Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

Poor old Tilly with her shaky knees and her dicky hip dancing her last waltz in the arms of a man. A brief encounter on a railway platform. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long . She’d played Laura Jesson once, a pretty dreadful repertory production – the Wolsey in Ipswich, or maybe it was the Theatre Royal in Windsor. It didn’t matter now. At the time she was too young to understand the notion of sacrifice, of what love demanded of a person.

A bad man who wanted to hurt the ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ child. For a second she thought she saw her father in his face.

And then she was rolling, rolling through the air and she thought it will be all right, it’s not far to fall to the tracks, but then the train got in the way. Silly Tilly.

Our little life is rounded with a sleep. She thought her wig might have fallen off. You didn’t want to be undignified at the end. If only it was somebody else’s story and not mine . Coiling down into the cold water, the big silver fish shoaling around her, escorting her, protecting her, as she sank slowly down on to the seabed. Be not afeard. Her bones already coral. Her eyes as blind as pearls. The rest is silence.

A Wounded Deer – leaps highest . Crossing on the glassed-in bridge over the tracks, he saw the whole drama play out. He recognized the bizarre cast of players – Vince Collier’s mother, the woman who had stolen his Saab, the little girl, Tweedledum and Tweedledee – in this strange impromptu performance. The only new actor was the old man who fell beneath the train with Vince Collier’s mother. From up here it looked as if she might have pushed him. What was the title of that Mary Gauthier song? ‘Mercy Now’?

Jackson really didn’t like trains. He really didn’t.

He should go down, take charge, do something, help someone. He scooped up the dog, it was only too easy to imagine it being trampled underfoot in this mêlée, and scooted down the escalator and got stuck in the clamour jamming up the platform. He caught sight of his thieving hitchhiker, little girl in tow. She was getting on to another train, leaving more chaos in her wake. He ran towards them but the train was already leaving the platform. He caught sight of the little girl, waving goodbye to him, making hands like stars, until she was out of sight.

An arresting hand on his shoulder made him jump. Brian Jackson. The false Jackson, as he had begun to think of him. Somehow Jackson – the real Jackson – wasn’t surprised.

‘She’s a slippery fish, that Tracy Waterhouse.’

‘Say again?’ Jackson said, wheels spinning in his brain. ‘That was Tracy Waterhouse?’

‘Call yourself a detective.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Jackson said. He didn’t know why he didn’t just get that sentence tattooed on his forehead.

‘I think we’re both after the same thing,’ Brian Jackson said. ‘It’s just that we’ve been coming at it from different starting points.’ Police and paramedics had begun to arrive on the scene now. ‘What a mess,’ Brian Jackson said. ‘Let’s go.’

Jackson hesitated. Shouldn’t he be helping, at the very least giving a statement about what he’d seen?

‘Innocent bystanders,’ Brian Jackson said, encouraging him in the direction of the escalator, like a sheepdog rounding up an obstinate ewe. ‘Come on, I’ve got someone you’d like to meet. Someone who’d like to meet you.’

‘Who?’

‘My client. A man called Michael Braithwaite. We’d both like to know who it is that you’re working for.’

‘You’re phoning me,’ she said.

‘I am,’ Jackson agreed.

‘You’re not emailing or texting,’ Hope McMaster said. ‘You’re speaking. You’ve got news. What’s happened?’ All exclamation marks suppressed beneath the breathless weight of expectation. Hope in the balance.

‘Well,’ Jackson said cautiously, ‘it goes like this. Good, bad, good. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘First of all, the good news is that I’ve found out who your real mother is. The bad news is that she was a prostitute who was murdered by your father.’

‘OK,’ Hope said. ‘I’ll digest that later. And the other good news?’

‘You have a brother.’

Hope McMaster. Michael Braithwaite. The two sides of a jigsaw. A perfect fit.

Hope McMaster was Nicola Braithwaite, Michael’s sister.

(‘Why didn’t you say that?’ Jackson had asked Marilyn Nettles this morning.

‘You didn’t ask,’ she said.)

Nicola Braithwaite, two years old. There had been no gagging orders about her, no injunctions, no need to ‘protect’ her because she didn’t exist. She didn’t go to school, she’d never been to the doctor’s, Carol Braithwaite had avoided health visitors and district nurses. She moved house all the time. Neighbours hadn’t even noticed her.

‘Disappeared,’ according to Marilyn Nettles. ‘She wasn’t in the flat when they broke down the door, so they didn’t know about her. Well, of course, some people knew about her… I had to dig deep to find out, but I never told anyone. Did she have a good life?’

‘Yes,’ Jackson said. ‘I suppose she did.’

‘Oh, it’s such a lovely story,’ Julia said, tears in her eyes.

‘Well, only the ending’s lovely,’ Jackson said, ‘not the story itself.’

‘A child who is found,’ Julia said. ‘Isn’t that the best thing in the world?’

‘What was left in the box,’ Jackson said.

1975: 21 March

She’d been in one of her moods when he arrived at the flat in Lovell Park. You never knew which way it would go, sometimes she was as high as a kite, other times she was sunk in self-pity and low spirits. It was so quick that sometimes you could see it happening, see her face changing. It didn’t help that tonight she’d been drinking – she was a mean drunk – and waved a bottle of cheap wine in his face as a greeting when he came in the door.

‘Kiddies are asleep,’ she said.

Only Michael was in bed – presumably, because there was no sign of him. Nicola was on the couch where she must have fallen asleep. Her face and hands were grubby, her pyjamas unwashed. What hope did the kid have?

‘I brought the money round.’ He handed her a five-pound note. Like a punter. He hadn’t slept with her for two years but some mistakes you paid for all your life. She didn’t know who the boy’s father was. No doubt about the girl though, she said. The girl could have been fathered by anyone, he said, but he knew in his heart she was his. And if he denied it she’d go to his wife. She was always threatening.

‘We have to talk,’ she said, lighting up a cigarette.

‘Do we?’ he said.

The photographs were fanned out on her cheap glass coffee table. ‘Look at that,’ she said, pointing at a photograph of all four of them together, ‘like a real family.’

‘Not really,’ he said. She’d hauled a youth working in a chip shop outside and asked him to take the picture ‘of us all together’.

She had been nagging since Christmas about wanting a day out and they’d ended up in Scarborough in a gale force wind. The place was deserted. At least it meant that the chances of him seeing anyone he knew would be nil.

She’d run down to the sea and taken her shoes and tights off and left them lying on the sand. Her tights looked as if a snake had shed its skin. She ran into the water and danced around in the waves. ‘Jesus Christ, it’s fucking freezing!’ she yelled at him. ‘Come on in, the water’s lovely.’