Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  The Winfields seemed indeed to have gone out of their way to adopt a child who looked nothing like them. They had been tall, dark and elegant, Hope was a blonde, sturdy, old-fashioned-looking child who had turned into a blonde, sturdy, old-fashioned-looking woman, if her photographs were anything to go by. First known photograph of me! she had tagged a picture taken on the Winfields’ arrival in New Zealand. The newly formed family were at some kind of tourist attraction, and Hope – freckled podgy face and a spiky urchin cut – was grinning for the camera, the epitome of happiness. The camera can lie, Jackson reminded himself. All those abused kids who only got noticed when they died. The papers always ran a photograph of them, smiling happily. Some kids automatically turned it on for the camera. Smile!

  What had started off as an innocuous request (I wondered if you could find out some information about my biological parents?) had taken Jackson into a maze that had led to dead ends at every turn. Hope McMaster was an existential conundrum. She might exist in the antipodean here and now, wife to Dave, mother to little Aaron. She might be attending ante-natal classes in the invisible company of the squid (and Pilates – it’s a miracle!) but any previous incarnation of her seemed to be a figment of the imagination. Although just whose imagination, Jackson wasn’t sure.

  Pandora advanced towards the box, the curious cat looked to be in mortal danger. ‘Perhaps there’s a cat in the box,’ Julia mused, ‘like Schrödinger’s.’

  ‘Who?’ Jackson asked before he could prevent himself.

  ‘You know, Schrödinger’s cat. In the box. Both alive and dead at the same time.’

  ‘That’s a ridiculous idea.’

  ‘In practice maybe, but theoretically . . .’

  ‘Is this related to atoms by chance?’

  ‘Verschränkung,’ Julia said with relish. Luckily the arrival of a fresh pot of tea at that moment distracted her from these mysteries.

  After some mandatory adoption counselling in New Zealand, Hope McMaster had applied to Leeds Crown Court for her original birth certificate. Last week she received the news that there wasn’t one. Nor was there any record of her adoption ever having taken place.

  ‘See – kidnapped. Shall I be mother? Seeing as I am one and you’re not.’

  The phone was ringing when they came in the house. Tracy picked up the receiver and said, ‘Hello?’ but found only silence on the other end. There was someone there, she was sure, and she exchanged a mute dialogue with the caller, like a battle of wills. The caller gave up first and she heard the click of a receiver. ‘Good riddance,’ Tracy said. She had more important things on her agenda. Like a kidnapped kid.

  They hadn’t done any food shopping – not that Tracy had enough energy to cook – and she had picked up pizza on the way home. Play it safe, all kids liked pizza, it might not be the healthiest thing in the world but right now Tracy didn’t care, as long as Courtney didn’t throw it back up again. Plenty of time for green vegetables and fruit in the future. The future was suddenly a place that you might want to be, rather than a place where you were going to have to slog it out with tedium on a day-by-day basis. A really, really terrifying place that you might want to be.

  The cupboard was bare, not a bone for a dog, not a tin of beans for a kidnapped kid, just some blackening bananas sitting accusingly in a fruit bowl. Tracy hadn’t really cooked anything since Janek started on the kitchen, she’d been living off takeaways and microwaved ready meals (nothing new there, of course), but when she looked around now she realized that the kitchen was nearly finished, just decorating and the lino to go down, a few tweaks here and there. The bag with Janek’s tools sat neatly in a corner. She would have to go back to the bank and get more money for him. Only this morning the idea that he would soon be gone had been profoundly depressing to her, now it hardly seemed to matter at all. She had embarked on an unexpected and perilous adventure and it was possible that she would fall off the edge of the world.

  ‘Another slice?’ Tracy asked and Courtney looked at her blankly, her mouth hanging open. Would Tracy have to get the kid’s adenoids removed, did they even do that any more? She wasn’t a bonny kid but Tracy could relate to that. It took a few seconds for Tracy’s words to reach Courtney’s brain (probably be a good idea to get her a hearing test as well) and then she nodded her head, up and down, and kept on nodding until Tracy advised her to stop. Was she the full shilling? Backward – but you weren’t allowed to say that any more. What did it matter, a kid was a kid.

