Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog

And after all this time buried in the country she had fancied being in a city. But perhaps not this one. Guildford or Henley perhaps, somewhere civilized.

They had her holed up in the middle of nowhere for the duration of her filming. Guest appearance on Collier , twelve-month contract, her character killed off at the end of it, not that she knew that when she took it on. Oh, darling, you must , all her theatre friends said. It’ll be amusing – and think of the money! You bet she was thinking of the money! She was more or less living hand-to-mouth these days. Nothing in the theatre for three years now. Scripts were tricky, the old memory not what it was. She had awful trouble learning her lines. Never used to have a problem, started off in rep when she was eighteen. The ingénue. (Rote learning at school, of course, out of fashion now.) Different play every week, knew all her lines and everyone else’s as well. She had once, long ago, just to prove she could, learned the whole of The Three Sisters by heart, and she was only playing Natasha!

‘Senile old bat,’ she heard someone say yesterday. It was true everything was dimming. The lights are going out all over Europe. Suffer the little children . Should she find a policeman? Or phone 999? It seemed an awfully dramatic thing to do.

The last thing she’d done for the telly was a Casualty where she’d played an old dear who had manned an ack-ack gun in the war and who’d died of hypothermia in a high-rise flat, which led to a lot of hand-wringing from the characters ( How can this happen in this day and age? This woman defended her country in the war . Et cetera). Of course she wasn’t really old enough to play the role. She was still a child during the war, could only remember certain awful things about it, Mother harrying her into the shelter in the middle of the night, the smell of damp earth inside. Hull took a terrible beating.

Flat-footed Father was given a desk job in the Army Catering Corps. Not much fish to sell during the war anyway, trawlers requisitioned by the navy. The ones that kept on fishing were blown out of the water, fishermen’s bodies coiling down into the cold, icy depths. Those are pearls that were his eyes . She had played Miranda at school. Have you thought about the stage, Matilda? Her headmistress didn’t think she was much good for anything else. Not exactly academically inclined, are you, Matilda?

Tilly wished she had been old enough to fight in the war, to be a bold girl on an ack-ack gun.

The producers of Collier had seduced her in the Club at the Ivy over a cocktail called the Twinkle, rather disturbing nomenclature for Tilly as that was the name her prudish mother assigned to female genitalia. Tilly had always rather liked the word ‘vagina’, it sounded like a swotty girl or a new found land.

When she had first spotted her, the little girl was skipping along, singing, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. The anthem of children everywhere. Made Tilly think of her mother again. The little girl made fists of her hands (so tiny!) and every time she sang the word ‘twinkle’ she opened them out, like little starfish. The girl was in tune, perfect pitch, someone should have told her mother that the little thing had a gift. Someone should have said something.

When Tilly saw them again, ten minutes later, the poor child was no longer singing. The mother – a brutal woman with crude tattoos and a mobile phone clamped to her ear – was yelling at her, ‘Would you just shut the fuck up, Courtney, you’re getting on my tits!’ She was furious, pulling her along and shouting at her. You knew what happened to children like that when they got home. Behind closed doors. Child cruelty. Snipping off all the little buds so that they could never blossom.

A little black thing among the snow . That was Blake, wasn’t it? Not that the ‘Twinkle,Twinkle’ little girl was black. Quite the opposite, as if she never saw the sun. Crying ‘weep! weep!’ in notes of woe . It was surprising more children didn’t have rickets. Perhaps they did. Tilly’s grandmother had had rickets, there was a photograph of her as a child, the only photograph of her, taken in a studio in some bleak, flat part of the East Riding. I by the tide of Humber would complain . Her grandmother, three years old if she was a day, had little bowed legs in boots, your heart wept for the past. You can’t change the past, only the future, and the only place you could change the future was in the present. That’s what they said. Tilly didn’t think she’d ever changed anything. Except her mind. Ha, ha. Very droll, Matilda .

Collier had turned out not to be so ‘amusing’, after all. Certainly nothing amusing about hanging around on set (basically, a big aircraft hangar in the middle of nowhere) at six thirty in the morning, freezing your cockles off. The set had been built in the grounds of a stately home belonging to Earl or Duke somebody-or-other. Bizarre, but then the aristocracy were always looking for money these days. ‘Purpose-built set,’ the producers said to her. ‘Cost millions, shows a commitment to longevity.’ Collier used to be on once a week, now it was three times and they were talking about four. Actors like donkeys, turning a wheel.

They’d brought Tilly in to play Vince Collier’s mother because they wanted to make the character ‘more human’, more vulnerable. Tilly had worked before with the actor who played Vince Collier, when he was a teenager, and she kept calling him by his real name – Simon – instead of Vince. Seven takes today just to say goodbye to him on a doorstep. Goodbye, Simon six times, the seventh take she just said Goodbye, dear . ‘Thank fuck,’ she heard the director say (a little too loudly). The name (‘Vince, Vince ,’ the director muttered, ‘how hard can it be?’) just kept eluding her. It was in her brain but she couldn’t find it.

Nice boy, Simon. Ran her lines with her all the time, told her not to worry. Gay as a goose. Everyone knew, worst-kept secret in television. You couldn’t say anything because Vince Collier was supposed to be very macho. Simon’s boyfriend, Marcello, was staying with him, rented cottage, nicer than Tilly’s. They’d had Tilly over to dinner, lots of gin and Marcello had cooked a chicken, ‘Sicilian style’. Afterwards they drank some lovely rum that the boys had brought back from holiday on Mauritius and played cribbage. All three of them gloriously tiddly. (She wasn’t a lush like Dame you-know-who.) Lovely old-fashioned evening.

She thought she’d signed up for the duration (‘My pension,’ she murmured happily over her third Twinkle) and then last week they told her that her contract wasn’t being renewed and she was going to die at the end of her run. She had only a few weeks to go. They hadn’t told her how. It was beginning to worry her in some curiously existential way as if Death was going to jump out at her from round a corner, swinging his sickle and shouting, ‘Boo!’ Well, perhaps not boo. She hoped that Death had a little more gravitas than that.

Tilly herself was beginning to feel a lack of commitment to longevity. Some days the old ticker felt like a hard little knot in her chest, other days it was like a soft, fluttering bird trying to escape from its ribbed cage. She suspected that her alter ego, poor old Marjorie Collier, was going to meet a sticky end rather than expire gracefully in her bed. And then! Just as she was coming out of Rayners’ she encountered Death, exactly as she’d feared. Thought she was going to drop dead on the spot but it was just some silly boy in a skull mask. Sneering at her, jumping up and down like a skeleton on strings. Shouldn’t be allowed.