Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Jackson said, ‘ “From Russia with love”.’

  Kim Strachan laughed and said, ‘Much filthier than

  that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have any idea who might have wanted to kill Laura, would you?’ Jackson asked her. ‘Any idea, however unlikely.’

  ‘Like I said, she was a nice middle-class girl, they don’t usually have many enemies.’

  Jackson produced the photograph of the yellow golfing jumper and held it out to her. She took it from him and studied it carefully. Then her face sort of fell apart. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said.

  ‘You recognize it?’ Jackson asked.

  Kim downed the rest of her gin and took a long drag on her cigarette before stubbing it out. She had tears in her eyes but her voice was raw with anger. ‘I should have known,’ she said, ‘I should have fucking known it would be him.’

  * * *

  They drove to Bamburgh and he took Marlee for a long walk on the beach. He kept his shoes and socks on (like an old man, like his father), but Marlee rolled up her gingham pedal-pushers and ran in and out of the waves. They didn’t bother going to look round the castle, even though he thought it had some kind of Harry Potter link that Marlee had been excited about initially. Jackson tended to close his ears to her incessant Harry Potter chatter (he had had a wizard-free childhood himself and failed to see the attraction), in the same way he closed his ears to Christina and Justin and the cloned pubescent boy-bands that she had brought with her and insisted on alternating with his own CDs.

  She was more interested in playing with the mobile phone he’d bought for her. It was a kind of Barbie pink and she spent her whole time texting her friends. He couldn’t imagine what they said to each other. Instead of going in the castle, they ate vinegary fish and chips in the front seats of the car, looking at the sea (like pensioners) and Marlee said, ‘This is nice, Daddy,’ and Jackson said, ‘Isn’t it just?’

  He was supposed to have taken Marlee for the last two weeks of the school holiday but Josie had phoned him and said, ‘Look, we’ve been offered this gîte in the Ardèche for a week by friends of David, and we thought it would be nice if just the two of us went.’

  ‘So you can fuck each other without your child being present?’ Jackson asked and Josie put the phone down on him. It took them another two phone calls before they managed a semi-civilized exchange on the subject. Of course, David would have friends who had a gîte in the Ardèche, wouldn’t he? He was sure it wasn’t coincidence that git and gîte were almost the same word.

  Jackson shook their chip papers out for the gulls, instantly recreating a scene from The Birds, and then drove away as quickly as possible before the Punto got covered in gull shit.

  ‘Are we going home now?’ Marlee was eating a Cornetto that was melting faster than she could eat it. It dripped on the upholstery of the Punto. There was something to be said for hired cars after all.

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said are we going home now?’

  ‘Yes. No.’

  ‘Which, Daddy?’

  Jackson found them a ropy-looking B and B, which nonetheless seemed to be the best one available in his old home town. It had a red neon ‘Vacancies’ sign in the window that made him feel he was checking into a brothel. The drive had taken longer than he expected and had brought them through a series of depressing post-industrial wastelands that made Cambridge seem positively paradisal in comparison. ‘Never forget this is what Margaret Thatcher did to your birthright,’ Jackson said to Marlee, and she said, ‘OK, I won’t,’ and popped the top on a tube of Smarties. Kim Strachan’s five-pound note had been fully utilized in the last Shell Shop they visited.

  The B and B was run by a sharp-faced woman called Mrs Brind who looked dubiously at Marlee before glaring at Jackson and informing him that she had ‘no twins left, only doubles’. Jackson half expected her to call the vice squad the minute he was inside the gloomy room with its years of nicotine impregnated into the wallpaper and curtains. It was like smoking aversion therapy. He would give up smoking, he would give up tomorrow. Or the next day.

