"Started Early, Took My Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atkinson Kate)
Treasure
‘And you saw it happen? You saw poor old Tilly go under the train? What on earth were you doing there?’
‘It had nothing to do with me,’ Jackson said.
‘The inquest ruled it was an accident,’ Julia said. ‘Which I was glad about because I really don’t think Tilly was the suicidal type. She was in the early stages of dementia though, poor old thing, so I suppose you don’t know what was going through her mind, do you? I went to the funeral, in St Paul’s in Covent Garden. It was a lovely service actually, lots of people saying nice things about dear old Till. Her friend Dame Phoebe March gave the eulogy, chewed up the scenery, of course, but it was good, really moving – all sorts of anecdotes about Tilly when she was young.’
You just had to wind Julia up and let her go.
Jackson was picking her up from the set of
Julia was amusing herself with the dog, crouching down and running her hand along its spine, like a masseuse. ‘Roll over and die for queen and country,’ she commanded and the dog spun over on to its back with its legs in the air.
To look at it, anyone would think the dog had a crush on Julia. Julia herself, of course, was in love with every dog on the planet. Unfortunately every dog on the planet made her sneeze.
‘This used to be a woman’s dog,’ Julia said.
‘Well, he’s a man’s dog now,’ Jackson said defiantly.
He was in the middle of fitting the booster seat that he had finally bought for Nathan. (‘About time,’ Julia said.) Jackson had managed to rescue a grateful Saab – mysteriously denuded of the light-up Virgin Mary – from a police pound just before it was sent to auction, thanks to Brian Jackson’s tracker. It had been found abandoned in the grounds of Fountains Abbey, a location that baffled Jackson. It was as if Jane had known where he wanted to go and had tried to make her way there ahead of him. ‘That’s ludicrous,’ Julia said.
Nathan was following him around, telling him about dinosaurs, barely stumbling over the names, ‘Velociraptor, Avaceratops, Diplodocus.’ Jackson wasn’t sure if his son knew they were extinct, didn’t want to ask him in case he spoiled some kind of mystery, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Jackson didn’t know that four-year-old boys could pronounce words like ‘Avaceratops’. He could barely remember Marlee at that age, her current sullen incarnation had begun to dominate earlier, sunnier versions of his daughter. Of course, there were a lot of things he didn’t know about four-year-old boys. He thought of his son as a baby and it was disturbing to see how far along the road to manhood he had already walked. One day that boy would outrun him, overtake him in the relay race of existence. And so it would go on and on until the sun cooled, or the meteor hit, or that bloody great volcano beneath Yellowstone grumbled its way back into life.
‘Well, everything dies,’ Julia said, absorbed in scratching the dog’s belly and staving off a sneeze. ‘That’s the way it goes.
‘From darkness we come and to darkness shall we return,’ Jackson said. Darkly.
‘I think it’s dust, not darkness,’ Julia said. ‘And I choose to think that we come from the light and return to the light.’
‘What a glass-half-full kind of person you are.’
‘One of us has to be,’ Julia said. ‘Or the glass would be entirely empty.’
‘Who?’ Jackson asked and she shrugged and said, ‘Just a friend.’
‘Could you be any vaguer?’
This despite the fact that Jackson had suggested to her that perhaps the three of them might take a holiday together during her time off. A step towards reconciliation, perhaps towards reunion.
‘Like a family holiday?’ she said and Jackson thought about it and said, ‘Yes, I suppose that is what I mean.’ Julia wrinkled her nose and said, ‘No, sweetie, I don’t think so.’
He was surprised at how disappointed he felt. But then women were full of surprises. Every one of them, every which way, every day.
‘Where is Jonathan anyway?’ he asked.
Julia put up a hand as if stopping traffic, as if stopping an enormous towering truck. ‘I’m not speaking about Jonathan. OK?’
‘Happy never to mention his name again, I’m sure.’
‘That poor boy,’ she said, putting her arms protectively around her own boy. Their boy.
‘Michael?’
‘He went through so much.’
‘He’s OK now.’
‘In the same way that you and I are?’ Julia said. ‘After what happened to us when we were children?’
‘Yeah. That way.’
Michael Braithwaite was on his way to New Zealand even as they were speaking. A brother and sister reunion. He was a nice bloke, top-to-toe denim, overweight, unhealthy, cheerful. He liked nothing more than a barbecue with his wife and kids next to his swimming pool. He’d made a fortune in scrap. Some people lived their life against all the odds.
