Started Early, Took My Dog (5 page)

She looked worse close up – flat hair, grey corpse-skin, bloodshot vampire eyes and a junkie edginess to her that made Tracy want to step back but she held her ground. The kid, tear-stained and mucky, had stopped crying and was staring slack-mouthed at Tracy. Made her seem gormless but Tracy guessed adenoidal. Her appearance wasn’t helped by the green caterpillar of snot crawling out of her nose. Three years old? Four? Tracy wasn’t sure how you told the age of a kid. Maybe it was from their teeth, like horses. They were small. Some were bigger than others. That was about as far as she was willing to go in the guessing stakes.

The kid was dressed in various shades of pink, with the addition of a little pink rucksack stuck on her back like a barnacle, so that the general impression was of a misshapen marshmallow. Someone – surely not Kelly – had attempted to plait the kid’s stringy hair. The pink and the plaits signalled her gender, something not immediately obvious from her podgy, androgynous features.

She was a small lumpy kind of kid but there was a spark of something in her eyes. Life perhaps. Cracked but not broken. Yet. What chance did this kid have with Kelly as her mother? Realistically? Kelly was still holding the kid’s hand, not so much holding it as gripping it in a vice as if the kid was about to fly up into the air.

A bus was approaching, indicating, slowing down.

Something gave inside Tracy. A small floodgate letting out a race of despair and frustration as she contemplated the blank but already soiled canvas of the kid’s future. Tracy didn’t know how it happened. One moment she was standing at a bus stop on Woodhouse Lane, contemplating the human wreckage that was Kelly Cross, the next she was saying to her, ‘How much?’

‘How much what?’

‘How much for the kid?’ Tracy said, delving into her handbag and unearthing one of the envelopes that contained Janek’s money. She opened it and showed it to Kelly. ‘There’s three thousand here. You can have it all in exchange for the kid.’ She kept the second envelope with the remaining two thousand out of sight in case she needed to up the ante. She didn’t need to, however, as Kelly suddenly meerkatted to attention. Her brain seemed to disassociate for a second, her eyes flicking rapidly from side to side, and then, with unexpected speed, her hand shot out and she grabbed the envelope. In the same second she dropped the kid’s hand. Then she laughed with genuine glee as the bus drew to a halt behind her. ‘Ta very much,’ she said as she jumped aboard.

While Kelly stood on the platform fumbling for change, Tracy raised her voice and said, ‘What’s her name? What’s your daughter’s name, Kelly?’ Kelly pulled her ticket out of the machine and said, ‘Courtney.’

‘Courtney?’ Typical chav name – Chantelle, Shannon, Tiffany. Courtney.

Kelly turned round, ticket clutched in her hand. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Courtney.’ Then she gave her a puzzled look, as if Tracy was a Polo short of a packet. Started to say something, ‘But she’s not—’ but the bus doors closed on her words. The bus drove off. Tracy stared after it. Gormless, not adenoidal. She registered a sudden spike of anxiety. She had just bought a kid. She didn’t move until a small, warm, sticky hand found its way into hers.

‘Where did Tracy go?’ Grant asked, scanning the bank of monitors. ‘She just disappeared.’

Leslie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Keep an eye on that drunk outside Boots, will you?’

‘Someone should do something.’ Tilly was surprised to find herself speaking out loud. And
so
loud too. Resolutely middle-class.
Resonate!
She could hear her old voice coach at drama college exclaiming,
Resonate! Your chest is a bell, Matilda!
Franny Anderson.
Miss Anderson
, you would never call her anything more familiar. Spine like a ramrod, spoke Morningside English. Tilly still did the voice exercises Miss Anderson had taught them –
ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar
– every morning, first thing, before she even had a cup of tea. The flat she lived in, in Fulham, had walls like paper, the neighbours must think she was mad. Over half a century since Tilly was a drama student. Everyone thought life began in the sixties but London in the fifties had been thrilling for a naïve eighteen-year-old girl from Hull, straight out of grammar school. Eighteen then was younger than it was now.

