Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

  “Too many,” Jackson said. And they all looked like they would have gladly opted for boredom rather than the slab.

  As he cruised along the Esplanade looking for a parking place, Jackson peered up at the houses that lined the street. This was Savile territory—“Jim’ll Fix It” had owned an apartment along here somewhere. There had been a plaque on the Esplanade railings, overlooking the sands, that said Savile’s View. Long since removed, of course. Buried with the honors befitting a Catholic saint and now rotting in an unmarked grave to prevent desecration. So it goes, Jackson thought, just a shame it took so long. Just a shame there were so many other predators still out there. You might catch one, but then ten seemed to rush in to fill the vacuum and no one seemed able to fix that.

  It was amazing how many deviants you could pack into one geographical area. Jackson had never forgotten being at a talk, a lifetime ago, given by a child protection officer. “Look around at any seaside beach in summer,” she had said, “and there’ll be a hundred pedophiles enjoying themselves in their natural hunting ground.”

  It was a great view, though, a panorama of the South Bay laid out before them. “Great view,” Jackson said to Nathan, although he knew you had to be at least thirty before you could appreciate a good vista. And anyway Nathan was busy consulting the oracle of his iPhone.

  Jackson spotted a parking space just as a Bassani’s ice-cream van began to make admirably stately progress along the Esplanade toward them. It was pink and the tune it was playing was “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” The chimes sounded as though they were running down, making the music—if you could call it that—mournful rather than merry. Jackson had a vague memory of singing it to his daughter when she was little. He had never previously thought of it as a sad tune. If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in disguise. Or threatening, even. He found it unnerving now, somehow.

  There’d been something about those pink ice-cream vans, hadn’t there? It had been one of the ways they’d enticed the kids. Could you hypnotize children with ice-cream-van chimes? Jackson wondered. Beguile them like the Pied Piper and lead them away to some horrible fate? (Had he read that in a Stephen King novel?) Who ran Bassani’s now? Was it still in the family or was it just a name now?

  How had Bassani and Carmody met each other—a council meeting, a black-tie charity event? They must have been delighted to discover they shared an appetite for the same fodder. It was a story that was depressingly familiar, a tale of girls—and boys—beguiled out of care homes and foster families or their own dysfunctional households. As council officials and respected charity supporters, Bassani and Carmody were in the perfect position to be welcomed into those places, they were invited in, for God’s sake, like vampires. They came bearing gifts—offering Christmas parties, outings to the countryside and the seaside, camping and trailer holidays—Carmody had owned trailer sites all along the East Coast. The kids were given free entrance to amusement arcades and funfairs. Ice cream, sweets, cigarettes. Treats. Deprived kids liked treats.

  There’d always been rumors of a third man. Not Savile, he’d had his own show, separate from Bassani and Carmody. The pair of them had been on the go for decades without being caught. There used to be a TV program, The Good Old Days, a tribute to the defunct music hall. The old programs were still—for some reason, God knows why—being rebroadcast on BBC4. (“Post-irony,” Julia said, a term that was mysterious to Jackson.) Bassani and Carmody had had their own show. The Bad Old Days.

  Bassani and Carmody had run this coast once. It was funny how so many men were defined by their downfall. Caesar, Fred Goodwin, Trotsky, Harvey Weinstein, Hitler, Jimmy Savile. Women hardly ever. They didn’t fall down. They stood up.

  “Can I have an ice cream?” Nathan asked, the Pavlovian response to the chimes kicking in straightaway.

  “Another ice cream? What do you think?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’ve just had one, obviously.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Jackson said, “you’re not getting another one.” It was never enough. It was the dominant trait in Nathan’s friends too. It didn’t matter how much they were given, how much stuff they acquired, they were never satisfied. They had been bred to consume and one day there would be nothing left. Capitalism would have eaten itself, thereby fulfilling its raison d’être in an act of self-destruction, aided by the dopamine feedback loop—the snake swallowing its own tail.

  Still, his son had his virtues, Jackson reminded himself. He was good with Dido, for example. Sympathetic to her ailments, always ready to brush her or feed her. He had known her since she was a puppy. Nathan had been a puppy himself, sweet and playful, but now Dido had left him far behind. It wouldn’t be long before her path ran out, and Jackson dreaded how Nathan would react to that. Julia would be worse, of course.

