Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘I am different,’ Tracy said boldly. ‘I’m a woman.’

She was grateful to Dennis for the matter-of-fact nature of the act but he was more grateful to her for being twenty and ‘well upholstered’ so it was a reasonably well-balanced exchange. She cancelled her next lesson, told him she was emigrating. Signed up with BSM and passed her test after eight lessons. It seemed an unfriendly thing to do but it was no more than he expected. He phoned the house once afterwards and, Sod’s Law, her mother answered. ‘Someone by the name of Dennis called for you,’ she reported when Tracy came in from work. ‘He wanted to know where your disembarkation port was. I told him not to be filthy.’

Things continued to look up for Tracy. Not long after she passed her driving test she signed the rental lease on a place of her own. She’s Leaving Home . She had left behind the single bed in her parents’ house where, apart from their annual evacuation to Bridlington, she had slept every night since coming home from the private maternity hospital that her parents thought would give their baby (hopefully a boy) a better start in life than an NHS ward. The maternity hospital was so underheated that Dorothy Waterhouse came home with chilblains and the infant Tracy with croup. Still, they had mixed with a better class of mother and baby and that was the important thing.

Tracy’s new home was a boxy little bedsit with an Ascot water heater and filthy carpets. A two-bar electric heater that smelled dangerous and a hot-water bottle to embrace at night as she huddled in her sofa-bed. The bedsit was unfurnished and Tracy had bought everything second-hand, keeping stuff in her father’s shed until she’d accumulated enough goods and chattels for the bachelorette life. When she got the key Arkwright and Barry helped her move it all in. When they finished they had tea and biscuits, sitting on the sofabed. ‘You won’t be here long, love,’ Arkwright said. ‘Some bloke’ll come along soon and snap you up.’ He patted the sofa-bed as if this would be the location of a future marriage proposal.

Barry smirked and choked on his Blue Riband.

‘Something, lad?’ Arkwright said.

‘Nothing,’ Barry said.

Having a place of her own raised many questions for Tracy that she never really grappled with successfully. For example, should she buy four dinner plates or two? There was a stall on the market that sold Wedgwood seconds. It was a stupid question, she only needed one plate, she dined alone every night. Findus Crispy Frozen Pancakes, Vesta curries, Smash potato. The nearest she got to cooking was frying up a batch of potato scallops.

She had imagined a future of domesticity, of inviting people from work round for ‘a bite to eat’ and turning out a fish pie or a plate of spaghetti, bottle of cheap plonk and a block of Wall’s Cornish ice cream afterwards and everyone saying, Tracy’s OK, you know . Never happened, of course. It wasn’t that kind of life. Not those kind of people.

Coming out of the station, not long after the move, Tracy nearly jumped out of her skin when Marilyn Nettles stepped out of nowhere in front of her. There was definitely something of the night about the woman.

‘Can we have a word?’ she said. If she was looking for a story she’d come to the wrong person. ‘Maybe we can grab a coffee somewhere? I’m not looking for information,’ she added. ‘The opposite, in fact. I wanted to tell you something.’

They drank sickly, milky coffees in a steamy café. It was drizzling outside, miserable summer rain. Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Tracy wondered what it would be like to live somewhere different. Marilyn Nettles took a pack of cigarettes from her handbag and said to Tracy, ‘Do you want a cancer stick?’

‘No thanks. No – wait, go on then.

‘So?’ Tracy said, drawing on the fag. She might lose some weight if she took up smoking. She stirred the foam on her coffee round and round. ‘What is it you want to tell me?’

‘The boy,’ Marilyn Nettles said.

Tracy stopped stirring. ‘What boy?’

‘The Braithwaite boy. Michael. Do you know where he is?’

‘He’s in foster care. Unless you know something different.’

‘I do. He was sent to an orphanage. Nuns.’ Marilyn Nettles shivered. ‘I hate nuns.’

‘An orphanage?’Tracy said. She had imagined Michael Braithwaite with experienced foster parents, the solid church-going type who’d seen hundreds of distressed kids pass through their hands, people who knew how to heal and comfort. But an orphanage? The very word sounded melancholic. Abandoned.

‘His name has been changed. There’s a restraining order in place,’ Marilyn Nettles said. ‘All kind of legalese. To protect him, supposedly. I’ve been warned off. From on high.’

Tracy heard Linda Pallister’s voice in her head, No visitors. It’s a directive from above .

‘He witnessed a murder,’ Marilyn Nettles said, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘And then he disappears. Pouf! Just like that. I would call that suspicious. I would say that perhaps someone made him disappear.’

Barry had told Tracy that Len Lomax had told him ‘in confidence’ that ‘someone’, someone who claimed to be Michael’s father, had confessed to the murder and had promptly died in custody. It wasn’t something she could tell Marilyn Nettles, she’d be all over it like a rash and before she knew it Tracy would be reading about it in the papers. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked.

Marilyn Nettles shook her head as if trying to dislodge an insect from her hair. ‘I’ve said too much already.’ She glanced nervously round the café. ‘I just wanted to tell someone. It’s not that I’m big on little kids but you have to feel sorry for that one. What chance does he have?’

‘Which orphanage did they send him to?’

‘Doesn’t matter, he’s been moved around.’ She got up abruptly and left a handful of coins on the table. ‘For the coffee,’ she said, as if Tracy might have thought the money was for something else.

Tracy paid for the coffee and checked her watch. She groaned inwardly, perhaps outwardly too. She had a party to go to.

Tracy’s parents were taking a leap into the unknown, attempting something that had never been attempted before in the Waterhouse household. They were throwing a party. The bungalow in Bramley was humming with tension.

Only a few years off retirement her father had been given ‘a significant promotion’ and, quite aberrantly, her parents had decided to celebrate in public. The invitation list was problematic as her parents had no friends as such, only acquaintances and neighbours and a few work colleagues of her father. Somehow or other they managed to scrape together a quorum.

The next dilemma was how to phrase the handwritten invitations in a way that would ensure that people left promptly at the end. Drinks and snacks, 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm was the wording finally decided on. ‘ The guests ’, her mother said, as if they were a dangerous breed of animal. Tracy was press-ganged into making an appearance. Her mother said, ‘You can invite a couple of friends if you like.’ ‘’S’all right,’ Tracy said. ‘I’ll come on my own.’

She arrived early and speared toothpicks, charged with pineapple and cubed cheese, into the pale green skull of a cabbage. When the guests arrived Tracy wandered around like a waitress with platters of vol-au-vents her mother had spent all afternoon stuffing with prawns or shredded chicken. There weren’t enough to go round and when they ran out her mother hissed, ‘Get the cheese straws from the kitchen. Hurry!’ As if she was asking for weapons reinforcements.