  The next morning Mrs Brind scrutinized Marlee for signs of distress or abuse but she cheerfully scrunched her way through a bowl of Frosties, a cereal outlawed in David Lastingham’s muesli-inclined household. Marlee followed the Frosties with a slippery fried egg that was served up with a stiff strip of streaky bacon and a single obscene-looking sausage. Jackson imagined getting up in the morning in France, wandering down to a village bakery for a warm baguette, making one of those little espresso pots of freshly ground coffee. For now he had to make do with a cup of acrid instant coffee and a couple of Nurofen because he’d run out of Co-codamol. He wasn’t really sure what hurt any more, whether it was his tooth, his head, the punch David Lastingham had surprisingly landed on him. It was just pain, generic pain. ‘You shouldn’t take those on an empty stomach,’ Mrs Brind said to him unexpectedly and pushed a plate of toast in front of him.

  It was raining when they got back in the Punto and drove across town. Jackson had a leaden feeling growing in his bowels that owed nothing to the miserable weather or the cheap, acidic coffee.

  ‘OK, sweetheart?’

  ‘Yes, Daddy.’

  He pulled up on a garage forecourt and filled up the Punto, breathing in the comforting smell of petrol. There were buckets of flowers arranged outside the shop but there wasn’t much in the way of choice. There were big pink daisies that looked artificial, some brightly coloured dahlias and lots of carnations. He recalled the heartfelt testimonial of one of Theo’s divorce clients: He buys me carnations, carnations are crap, every woman knows that so why doesn’t he? Jackson beckoned Marlee out of the car and asked her to choose and without any hesitation she picked the dahlias. Dahlias always reminded Jackson of the allotments where his father had spent most of his spare time. Jackson’s mother used to say that his shed was kitted out better than their house. They’d passed the allotments a couple of streets back and if they took the next left at the crossroads they would come to the street where Jackson lived between the ages of nine and sixteen, but they didn’t take a left and Jackson didn’t mention it to Marlee.

  Jackson hadn’t visited the cemetery for ten years but he knew exactly where to go. There was a map that had been burnt into his memory a long time ago. There had been a time when he came here nearly every day, long ago when the dead were the only people who loved him. ‘This is where my mother’s buried,’ he said to Marlee. ‘My grandma?’ she checked, and he said, ‘Yes, your grandma.’ She stood respectfully in front of a headstone that looked more weather-beaten than it should have done after thirty-three years and he wondered if his father had ordered a cheap sandstone for his wife’s memorial. Jackson didn’t feel much when he looked at it. He found it hard to conjure up many memories of his mother. They walked on and Marlee worried that he hadn’t left the flowers on his mother’s grave and Jackson said, ‘They’re not for her, sweetheart.’

  20

  Case History No. 4 1971

  Holy Girls

  JACKSON NEVER THOUGHT MUCH ABOUT ANYTHING BEFORE his mother started to die. He was just a boy, he did things boys did. He was in a gang that had a den in a disused warehouse, they played on the banks of the canal, they pilfered sweets from Woolworth’s, they cycled out to the country and swung on branches across the river and rolled down hills, they bribed older boys to buy them cigarettes and they smoked and drank themselves sick on cider in their den or in the town cemetery, to which they gained entry at night via a hole in the wall that only they and a pack of feral dogs knew about. He did things his mother (and probably his father) would have been horrified by, but when he looked back on it in later life it seemed a healthy, harmless sort of boyhood.

  He was the baby of the family. His sister Niamh was sixteen and his brother Francis was eighteen and had just finished serving his time as an apprentice welder with the Coal Board. His father always told both his s
ons not to follow him down the pit but it was hard to get away from mining when it was the only industry in town. Jackson never considered the future but he thought being a miner looked OK, the comradeship, the drinking – like being in a grown-up gang really – but his father said it was a job that you wouldn’t make a dog do, and this was a man who hated dogs. Everyone voted Labour, men and women, but they weren’t socialists, they ‘craved the fruits of capitalism’ more than anyone, that’s what his father said. His father was a socialist, the bitter, chip-on-the-shoulder Scottish kind that attributed everything that had gone wrong with his life to someone else but particularly ‘capitalist bosses’.

