Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘No, no, I’m sorry, it wasn’t,’ Tilly said. Confrontation tied her up in knots inside. That came from Dad, all those years ago. He was never wrong. A big, blustery man, slapping cod fillets down on his marble counter as if he was teaching them a lesson. Tilly had had to learn a few lessons from him. Ran away in the end, never went back to the Land of Green Ginger, reinvented herself in Soho, like many a girl before her. ‘It was a twenty,’ Tilly persisted gently. She could feel herself getting upset. Calm, calm, she said to herself. Breathe, Matilda!

  The girl behind the counter held up a ten-pound note that she’d taken from the till as if it was incontrovertible proof. But it could have been any ten-pound note! Tilly’s heart was thudding uncomfortably in her chest. ‘It was a twenty,’Tilly said again. She could hear herself sounding less certain. She’d been to the cashline and it had given her twenties. She’d had nothing else in her purse, that was why she had given the girl the twenty in the first place. She could hear a mutter of discontent behind her in the queue, heard a gruff voice say, ‘Get a move on.’ You would think that after all these years in the profession she would be able to slip into a role, she was, after all, most comfortable in someone else’s skin. An imperious, commanding character, Lady Bracknell, Lady Macbeth, would know how to deal with the girl but when Tilly searched inside all she could find was herself.

  The girl was staring at her as if she was nobody, nothing. Invisible.

  ‘You’re a thief,’ Tilly heard herself suddenly say, too shrilly. ‘A common thief.’

  ‘Get lost, you stupid cow,’ the girl said, ‘or I’ll call security.’

  She would need money to pay her way out of the multi-storey. Where did she put her purse? Tilly looked through her bag. No purse. She looked again. Still no purse. Plenty of other things that didn’t belong there. Recently she’d noticed all these objects suddenly appearing in her bag – key rings, pencil sharpeners, knives and forks, coasters. She had no idea how they got there. Yesterday she had found a cup and a saucer! The emphasis on cutlery and cups suggested she was trying to put together a complete place-setting. ‘Turning into a bit of a klepto, Tilly?’ Vince Collier had laughed at her the other day in the canteen. ‘What do you mean, dear?’ she said. Vince wasn’t his real name. His real name was . . . hm.

  Mother kept a long-handled brass toasting fork hung with the fire-irons on the hearth. Always polishing the fire-irons. Always polishing everything. Father liked things clean, would have got on well with Saskia. The toasting fork had three wise monkeys on the top of the handle. See no evil. Plenty of evil to see in that house. Tilly used to sit by the fire and toast teacakes, Mother would butter them. The teacakes used to get stuck on the prongs of the fork. Father threw the toasting fork at Mother once. Like a spear. Got stuck in her leg. Mother howled like an animal. A poor bare forked animal.

  She emptied the contents of her handbag on to the passenger seat. A mysterious tablespoon and a packet of crisps – cheese and onion. She hadn’t bought those, she didn’t like crisps, how had they got there? Definitely no purse. Fear squeezed her heart. Where was it? She’d had it in the newsagent. Had that horrible girl taken it, but how? What was she going to do now? She was trapped in the car park. Trapped! Could she phone someone? Who? No point in phoning anyone in London, not much they could do. The nice production assistant who had made her appointment at the optician’s, what was her name? Tilly drew a blank. Something Indian and therefore more difficult to remember. She went through the alphabet – A-B-D-C-E – a method that often helped to prompt her memory. She went through the whole alphabet and came up with nothing. Silly Tilly.

  Perhaps she was just being highly strung. That’s what they said about her when she was a child. Family doctor prescribed an iron tonic – thick green stuff like mucus that made her gag although not as bad as castor oil or syrup of figs, gawd, the things they used to give the poor suffering child. Highly strung indeed. Artistic temperament, that’s how Tilly preferred to think of it. As if an iron tonic could cure that.

  Think about something else and then it’ll come. Hopefully. She checked herself in the rear-view mirror, adjusted her wig. Who would have thought it would come to this? At least it was a very good wig, made by one of the best, cost a fortune. No one could tell. Made her look younger (well, one lived in hope), not like the awful rug she had to wear to be Vince Collier’s mother. Looked like a Brillo pad. She wasn’t completely bald, not like Mother had been at this age (like a billiard ball), just rather thin on top. Nothing more laughable than a bald woman.

