it.’ She turned to Brian Jackson, still grubbing through the glove compartment, and said, ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Nothing, just wondered what he had in here. Can’t help but be curious, he’s like – what’s the fancy term, alter ego, yeah, this geezer’s like my alter ego.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Looking good here, all the best, N.’ he read out from an old postcard that he found. ‘Nice place, Cheltenham,’ he said. ‘Ever been there?’ He flicked through the CDs. ‘Country music,’ he said. ‘Good lord, who’d have thought it.’

  ‘You’re here about the kid,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Bang to rights. I’m here about the kid. Not this one though, as interesting as I find her.’ He turned round and stared at Courtney. She stared back.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Tracy said. ‘She won’t look away first. What do you mean, you’re not interested in her?’ Her spirits rose. She felt incredibly chuffed. ‘You mean you haven’t come to get her back?’

  ‘Nah. I’m here about a different kid.’

  ‘Different kid?’ Tracy said.

  ‘Not a kid any more. Used to be a kid.’

  ‘We all used to be kids.’

  ‘Not me.’

  A group of fawns sauntered across the road in front of the car. ‘Look,’ Courtney said.

  ‘I see them, pet,’ Tracy said, keeping her eyes on Brian Jackson.

  ‘Why don’t we all hop in my car,Tracy?’ Brian Jackson said. ‘A lot safer for you than this one. This one’s been reported stolen. Mine’s not stolen – thief’s honour. I’ll give you a lift to wherever you’re going – Leeds, is it? And we can have a little chat along the way.’

  ‘Not until you tell me what this is about.’ She suddenly felt incredibly irritated, the leaden cloak of defeat, now no more than a poor metaphor, dropped from her shoulders. Tracy had her mojo back. ‘I am very busy at the moment and I do not have time for your mucking me about, so start talking.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘Keep you hair on.’ Courtney made a noise indicating surprise and Tracy said, ‘Not literally,’ to her, without turning round.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Michael Braithwaite,’ he said. ‘Name mean anything to you?’

  ‘Michael Braithwaite?’

  ‘Yeah, thought it might. I’ve got a couple of questions. Need to fill in some blanks. You’re a key witness, as you might say. What do you reckon – shall we get going?’

  ‘You said that you weren’t the person I should be worried about,’ Tracy said. ‘Who is the person I should be worried about?’

  He sat in the dining room of Bella Vista and ate his ‘full Yorkshire breakfast’ as if the only thing that had happened to him between closing his eyes last night and opening them again this morning had been a
n untroubled sleep in Valerie’s flowery bower.

  The baffled (one might say traumatized) binmen had wanted to phone emergency services but somehow or other Jackson had managed to persuade them that he had ended up in the bin as a result of a dangerous prank on the part of his friends. ‘A joke that went wrong.’

  ‘Some joke,’ one of them said.

  They had had to tilt the bin to free him and he had rolled out with the rubbish, like a legless bug. One of them produced a Stanley knife and cut the duct tape that was binding his ankles and wrists. It took some time for his limbs to come back to life but he managed to rip off the duct tape gag himself and to stumble off down the road, aware of the dubious glances at his back. He passed a shop window full of clocks. All the hands of the clocks were stretched out vertically. Six o’clock. He thought he had been in the bin for hours but it was less than two. Not a wheelie-bin but a Tardis.

  The dog scampered by his side all the way back to Bella Vista in a state of near-delirium. At the site of the train crash two years ago Jackson’s life had been saved by a girl administering CPR. Now he had been saved by the loyalty of a dog. The less innocent he was, the more innocent his saviours became. There was some kind of exchange at work in the universe that he didn’t understand.