Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog

‘Ey up,’ Grant said. ‘ Tracy ’s going into Thornton ’s. Must need her daily rations topping up.’

Leslie liked Tracy, you knew where you were with her. No bullshit.

‘She’s a right fat pig,’ Grant said.

‘She’s not fat, just big.’

‘Yeah, that’s what they all say.’

Leslie was small and delicate. A cracking bird if ever there was one, in Grant’s opinion. Special. Not like some of the slags you got round here. ‘Sure you don’t want to go for a drink after work?’ he asked, ever hopeful. ‘Cocktail bar in town. Sophisticated place for a sophisticated laydee.’

‘Ey up,’ Leslie said. ‘There’s some dodgy kids going into City Cyber.’

Tracy Waterhouse came out of Thornton ’s, stuffing her forage into the big, ugly shoulder bag that she wore strapped, like a bandolier, across her substantial chest. Viennese truffles, her midweek treat. Pathetic really. Other people went to the cinema on an evening, to restaurants, pubs and clubs, visited friends, had sex, but Tracy was looking forward to curling up on her sofa with Britain’s Got Talent and a bag of Thornton ’s Viennese truffles. And a chicken bhuna that she was going to pick up on the way home and wash down with one or two cans of Beck’s. Or three or four, even though it was a Wednesday. A school night. More than forty years since Tracy left school. When had she last eaten a meal with someone in a restaurant? That bloke from the dating agency, a couple of years ago, in Dino’s in Bishopsgate? She could remember what she’d eaten – garlic bread, spaghetti and meatballs, followed by a crème caramel – yet she couldn’t recall the bloke’s name. ‘You’re a big girl,’ he said when she met him for a drink beforehand in Whitelock’s.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Want to make something of it?’ Downhill from there on really.

She ducked into Superdrug to pick up some Advil for the Beck’s headache she would wake up with tomorrow. The girl behind the till didn’t even look at her. Service with a scowl. Very easy to steal from Superdrug, lots of handy little things to slip into a bag or a pocket – lipsticks, toothpaste, shampoo, Tampax – you could hardly blame people for thieving, it was as if you were inviting them. Tracy glanced around at the security cameras. She knew there was a blind spot right on Nailcare. You could have taken everything you needed for a year’s worth of manicures and no one would be any the wiser. She placed a protective hand on her bag. It contained two envelopes stuffed with twenties – five thousand pounds in all – that she’d just removed from her account at the Yorkshire Bank. She would like to see someone trying to snatch it from her – she was looking forward to beating them to a pulp with her bare hands. No point in having weight, Tracy reasoned, if you weren’t prepared to throw it around.

The money was a payment for Janek, the workman who was extending the kitchen in the terraced house in Headingley that she’d bought with the proceeds of the sale of her parents’ bungalow in Bramley. It was such a relief that they were finally dead, dying within a few weeks of each other, minds and bodies long past their sell-by date. They had both reached ninety and Tracy had begun to think that they were trying to outlive her. They had always been competitive people.

Janek started at eight in the morning, finished at six, worked on a Saturday – Polish, what else. It was embarrassing how much Tracy was attracted to Janek, despite the fact that he was twenty years younger and at least three inches shorter than she was. He was so careful and had such good manners. Every morning Tracy left out tea and coffee for him and a plate of biscuits wrapped in cling-film. When she returned home the biscuits were all eaten. It made her feel wanted. She was starting a week’s holiday on Friday and Janek promised everything would be finished by the time she returned. Tracy didn’t want it to be finished, well, she did, she was sick to death of it, but she didn’t want him to be finished.

She wondered if he would stay on if she asked him to do her bathroom. He was champing at the bit to go home. All the Poles were going back now. They didn’t want to stay in a bankrupt country. Before the Berlin Wall came down you felt sorry for them, now you envied them.

When Tracy was on the force her fellow officers – male and female – all assumed she was a dyke. She was over fifty now and way back when she had joined the West Yorkshire Police as a raw cadet you had to be one of the boys to get along. Unfortunately, once you’d established yourself as a hard-nosed bitch it was difficult to admit to the soft and fluffy woman you were hiding inside. And why would you want to admit to that anyway?

Tracy had retired with a shell so thick that there was hardly any room left inside. Vice, sexual offences, human trafficking – the underbelly of Drugs and Major Crime – she’d seen it all and more. Witnessing the worst of human behaviour was a pretty good way of killing off anything soft and fluffy.

She’d been around so long that she had been a humble foot soldier when Peter Sutcliffe was still patrolling the streets of West Yorkshire. She remembered the fear, she’d been afraid herself. That was in the days before computers, when the sheer weight of paperwork was enough to swamp the investigation. ‘There were days before computers?’ one of her younger, cheekier colleagues said. ‘Wow, Jurassic.’

He was right, she was from another era. She should have gone sooner, only hanging on because she couldn’t think how to fill the long empty days of retirement. Sleep, eat, protect, repeat, that was the life she knew. Everyone was fixated on the thirty years, get out, get another job, enjoy the pension. Anyone who stayed on longer was seen as a fool.

Tracy would have preferred to have dropped in harness but she knew it was time to go. She had been a detective superintendent, now she was a ‘police pensioner’. Sounded Dickensian, as if she should be sitting in the corner of a workhouse, wrapped in a dirty shawl. She’d thought about volunteering with one of those organizations that helped mop up after disasters and wars. After all, it was something she felt she’d been doing all her life, but in the end she took the job in the Merrion Centre.

At her farewell piss-up they had given her a laptop and two hundred quid’s worth of spa vouchers for the Waterfall Spa on Brewery Wharf. She was pleasantly surprised, even flattered, that they imagined she was the kind of woman who would use a spa. She already had a laptop and she knew the one they gave her was one of those that Carphone Warehouse gave away for free, but it was the thought that counted.

When she took the job as head of security in the Merrion Centre Tracy thought ‘fresh start’ and made some changes, not just moving house but getting her moustache waxed, growing her hair into a softer style, shopping for blouses with bows and pearl buttons and shoes with kitten heels to wear with the ubiquitous black suit. It didn’t work, of course. She could tell that, spa vouchers or no spa vouchers, people still thought she was a butch old battleaxe.

Tracy liked getting up close and personal with the punters. She strolled past Morrisons, the gap where Woolworths used to be, Poundstretcher – the retail preferences of the lumpenproletariat. Was there anyone in the entire soulless place who was happy? Leslie perhaps, although she kept her cards close to her chest. Like Janek, she had a life somewhere else. Tracy imagined Canada was a good place to live. Or Poland. Perhaps she should emigrate.

It was warm today. Tracy hoped the weather would last for her holiday. A week in a National Trust cottage, lovely setting. She was a member. That was what happened when you grew older and had nothing fulfilling in your life – you joined the National Trust or English Heritage and spent your weekends meandering around gardens and houses that didn’t belong to you or gazing in boredom at ruins, trying to reconstruct them in your mind – long-gone monks cooking, pissing, praying inside walls of cold stone. And you spent your holidays on your own, of course. She’d joined a ‘singles social club’ a couple of years ago. Middle-aged, middle-class people who didn’t have any friends. Rambling, art classes, museum visits, all very sedate. She joined thinking it might be nice to go on holiday with other people but it hadn’t worked out. Spent all her time trying to get away from them.