Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

Barry Crawford was born a miserable old git but they rubbed along. Tracy remembered when Amy was born, remembered wetting the baby’s head in a pub full of coppers. Barry a DC by then, Tracy still in uniform. (Of course.) Not long after the Ripper was caught.

‘Women are safe again,’ an inspector said to her over the congratulatory beers and Tracy was so drunk that she had laughed in his face. As if taking one mad, bad bloke off the streets made women safe.

‘To my new daughter,’ Barry said, raising his glass of double malt high to the room in general. Must have been about his sixth that night. ‘Better luck next time,’ some joker at the back of the room said.

When Amy’s own baby, Sam, was born, Amy’s husband, Ivan, was in the delivery room with her, sweating out every minute of the labour. ‘Times have changed,’ Barry said sardonically to Tracy. ‘Now you have to be supportive . Men have to be like women these days, God help us.’

‘Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry,’ Tracy said.

‘Eh?’

‘Gloria Steinem. Early feminist.’

‘Heck, Tracy.’

‘Quote of the day on my quote-a-day calendar. Just saying.’

Barry sighed and raised his glass. ‘To my grandson. Sam.’ They were in a pub in Bingley. Birthplace of the Ripper. They should put up a plaque. Ancient history now. There were just the two of them toasting the baby this time, dinosaurs left over from prehistoric times. ‘If you don’t evolve you get left behind,’ Barry said.

‘If you don’t evolve you die,’ Tracy said.

Amy wasn’t christened when she was a baby. ‘We’re not really religious,’ Barry said. They had her christened after the accident though, while she lay on life support. ‘Just in case,’ Barry said. Clutching at straws. Amy came off life support, Sam didn’t. Ivan himself was on another ward, strung up in traction like a fly in a web. Barry and Barbara only went to visit him once, when they had to talk to him about turning off all those nice shiny machines and consigning Sam to eternity.

‘You can’t understand,’ Barbara Crawford had said when Tracy had offered her condolences at the crematorium. ‘You don’t have children, grandchildren. If only it could have been me instead.’

Tracy wondered if her own parents would have been willing to sacrifice themselves to save her. Her mother had lingered on after Tracy ’s father died and in her final days gave the impression that she wasn’t going unless she could take Tracy down with her. Her mother had the DNA of a scorpion, built to outlast a nuclear winter. The cancer got her in the end though. Nobody lasted for ever, not even Dorothy Waterhouse. The diamonds and the cockroaches were free to inherit the earth now she was gone.

Barbara Crawford was right, of course. Tracy had never experienced that feeling. Overwhelming, gut-wrenching, lay-downyour-life kind of love. Except perhaps for that one time before with Carol Braithwaite’s kid in that hellish flat in Lovell Park. And now – with this scrap of a human being sitting in a supermarket trolley. Tracy wasn’t even sure that love was the right word for this feeling, but whatever it was it made you want to weep, whether your kids were alive or dead.

Barbara and Barry’s daughter, Amy, was neither alive nor dead but floating somewhere in between. In a ‘facility’. Tracy wondered how often Barbara visited Amy. Every day? Every week? Did it become less and less frequent as time went on?

Tracy had been to see her once. Could only think of Disney – Snow White, Sleeping Beauty. Seemed a rubbish frame of reference. Tracy wanted to end it for her, do Barry and Barbara the favour they couldn’t do for themselves. Tracy never went back for a second visit. She could still see Amy, dancing with her father on her wedding day, the huge skirt of her white dress crushed against his dark suit, the comedy flower in his buttonhole. Now Amy was suspended for ever, a sleeping fairytale princess without an ending, happy or otherwise. What had Barry said? And then you die and there’s nothing else. Of course it turns out you don’t even need to be dead for that .

Sam was dead though. Torn up in a car crash, the car driven by his own father, Ivan. Nearly three times over the limit, ‘driving like a maniac’, according to a witness. He’d turned out to be Ivan the Terrible, after all. Why had Amy got in the car with him, with a child? No saying, now, too late. Ivan was given a short custodial sentence, judge considered that he had ‘already paid a heavy price for a day he would regret for the rest of his life’. ‘Bollocks,’ Barry said.

Tracy could hardly bear the sight of Barry Crawford walking up the aisle of the church, staggering under the weight of the small white coffin. ‘Heavy,’ he said afterwards to Tracy, ‘for such a little thing inside.’ Red eyes washed with whisky. Poor bugger. Same aisle that he had taken his daughter up a year before. Ivan would be getting out some time soon. Tracy wondered if Barry would kill him as he stepped into the free daylight. Sometimes Tracy wondered about doing it for him, something covert. She was pretty sure she could pull off the perfect murder if she had to. Everyone had a killer inside them just waiting to get out, some more patient than others.

‘How am I?’ Barbara Crawford said as if it was a question that needed serious consideration rather than a polite greeting. ‘Oh, you know,’ she said vaguely, picking up a can of peas and scrutinizing it as if an alien had just handed it to her and told her, This is what we eat on our planet . She was drugged up to the eyeballs, of course. Well, why wouldn’t you be? She didn’t even remark on Courtney’s presence in the shopping trolley, didn’t even seem to notice her. Tracy had been all ready with some patter – Foster kid, thought I’d do something useful now that I’m in an easier job – but it wasn’t called for.

Barbara put the can back on the shelf and wafted her hand in the air as if she was trying to say something but couldn’t think of the words. ‘Well,’ Tracy said, breaking away, ‘good to see you, Barbara. Give my best to Barry.’ She didn’t say, I talked to Barry on the phone last night. He was with a dead woman . He had said to Tracy once that he preferred them dead, they couldn’t talk back. ‘Joking, Tracy,’ he said. ‘Jesus, what’s wrong with women? Don’t you have a sense of humour?’

‘Apparently not,’ Tracy said.

‘Well, anyway,’ she said to Barbara, ‘must be getting along.’

‘Yes,’ Barbara murmured. Her gaze suddenly fixed on Courtney and she recoiled slightly.

‘Babysitting,’ Tracy said, doing a three-point turn with the shopping trolley and accelerating down the dairy aisle, plucking cartons of milk and yoghurts as if cows were about to go out of fashion.

The kid, meanwhile, was quietly demolishing a packet of Jaffa cakes that she had managed to filch from somewhere. ‘Shoplifting’s a crime,’ Tracy said. Courtney offered her the packet. Tracy took two Jaffa cakes and crammed them in her mouth.

‘Thanks,’ she mumbled.

‘You’re welcome,’ Courtney said. Tracy ’s heart plummeted. Where had the kid learned manners? It hardly seemed likely that it was from Kelly Cross.

‘What would you like to do now?’ she asked Courtney. She looked like a kid who never got to make a choice, Tracy thought she’d give her one. Give the kid a choice. Give the kid a chance. Give them all a chance.

1975: 21 March

Eight o’clock in the evening. Kitty was cold and had gone upstairs to fetch a cardigan. It was draughty, the wind was trying to get in the house through any gap it could. The wind has such a rainy sound / Moaning through the town . Who wrote that? Kitty had never been one for literature. She had been the ‘muse’ of a writer for a while. You hardly heard his name any more. He was quite famous at the time, although possibly more famous for his lifestyle than his works. He was unfaithful and drank from breakfast to bedtime. Boozing and whoring, he said, the Rights of Man. She had been one of his trophies, ‘muse’ a fancy word for mistress. He lived in Chelsea but had a wife and three small children tucked away in the country somewhere.