Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog

1975: 22 March

When he woke he immediately reached beneath the pillow for his favourite car, a blue-and-white panda police car. With the car clutched in one hand he climbed out of the bed he shared with his sister. They slept top-to-tail, squeezed in. ‘Like sardines,’ his mother said. His sister wasn’t in the bed. He thought she must have gone through to their mother’s bed some time in the night.

He was a monkey, his mother said. Full of beans . Sometimes his mother laughed and squeezed him and said he was tiny . He was four. Other times, when she was cross, she said, For fuck’s sake you’re a big boy now, Michael, why don’t you behave like one? Sometimes she danced around the kitchen with him, he stood on the tops of her feet and she whirled him round and round, laughing and laughing, until he shouted at her to stop. Other times she told him to get out of her sight and stay out of it. He never knew how it was going to be.

He was hungry and went into the kitchen to get some cornflakes. There was nowhere to sit in the kitchen and he carried his bowl carefully through to the living room. He ate his cornflakes before he went to look for his mother. She was lying on the bedroom floor. He tried to wake her up. He switched the kettle on and made her a cup of tea the way he had watched her do. He spilled a lot of it and forgot to put milk and sugar in it. She said she had to start the day with a cup of tea and a fag. He went and looked for her fags. Put the cup of tea and the cigarettes next to her head but she still didn’t wake up. Tried to put a cigarette in her mouth.

‘Mummy?’ he said and shook her. When she wouldn’t wake up he lay down beside her and tried to cuddle her ( Who’s my lovely boy, giveus a cuddle then ). After a while he got bored, scrambled up off the floor and went looking for his other cars.

Later when she still hadn’t got up he dragged a chair to the front door and tried to unlock it. He’d done it before but there was no key in the lock this time and it wouldn’t open.

That night he got a blanket from his bed and lay down to sleep on the floor next to his mother. He did that for another two or three nights but after that he knew he couldn’t. His mother had begun to smell funny. He closed the door of her bedroom and didn’t look in there again.

He dragged the chair over to the window and every so often stood on it and tried to attract someone’s attention down below, banging on the glass and waving, but no one ever saw him. The people looked like ants. He stopped trying after a while.

He had looked everywhere in the flat for his sister, worried that she was playing hide-and-seek and had got trapped in a cupboard or under a bed, but he couldn’t find her anywhere. Kept shouting, Nicky ? Or sometimes Nicola! Come here! The way his mother did when she was cross. His sister was funny, always doing silly things. His mother said, Oh, you’re so serious, Michael, you’re going to be a serious old man. Your sister’s going to be like me, Nicky knows how to have fun . He missed his sister more than he missed his mother. Someone would come soon, he thought. But nobody did.

9 April

The sound of the doorbell ringing woke him up. Someone was banging on the door, saying they were police. Daddy was a policeman. He didn’t like being called Daddy. He stumbled into the hallway and saw that the letterbox was open. He could see a mouth, the mouth was moving, saying something.

It’s OK, it’s OK, everything’s OK now. Is Mummy there? Or your daddy? We’re going to help you. It’s OK .

The big policewoman was holding him tightly. Where’s my sister? he whispered and she whispered back, What, pet? and the other woman, the one he would come to know as Linda, said, ‘He doesn’t have a sister, he’s delirious.’Then she took him away in an ambulance. When they were in the ambulance he asked her again, ‘Where’s my sister?’ and she said, ‘Shush, you don’t have a sister, Michael. You have to stop talking about her.’ So he did. He locked her away where you lock away everything that’s precious and he didn’t bring her out again for over thirty years.

Fountains. At last.

There were deer and ancient trees and the long shadows of a midsummer evening. The trees were in full new leaf, the alchemy of green into gold. The sweet birds were singing. Julia would have loved it here.

He’d arrived after the gates were closed and had to find another, slightly less legal way in.

The deer were quiet, not startled at all by a man and a dog. The dog was on a lead. They walked past a big house and a church, both ‘designed by Burges’, whoever he was. Jackson may have been a trespasser but he was a well-informed trespasser. The place was better without people. Most things were, in Jackson ’s opinion. ‘Just you and me,’ he said to the dog.

The abbey itself didn’t disappoint, although Jackson still preferred the more homely remains of Jervaulx. He let the dog off the lead and walked up to the High Ride, the path that ran along the top of the valley that sheltered Fountains. He stopped at Anne Boleyn’s Seat to contemplate the glorious vista of lawns and water that led to the ruins of the abbey in the distance. No sign of any headless women. Twilight. In Scotland, where Louise was, it would be the gloaming.

He walked back down again and wandered amongst the ruins. The dog ran off, chasing like a cheetah after a rabbit. Jackson sat on the low stones of an old wall. He thought it might be part of the cloister but when he peered at the signage he saw that it was part of the latrines. Probably time he cashed in that prescription for spectacles.

‘ This is my letter to the World ,’ he said to the dog when it returned, rabbit-less, ‘ That never wrote to Me. ’ The dog cocked its head. ‘I don’t know what it means either,’ Jackson said. ‘I think that’s the whole point of poetry.’

Just for a second, he thought he saw his sister, dressed in white, running and laughing, the petals falling from her hair. But that was poetry too. Or a certain slant of light.

Because all this time, in all these places, standing in the bare ruined choirs and the echoing engine sheds or sitting in the tearooms and the Golden Fleece pubs, his sister was there in the shadows, laughing and shaking blossom off her clothes, out of her hair, like a bride, a shower of petals like thumbprints on the dark veil of her hair.

She was locked in the echo-chamber of his heart as the queen of the May, a holy virgin. (‘For ever,’ Julia said fiercely, thumping her chest and then keeping her arm folded across it like a warrior giving allegiance. ‘Dead to the world but alive in your heart.’ The eternal paradox of the missing.) She had gone before him and he was never going to catch her. He could live with that, he decided. It wasn’t as if he had a choice.

‘On the road again,’ Jackson said, getting into the Saab. ‘Miles to go, and so on.’

His compliant co-pilot in the footwell gave an encouraging little yap. Jane awaited instruction.

There was still something nagging at him. Not Michael and Hope, not Jennifer, the little girl in Munich – it was thinking about her missing brother that had finally prompted him into asking Marilyn Nettles the right question.

It was something else. A scar, a sign, a birthmark the shape of Africa. Something he had seen recently. He supposed the small men in his brain would locate it eventually.

He was about to start the engine when his phone rang. Louise , the screen informed him. Jackson hesitated, imagining what might happen if he didn’t answer it.