  Padma! That was the girl’s name. Of course. Tilly fumbled for her phone, she wasn’t very good with mobiles, the buttons were so small. She put on her new spectacles and peered at the phone. Wrong ones, she needed her reading specs but when she found them she realized that she couldn’t remember how to use the phone, not the foggiest. She took her specs off and looked through the car windscreen, gazed out at the other parked cars. Everything a blur. She didn’t have the faintest idea where she was.

  She put the phone down on the passenger seat. Breathe, Matilda. She looked at her hands in her lap. Now what was she going to do?

  When you were lost you needed a map. Ariadne and her thread, Tilly the Leeds A–Z that she found in a newsagent. Somehow or other she had wound her way back from the car park to the shopping centre. It was very brightly lit, brighter than the sun. Tilly could have sworn that she felt the hum of electricity passing through her bones. She had been disconcerted by hearing her mother’s voice on the tannoy system, echoing down the years from her childhood, saying, ‘If you get lost, go up to a policeman.’ Tilly knew she must be mad because the last time her mother said that to her was well over sixty years ago, not to mention the fact that her mother had been dead for three decades and even if she had been alive it seemed unlikely that she would be making public announcements in a shopping centre in Leeds.

  Anyway there wasn’t a policeman to be seen anywhere.

  The newsagent was familiar, she had definitely been here before. She put her spectacles on and opened up the A–Z. Why? What was she looking for? A way out of the ninth circle of hell. That was where traitors went, wasn’t it? Where Phoebe belonged, not Tilly. As she walked out of the shop, face buried in the A–Z, a mean-faced, gum-chewing girl behind the counter shouted, ‘Oi!’ at her. Tilly thought it best to ignore her, you never knew what girls like that wanted.

  She reached the foot of an escalator. The A–Z flapped uselessly in her hand. It was very hot in here, it must be the heat that was affecting her brain. She fanned herself with the A–Z. A youth, face raw with acne, like the inside of a pomegranate, loomed in front of her.

  ‘Have you paid for that, madam?’ he asked, pointing at the A–Z. Tilly’s heart began to pound, a steam hammer threatening the end. Her mouth was dry, there was a buzzing in her ears as if an insect was trying to escape from her brain. A curtain descended before her eyes, waving and undulating, how she imagined the aurora borealis would be, although she’d never seen it. She would like to, she had always wanted to go to the North Pole – such a romantic destination. The Northern Lights. She was so hot, feverish. Be not afeard. Think of something cold. Tilly remembered shivering on the dockside with her father in the winter, watching the trawlers sailing into harbour after fishing the Arctic waters. Mysterious places – Iceland, Greenland, Murmansk. Ice still slick on the decks of the boats. Her father buying fish in the market, great trays of cod, bedded on crushed ice. Big fish, pure muscle. Poor things, Tilly used to think, swimming in the deep, cold waters of the north and then ending up on her father’s slab. From the north. Like the wind, like winter monarchs. King Cod.

  ‘Do you have a receipt for that, madam?’ The spotted youth’s voice boomed and receded. The curtain of Northern Lights vibrated and shrank, disappearing to a pinpoint of black. ‘Please, excuse me,’ Tilly murmured. Going down, she thought but then a pair of strong arms had her and a voice was saying, ‘Steady the Buffs. Hold on there. Are you OK, do you need so
me help?’

  ‘Oh, thank you, I’m all right really, you know.’ She could hear herself panting. Like a hart. Her heart pulsing like a fleeing hart. If a hart do lack a hind, / Let him seek out Rosalinde. She had done As You Like It twice when she was younger. Nice play. The white hart was a harbinger of doom for the Celts. Douglas told her that. He knew so much! Wonderful memory. The White Hart in Drury Lane, used to go there sometimes with Douglas and drink pink gins. No one drank pink gins any more, did they? Oh God, make it all stop.

  ‘I was looking for a policeman,’ she said to the man who had asked her if she needed help.

  ‘Well, I used to be one,’ he said.

