Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

The offal and sewage smell of death was everywhere. Even Tracy’s tough police ticker missed a beat. Kelly Cross was sprawled on the bed, her head mashed in, her belly slashed open. She looked as if she was in her work uniform, a tiny black skirt and a silver-sequinned halter top. Some of the sequins were scattered on the bed, glinting like fish scales in the harsh overhead light.

Tracy put two fingers against Kelly Cross’s neck. No pulse. She didn’t know why she was checking, as it was glaringly obvious that Kelly was dead. She was still warm. Tracy preferred her dead bodies to be cold.

Kelly Cross was dead. Tracy had got what she had wished for. It suggested a dark magic at work if Tracy’s thoughts could be translated so fast. Tracy didn’t believe in magic. She believed in darkness though.

She had seen worse in the past, although that didn’t make the foul tableau in front of her eyes any less repugnant. No time to be shocked, however. Think like the police or think like a criminal? Tracy wondered. Turned out, as she had previously expected, that it was pretty much the same, but in reverse. She rooted in her bag for a tissue and wiped all the door handles and jambs. Shame she hadn’t got round to buying the Wet Wipes yet. She had probably left trace evidence behind, a hair, a flake of skin, a scale of fish. A trace of Tracy.

Had the kid touched anything? Courtney was still waiting dutifully in the kitchen. Did she suspect anything? Her expression was, as usual, unreadable.

‘Come on, pet,’ Tracy said, her voice cracking with the effort of sounding inanely cheerful. ‘Time to go home.’

The kid dipped the wand, a magisterial blessing on the house of the dead. She slipped off the chair and Tracy shepherded her out of the house. ‘Let’s get back in the car, Courtney.’

‘It’s Lucy,’ the kid reminded her.

Courtney was asleep by the time Tracy pulled up in the lane at the back of her house. No tarmac, just a cinder-type covering, felt almost rural. It led to a row of rented lock-ups that served as handy garages for some of the car owners in the street. Tracy yanked open the door on her own lock-up and reversed into the empty space like a precision driver, killed the engine, rested her forehead on the steering wheel. She thought she might throw up.

Courtney woke with a start and said, ‘What happened?’

‘You fell asleep,’ Tracy said. ‘Nothing happened while you were asleep. We moved on a little in space and time, that’s all. We’re home. Have another apple.’ Bananas were all gone now.

The kid gave the eating of the apple a lot of attention, as if she was studying to become a professional apple eater. The thought of ingesting anything made Tracy feel queasy. She couldn’t wait to step in the shower and scrub off the smell of death that had followed her from Harehills and lingered like a foul aura.

‘Come on then.’ She sighed and opened the car door.

Courtney went to bed still wearing the pink fairy costume, refused to take it off. Tracy didn’t care, she hadn’t been in a maternal role long enough to have acquired any rules.

The kid’s treasure was laid out on the bed and she began to pack it away. When she got to the fortune cookie she stared at it for a while as if it was going to crack open on its own.

‘You have to break it,’ Tracy said. The kid stared at her. ‘Trust me,’ Tracy said. The kid smashed it with her fist.

‘Yeah, that’ll do it,’ Tracy said.

The kid removed the slip of paper from the debris of crumbs and handed it silently to Tracy to read.

‘ The treasure here is you ,’ Tracy read out loud.

The kid reached over and patted Tracy’s hand. ‘And you,’ she said, sympathetic to Tracy’s exclusion from good fortune.

‘I don’t think so somehow,’ Tracy said.

‘You have it,’ Courtney said and Tracy tucked the slip of paper in her bra, a good luck charm. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she said and went downstairs. She came back with Dorothy Waterhouse’s engagement ring which she’d shoved to the back of the dresser drawer. ‘Real treasure,’ she said, adding it to the contents of the backpack.

‘Yes,’ Courtney said. ‘Real treasure.’

Princess Courtney went on another adventure, a rather dauntless one involving wolves and axes and porridge-eating bears. ‘I don’t like wolves,’ Courtney said.

‘Me neither,’ Tracy said. ‘But we’re all right, they’ve been banned from Leeds.’ If only.

Once Courtney was asleep, Tracy rummaged suitcases out of the hall cupboard, hauled them into her bedroom and stuffed them with Courtney’s new Gap wardrobe and anything of her own that came to hand. Added another bag of toys. Took the supermarket bags out of the boot of the Audi and replaced them with the suitcases, put the supermarket bags in the back of the car. She’d sort them out when she got there. Everything probably inedible by now. ‘There,’ she said to herself. ‘All ready for the off, first thing.’ She sounded deranged. She sounded like her mother getting ready for the annual holiday in Bridlington.

Tracy checked on Courtney. The kid was fast asleep, snoring gently. A piglet, a kitten.

There was no Beck’s left – how did that happen? So Tracy made do with half a bottle of Chardonnay she found in the fridge, left over from who knew when. The wine looked like urine and didn’t taste much better. She could feel it roiling like acid in her stomach. Found half a packet of crisps hiding at the back of the cupboard and munched her way through them without tasting them.

When she turned on the TV the end credits for Collier were just scrolling.

Dropped off in front of the telly. She had been watching Britain’s Got Talent and then she must have fallen asleep because the next thing Tilly knew she’d woken herself up with her own snoring. Pnorr, pnorrr, pnorrrgh! She jerked awake, felt her heart trip. These little evening snoozes were going to be the death of her.

She was confused. What was on the box now seemed real, not television at all. There was Saskia aiming a gun at someone and shouting, ‘Drop it or I’ll shoot!’ but she could hear Saskia moving about upstairs in the bathroom, the sound of running water. She was forever saying how dirty the cottage was and did Tilly actually know how to clean. ‘Filth everywhere,’ she said. For some reason Tilly imagined filth as a person, a man in an old-fashioned brown mackintosh, greasy and stained – a trilby shading his face. He lurked around a corner, waiting to jump out and flash her. Tilly had encountered a few like that in Soho in the old days, hanging round the back of the mucky bookshops and the strip joints. She had been propositioned a couple of times too. Tilly hadn’t been tempted, even when she was hungry for a crust. She knew for a fact that Phoebe, Dame Phoebe, had gone off for a weekend on a yacht with some rich nabob. The man looked like a frog. She came back with diamonds. Draw your own conclusions.

Yesterday Saskia had silently presented Tilly with a mat of soapy hair from the bath plughole. Enough to make a wig from. She was holding the hair on a piece of loo roll as if it was a dangerous spider about to attack her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘maybe you could, um, clear up after yourself?’

It was just a bit of hair, for heaven’s sake. People were funny about things like that. Phoebe couldn’t abide toenails, her own or other people’s. That woman went for a pedicure every single month, never cut her own toenails, not once! ‘Nanny used to do it for me,’ she said, when they were first living in Soho.

Tilly took the hair reluctantly from Saskia. ‘Oh dear, I appear to be moulting,’ she said, trying to muster some dignity.