Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘She’s in adoption counselling. Were you adopted?’ one of them said, reaching out and holding his hand. ‘Poor baby. Were you an orphan? Abandoned? Unwanted? Come to Mummy, pet.’ Another one said, ‘She’s ancient . You don’t want her. You want us .’

One of the women moved so close to him that he could feel the heat of her face next to his. She was drunk enough to think that she was being seductive when in a breathy voice she said to him, ‘Would you like a Slippery Nipple?’

‘Or a Blowjob?’ another woman shrieked.

‘They’re having you on,’ yet another one said, sidling close to him, ‘they’re the names of drinks.’

‘To you maybe,’ the first woman laughed.

‘Go on, love, give her a shag,’ someone else said. ‘She’s gagging for it, put her out of her misery.’

What had happened to women? Jackson wondered. They made him feel almost prudish. (Obviously not prudish enough to have resisted the dubious charms of one of them.) More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn’t just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.

‘You’re scowling,’ Abi said.

‘That’s just the way I look,’ Jackson said.

‘Don’t worry, we don’t bite.’

‘Not yet,’ one of them laughed.

Jackson smiled and the temperature around him went up a degree. The treasure here was clearly Jackson. The atmosphere in the bar was so charged that there was a very real danger that these wild women might simply explode with excitement.

Well, Jackson thought, what happens in Leeds stays in Leeds. Isn’t that what they said?

‘I’m not worried,’ he said. ‘But if you’re buying, ladies, I’ll have a Pernod.’

Time to get the hell out of Dodge. Jackson slipped quietly out of the bed and found his clothes where he must have shucked them on to the floor a few hours earlier. He moved with a certain delicacy. His head felt leaden, as if the weight of it was too much for the fragile stem of his neck. He crept along a narrow hallway and was thankful that he guessed correctly which door led to the bathroom. Treating the house as a recce in hostile territory seemed as sensible an approach as any. It was a better version of the house he had been brought up in, a fact which unnerved him, the way some dreams did.

The bathroom was warm and clean and had matching bath and pedestal mats in strawberry pink. The suite was also pink. Jackson couldn’t remember urinating into a pink toilet before. First time for everything. The bath tiles had flowers on them, the supermarket toiletries were lined up neatly at the end of the bath. Jackson wondered about the woman who lived here and why she would sleep with a complete stranger. He could ask himself the same question, of course, but it seemed less relevant. Two toothbrushes stood in a mug on a shelf above the sink. Jackson considered what that meant.

He washed his hands (he was house-trained, by a line of women that stretched back to the Stone Age) and caught sight of himself in the mirror. He looked about as debauched as he felt. He had fallen. Like Lucifer.

He was desperate for a shower but more desperate to get out of this claustrophobic house. He went downstairs, keeping to the edge of the steep, carpeted staircase where the boards wouldn’t creak so much. The woman lived with someone who had left a bike parked in the hallway. Probably the same person had carelessly tossed a pair of muddy football boots down by the front door. A skateboard was propped up against the wall. The sight of the skateboard (where was the owner?) made Jackson feel depressed.

Somehow he would have preferred it if the second toothbrush had belonged to a partner or a lover rather than a teenage son. He felt suddenly unexpectedly grateful that his first wife had remarried, not because she was (apparently) happy, he didn’t give a toss for her happiness, but because it meant that she wasn’t picking up strange men (like himself) for the night. Strange men who were free to prowl around the house where his daughter was in the throes of an intense and brooding adolescence.

Jackson didn’t breathe until he had shut the front door behind him and stepped out into the misty early morning air. The day looked as though it could go either way and he wasn’t just thinking about the weather.

He set his internal compass to ‘Town Centre’ and jogged back into town at a more sedate pace than normal, hoping to outdistance a heroic hangover. Jackson had recently taken up running again. With any luck, if his knees held up, he planned to keep on running right through his golden years and into his diamond ones.

(‘Why?’ Julia asked. ‘Why running?’

‘Stops the thinking,’ he said cheerfully.

‘That’s a good thing?’

‘Definitely.’)

As a bonus, on his tour of England and Wales he had discovered that running was a good way of seeing a place. You could go from town to countryside before breakfast and move from urban decay to bourgeois suburb without breaking stride. A great way to evaluate the real estate on offer. And no one took any notice of you, you were just the madman out at dawn trying to prove he was still young.

Jackson finally reached the Best Western, where he had fully intended to spend the night rather than in the arms of a stranger. It was a long time since Jackson had had a one-night stand. ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ Hopefully not.

He took the lift up to his floor and thought he might make up some of the sleep he had lost. His appointment with Linda Pallister was at ten o’clock, a stone’s throw from the hotel. Plenty of time for forty winks, a shower and a shave and some breakfast, he thought as he entered the room. A decent cup of coffee. Even an indecent cup would do at this juncture.

He had completely forgotten about the dog.

It was waiting anxiously on the other side of the door as if it was unsure who was going to come through it. When it saw that it wasn’t the erstwhile Colin it went wild with tail-wagging. Jackson dropped to a crouch and indulged its happiness for a minute. He felt bad about leaving the dog locked in solitary all night. If he had taken the dog with him last night perhaps it could have monitored his antics, guarded his morals – a friendly paw on the shoulder at some point, advice to think twice, Go home, Jackson. Don’t do it. Just say no .

He looked around the hotel room to check if any little brown gifts had been deposited and when he found nothing said, ‘Good dog,’ and, although it was possibly the last thing in the world that he wanted to do at that moment, he fetched the lead and said, ‘Come on then,’ and unzipped the rucksack for the dog.

She had done nothing to help that poor mite. Suffer the little children. She thought of the little girl who had been singing her song of innocence, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, in the Merrion Centre and her horrible bully of a mother. Courtney. Shut the fuck up will you, Courtney . What was wrong with people that they could behave like that? An echo of Father, Children should be seen and not heard, Matilda . He thought they should be neither heard nor seen. There had been another child, a brother, already dead when Tilly was born, his shadow walking ahead of her all of her childhood. All those graveyards in the past, full of little children, their headstones like small broken teeth. Modern medicine would have saved most of them, would have saved her brother. It would take more than medicine to save the little Courtneys of this world though.

Funny how she could remember the name of a child she didn’t know and had trouble recalling what simple everyday objects were called. Kettle. This morning it had taken her ten minutes to dredge up the word ‘kettle’. ‘The thing for boiling water,’ she said helplessly to Saskia. ‘Billabong. Billy. Billy boiled. You know.’