‘You and me too, sweetie,’ Julia said, patting him on the hand.
Linda Pallister had returned to Leeds and was set to appear before a tribunal and be made to answer for her actions. (‘Ah, the whirligig of time,’ Julia said.) She had helped a four-year-old witness to disappear. Put him in a care home in Roundhay run by nuns, changed his name. And never mentioned his sister to anyone. Told the nuns he was a liar, lied all the time, about having a sister, about his dad killing his mum. When Michael was eighteen he was handed his birth certificate and found out his name, but Linda Pallister never came forward and told him the truth about his mother, or his sister. ‘She was coerced,’ Michael Braithwaite said, ‘her own kid threatened.’
‘Not an excuse,’ the two Jacksons said in unison. Brian Jackson, Michael Braithwaite and Jackson were eating lunch in the bistro in 42 The Calls. Jackson, still shaken by the scene on Leeds station, drank a double malt instead of lunch.
Michael Braithwaite’s memories faded until the slate was wiped clean, but he realized there was an emptiness that would destroy him eventually. ‘Therapy in rehab,’ he shrugged. ‘My name is Michael Braithwaite and I’m an alcoholic, all that stuff.’ Guiltily, Jackson put his whisky down. ‘Decided to go looking,’ Michael Braithwaite said.
‘And found me,’ Brian Jackson said, beaming. ‘Twenty years in the Met behind me. Give me a task and I’m like a dog with a bone.’ Jackson had begun to think of Brian Jackson as his doppelgänger – God knows why – but now he could see that really he was his polar opposite. ‘Made an appointment with Linda Pallister, tracked her down,’ Brian Jackson said. ‘Dog, bone, et cetera. She spilled the beans, most of them anyway, seemed keen to get it off her chest. Changed her mind, took fright, of course.’
Brian Jackson’s phone rang – the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, Da-da-da-
Linda Pallister had not been squirrelled away by Brian Jackson. She had, despite her daughter Chloe’s protestations, simply run away. ‘Bolted,’ Brian Jackson said, ‘to avoid facing the music.’ She had caught an easyJet flight to Malaga and hidden herself away like a desperado in a cheap apartment block on the Costa del Sol.
‘It’s all quite banal really, isn’t it?’ Julia said. ‘People frightened of losing their jobs, their reputations, their marriages. You feel that tragedy should be more
Jackson’s knee-jerk reaction was to disagree with her but when he thought about it he suspected Julia might be right. His own sister, as beautiful as she was, more beautiful than was possible in his memory, wanted nothing more than the most ordinary of lives and what she got was the most ordinary of murders. A random act of violence. A girl who opened the wrong box. As far as her killer was concerned, Niamh could probably have been anyone – the girl before her, the girl after her. Better to go up in flames at the stake, or jump from a mountain ledge, be torn apart by wolves, rather than have your fate placed in the hands of some wanker waiting at a bus stop.
‘The Ambassador loves having his tummy tickled,’ Julia said.
Jackson was definitely going to give the dog a different name. He wondered what Louise, back in Edinburgh, had called the puppy he had given her. She probably hadn’t even kept it.
‘Where are you going now?’ Julia asked him when he said goodbye to her at security in Manchester airport.
‘Journey’s end,’ he said.
‘In lovers meeting?’
‘I doubt it.’
He was still looking for a new home, he had to lay his head down somewhere every night. He supposed he was still looking for his thieving wife as well, but his enthusiasm for the hunt had cooled. He suspected he might have done with travelling for now. He held Nathan, the boy, in his arms, and kissed him goodbye. And there it was.
To his surprise, to his alarm – the fierce churning of the heart, the unbreakable, sacrificial bond. Love. He knew who he was, he was this boy’s father.
It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it. It was terrifying, although Julia would have said ‘wonderful’, being the full half of the glass.
‘Stop putting words in my mouth,’ Julia said.
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In the security control room at the Merrion Centre, Grant had his feet up, reading the paper instead of watching the screens. Leslie could see the headline in the paper, ‘Leeds prostitute murders – man held for questioning’ and then something about ‘a new Ripper’.
‘It never stops,’ Leslie said.