  Jackson had no idea what capitalism was and no desire to know. Francis said it was driving a Ford Consul and buying a Servis twin-tub for his mother and Jackson was the only person who knew that when Francis had become part of the first generation of eighteen-year-olds to vote last year he had put his cross next to the name of the Tory candidate, even though ‘he hadn’t a fart in hell’s chance’ of winning. Their father would have disowned Francis (possibly killed him) because the Tories wanted to wipe the miners off the face of the earth and Francis said who gives a fuck because he planned to save enough money to drive a Cadillac across the States, pausing only to salute the King at the gates of Graceland and otherwise not stopping until he hit the Pacific Highway. Their mother died the week after the election so politics weren’t on anyone’s mind for a while, although their father tried hard to find a way of blaming the government for the cancer that ate Fidelma up and then spat her out as a shrivelled, yellowed husk to die on a morphine drip in a side ward of the Wakefield General.

  Their father was a good-looking man but their mother was a big plain woman who always looked as if she’d just come in from milking the cows or cutting peat. Their father said, ‘You can take the woman out of Mayo but you can’t take Mayo out the woman.’ He said it as a joke but no one ever thought it was funny. He never bought his wife flowers or took her out for a meal but then no one else did that for their wives either and if Fidelma felt badly done by it was no more than any other woman she knew. Niamh expected something different from her life. She left school at fifteen and went to college, where she did shorthand and typing, and left with her RSA certificates and a box of Dairy Milk from her teacher for being top of her class. Now she caught the bus every day to Wakefield, where she had a job as ‘personal secretary’ to the manager of a car dealership. She gave a third of her six pounds a week to her mother, a third went into a savings account and the remainder she spent on clothes. She liked clothes that made her look the role, pencil skirts and angora cardigans, lambswool twinsets and pleated skirts, all worn with fifteen deniers and black court shoes with a three-inch heel, so that she looked strangely old-fashioned even when she was sixteen. To complete her look she wore her hair up in a neat pleat and bought a string of fake pearls with matching earrings. For winter, she invested in a good herringbone-tweed coat with a buttoned half-belt and when summer came she bought a belted mac in a thick cream gabardine that her father said made her look like a French film star. Jackson had never seen a French film so he didn’t know if this was true. Luckily for Niamh she had inherited none of her mother’s peasant genes and was, everyone agreed, ‘a lovely girl’ in all ways.

  She took Fidelma’s death worse than anyone. It wasn’t so much her death, it was the time she took dying, so that when their mother did finally expire her last, sickly breath, it was welcomed by everyone. By that time Niamh was already doing all the cooking and cleaning as well as going to Wakefield every day in her nice clothes and one day, a few weeks before their mother died, she had come into the room that Jackson shared with Francis – Francis was out on the town, as usual – and she sat down on the old, small single bed that there wasn’t really room for and said, ‘Jackson, I can’t do this.’ Jackson was reading a Commando comic and wondering if Francis had any cigarettes hidden anywhere and didn’t know what to make of his sister’s trembling mouth and her big dark eyes brimming with tears. ‘You have to help me,’ she said, ‘promise me?’ and he said, ‘OK,’ without having any idea what he was signing up to. And that was how he found himself spending all his spare time vacuuming and dusting, peeling potatoes, hauling in coal and hanging up sheets and going down the Co-op, so that his friends laughed their heads off at him and said he’d turned into a girl. They were already at the secondary school by then and Jackson knew life was changing and if he had to choose between his sister and a gang of morons it had to be his sister, even if he’d rather be with the morons, because no matter how you felt, blood always came first, and that wasn’t even something you learned, it was just something that was. And anyway she paid him ten bob a week.

  It was just a normal day. It was January, a few months after Fidelma died and a week after Jackson’s twelfth birthday. Francis bought him a second-hand bike and restored it so that it looked better than new. His father gave him five quid and Niamh bought him a watch, a grown-up watch with an expanding bracelet that hung heavily on his wrist. They were all good presents and he supposed they were trying to make up to him for not having a mother.