  Tracy was too wound up to eat. Only alcohol could address the state of mind she was in but she didn’t want the kid to see her drinking, she had probably been around drunks all her short life, so instead Tracy made a sober cup of Typhoo and watched Courtney eating, imagining private tutoring to bring her up to speed, a lot of visits to the ENT department, an eye test (she had a bit of a squint going on), a good haircut, followed by a thoughtful, child-centred school, perhaps one of those hippy-dippy ones – Linda Pallister might know about those. After that, who knows, kid might manage to get a place at the kind of university that was a polytechnic by another name, and Tracy would be there when she graduated in cap and gown, drinking cheap white wine afterwards with other proud parents.

  Part of Tracy’s brain was still on the beat in the Merrion Centre and hadn’t caught up with the bizarre turn the day’s events had taken. This lagging part of the brain seemed to suddenly sit up and take notice. What the hell is going on? it asked. You’re making long-term plans to live outside the law! Yes, Tracy said, to the recalcitrant bit of brain. That’s exactly what I’m doing. She was a kidnapper. She had napped a kid. She had never thought about where the word came from before.

  How was she going to explain the sudden appearance of a child in her life? It would be easier if they both vanished, started again somewhere else where nobody knew them (I’m Mrs Waterhouse, and this is my little girl, Courtney). Change Courtney’s name to something more middle-class – Emily or Lucy. Put down new roots in the country perhaps – the Dales or the Lakes – they could easily live on Tracy’s police pension. The kid could go to a little village primary and Tracy could get a few chickens, grow some veg, cook nourishing meals. She imagined herself at the annual village fête, doing facepainting, baking cupcakes (Oh,Tracy’s a wonderful mum, isn’t she? ). Of course, she had never baked a cupcake in her life but everyone started somewhere.

  Run for the hills. Or the Dales or the Lakes. Bloody good job she had that National Trust holiday cottage booked for Friday, couldn’t have timed it better even if she’d known ahead that her life was going to turn upside down. A breathing space. Time to think. Foxes in a hole, hiding from the hounds. Just in case someone came looking for them before they could make their final escape. Someone like Kelly Cross, changing her mind about the recent sale. Caveat emptor. What after that – stay or run? Fight or flight. Start a new life (Imogen Brown and her little girl, Lucy) or try and carry on with the old one (butch Tracy and the kidnapped kid) and risk discovery and its consequences?

  She would have to change her own name as well, she’d never liked Tracy. Imogen or Isobel, something feminine and romantic. She supposed she didn’t look like an Imogen. Imogens were middle-class Home Counties girls with long blonde hair and vaguely Bohemian mothers. Her surname would have to change too, something plain, unremarkable perhaps. Imogen Brown and her little girl, Lucy, walking hand in hand with the kid into a clean, untarnished, white future. She would make up for all the other lost kids. One fallen fledgling popped back into the nest.

  Was she too old to pass as a mother? IVF, followed by sudden, early widowhood would take care of a lot of questions. New names, new identities, it would be like being in witness protection. The one thing that was odd was that Courtney hadn’t mentioned her mother. No ‘Where’s Mummy?’ or ‘I want my mummy.’ No sign at all that she was missing someone. Was she a throwaway, or something precious that had been stolen?

  ‘Courtney,’ she said hesitantly, ‘where do you think Mummy is just now
?’ Courtney shrugged extravagantly and worked her way through another slice before volunteering, ‘I don’t have a mummy.’ (Really? This was very good news. For Tracy anyway.)

  ‘Well, you do now,’ Tracy said. The kid snapped her head up and stared at Tracy before glancing warily round the kitchen.

  ‘Where?’

  Tracy put her hand on her chest and said, rather heroically, ‘Here. I’m going to be your mummy.’

  ‘Are you?’ Courtney said, looking doubtful. As well she might, Tracy thought. Who was she kidding? (That word again.)

  ‘Last slice?’ Courtney gave her a thumbs-down, a small emperor in the Colosseum. She yawned. ‘Time for bed,’ Tracy said, trying to sound as if she knew what she was doing.

