Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘Get lost, you stupid cow,’ the girl said, ‘or I’ll call security.’

She would need money to pay her way out of the multi-storey. Where did she put her purse? Tilly looked through her bag. No purse. She looked again. Still no purse. Plenty of other things that didn’t belong there. Recently she’d noticed all these objects suddenly appearing in her bag – key rings, pencil sharpeners, knives and forks, coasters. She had no idea how they got there. Yesterday she had found a cup and a saucer! The emphasis on cutlery and cups suggested she was trying to put together a complete place-setting. ‘Turning into a bit of a klepto, Tilly?’ Vince Collier had laughed at her the other day in the canteen. ‘What do you mean, dear?’ she said. Vince wasn’t his real name. His real name was… hm.

Mother kept a long-handled brass toasting fork hung with the fire-irons on the hearth. Always polishing the fire-irons. Always polishing everything. Father liked things clean, would have got on well with Saskia. The toasting fork had three wise monkeys on the top of the handle. See no evil . Plenty of evil to see in that house. Tilly used to sit by the fire and toast teacakes, Mother would butter them. The teacakes used to get stuck on the prongs of the fork. Father threw the toasting fork at Mother once. Like a spear. Got stuck in her leg. Mother howled like an animal. A poor bare forked animal.

She emptied the contents of her handbag on to the passenger seat. A mysterious tablespoon and a packet of crisps – cheese and onion. She hadn’t bought those, she didn’t like crisps, how had they got there? Definitely no purse. Fear squeezed her heart. Where was it? She’d had it in the newsagent. Had that horrible girl taken it, but how? What was she going to do now? She was trapped in the car park. Trapped! Could she phone someone? Who? No point in phoning anyone in London, not much they could do. The nice production assistant who had made her appointment at the optician’s, what was her name? Tilly drew a blank. Something Indian and therefore more difficult to remember. She went through the alphabet – A-B-D-C-E – a method that often helped to prompt her memory. She went through the whole alphabet and came up with nothing. Silly Tilly .

Perhaps she was just being highly strung. That’s what they said about her when she was a child. Family doctor prescribed an iron tonic – thick green stuff like mucus that made her gag although not as bad as castor oil or syrup of figs, gawd, the things they used to give the poor suffering child. Highly strung indeed. Artistic temperament, that’s how Tilly preferred to think of it. As if an iron tonic could cure that.

Think about something else and then it’ll come. Hopefully. She checked herself in the rear-view mirror, adjusted her wig. Who would have thought it would come to this? At least it was a very good wig, made by one of the best, cost a fortune. No one could tell. Made her look younger (well, one lived in hope), not like the awful rug she had to wear to be Vince Collier’s mother. Looked like a Brillo pad. She wasn’t completely bald, not like Mother had been at this age (like a billiard ball), just rather thin on top. Nothing more laughable than a bald woman.

Padma! That was the girl’s name. Of course. Tilly fumbled for her phone, she wasn’t very good with mobiles, the buttons were so small. She put on her new spectacles and peered at the phone. Wrong ones, she needed her reading specs but when she found them she realized that she couldn’t remember how to use the phone, not the foggiest. She took her specs off and looked through the car windscreen, gazed out at the other parked cars. Everything a blur. She didn’t have the faintest idea where she was.

She put the phone down on the passenger seat. Breathe, Matilda . She looked at her hands in her lap. Now what was she going to do?

When you were lost you needed a map. Ariadne and her thread, Tilly the Leeds A-Z that she found in a newsagent. Somehow or other she had wound her way back from the car park to the shopping centre. It was very brightly lit, brighter than the sun. Tilly could have sworn that she felt the hum of electricity passing through her bones. She had been disconcerted by hearing her mother’s voice on the tannoy system, echoing down the years from her childhood, saying, ‘If you get lost, go up to a policeman.’ Tilly knew she must be mad because the last time her mother said that to her was well over sixty years ago, not to mention the fact that her mother had been dead for three decades and even if she had been alive it seemed unlikely that she would be making public announcements in a shopping centre in Leeds.

Anyway there wasn’t a policeman to be seen anywhere.

The newsagent was familiar, she had definitely been here before. She put her spectacles on and opened up the A-Z . Why? What was she looking for? A way out of the ninth circle of hell. That was where traitors went, wasn’t it? Where Phoebe belonged, not Tilly. As she walked out of the shop, face buried in the A-Z , a mean-faced, gum-chewing girl behind the counter shouted, ‘Oi!’ at her. Tilly thought it best to ignore her, you never knew what girls like that wanted.

She reached the foot of an escalator. The A-Z flapped uselessly in her hand. It was very hot in here, it must be the heat that was affecting her brain. She fanned herself with the A-Z . A youth, face raw with acne, like the inside of a pomegranate, loomed in front of her.

‘Have you paid for that, madam?’ he asked, pointing at the A-Z . Tilly’s heart began to pound, a steam hammer threatening the end. Her mouth was dry, there was a buzzing in her ears as if an insect was trying to escape from her brain. A curtain descended before her eyes, waving and undulating, how she imagined the aurora borealis would be, although she’d never seen it. She would like to, she had always wanted to go to the North Pole – such a romantic destination. The Northern Lights. She was so hot, feverish. Be not afeard . Think of something cold. Tilly remembered shivering on the dockside with her father in the winter, watching the trawlers sailing into harbour after fishing the Arctic waters. Mysterious places – Iceland, Greenland, Murmansk. Ice still slick on the decks of the boats. Her father buying fish in the market, great trays of cod, bedded on crushed ice. Big fish, pure muscle. Poor things, Tilly used to think, swimming in the deep, cold waters of the north and then ending up on her father’s slab. From the north . Like the wind, like winter monarchs. King Cod.

‘Do you have a receipt for that, madam?’ The spotted youth’s voice boomed and receded. The curtain of Northern Lights vibrated and shrank, disappearing to a pinpoint of black. ‘Please, excuse me,’ Tilly murmured. Going down, she thought but then a pair of strong arms had her and a voice was saying, ‘Steady the Buffs. Hold on there. Are you OK, do you need some help?’

‘Oh, thank you, I’m all right really, you know.’ She could hear herself panting. Like a hart. Her heart pulsing like a fleeing hart. If a hart do lack a hind, / Let him seek out Rosalinde . She had done As You Like It twice when she was younger. Nice play. The white hart was a harbinger of doom for the Celts. Douglas told her that. He knew so much! Wonderful memory. The White Hart in Drury Lane, used to go there sometimes with Douglas and drink pink gins. No one drank pink gins any more, did they? Oh God, make it all stop.

‘I was looking for a policeman,’ she said to the man who had asked her if she needed help.

‘Well, I used to be one,’ he said.

The nice man who used to be a policeman steered her into a room. The spotted youth led the way. Bleak little room, painted in several different shades of institutional beige. Reminded her of the sick room at school. There was a Formica-topped metal table and two stiff plastic chairs. Was she going to be interrogated? Tortured? There was a girl there now instead of the spotted youth, she pulled out one of the chairs from the table and said to Tilly, ‘Stay here, I’ll be back in a minute,’ and was as good as her word, returning with a cup of hot sweet tea and a plate of Rich Tea biscuits.