  The nice man who used to be a policeman steered her into a room. The spotted youth led the way. Bleak little room, painted in several different shades of institutional beige. Reminded her of the sick room at school. There was a Formica-topped metal table and two stiff plastic chairs. Was she going to be interrogated? Tortured? There was a girl there now instead of the spotted youth, she pulled out one of the chairs from the table and said to Tilly, ‘Stay here, I’ll be back in a minute,’ and was as good as her word, returning with a cup of hot sweet tea and a plate of Rich Tea biscuits.

  ‘My name’s Leslie,’ the girl said, ‘with an “ie”. Do you want one?’ she said to the man who used to be a policeman.

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ he said.

  ‘Are you American?’ Tilly asked the girl, making an effort to enter into polite conversation. Tea, biscuits, chat. One should keep one’s end up.

  ‘Canadian.’

  ‘Oh, of course, so sorry.’ Tilly usually had a good ear for accents. ‘I lost my purse, you see,’ she said.

  ‘She’s not going to be arrested for shoplifting, is she?’ the man who used to be a policeman said.

  Shoplifting! Tilly moaned with horror. She was not a thief. Never knowingly stolen so much as a pencil. (All those knives and forks and key rings and packets of crisps couldn’t be stolen because she didn’t want them. Quite the opposite.) Not like Phoebe. Phoebe was always ‘borrowing’ bracelets and shoes and frocks. Borrowed Douglas, never gave him back.

  ‘Are you going to be OK?’ the man asked, crouching down next to her.

  ‘Yes, yes, thank you very much,’ she said. So nice to encounter a proper gentleman these days.

  ‘Right, I’ll be off then,’ she heard him say to the girl.

  ‘Feel better now?’ the girl called Leslie said when the man had gone.

  ‘Are you going to prosecute me?’ Tilly asked. She could hear the wobble in her voice. Tilly supposed the girl thought she was doolally. Not that Tilly blamed her. She was a stupid old woman who couldn’t find her way home. Silly Tilly.

  ‘No,’ the girl said. ‘You’re not a criminal.’

  The tea was wonderful. Tilly could have cried when she took her first sip. It restored her in every way. ‘Silly me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, I just went blank, you know? No, of course you don’t,’ she added, smiling at the girl. ‘You’re young.’

  ‘It must have been the shock of losing your purse,’ the girl, Leslie, said sympathetically.

  ‘There was a woman,’ Tilly said, ‘she was being horrible to a child. Poor little thing, I wanted to find someone who would do something about it. But I didn’t. You’re really not going to arrest me?’

  ‘No,’ Leslie said. ‘You forgot yourself, that’s all.’

  ‘I did!’ Tilly said, immensely cheered by this idea. ‘That’s exactly it, I forgot myself. And now I’ve remembered myself. And everything will be all right. It really will.’

  He thought of Leeds as a place where it always rained but the weather today was perfect. Roundhay Park was full of people who were anxious to wring a good day out of the English climate. Hordes everywhere, didn’t anyone have a job to go to? He supposed he could ask himself the same question.

  He came across an unexpected picture of happiness. A dog, a small scruffy one, was racing around the park as if it had just been released from prison. It disturbed a flock of pigeons intent on an abandoned sandwich and the birds rose up in a flutter of annoyance when it yapped excitedly at them. It started off again, running at full tilt and skidding to a halt, a second too late, next to a woman lying on a rug. She yelled and threw a flip-flop at it. The dog caught the flip-flop mid-air, shook it as if it were a rat, and then dropped it and ran off towards a small girl who screamed as it jumped up, trying to lick the ice cream in her hand. When the child’s mother threatened it with blue murder the dog ran off and barked for a long time at something imaginary before finding a broken branch that it dragged round in circles until its attention was caught by the scent of something more interesting. It truffled around until it found the source – the dried turd of another dog. The dog sniffed it with the delight of a connoisseur before growing bored and trotting off towards a tree where it lifted its leg. ‘Bugger off,’ a man nearby shouted.