  Jackson was distracted by the sight of a girl, walking on the other side of the road. She was wearing running shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt with a sequinned picture of a kitten’s head on it. A brightly colored backpack. Twelve years old? Jackson didn’t like to see girls on their own. The ice-cream van slowed to a halt and the girl turned to look both ways (good) before crossing the road, and Jackson thought that she was going to get an ice cream but then she stuck out her thumb (bad) at the passing cars.

  She was hitching, for Christ’s sake! She was a child, what was she thinking? She ran toward the ice-cream van, her backpack bumping against her skinny shoulders. The bag was blue and had a unicorn on it, among a scattering of little rainbows. Kittens, unicorns, rainbows—girls were curious creatures. He couldn’t imagine Nathan carrying a bag with a unicorn on it or wearing a T-shirt displaying a kitten’s head. Unless it was the logo of a global brand, in which case the sequins would probably have been sewn on by hand by a child in a Third World sweatshop. (“Must you always see the dark side of everything?” Julia said. “Someone has to,” Jackson said. “Yes, but does it have to be you?” Apparently, yes. It did.)

  The girl didn’t stop at the ice-cream van but instead ran past it, and that was when Jackson spotted the unassuming gray hatchback that had pulled to a halt in front of the Bassani’s van, and before he could even think Don’t do that! she was climbing in the passenger side and the car was driving off.

  “Quick!” Jackson said to Nathan. “Photograph that car.”

  “What?”

  “That car, get the number plate.”

  Too late. Jackson started the engine and threw the Toyota into a U-turn just as the ice-cream van moved off slowly and—lo and behold—a garbage truck appeared, straddling the road with no intention of making way for anyone and cutting Jackson off at the pass. Between the pink ice-cream van and the garbage truck, Jackson had lost all chance of following the car.

  “Shit,” he said. “I didn’t even notice what make it was.” He was losing his touch.

  “A Peugeot 308,” Nathan said, his eyes already back on his phone.

  Despite his frustration, Jackson felt a twinge of pride. That’s my boy, he thought.

  “I don’t know why you’re so worked up,” Nathan said. “It was probably her dad or her mum picking her up.”

  “She was hitching.”

  “She might have been joking with them.”

  “Joking?”

  Nathan passed his phone to Jackson. There was a photograph, after all, too blurred to read the number plate.

  “Can we go, Dad?”

  No sign of Julia at the unit base. “Still on set,” someone said. The cast and crew were used to Jackson. The guy who played Collier was always pumping him for information about how a “real” detective would behave and then not taking the advice. “Well, why should he?” Julia said. “It’s years since you were in the police.” Yes, but I’ll always be a policeman, Jackson thought. It was his default setting. It was knitted into his soul, for heaven’s sake.

  He was the second guy to play Collier, the original actor had had a breakdown, left, and never come back. That w
as five years ago, but Jackson still thought of the new guy as the new guy, and he had one of those names—Sam, Max, Matt—that had never stuck in Jackson’s brain.

  The catering van had put sandwiches out and Nathan wolfed down a handful with no trace of a please or thank-you. He could give Dido a run for her money. “Nice there in the pigsty, is it?” Jackson said, and Nathan scowled at him and said, “What?” as if he was an irritation. He was, Jackson knew it. An irritation and an embarrassment. (“It’s part of your job description as father,” Julia said. “And, anyway, you’re an old man.” “Thanks.” “In his eyes, I meant.”)

  Jackson thought he looked quite good for his age. Full head of hair, which—genetically—he would be donating to Nathan one day, so he should be grateful (as if). And with his Belstaff Roadmaster jacket and his Ray-Bans, Jackson thought he still cut quite an attractive figure, some might even say cool. “Of course you are,” Julia said, as if she were soothing a fractious child.