Tilly had shared a little place in Soho with Phoebe March,
Dame
Phoebe now of course – hell to pay if you forget the title. She’d been Helena to Phoebe’s Hermia at Stratford, oh God, decades ago now. Started off on an equal footing, you see, and now Phoebe was forever playing English queens and wearing frocks and tiaras. She had Oscars (supporting) and Baftas coming out of her ears, while Tilly was stuffed into a pinafore apron and slippers pretending to be Vince Collier’s mother. Hey-ho.

Not really an equal footing. Tilly’s father had owned a wet fish shop in the Land of Green Ginger – a street more romantic in name than in reality – whilst Phoebe, although she
called
herself a ‘northern girl’, was really from the landowning classes – house designed by John Carr of York near Malton – and she was the niece of a cousin of the old king, huge house on Eaton Square that she could repair to if things got tricky in Soho. The stories Tilly could tell about Phoebe –
Dame
Phoebe – would make your hair curl.

Miss Anderson would be long dead now, of course. She wasn’t the kind to rot messily in the grave either. Tilly imagined she would have become a parched mummy, eyeless and shrivelled, and as weightless as dead bracken. But still with perfect diction.

Tilly knew her outrage was impotent, she wasn’t going to be the one to tackle the fearsome tattooed woman. Too old, too fat, too slow. Too frightened. But someone should, someone braver. A
man
. Men weren’t what they used to be. If they ever had been. Agitated, she glanced around the shopping centre. Dear God, this was an awful place. She would never have come back but she had to pick up her new specs from Rayners’. She wouldn’t have come here at all but a production assistant, nice girl, Padma – Indian, all the nice girls were Asian now – had made the appointment for her.
There you go, Miss Squires, anything else I can do to help?
What a sweetheart. Tilly had sat on her old specs. Easy thing to do. Blind as a bat without them. Difficult driving the old jalopy when you couldn’t see a thing.

And after all this time buried in the country she had fancied being in a city. But perhaps not this one. Guildford or Henley perhaps, somewhere civilized.

They had her holed up in the middle of nowhere for the duration of her filming. Guest appearance on
Collier
, twelve-month contract, her character killed off at the end of it, not that she knew that when she took it on.
Oh, darling, you must
, all her theatre friends said.
It’ll be amusing – and think of the money!
You bet she was thinking of the money! She was more or less living hand-to-mouth these days. Nothing in the theatre for three years now. Scripts were tricky, the old memory not what it was. She had awful trouble learning her lines. Never used to have a problem, started off in rep when she was eighteen. The ingénue. (Rote learning at school, of course, out of fashion now.) Different play every week, knew all her lines and everyone else’s as well. She had once, long ago, just to prove she could, learned the whole of
The Three Sisters
by heart, and she was only playing Natasha!

‘Senile old bat,’ she heard someone say yesterday. It was true everything was dimming.
The lights are going out all over Europe. Suffer the little children
. Should she find a policeman? Or phone 999? It seemed an awfully dramatic thing to do.

The last thing she’d done for the telly was a
Casualty
where she’d played an old dear who had manned an ack-ack gun in the war and who’d died of hypothermia in a high-rise flat, which led to a lot of hand-wringing from the characters (
How can this happen in this day and age? This woman defended her country in the war
. Et cetera). Of course she wasn’t really old enough to play the role. She was still a child during the war, could only remember certain awful things about it, Mother harrying her into the shelter in the middle of the night, the smell of damp earth inside. Hull took a terrible beating.

Flat-footed Father was given a desk job in the Army Catering Corps. Not much fish to sell during the war anyway, trawlers requisitioned by the navy. The ones that kept on fishing were blown out of the water, fishermen’s bodies coiling down into the cold, icy depths.
Those are pearls that were his eyes
. She had played Miranda at school.
Have you thought about the stage, Matilda?
Her headmistress didn’t think she was much good for anything else.
Not exactly academically inclined, are you, Matilda?

Tilly wished she had been old enough to fight in the war, to be a bold girl on an ack-ack gun.

