Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘My name’s Leslie,’ the girl said, ‘with an “ie”. Do you want one?’ she said to the man who used to be a policeman.

‘No, you’re all right,’ he said.

‘Are you American?’ Tilly asked the girl, making an effort to enter into polite conversation. Tea, biscuits, chat. One should keep one’s end up.

‘Canadian.’

‘Oh, of course, so sorry.’ Tilly usually had a good ear for accents. ‘I lost my purse, you see,’ she said.

‘She’s not going to be arrested for shoplifting, is she?’ the man who used to be a policeman said.

Shoplifting! Tilly moaned with horror. She was not a thief. Never knowingly stolen so much as a pencil. (All those knives and forks and key rings and packets of crisps couldn’t be stolen because she didn’t want them. Quite the opposite.) Not like Phoebe. Phoebe was always ‘borrowing’ bracelets and shoes and frocks. Borrowed Douglas, never gave him back.

‘Are you going to be OK?’ the man asked, crouching down next to her.

‘Yes, yes, thank you very much,’ she said. So nice to encounter a proper gentleman these days.

‘Right, I’ll be off then,’ she heard him say to the girl.

‘Feel better now?’ the girl called Leslie said when the man had gone.

‘Are you going to prosecute me?’ Tilly asked. She could hear the wobble in her voice. Tilly supposed the girl thought she was doolally. Not that Tilly blamed her. She was a stupid old woman who couldn’t find her way home. Silly Tilly .

‘No,’ the girl said. ‘You’re not a criminal.’

The tea was wonderful. Tilly could have cried when she took her first sip. It restored her in every way. ‘Silly me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, I just went blank, you know? No, of course you don’t,’ she added, smiling at the girl. ‘You’re young.’

‘It must have been the shock of losing your purse,’ the girl, Leslie, said sympathetically.

‘There was a woman,’ Tilly said, ‘she was being horrible to a child. Poor little thing, I wanted to find someone who would do something about it. But I didn’t. You’re really not going to arrest me?’

‘No,’ Leslie said. ‘You forgot yourself, that’s all.’

‘I did!’ Tilly said, immensely cheered by this idea. ‘That’s exactly it, I forgot myself. And now I’ve remembered myself. And everything will be all right. It really will.’

He thought of Leeds as a place where it always rained but the weather today was perfect. Roundhay Park was full of people who were anxious to wring a good day out of the English climate. Hordes everywhere, didn’t anyone have a job to go to? He supposed he could ask himself the same question.

He came across an unexpected picture of happiness. A dog, a small scruffy one, was racing around the park as if it had just been released from prison. It disturbed a flock of pigeons intent on an abandoned sandwich and the birds rose up in a flutter of annoyance when it yapped excitedly at them. It started off again, running at full tilt and skidding to a halt, a second too late, next to a woman lying on a rug. She yelled and threw a flip-flop at it. The dog caught the flip-flop mid-air, shook it as if it were a rat, and then dropped it and ran off towards a small girl who screamed as it jumped up, trying to lick the ice cream in her hand. When the child’s mother threatened it with blue murder the dog ran off and barked for a long time at something imaginary before finding a broken branch that it dragged round in circles until its attention was caught by the scent of something more interesting. It truffled around until it found the source – the dried turd of another dog. The dog sniffed it with the delight of a connoisseur before growing bored and trotting off towards a tree where it lifted its leg. ‘Bugger off,’ a man nearby shouted.

It seemed as if the dog didn’t belong to anyone but then a man lumbered up, bearing down on the dog, barking orders at it, ‘YoufuckinglittleshityoucomewhenIcallyou!’ He was a big guy, with a mean expression on his face, barrel-chested like a Rottweiler. Add to that the shaved head, the weight-lifting muscles and a St George’s flag tattooed on his left bicep, twinned with a half-naked woman inked into his right forearm, and, voilà , the perfect English gentleman.

The dog was wearing a collar but instead of a lead the man was carrying a rope, thin like a washing-line, with a noose at one end and without warning he grabbed the dog by the scruff and lassoed it. Then he hitched the dog up in the air so that it started to choke, its small legs paddling helplessly. Just as suddenly the dog was dropped to the ground and the man aimed a kick that connected with the dog’s delicate-looking haunch. The dog cringed and started to tremble in a way that made his heart go out to it. The man yanked on the rope leash and pulled the dog along, shouting, ‘Going to put you down, should have done it the minute that bitch left.’ Dogs and mad Englishmen out in the midday sun.

A commotion was growing quickly, agitated people protesting loudly at the man’s behaviour, a jumble and hum of angry-sounding words – innocent creature – pick on someone your own size – watch it, mate . Mobile phones came out and people started to photograph the man. He took out his own iPhone. He had resisted the temptations of the Apple for a long time but now he had fallen. It was a lovely bit of kit. Until he was eight years old when his family bought a secondhand television that looked as if it was transmitting from Mars, they had only the radio for entertainment and information. In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush valve radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.

He shot off a couple of pictures of the man hitting the dog. Photographic evidence, you never knew when you were going to need it.

A woman’s voice rose shrilly above the others, ‘I’m calling the police,’ and the man snarled, ‘Mind your own fucking business,’ and he continued to drag the dog along the path. He was pulling it so fast that a couple of times it tumbled head over heels and scraped and bounced along the hard surface of the path.

Cruel and unusual punishment, he thought. He had been around violence in one form or another all his life, not always on the receiving end of it, but you had to draw the line somewhere. A small, helpless dog seemed like a good place to draw that line.

He followed the man out of the park. The man’s car was parked nearby and he opened the boot and plucked up the dog and flung it inside where it cowered, shivering and whimpering.

‘You just wait, you little bastard,’ the man said. He already had his mobile phone open, holding it to one ear as he raised a warning finger to the dog in case it made a move to escape. ‘Hey, babe, it’s Colin,’ he said, his voice turning oily, a cage-fighting Romeo.

He frowned, imagining what would happen to the dog when the man got it home. Colin. It seemed unlikely it would be good. He stepped forward, tapped ‘Colin’ on the shoulder, said, ‘Excuse me?’ When Testosterone Man turned round, he said, ‘On guard.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Colin said and he said, ‘I’m being ironic,’ and delivered a vicious and satisfying uppercut to Colin’s diaphragm. Now that he was no longer subject to institutional rules governing brutality he felt free to hit people at will. He might have been around violence all his life but it was only recently that he was beginning to see the point of it. It used to be that his bark was worse than his bite, now it was the other way round.