  Julia pitched up eventually, looking as if she’d come straight from the battlefield. She was dressed in scrubs, which was a good look on her except that she was smeared with blood and had a nasty slash across her face, courtesy of the makeup department. “Been attacked by a serial killer,” she said cheerfully to Jackson. Nathan was already shying away from her as she approached him with arms open for a hug. “Hold him down for me, will you?” she said to Jackson. He chose sides and declined. Nathan ducked and dived but Julia managed to get hold of him and plant a noisy, smacking kiss on him while he wriggled like a fish on a hook in an attempt to escape the maternal embrace. “Mum, please, stop.” He broke free.

  “He loves it really,” Julia said to Jackson.

  “You look disgusting,” Nathan said to her.

  “I know. Brilliant, isn’t it?” She dropped to her knees and embraced Dido almost as effusively as she had embraced her son. The dog, unlike the child, responded in kind.

  They were running late, she said, she was going to be ages. “You’d better go home with Dad.”

  “No problem,” “Dad” said.

  Julia made an excessively pouty clown-face of sorrow, and said to Nathan, “And I was so looking forward to spending time with my baby. Come back and see me tomorrow, sweetie?” To Jackson, less pouty, more efficient, she said, “I’ve got a day off tomorrow. Can you bring him down to the hotel?”

  “No problem. Come on,” Jackson said to Nathan. “We’ll go and get a fish supper.”

  They ate their fish and chips on the hoof, out of cardboard boxes, while walking along the foreshore. Jackson missed the greasy, vinegary newspaper of the fish suppers of his boyhood. He was becoming a walking, talking history lesson, a one-man folk museum, except that nobody was interested in learning anything from him. Jackson pushed their finished boxes into an overflowing trash can. So much for the obstructive garbage truck.

  There were still a lot of people on the beach, making the most of the balmy early-evening weather. In the part of Yorkshire in which Jackson had been born and bred it had rained every day, all day, since time began, and he had been pleasantly surprised how literally bright and breezy the East Coast could be. And it had been a great summer too, the sun showing his face, sometimes even with his hat on, for at least a few hours every day.

  The tide was currently halfway out, or halfway in, Jackson couldn’t tell which. (Was this a glass-half-full/half-empty kind of thing?) He was still learning what it meant to live on the coast. If he stayed here long enough perhaps he would feel the ebb and flow of the sea in his blood and would no longer need to consult the tide table every time he went for a run on the beach.

  “Come on,” Jackson said to Nathan. “Let’s walk on the sand.”

  “Walk?”

  “Yeah, walk, it’s easy. I’ll show you how, if you like. See—this foot first, and then follow it with the other one.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “Come on. Then we’ll catch the funicular back to the car. It’s fun, that’s why it’s called that.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “True, but you’ll like it.”

  “Oh, hold me back,” Nathan muttered, which was something Jackson himself said, in moments of high cynicism. Strange and rather flattering to hear the boy speaking like the man.

  Come on,” Jackson encouraged when they reached the beach.

  “O-kay.”

  “Do you know that ‘okay’ is the most recognizable word in the world?”

  “Yeah?” Nathan shrugged his disinterest but trudged along beside him. Men had trekked across deserts beneath a boiling sun with more enthusiasm.

  “Go on, ask me,” Jackson said, “because I know you’re dying to—what’s the second most recognizable word in the world?”

  “Dad?” The cynical teenager was gone and for a moment he was just a boy again.

  “What?”

  “Look.” Nathan pointed out to the bay, where there was some kind of commotion taking place in the water. “There’s no sharks here, are there?” he said doubtfully.

  “Plenty, but they’re not necessarily in the sea,” Jackson said. Not a shark attack, but the trio of bad boys from earlier in the car park. Two of them were in a ramshackle-looking inflatable, more of a kids’ toy than a seaworthy vessel. The third was presumably the one causing pandemonium by inconveniently drowning in the water. Jackson looked around for a lifeguard, but couldn’t see one. Surely they didn’t keep office hours? He sighed. Just his luck to be the one on watch. He pulled off his Magnum boots and handed his jacket to Nathan—no way was he about to ruin a Belstaff for one of these numpties. He ran down to the water’s edge and kept on running, splashing in a rather ungainly fashion until he could launch himself on the waves and start swimming. A man running into the sea in his socks was almost as undignified as a man walking along licking an ice-cream cone.