  She gave the napped kid a bath. A lot of grime but no bruises, no obvious sign of damage. Skinny little legs and arms, thin shoulder blades that were like wing nubs. A noticeable birthmark, tattooed by some tiny misreading of the genetic code on to the kid’s forearm. The birthmark was the shape of India, or was it Africa? Geography had never been Tracy’s strong point. Any distinguishing marks? A seal of ownership stamped on the skin for ever. A stigma. Maybe there was a way of removing it. Laser treatment perhaps.

  Courtney sat passively while Tracy soaped and rinsed her, untangled the scrawny plaits, carefully washed her hair and then wrapped her in a towel and lifted her out of the water. Tracy hadn’t appreciated just how small a kid really was. Small and vulnerable. And heavy. It was like being put in charge of a Ming vase, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Thank God Courtney wasn’t a tiny baby, Tracy didn’t think she would have been able to cope with the nerves.

  Tracy’s newly acquired house had last been refurbished some time in the early eighties – hardly the pinnacle of style in décor – and the bathroom suite was a sludgy avocado, the colour of Shrek. Tracy had watched all three Shrek DVDs on her own. If you had a kid you could watch cartoons, go to the pantomime, visit Disneyland, without feeling like a pathetic loser. Just the sight of the small, naked body sitting in her own snot-coloured bath had almost moved her to tears. She was surprised to find (let alone explain) such deep wells of primal, untapped emotions inside the calcified shell.

  ‘Just a sec, pet,’ she said, perching a towel-swaddled Courtney on the bathroom stool. She raked through the bathroom cabinet and found a pair of nail scissors. ‘Just tidy you up a bit,’ she said, taking a lock of the kid’s limp hair and snipping it off. Felt like a violation, but it was just hair, she told herself.

  She helped Courtney into the new Gap pyjamas and said, ‘Just pop into bed, pet,’ and felt her heart moved all over again when Courtney obediently scrambled into bed, lay on her back and pulled the covers up to her chin. Christ, you could get a little kid to do anything, you just told them and they did it. Horrifying.

  Tracy looked around with new eyes and realized that the small spare room with its mean little bed seemed hopelessly barren and inhospitable. There was a third bedroom but it was still full of cardboard boxes from her own move as well as all the junk from her parents’ house that Tracy hadn’t had the energy or the interest to look into – a jumble of embroidered tray-cloths, chipped plates and old photographs of unidentifiable relatives. Why unpack the stuff, she could just take the whole lot and dump it on the pavement outside an Oxfam shop.

  She should have done something about the bedrooms before she started on the downstairs. Tracy had been pleased when she decorated the living room, having toiled her way through The World of Interiors and House & Garden for weeks, but when it was finished and she looked around she realized it looked more like a public space in a corporate hotel than a comfortable nest. Her own bedroom had been decorated by the previous owner with a wallpaper patterned with big purple flowers that had a vaguely obscene look to them.

  The little spare room, papered in boring woodchip, seemed to have been used as a study. Flimsy plastic Venetian blinds hung at the window and the floor was covered in cheap beige contract carpeting. Tracy wished that she had thought ahead, bought cheerful curtains and a nice soft rug and painted the room in pleasant pastel colours. Or white. Pure and unsullied, the colour of swans and birthday cake icing. A woman with foresight would have anticipated kidnapping a kid.

  Hot milk? Or cocoa? Tracy was trying to invent a childhood she had never had herself, her own self-absorbed parents having expected Tracy to bring herself up somehow. They had never taken much interest in her and it was only when they died that she realized they never would. Better parents (loving parents) and she might have turned out differently – confident and popular, with the ability to charm the opposite sex into bed and into love so that now she would have a child of her own rather than a second-hand one.