‘Slappers, what do you expect?’ Grant said, reaching for a packet of Monster Munch.
‘I expect people to behave better.’
‘You’ll be waiting a long time. What’ve you got there?’ Grant asked.
‘A purse.’ Someone had handed it in, found it in the car park. The purse was bulky, stuffed with all kinds of things, credit cards, store cards, little cards with dental and hair appointments, some of them well out of date. Notes of the ‘Remember to’ variety that the owner must have written to herself.
‘Dunno,’ Grant said. He turned the page and gawped openly at the good-as-naked Page 3 girl on offer. Leslie missed Tracy. She didn’t allow sleazy newspapers and snack food. Leslie wondered why she had never come back from holiday.
‘Maybe she’s dead,’ Grant said, quite animated by the idea. She wasn’t dead. She had sent Leslie a postcard, a picture of the London Eye, and on the back Tracy had written, ‘Won’t be coming back, it was nice knowing you, have a good life, best wishes,Tracy.’ She didn’t tell Grant. The message wasn’t for him.
Leslie was decamping as well. She hadn’t told anyone but her flight to Canada left in a couple of days. She had taken her cue from Tracy, she was simply going to disappear. She’d get a job for the summer, go to the lake with her parents and her brother and her dog and then after that she’d get started on her good life. Leave this place far behind.
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The best room in the house. The ‘Sleeping Beauty suite’. It was meant for a bigger family, of course, but big and best was what Tracy wanted for the kid. She had been lucky to get the suite, only managed it because the hotel had a last-minute cancellation. Tracy’s old friends, the world and his wife, or in this case Europe and his
She had expected there would be only parents with children in the park but there were all sorts of permutations – groups of young guys, gangs of giggling girls, old couples and honeymooners. Tracy couldn’t imagine why you would want to spend a romantic break in the centre of the dark beating heart of capitalism.
There was even the occasional lone male. ‘Beware,’ Tracy murmured to the kid.
It was surprising how easy it was to step out of one life and into another. They had spent a couple of weeks lost in London, where no one knew who you were or cared. They’d tested out their new identities on doctors and dentists and opticians. Kid had had her ears syringed, eyes tested, wore specs now. Added to her allure. Tracy, or rather Imogen Brown, had opened a new bank account and Harry Reynolds had transferred funds into it, all nicely laundered with a credible history. She was surprised, she hadn’t actually expected him to come through with the money, thought he would simply sell her house on and pocket the profit.
When they passed through passport control at St Pancras Tracy had expected there to be questions, expected to be scrutinized suspiciously. Expected an expressionless official to take them to one side and say, ‘Would you just come this way, madam?’ but they boarded the Eurostar train with ease and in no time at all they were in the Magic Kingdom.
The kid had her priorities. In the hotel shop Tracy bought her a new fairy outfit – Tinker Bell’s green attire. The matching wand had a butterfly hovering on the top. Half the kids in the hotel were dressed up, dozens of fairies and Peter Pans, the occasional pirate. You couldn’t walk along a hotel corridor without bumping into an adult re-enactor pretending to be Goofy or Mary Poppins. It was surreal and vaguely alarming. The kid accepted it as normal.
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‘Mirror, mirror on the wall,’ Tracy said when they returned to the hotel suite, ‘who’s the fairest fairy of them all?’
‘Me,’ Courtney said when she saw her reflection. Little hands making stars, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’.
‘You look lovely,’ Tracy said.
‘I do,’ Courtney agreed.
They walked down Main Street towards the hallowed walls of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
Tracy wondered if Disneyland Paris was technically American soil and if she could throw herself on the mercy of Mickey and ask for asylum. They could move to the States, somewhere quiet, away from the public eye, Oregon, New Mexico, a small town in the Midwest, somewhere no one would look for them.
All the bright shiny places. Long way from the starlight and the firelight. Long, long way. They queued. And then they queued again. And then after they had queued they queued some more. They queued to see Sleeping Beauty’s castle, they queued to see Snow White’s cottage, both, frankly, rather disappointing. They queued to fly with Peter Pan into Neverland, which they both liked. They queued to ride around in the Mad Hatter’s teacups and on Dumbo’s back. They queued for the Voyages of Pinocchio which was rubbish and for Pirates of the Caribbean which was good and, they both agreed, just a little bit scary. They stood for an eternity corralled between railings in a queue that was like a fat snake, waiting to be loaded on to boats on a shallow artificial waterway before being carried away on the current, borne helplessly into the terrifying animatronic vision of ‘It’s A Small World’. When they finally escaped back into the big world they spent another lifetime in the pythonesque grip of a queue in order to ride on the Disneyland Railroad.
