Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘Hello,’ he said. Courtney stared blankly back at him. ‘My niece,’ Tracy said. ‘My sister’s much younger than me,’ she added, embarrassed suddenly by how old she must seem to Janek. Of course he had kids of his own, didn’t he? Poles probably really liked kids. Most foreigners liked kids more than the British did.

‘We’re on our way out,’ she said hastily before she got involved in anything more complicated about the kid’s origins.

‘Help yourself to biscuits,’ she added. What a difference a day made.

He woke up with no idea where he was or how he had got there. That was alcohol for you.

Jackson wasn’t alone. There was a woman lying next to him, her face pressed into the pillow, her features partly hidden by a messedup nest of hair. He never ceased to be amazed by how many round-heeled women there were in the world. In a sudden moment of paranoia he reached over and checked the woman’s breathing and was relieved to find it sour and regular. Her skin had the bruised and waxy look of a corpse but, on inspection, Jackson realized that it was just her make-up from the previous evening, smeared and blotchy. Close up, even in the street-lit gloom of the bedroom, he could see that she was older than he had first thought. Early forties, Jackson reckoned, maybe a little younger. Maybe a little older. She was that kind of woman.

A digital clock by the bed told him it was five thirty. In the morning, he assumed. Winter or summer it was the time he woke at, thanks to his body’s own internal alarm clock, set a long time ago by the army. Up with the lark. Jackson didn’t think that he’d ever seen a lark. Or heard one for that matter. Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music, / Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled . What kind of a woman came up with an image like that? Jackson felt pretty sure that Emily Dickinson didn’t wake up hungover, with a strange man in her bed.

Dawn was just cracking open the sky. It was good to get a march on the day. Time was a thief and Jackson felt he gained a small triumph by stealing back some of the early hours. He had a feeling it was Thursday but he wouldn’t have sworn to it.

The nameless woman lying next to him muttered something unintelligible in her sleep. She turned her head and opened her eyes, they had the same blank quality as the dead. When she saw Jackson her eyes came to life a little and she murmured, ‘Christ, I bet I look rough.’

She did look a bit of a dog’s breakfast but Jackson bit down on his unfortunate compulsion for honesty and, smiling, said, ‘Not really.’ Jackson didn’t often smile these days (had he ever?) and it tended to take women by surprise. The woman in the bed (surely she must have told him her name at some point?) squirmed with pleasure and giggled and said, ‘Gonna make me a cuppa tea then, lover boy?’

He said, ‘Go back to sleep. It’s still early.’ Strangely obedient, the woman closed her eyes and within minutes was snoring gently. Jackson suspected that he might be punching below his weight.

He had a memory – vague at first but growing unfortunately clearer now – of dropping into a bar in the town centre, intent on casting off his golden years. He seemed to recollect that he had been looking for a pastis , a warm billet in a cold city, but the place turned out to be some kind of cocktail joint containing a job lot of clapped-out men who were easily outnumbered by the hordes of brash women. A gang of them had descended on him, feverish with alcohol and eager to pick him off from the herd of homely suits. The women seemed to have started drinking some time last century.

They were celebrating the divorce of one of their pack. Jackson thought that divorce was possibly an occasion for a wake rather than a knees-up but what did he know, he had a particularly poor track record where marriage was concerned. It surprised him to discover that the women all seemed to be teachers or social workers. Nothing more frightening than a middle-class woman when she lets her hair down. Who were those Greek women who tore men to pieces? Julia would know.

Despite it being midweek, the women were all drinking shooters with ridiculous names – Flaming Lamborghini, Squashed Frog, Red-Headed Slut – and Jackson felt faintly disturbed by the sickly contents of their glasses. God only knew what kind of faces they would have on them when they turned up for work the next morning.

‘I’m Mandy,’ one of the women said brightly.

‘Go on, love – fly her,’ another one said, her throat filthy with years of smoking.

‘This is how it goes,’ Mandy said, ignoring her friend. ‘I say, “My name is Mandy,” and you say…?’

‘ Jackson,’ Jackson said, reluctantly.

‘What’s “ Jackson ”?’ one of them asked.’ A first name or a last name?’

‘Take your pick,’ Jackson said.

He liked to keep conversations simple. There wasn’t much you couldn’t convey with ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Do’ and ‘Don’t’, anything else was pretty much ornamental, although throwing in the occasional ‘please’ could get you a surprisingly long way and ‘thank you’ even further. His first wife had deplored his lack of small talk (‘Jesus, Jackson, would it kill you to have a meaningless conversation?’). This was the same wife who, at the beginning of their courtship, had admired him for being ‘the strong, silent type’.

Perhaps he should have found more words to give Josie. Then she might not have left him, and if she hadn’t left him he wouldn’t have taken up with Julia who drove him to distraction and then he certainly wouldn’t have met the false second wife, Tessa, who had fleeced him and robbed him blind. For want of a nail. ‘Good wife, bad wife,’ Julia said. ‘You know in your heart which one you really prefer, Jackson.’ Did he? Which? No one, not even Tessa, had ever messed with his mind the way Julia did. ‘The Black Widow,’ she said with relish. ‘You were lucky that she didn’t eat you.’

Women were often drawn to Jackson – to begin with, at any rate – but he didn’t set much store by looks any more, either his own or (it seemed) those of the opposite sex, having witnessed too often the havoc wrought by beauty without truth. Although there was a time when, no matter how drunk, he would not have been attracted to someone like the woman he had woken up to this morning. Or perhaps standards simply fell as you grew older. Of course, Jackson, as faithful as a dog at heart, had spent a lot of his adult life in monogamous relationships where these problems had been merely hypothetical.

He had not thought of himself as priapic. Since Tessa he had been in an ascetic, almost monkish place, appreciating the lack of necessity in his life. A Cistercian. And then suddenly all the untaken vows had been broken by a muster of the monstrous regiment.

‘What brings you to this neck of the woods?’ one of the more sober of the coven asked. (‘My name’s Abi, I’m the designated grown-up,’ a fact that seemed to make her bitter.)

Jackson wasn’t big on questions and if faced with a choice he would rather be asking than answering them. Teachers and social workers, he remembered. ‘I don’t suppose any of you know Linda Pallister, by any chance?’ he asked. A couple of the women howled like hyenas. ‘You wouldn’t catch Linda dead in a place like this. She’ll be recycling cats or worshipping trees somewhere.’

‘No, she’s not a pagan, she’s a Christian,’ someone said. This fact seemed to take them to a new level of hilarity.

‘What do you want her for anyway?’ the rather petulant Abi asked.

‘I had an appointment with her this afternoon but she was a no-show.’