  Hot chocolate, she decided, her own idea of a treat. When she came back with a mug for each of them she found Courtney sitting up in bed with the contents of her little pink backpack spread out on the thin Ikea duvet. It seemed she had a collection of totemic objects, their significance known only to their small owner:

  a tarnished silver thimble

  a Chinese coin with a hole in the middle

  a purse with a smiling monkey’s face on it

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

  a shell shaped like a cream horn

  a shell shaped like a coolie hat

  a whole nutmeg

  ‘Quite a treasure trove,’ Tracy said. The kid looked up from her wampum and stared inscrutably at her and then, for the first time since Tracy bought her, Courtney smiled. A beatific sunbeam of a smile. Tracy beamed back, a bubble-burst of mixed emotion – ecstasy and agony in equal, confusing measure inside her – rising in her chest. Jesus. How did parents manage with this kind of stuff on a daily basis? She found herself blinking back tears. ‘I haven’t got a bedtime book, I’m afraid,’ she said quickly.

  Tracy herself liked to read big fat Jackie Collins books. She would never have told anyone, they were like a secret vice, an unspeakable pleasure like pornography (or Disney). Hardly suitable for a kid so instead she made up a bespoke fairy tale about a poor little princess called Courtney who had a wicked mother and was rescued by a very good stepmother. She threw in a lot of mythic paraphernalia – spinning wheels and dwarves – and by the time the glass slipper was being tried for size on Princess Courtney’s little foot, the kid was asleep.

  Tracy kissed her tentatively on the cheek. The kid smelled of soap and new cotton. Tracy didn’t remember ever kissing a child before and a small, primitive part of her felt as if she had trespassed, broken some natural law. She half expected something momentous to happen – for the sky to crack open like an egg or an angel to appear – and when neither of these things occurred Tracy breathed a sigh of relief. She felt as if she’d achieved something, although she wasn’t sure what.

  When she came back downstairs the answer machine was blinking even though she hadn’t heard the phone ringing. She played the message back, worried that it might be announcing her downfall. Can you confirm that you are harbouring a child who belongs to someone else? Children were possessions, people didn’t like it when you stole their stuff. For years it had been her job to see that they didn’t. Sleep, eat, protect, repeat.

  She was relieved that it was only Linda Pallister, although why Linda should be getting in touch out of the blue was a puzzle. There was something spooky about the way Tracy had been thinking about contacting Linda and now Linda was contacting her. When had Linda Pallister ever phoned her at home? Never, as far as Tracy could remember. Her message was even more puzzling. Tracy? Tracy? I didn’t know who to call. I have to talk to you. I think I’m in . . . trouble. How could Linda Pallister be in trouble? And what was it to do with Tracy? There was a long silence and then Linda started up again, hardly more than a mumble. It’s about Carol Braithwaite. Do you remember Carol Braithwaite, Tracy? Someone’s been asking me about her. Phone me back when you get this message, will you? Please.

  Carol Braithwaite? Tracy
puzzled. After all these years? Linda Pallister was phoning her about Carol Braithwaite? Tracy had put Carol Braithwaite away in a box, put the box on a shelf at the back of a cupboard, shut the door of the cupboard and hadn’t opened it for more than thirty years. And now here was Linda Pallister wanting to talk about her. Linda Pallister, the whited sepulchre. Linda Pallister who had made a small child disappear into thin air. Poof.

  The past was the past, Tracy counselled herself, and the past was dead or lost but the present was alive and well and asleep in the back bedroom. On the other hand . . . if she returned Linda’s call she could casually slip something into the conversation, Kelly Cross, Linda, are all her kids in care, do you know? But when she dialled Linda’s number it rang out. Tracy was relieved, she had enough problems of her own without having to shoulder Linda Pallister’s burdens. But still . . . Carol Braithwaite. Tracy hadn’t gone there in a long time. That awful day. That poor little kid.

  She retrieved a can of Beck’s from the fridge. She popped the top and dialled her former colleague Barry Crawford’s number. He sounded tetchy but then that was his default mode.

  ‘Just wondered if you’d run into Kelly Cross recently, Barry?’

  ‘What, the original good-time girl? Nah, I’m too far up the food chain to come across a bottom-feeder like her. Why? Missing the streets, are you?’

  ‘No, no, it’s nothing. There’ve been no kids reported going astray, have there?’

  ‘Kids? I can ask about. I don’t know if you’re too ga-ga to remember but you retired a few months back.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’