Kate Atkinson - Behind the Scenes at the Museum

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM Kate Atkinson

CHAPTER ONE

1951

Conception

I EXIST ! I AM CONCEIVED TO THE CHIMES OF MIDNIGHT ON THE clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall. The clock once belonged to my great-grandmother (a woman called Alice) and its tired chime counts me into the world. Im begun on the first stroke and finished on the last when my father rolls off my mother and is plunged into a dreamless sleep, thanks to the five pints of John Smiths Best Bitter he has drunk in the Punch Bowl with his friends, Walter and Bernard Belling. At the moment at which I moved from nothingness into being my mother was pretending to be asleep as she often does at such moments. My father, however, is made of stern stuff and he didnt let that put him off.

My fathers name is George and he is a good ten years older than my mother, who is now snoring into the next pillow. My mothers name is Berenice but everyone has always called her Bunty.

Bunty doesnt seem like a very grown-up name to me would I be better off with a mother with a different name? A plain Jane, a maternal Mary? Or something romantic, something that doesnt sound quite so much like a girls comic an Aurora, a Camille? Too late now. Buntys name will be Mummy for a few years yet, of course, but after a while there wont be a single maternal noun (mummy, mum, mam, ma, mama, mom, marmee) that seems appropriate and I more or less give up calling her anything. Poor Bunty.

We live in a place called Above the Shop which is not a strictly accurate description as both the kitchen and dining-room are on the same level as the Shop itself and the topography also includes the satellite area of the Back Yard. The Shop (a pet shop) is in one of the ancient streets that cower beneath the looming dominance of York Minster. In this street lived the first printers and the stained-glass craftsmen that filled the windows of the city with coloured light. The Ninth Legion Hispana that conquered the north marched up and down our street, the via praetoria of their great fort, before they disappeared into thin air. Guy Fawkes was born here, Dick Turpin was hung a few streets away and Robinson Crusoe, that other great hero, is also a native son of this city. Who is to say which of these is real and which a fiction?

These streets seethe with history; the building that our Shop occupies is centuries old and its walls tilt and its floors slope like a medieval funhouse. There has been a building on this spot since the Romans were here and needless to say it has its due portion of light-as-air occupants who wreathe themselves around the fixtures and fittings and linger mournfully at our backs. Our ghosts are particularly thick on the staircases, of which there are many. They have much to gossip about. You can hear them if you listen hard, the plash of water from Viking oars, the Harrogate Tally-Ho rattling over the cobblestones, the pat and shuffle of ancient feet at an Assembly Rooms ball and the scratch-scratch of the Reverend Sternes quill.

As well as being a geographical location, Above the Shop is also a self-contained, seething kingdom with its own primitive rules and two rival contenders for the crown George and Bunty.

The conception has left Bunty feeling irritable, an emotion with which shes very comfortable, and only after much tossing and turning does she succumb to a restless, dream-laden sleep. Given free choice from the catalogue offered by the empire of dreams on her first night as my mother, Bunty has chosen dustbins.

In the dustbin dream, shes struggling to move two heavy dustbins around the Back Yard. Now and then a vicious tug of wind plasters her hair across her eyes and mouth. She is growing wary of one dustbin in particular; she suspects its beginning to develop a personality a personality uncannily like that of George.

Suddenly, as she heaves hard at one of the bins, she loses control of it and it falls with a crash of galvanized metal CCRASH KERKLUNCK! spewing its contents over the concrete surface of the yard. Debris, mostly from the Shop, is sprawled everywhere empty sacks of Wilsons biscuit mix, flattened packets of Trill, tins of Kit-e-Kat and Chappie that have been neatly stuffed with potato peelings and egg shells, not to mention the mysterious newspaper parcels that look as if they might contain severed babies limbs. Despite the mess, the dreaming Bunty experiences a flush of pleasure when she sees how tidy her rubbish looks. As she bends down and starts picking it all up she becomes aware of something moving behind her. Oh no! Without even turning round she knows that its the George dustbin, grown into a lumbering giant and now towering over her, about to suck her into its grimy metallic depths...

Somehow, I cant help feeling that this dream doesnt augur well for my future. I want a mother who dreams different dreams. Dreams of clouds like icecream, rainbows like sugar-crystal candy, suns like golden chariots being driven across the sky... still, never mind, its the beginning of a new era. Its the 3rd of May and later on today the King will perform the opening ceremony for the Festival of Britain and outside the window, a dawn chorus is heralding my own arrival.

This garden bird fanfare is soon joined by the squawking of the Parrot down in the Pet Shop below and then DRRRRRRR-RRRRIINGG!!! The bedside alarm goes off and Bunty wakes with a little shriek, slapping down the button on the clock. She lies quite still for a minute, listening to the house. The Dome of Discovery will soon be echoing to the exultant cries of joyful English people looking forward to the future but in our home its silent apart from the occasional chirrup and twitter of birdsong. Even our ghosts are asleep, curled up in the corners and stretched out along the curtain rails.

The silence is broken by George suddenly snorting in his sleep. The snort arouses a primitive part of his brain and he flings out an arm, pinioning Bunty to the bed, and starts exploring whatever bit of flesh he has chanced to land on (a rather uninspiring part of midriff, but one which houses my very own, my personal, Dome of Discovery). Bunty manages to wriggle out from under Georges arm shes already had to endure sex once in the last twelve hours (me!) more than once in a day would be unnatural. She heads for the bathroom where the harsh overhead light ricochets off the black-and-white tiles and the chrome fittings and hits Buntys morning skin in the mirror, making ghastly pools and shadows. One minute she looks like a skull, the next like her own mother. She cant make up her mind which is worse.