The producers of
Collier
had seduced her in the Club at the Ivy over a cocktail called the Twinkle, rather disturbing nomenclature for Tilly as that was the name her prudish mother assigned to female genitalia. Tilly had always rather liked the word ‘vagina’, it sounded like a swotty girl or a new found land.

When she had first spotted her, the little girl was skipping along, singing, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. The anthem of children everywhere. Made Tilly think of her mother again. The little girl made fists of her hands (so tiny!) and every time she sang the word ‘twinkle’ she opened them out, like little starfish. The girl was in tune, perfect pitch, someone should have told her mother that the little thing had a gift. Someone should have said something.

When Tilly saw them again, ten minutes later, the poor child was no longer singing. The mother – a brutal woman with crude tattoos and a mobile phone clamped to her ear – was yelling at her, ‘Would you just shut the fuck up, Courtney, you’re getting on my tits!’ She was furious, pulling her along and shouting at her. You knew what happened to children like that when they got home. Behind closed doors. Child cruelty. Snipping off all the little buds so that they could never blossom.

A little black thing among the snow
. That was Blake, wasn’t it? Not that the ‘Twinkle,Twinkle’ little girl was black. Quite the opposite, as if she never saw the sun.
Crying ‘weep! weep!’ in notes of woe
. It was surprising more children didn’t have rickets. Perhaps they did. Tilly’s grandmother had had rickets, there was a photograph of her as a child, the only photograph of her, taken in a studio in some bleak, flat part of the East Riding.
I by the tide of Humber would complain
. Her grandmother, three years old if she was a day, had little bowed legs in boots, your heart wept for the past. You can’t change the past, only the future, and the only place you could change the future was in the present. That’s what they said. Tilly didn’t think she’d ever changed anything. Except her mind. Ha, ha.
Very droll, Matilda
.

Collier
had turned out not to be so ‘amusing’, after all. Certainly nothing amusing about hanging around on set (basically, a big aircraft hangar in the middle of nowhere) at six thirty in the morning, freezing your cockles off. The set had been built in the grounds of a stately home belonging to Earl or Duke somebody-or-other. Bizarre, but then the aristocracy were always looking for money these days. ‘Purpose-built set,’ the producers said to her. ‘Cost millions, shows a commitment to longevity.’
Collier
used to be on once a week, now it was three times and they were talking about four. Actors like donkeys, turning a wheel.

They’d brought Tilly in to play Vince Collier’s mother because they wanted to make the character ‘more human’, more vulnerable. Tilly had worked before with the actor who played Vince Collier, when he was a teenager, and she kept calling him by his real name – Simon – instead of Vince. Seven takes today just to say goodbye to him on a doorstep.
Goodbye, Simon
six times, the seventh take she just said
Goodbye, dear
. ‘Thank fuck,’ she heard the director say (a little too loudly). The name (‘Vince,
Vince
,’ the director muttered, ‘how hard can it be?’) just kept eluding her. It was in her brain but she couldn’t find it.

Nice boy, Simon. Ran her lines with her all the time, told her not to worry. Gay as a goose. Everyone knew, worst-kept secret in television. You couldn’t say anything because Vince Collier was supposed to be very macho. Simon’s boyfriend, Marcello, was staying with him, rented cottage, nicer than Tilly’s. They’d had Tilly over to dinner, lots of gin and Marcello had cooked a chicken, ‘Sicilian style’. Afterwards they drank some lovely rum that the boys had brought back from holiday on Mauritius and played cribbage. All three of them gloriously tiddly. (She wasn’t a lush like Dame you-know-who.) Lovely old-fashioned evening.

She thought she’d signed up for the duration (‘My pension,’ she murmured happily over her third Twinkle) and then last week they told her that her contract wasn’t being renewed and she was going to die at the end of her run. She had only a few weeks to go. They hadn’t told her how. It was beginning to worry her in some curiously existential way as if Death was going to jump out at her from round a corner, swinging his sickle and shouting, ‘Boo!’ Well, perhaps not boo. She hoped that Death had a little more gravitas than that.