Kid was a heroic queuer.
They stood on Main Street and watched the parade go by and ate ice cream. By the end of the day Courtney had that stunned look again, the one abused kids wore. Tracy expected that if she looked in a mirror she would see the same look on her face as well. The music from ‘It’s A Small World’ was lodged in Tracy ’s brain. She wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to get rid of it.
‘And we can do it all again tomorrow,’ she said, as they staggered into the hotel through the back entrance.
This was what you did if you had a terminal illness, wasn’t it? You packed the days, took the helicopter flight over the Victoria Falls, the boat down the Nile, the train to Venice, the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building, You went on safari in Africa and played the slots in Vegas because you were suddenly greedy for the world you were about to lose. Or you just rode round in giant teacups taking endless photos of a kid giving you the thumbs-up. Wondering how long it could last.
When they returned to their Sleeping Beauty suite an envelope with the Disneyland logo and
Turn your back for a minute and the world shifted on its axis. There was a PS from Harry –
She put a cartoon on the TV for the kid and read Barry’s letter, finally found out the truth about Michael Braithwaite. He had a sister. Tracy ’s heart dropped ten floors. First thing the kiddy had said to her.
‘What was your favourite thing?’ Tracy asked Courtney as they queued to go into the restaurant.
‘My dress,’ she said without hesitation.
The waiter led them to a table by the window where they had an excellent view of Sleeping Beauty’s illuminated castle. They toasted each other with wine and Coca-Cola. Tracy drank a modest half bottle of red although she could have drunk a vineyard. She thought of the kid, sitting next to her while they flew to Neverland. The feeling of cherishing someone small and helpless. Made her think of Michael Braithwaite, all those years when nobody cared what happened to him. A Lost Boy. She was grateful to Barry for providing her with the happy ending. Poor old Barry, never got to have his retirement do after all. She raised a silent toast to him.
Mickey did the rounds of the tables. As did Goofy and Pluto. The kid liked Pluto best. Thumbs-up all round. Tracy took photo after photo. Terminal illness.
After dinner Courtney got dressed in her new Minnie pyjamas, bought in the hotel shop, and they ordered hot chocolate on room service, watched a DVD in bed. Disney obviously.
Kid had her chattels laid out on the bed:
the tarnished silver thimble
the Chinese coin with a hole in the middle
the purse with a smiling monkey’s face on it
the snow globe containing a crude plastic model of the Houses of Parliament
the shell like a cream horn
the shell shaped like a coolie hat
the pine cone
Dorothy Waterhouse’s sapphire engagement ring
the filigree leaf from the wood
the links from a cheap gold chain
the light-up Virgin Mary from the Saab
the silver star from the old wand
Another couple of years of this and they would need a truck to carry the kid’s cargo around.
From now on Tracy would forever be looking over her shoulder, waiting for the knock on the door. Cameras had tracked them everywhere, if somebody was looking for them they would find them. Harry Reynolds had. And if the bad didn’t get them then the good ones probably would.
When she bought the kid she made a covenant with the devil. She could have someone to love but it would cost her everything. She thought of the Little Mermaid, every step torture, a pain like the piercing of sharp swords. Just to be human, to love.
Kid dipped her wand in Tracy ’s direction. Granting a wish or casting a spell, hard to tell which. Courtney had knitted herself into Tracy ’s soul. What would happen if she was ripped away?
This was love. It didn’t come free, you paid in pain. Your own. But then nobody ever said love was easy. Well, they did, but they were idiots.
Her phone rang. New phone, new name, new number. No one had the number. Perhaps it was her service provider with a courtesy call. Perhaps it was another mysterious caller, or even the same one. Or something more sinister. She switched the phone off, watched the DVD instead. Tinker Bell was looking for lost treasure. Wasn’t everyone?
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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.
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 (
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,
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.
The big policewoman was holding him tightly.
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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.
‘
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.
And what would happen if he did.
‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops – at all -
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard -
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of Me.
Emily Dickinson
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