  It seemed as if the dog didn’t belong to anyone but then a man lumbered up, bearing down on the dog, barking orders at it, ‘YoufuckinglittleshityoucomewhenIcallyou!’ He was a big guy, with a mean expression on his face, barrel-chested like a Rottweiler. Add to that the shaved head, the weight-lifting muscles and a St George’s flag tattooed on his left bicep, twinned with a half-naked woman inked into his right forearm, and, voilà, the perfect English gentleman.

  The dog was wearing a collar but instead of a lead the man was carrying a rope, thin like a washing-line, with a noose at one end and without warning he grabbed the dog by the scruff and lassoed it. Then he hitched the dog up in the air so that it started to choke, its small legs paddling helplessly. Just as suddenly the dog was dropped to the ground and the man aimed a kick that connected with the dog’s delicate-looking haunch. The dog cringed and started to tremble in a way that made his heart go out to it. The man yanked on the rope leash and pulled the dog along, shouting, ‘Going to put you down, should have done it the minute that bitch left.’ Dogs and mad Englishmen out in the midday sun.

  A commotion was growing quickly, agitated people protesting loudly at the man’s behaviour, a jumble and hum of angry-sounding words – innocent creature – pick on someone your own size – watch it, mate. Mobile phones came out and people started to photograph the man. He took out his own iPhone. He had resisted the temptations of the Apple for a long time but now he had fallen. It was a lovely bit of kit. Until he was eight years old when his family bought a secondhand television that looked as if it was transmitting from Mars, they had only the radio for entertainment and information. In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush valve radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.

  He shot off a couple of pictures of the man hitting the dog. Photographic evidence, you never knew when you were going to need it.

  A woman’s voice rose shrilly above the others, ‘I’m calling the police,’ and the man snarled, ‘Mind your own fucking business,’ and he continued to drag the dog along the path. He was pulling it so fast that a couple of times it tumbled head over heels and scraped and bounced along the hard surface of the path.

  Cruel and unusual punishment, he thought. He had been around violence in one form or another all his life, not always on the receiving end of it, but you had to draw the line somewhere. A small, helpless dog seemed like a good place to draw that line.

  He followed the man out of the park. The man’s car was parked nearby and he opened the boot and plucked up the dog and flung it inside where it cowered, shivering and whimpering.

  ‘You just wait, you little bastard,’ the man said. He already had his mobile phone open, holding it to one ear as he raised a warning finger to the dog in case it made a move to escape. ‘Hey, babe, it’s Colin,’ he said, his voice turning oil
y, a cage-fighting Romeo.

  He frowned, imagining what would happen to the dog when the man got it home. Colin. It seemed unlikely it would be good. He stepped forward, tapped ‘Colin’ on the shoulder, said, ‘Excuse me?’ When Testosterone Man turned round, he said, ‘On guard.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Colin said and he said, ‘I’m being ironic,’ and delivered a vicious and satisfying uppercut to Colin’s diaphragm. Now that he was no longer subject to institutional rules governing brutality he felt free to hit people at will. He might have been around violence all his life but it was only recently that he was beginning to see the point of it. It used to be that his bark was worse than his bite, now it was the other way round.

  His philosophy where fighting was concerned was to keep clear of anything fancy. One good, well-placed blow was usually enough to lay a man down. The punch was driven by a flash of black anger. There were days when he knew who he was. He was his father’s son.

  Right enough, Colin’s legs went from beneath him and he dropped to the ground, making a face like a suffocating fish. Strange squeaking and squealing noises came from his lungs as he fought for breath.

  He squatted down next to Colin and said, ‘Do that to anyone or anything again – man, woman, child, dog, even a fucking tree – and you’re dead. And you’ll never know whether or not I’m watching you. Understand?’ The man nodded in acknowledgement even though he still hadn’t managed to take a breath, looked in fact like he might never take another one. Bullies were always cowards at heart. His phone had clattered to the pavement and he could hear a woman’s voice saying, ‘Colin? Col – are you still there?’

  He stood up and stepped on the phone and ground it into the pavement. Unnecessary and ridiculous but somehow satisfying.

  The dog was still cowering in the boot. He could hardly leave it there so he picked it up and was surprised to find that it was warm even though it was shivering all over as if it was frozen. He cradled it against his chest and stroked its head in an effort to reassure it that he wasn’t another big man about to beat it up.