Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

He spent some time drilling his new recruit on the beach – sit , stay , heel , come . The dog was pretty good. At sit its haunches dropped as if its back legs had been taken from beneath it. When Jackson said stay and walked away the dog might as well have been glued to the sand, its whole body quivering with the effort of not hurtling after Jackson. And when Jackson found a stick of driftwood and held it above the dog’s head, the dog not only stood on its hind legs but even walked a few steps. What next? Talking?

An elderly man in the company of an equally elderly Labrador ambled by. The man tipped his cap in Jackson’s direction and said, ‘Th’should be in circus, lad.’ Jackson wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the dog or himself. Or both. Jackson and the Amazing Talking Dog.

The dog and Jackson played at throw and fetch for a while and then, unfortunately, the dog blithely deposited one of its antisocial brown wreaths on the sand and a guilty Jackson had to use the driftwood stick as a makeshift shovel to bury it, the plastic bags having been stolen along with his car.

It seemed a good moment for two naughty boys to turn around and run away.

He bought fish and chips – northern soul food – and sat on a bench on the pier while watching the tide come in. He shared his fish supper with the dog, wafting pieces of fish in the air to cool them down before handing them on, just as he had once done for Marlee. The tide had turned, the sea crawling up the beach now. Further along, the waves had more power and Jackson watched as they voomphed against the stanchions of the pier.

It was growing dark and the dark brought the cold with it, the warmth of the afternoon now an unlikely memory. The wind skating off the North Sea was an icy blade that cut through to the bone, so he threw the fish and chip paper in the bin and headed for the bed and breakfast he had booked over the phone last night. Twenty-five pounds a night for ‘Complimentary toiletries, hospitality tray and a full Yorkshire breakfast’. Jackson wondered what made it a Yorkshire breakfast as opposed to any other kind.

‘Bella Vista’ – what else. It was in the middle of a street of similar houses, five storeys from basement to attic. Most of Bella Vista’s neighbours were also guest houses – Dolphin, Marine View, The Haven. Jackson wondered if any of these guest houses had been around in his childhood, if perhaps it was the hallway of Marine View or The Haven where a copper gong had been beaten to announce dinnertime, perhaps was still being beaten.

Bella Vista seemed a misnomer, there was no sign of the sea at all. Perhaps if you stood on a chair at an attic window. NO DOGS, NO SMOKING, NO GROUPS, a sign announced on one of the pillars at the door. In smaller cursive script underneath were the words Mrs B. Reid, Proprietress .

‘It’s late,’ Mrs Reid said, by way of greeting. Jackson checked his watch, it was eight o’clock. Was that late?

‘Better than never,’ he said affably. He wondered if Bella Vista got many returning guests. Mrs Reid was a hardened blonde, a woman of a certain age, the only kind that Jackson seemed to meet these days. She led him into a big square hall where a table displayed a pile of leaflets about local tourist attractions and an honesty box for the phone in the shape of a small, old-fashioned red telephone box. Opening off the hall were a guest lounge and a breakfast room, their function announced by little china plaques affixed to the doors.

In the breakfast room he could see tables set for the morning with small pots of jams and marmalade, tiny tablets of foil-wrapped butter. It was strange, this miniaturization of everything, every expense spared. Jackson thought that if he was running a guest house (a big leap of imagination required) he would be generous with his portions – big bowls of jam, a dish with a fat yellow block of butter, giant pots of coffee.

He was led up three flights of stairs to an attic room at the back where servants would once have been crammed like sardines in a tin.

The ‘hospitality tray’ sat on the chest of drawers – an electric kettle, a small stainless-steel teapot, sachets of tea, coffee and sugar, tiny tubs of UHTmilk, a cellophane packet containing two oatmeal biscuits, everything again parcelled out into the smallest quantities. The room also harboured an assortment of completely unnecessary clutter – crocheted mats, little dishes of pot pourri and a troop of ringletted, porcelain-faced dolls sitting to attention on top of the wardrobe. In the small, cast-iron fireplace there was a vase of dried flowers, which, as far as Jackson was concerned, were simply dead flowers by another name. Jackson wondered if there was a Mr Reid. The house felt as if it had long ago been released from the sober, restraining hand of a man. Divorcee or widow? Widow, Jackson guessed, she had the look of someone who had successfully out-survived a sparring partner. Some women were destined for widowhood, marriage was just the obstacle in their way.

On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said Valerie . On the way up, Jackson noticed that other bedrooms also had names – Eleanor , Lucy , Anna , Charlotte . They seemed like the names the dolls would have. Jackson wondered how you decided on a name for a room. Or a doll. Or a child, for that matter. The naming of dogs seemed even more perplexing.

Mrs Reid looked around the room doubtfully. It was pretty obvious that Jackson wasn’t the kind of person who belonged in a room like this. She was probably thinking about amending her notice: NO DOGS, NO SMOKING, NO GROUPS, NO SCRUFFY MEN IN BLACK COMBATS AND BOOTS WITH NO APPARENT REASON TO BE HERE. The air in Valerie smelled cloying and chemical, as if the room had just been vigorously sprayed with air freshener.

‘Business or pleasure, Mr Brodie?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Are you here on business or pleasure?’

Jackson thought about the answer a little longer than seemed necessary to either of them. ‘Bit of both really,’ he said finally. A soft whine came from his bag.

‘Thank you,’ Jackson said to Mrs Reid and closed the door.

He pulled up the sash window to let some real air into the room and discovered that there was a fixed metal fire escape outside the window. Jackson liked the idea that he could make a quick getaway from Valerie if necessary.

An uncharacteristically brief email from Hope McMaster pinged its way through the ether to him. Anything? she asked. Nothing , he replied. I thought I’d found you but you turned out to be a boy called Michael .

Always looking, the sheepdog returning the lost lambs. In London he’d met a guy called Mitch, South African, tough Boer type, politics somewhere to the right of Thatcher, if that was possible, but with his heart bang, slam in the centre of his being. Jackson didn’t know the whole story, just that a long time ago Mitch had had a small son who was abducted and of whom not a scrap was ever found. Now, many times divorced and not short of a bob or two, he ran an investigative outfit that looked for missing kids worldwide. It didn’t advertise itself. Hundreds of kids around the world disappeared every day, here one moment, gone the next. Some of the people they left behind found their way to Mitch.

Mitch had a dossier, a huge file, depressing in its size, full of runaways and abductions of all kinds. He knew more about some of the kids in that dossier than Interpol. All those photographs broke Jackson’s heart. Holiday snaps, birthdays and Christmases, all the highlights of family life. Jackson found photographs unsettling enough at the best of times. There was a lie at the heart of the camera, it implied the past was tangible when the very opposite was true.