Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

There was an announcement about a ‘through train’, telling people to stand back from the edge of the platform. The platform was swarming – Bank Holiday weekend, Tracy supposed – and she hung on to Courtney’s hand as if the kid was about to be carried off to Kansas. Tracy had once attended an incident where someone had been pushed off a crowded platform beneath a train. Bloke who did it – ordinary bloke, looked a bit like Les Dennis – said he couldn’t help himself. The more he told himself not to shove the bloke standing in front of him, the more he felt impelled to do it. Seemed to think that was a reason, didn’t even plead temporary insanity. Caught on camera, got life, would be out in five years. ‘Keep back from the edge,’ Tracy said to Courtney.

No idea how it happened. There was a surge in the crowd – maybe they thought that the train was pulling into the station, not pushing its way through, but one second she had hold of the kid, the next she’d slipped from her grasp. Panic clenched Tracy’s chest as she spun round looking for Courtney and came up almost jaw to jaw with Len Lomax.

It was years since she’d last seen him. Three-piece silk suit, black funeral tie, specs that belonged on a younger man. He must be pushing seventy if he was a day but he looked good on it considering he’d spent the best part of his life smoking and drinking and who knew what else.

‘Tracy, long time no see,’ he said as if they were at a garden party.

‘Not now, boss,’ she said, scanning the crowded platform for the kid. Over fifteen years since he’d been her boss but the subordination came naturally.

She spotted Courtney further along the platform, being led away by an old woman. Kid would probably go with anyone. A dog would have more sense. An old woman was a safe pair of hands, wasn’t she? Old women found kids and took them to Lost Property and pressed a sixpence into their hand. (This had happened to an infant Tracy once on York station. She had rather hoped the old woman in question would take her home.) Unless they were evil witches, of course, in which case they took the kid home and fattened it up before putting it in the oven.

She lost sight of the old woman in the crush, started to hyperventilate. Keep calm. Stay in control. Saw the old woman again and began shoving her way through the crowd but something was tugging at her arm, pulling her back. Not something, someone. Len Lomax again. What was he playing at? He reached out and grabbed hold of her upper arm and she felt the surprising strength of his grip on her bicep. He wouldn’t let go, he was an anchor, dragging her away from the kid, saying, ‘You’re a hard woman to get hold of,Tracy. You and I need to have a little chat.’ Who is the person I should be worried about? she’d asked Brian Jackson. ‘Strickland and his sidekick Lomax,’ he said. Funny but Tracy had always thought of Strickland as Lomax’s sidekick rather than the other way round. ‘They’re trying to keep the lid on the past,’ Brian Jackson said. ‘But the truth will always out.’

‘Fuck off and let go of me.’ She tried to twist away but Lomax was holding on hard. ‘Sorry, boss,’ she said and kneed him in the groin.

‘Bitch!’ she heard him shout as she dashed off. She had got within breathing distance of the kid when one of the Land Cruiser blokes from the garage suddenly stepped in front of her like a wall. She started to put two and two together, it was a sum that had been a long time coming. The leather-jacket thugs were Lomax’s men. Excons whose path had crossed with his at some point. ‘Key witness,’ Brian Jackson said to her on the drive from Fountains to Leeds. ‘You were there when they broke down that door.’Witness to nothing, she was the last person who was key.

Tracy didn’t break stride, just punched the Land Cruiser bloke hard in the face and steamed on towards the kid. She caught sight of the other hulking leather-jacket – no surprise there – weaving his way through the throng towards her. Wolves everywhere, closing in. This one was expecting her to dodge out of his reach but instead Taurean Tracy charged straight at him and rammed the hulk out of the way.

The crowd shrank back from her, nothing like a mad cow on the rampage to clear a space. Courtney spotted Tracy and let go of the old woman’s hand and ran towards her. Tracy snatched her up and clutched her tightly in her arms. Save the kid, save the world. Kid was the world. The world, the whole world and nothing but the world. ‘Can’t breathe,’ Courtney murmured.

‘Sorry,’ Tracy said, loosening her grip, looking round for the escalator. No way out, too many people. And here was bloody Len Lomax again, what was wrong with the stupid old bastard? He was spitting mad, he never did like to be thwarted, especially by a woman. ‘I want to fucking talk to you, OK?’ he said.

He darted forward and tried to seize the kid, started pulling her away from Tracy. Courtney, clamped on to Tracy like a baby koala, screamed her head off and started bashing him with her wand. Like hitting an elephant with a stalk of grass.

The old woman, wig askew, made a sudden, unexpected lunge at Lomax, more like falling than lunging, and grasped him round the waist. Lomax twisted round so that he was face to face in the old woman’s embrace and for a second they looked like a pair of grappling pensioners at a particularly fraught tea-dance.

The old woman had sent Len Lomax off balance and the two of them wobbled perilously as he tried to regain equilibrium. There was another, more urgent platform announcement about the through train and a rush of air and noise signalling its approach. There was a collective gasp of horror from those members of the crowd who were close enough to the bumbling old waltzers to see the imminent danger in their dance. People started to yell and shout and a couple of blokes leaped forward and tried, and failed, to pull them back.

There was a quantum second of silence, counting for nothing in one dimension and stretching to infinity in another. In the balance between triumph and disaster Tracy sensed the inevitability of the outcome.

Sound returned with a vengeance as the train roared into the station and Tracy watched in disbelief as Len Lomax and the old biddy, still clasped in each other’s arms, both lost their footing and toppled over the edge into the engine’s unforgiving path. Tracy slapped her hand over the kid’s eyes but it was all over in a second. The noise of the train’s shrieking brakes outdid the screams and cries from the people on the platform. It was no longer a through train, it was a stopping one now.

Turning away, Tracy caught a glimpse of the leather-jackets, resuscitated like a pair of cartoon villains, scrambling away up the escalator. The puppet-master was gone, no need for the puppets to hang around.

‘I can’t see,’ Courtney said.

‘Sorry,’ Tracy said, removing her hand from the kid’s eyes.

A pair of railway police were sprinting down the other escalator and into the pandemonium on the platform. Two platforms over, another train was standing patiently. ‘Come on,’Tracy said to the kid. The guard was already blowing the whistle to signal that the doors were about to shut. They stepped on to the train just before its jaws hissed and closed.

They walked to the far end of the train, took their seats sedately, like any passengers. All the kid had left of the wand was the silver star. She put it in the backpack.

Tracy found an old freckled banana nestling next to the Maglite in the bottom of her bag. Kid gave the thumbs-up. Made starfish hands out the window.

For a hallucinogenic moment Tracy thought she saw the Saab driver standing next to Brian Jackson on the platform.

Goodbye to Leeds. Good riddance to bad rubbish, Tracy thought. She was never coming back. She was finished with the past. She was an astronaut who’d travelled too far. No return to earth for Tracy. She wasn’t Tracy any more anyway. She was Imogen Brown. She had seventeen friends on Facebook and cash in the bank. And she had the kid to look after. Sleep, eat, protect. Repeat.