  The boy (or the wanker in the water, as he preferred to think of him) had gone under by the time Jackson got there. The other two bad boys were yelling like useless idiots, their bluster gone, replaced by blind panic. Jackson took a great breath and forced himself under the water. The sea had looked calm from the beach, but out here, less than a hundred feet from shore, it felt brutishly in command. The sea took no prisoners, you won or you lost.

  Jackson, an awkward merman if ever there was, bobbed up and pushed himself back down again. He managed to hook the boy by grabbing a handful of hair and then snagging the back of his jeans until finally, somehow, God knows how, he was able to get them both up to the surface. It was not the most elegant piece of lifesaving, but it would have worked fine if Jackson hadn’t then tried to hold on to the worse-than-useless dinghy. It proved far too frail for the job and the other two boys were tipped, screaming, into the water. More drowning commenced. Had none of them ever learned to swim? They were a waste of space, all three of them, but not to their mothers, he supposed. (Or perhaps they were.) Waste of space or not, the instinct was to save them.

  One was not so bad, but three was impossible. Jackson could feel exhaustion kicking in and for a brief second he thought, Is this it? But luckily for all of them, the inshore lifeboat motored up and started hauling them out of the water.

  Back on dry land someone gave the drowned boy CPR on the sand, while people stood around offering mute encouragement. The other two boys—a pair of sodden water rats—stepped away from Jackson when he approached, ill equipped to deal with gallantry, his or anyone else’s.

  The drowned boy spluttered back to life—a miracle, Jackson thought, waste of space or not—reborn right there on the sands. He thought of Penny Trotter, who was “born again.” Jackson himself had once been dead. He had been injured in a rail crash and his heart had stopped. (“Briefly,” the doctor in A&E had said—somewhat dismissively in Jackson’s opinion.) He had been revived by someone—a girl—at the side of the railway tracks and had for a long time afterward felt the euphoria of the saved. It had worn off now, of course, the commonplace of everyday life having eventually defeated transce
ndence.

  A paramedic draped Jackson in a blanket and wanted to take him to hospital, but he refused. “Dad?” Nathan was hovering, pale and worried. Dido moved to Jackson’s side to offer silent, stoic support, which involved leaning rather heavily on him. “All right?” Nathan asked.

  “Yeah,” Jackson said. “Can we go now?”

  Sugar and Spice

  The scent of his dad’s breakfast—sausage, bacon, egg, black pudding, baked beans, fried bread—still lingered rather threateningly throughout the house (and it was a big house). “It’s going to kill you one day, Tommy,” Crystal said nearly every time she put it in front of him. “Hasn’t happened yet,” his father said cheerfully, as if that was a logical argument. (Harry imagined his mother saying, “Well, I haven’t fallen off a cliff yet,” when warned about the dangers.)

  His dad had driven off first thing this morning to the Port of Tyne to meet a DFDS ferry coming in from Rotterdam. “White goods,” he said. He quite often met his trucks himself at Customs if they were coming in from the Continent. “Quality control,” he said. “Vital if you’re going to keep customer loyalty.” His dad used to express the wish that Harry would join the firm—“Holroyd and Son,” he said—but he hadn’t mentioned this idea much lately, not really since Harry had said he wanted to do Theater Studies. (“Why not Engineering or something?”)

  The other day Harry overheard him asking Crystal if she thought his son was gay. “I mean, he’s a bit light in his loafers, isn’t he?” “Dunno,” Crystal said. “Does it matter?” To his dad it did, apparently. Harry didn’t think he was gay—he liked girls (although perhaps not in that way)—but he also felt so unformed as a person, as a character at the center of his own drama, that he didn’t feel ready to be definitive about anything. Perhaps his father could persuade Candace into the business instead. Holroyd and Daughter. Paint his trucks pink to tempt her.

  Harry was alone in the house. Crystal and Candace were at playgroup, which was usually followed by the park or coffee in Costa with the other mothers—which was basically just the playgroup in a different, less suitable location. In the school holidays Harry sometimes did the playgroup run. It was interesting having coffee with the playgroup mothers. Between the mothers and the chorus girls at the theater he had learned a lot, most of it anatomical and confusing.