She would like to go home, to the robust brick-built semi in Ilford that she and Greg had bought when they married, but she seemed to be stuck in the North. “Obfuscate” and “hieroglyph” were not words Mandy had previously needed to employ. In a newsagent’s in the Metro Centre she had scanned endless front pages, but words were like hieroglyphs now, the world and its doings obfuscated from her view. She couldn’t really hear anything either, just a murmur, as if she was trying to listen to a radio turned down frustratingly low. She had tried to watch television, once in South Shields in an old woman’s house, once in the electrical department of Currys in Newcastle, but neither on the modest set belonging to the old woman nor on the endless ranks of flat-screen TVs was she able to make out what was happening. Interesting fact-some things didn’t change just because you were dead. Even dead, the big questions remained-was there any meaning to existence, had Prince Alfie found a suitable bride, had Crown Prince Kenneth reconciled himself to his future as king? (Mandy was a staunch supporter of the royal family.)Īnd, perhaps more importantly, would she ever find out now who had killed Josh Ackroyd on Green Acres? Did it still matter? Yes, in a strange way. Except she wasn’t any more, was she?īeing dead was an ongoing state, rather than an end in itself. Of course, nowadays Jonathan had a vast office and a legion of staff, but Mandy Barrowman, née Watson, was still his minion, his terrier and occasionally his conscience. Then the aforementioned Amstrad, with its tiny blinking cursor that followed her every move like a jealous emerald eye, until she finished up on a desktop Dell with a screen that wouldn’t have been out of place in a cinema. She had learnt to type on a big sit-up-and-beg Olivetti, graduated to a daisy wheel and then a machine with a little window where you could watch your words run in front of your eyes like ticker tape. There wasn’t a keyboard that was a stranger to Mandy.

( Dear David, In regard to the findings of the sub-committee. Seventeen years old when she started work, armed with her RSA certificates and a fuchsia lip-gloss and already thinking with nostalgic fondness of the drunken and careless youth she had exchanged in order to be tethered to a dictaphone.

Everyone else seemed to be, but not Jonathan. They sat either side of that ancient desk, so close that their knees occasionally touched, something that made them both feel awkward. There used to be mouse droppings on her desk when she uncovered her Amstrad in the morning. Mandy had been with him for what seemed like for ever, right back when he’d been the assistant to a Junior Minister and they had shared a cramped cupboard in the bowels of the Chamber. Jonathan was currently in the Ministry for Health. At a constituency meeting on the twelfth of April 2017, you promised him there’d be an inquiry into his wife’s case. Jonathan was always saying, “Who’s this chap who’s been on at me? Have I ever met him?” and Mandy would say, “Roger Peacock. And if anyone was ever in doubt about what someone had said, who they had said it to, when they had said it, they would come running to her. You came to Mandy before you went to Google. A great golden lion of a memory waiting to spring into life.īefore she was dead, Mandy had a brilliant memory. It was something tremendously important and it was gnawing and tugging at her, trying to make itself visible, to bring itself into the light. A beast in the jungle, refusing to come into the light of the campfire.

She didn’t know what it was (obviously, or she would have remembered it), and the thing scratched and prowled around in the dark hinterland of her memory, exasperatingly out of sight. The international sensation Life After Life won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and won the Costa Novel Award, a prize Atkinson won again for her subsequent novel, A God in Ruins. Atkinson won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. The following is a story from Kate Atkinson's Normal Rules Don't Apply.

Dear minion sayings