  Their father was on a night shift and came home as they were all having their make-do breakfasts before rushing off into their day. At that time of year it was dark when they left the house and it was dark when they came home and that day seemed darker than ever because of the rain, a cold, wet, winter rain that made you want to cry. Francis was hungover from the night before and in a foul mood but he gave Niamh a lift to her bus stop. Niamh kissed Jackson goodbye, even though he tried to duck out of it. Fidelma used to kiss him as he went off to school and now Niamh had taken over. Jackson wished she wouldn’t because she always left the mark of her lipstick on his cheek and the other boys laughed at him if he didn’t manage to wipe it all away.

  Jackson cycled to school on his brand new bike and was so wet when he arrived that he left puddles of water all the way along the corridor leading to his classroom.

  Jackson came home from school and shoved a wash into the Servis twin-tub that their mother hadn’t lived long enough to appreciate, then he peeled potatoes and chopped onions and took out the soft, dead-smelling packet of mince from the fridge where Francis kept his fishing maggots in a Tupperware container, now that his mother wasn’t there to stop him. Jackson wouldn’t have minded cooking so much if it had got him out of homework but Niamh stood over him every night and watched him, slapping him round the ear when he got anything wrong.

  Once the mince and potatoes were on he crept upstairs to his room. His father was still in bed and he didn’t want to wake him for all kinds of reasons but mainly because he wanted to sneak one of Francis’s fags from a cache he’d discovered in his wardrobe. He had to open the window to smoke so Francis wouldn’t smell it when he came in. The wind blew the rain on to his face, freezing him half to death and making the cigarette too soggy to smoke. He put it under his pillow and hoped it would dry out overnight.

  If Francis was home before Niamh and it was bad weather he would usually drive to the bus stop and pick her up but today, despite the relentless rain, he collapsed in the chair by the fire, still in his overalls, and lit a cigarette. He smelt of metal and coal and he looked liverish and even more irritable than he had this morning. It must have been some bender he was on the night before and Jackson said to him, ‘You shouldn’t drink so much,’ and Francis said, ‘When did you turn into a fucking woman, Jackson?’

  ‘She must have missed the bus,’ their father said. The plates were on the table and there was a momentary hesitation about whether they should start without her but Jackson said, ‘I’ll put her plate in the oven.’ Of course, Niamh never missed the bus, but as their father said, ‘There’s always a first time,’ and Francis said, ‘She’s grown-up, she can do what the fuck she likes.’ Francis swore a lot more now that Fidelma was dead.

  Her mince and potatoes were all dried up now. Jackson took her plate out of the oven and put it at her place at t
he table as if that might make her hurry up. Their father had gone to work – he had been on the night shift since Fidelma died. Niamh said it was because he didn’t want to sleep alone and Francis said, ‘He still sleeps alone,’ and Niamh said, ‘It’s different sleeping alone in the daytime to sleeping alone at night.’ Francis had gone to meet the next bus. ‘She’s probably gone out for a drink with her friends,’ he said to Jackson, and Jackson said, ‘Yeah, probably,’ even though Niamh only ever went out on Fridays and Saturdays. When Francis came back he got soaked to the bone just running from the car to the house. It was only half-past seven and they both felt stupid for feeling worried. They watched Coronation Street, which both of them hated, so that they could tell Niamh what had happened when she came in.

  At ten o’clock, Francis said he was going to ‘drive around a bit’ and see if he could spot her, as if she might be wandering the streets in a downpour. Jackson went with him because he didn’t think he could sit and wait any longer without going mad. They ended up back at the bus stop, waiting for the last bus. Francis gave Jackson a cigarette and lit it with his new lighter, which was a present from a girlfriend. Francis had lots of girlfriends. When the bus came into view, its bright yellow lights shining through the rain, Jackson was absolutely sure she would be on it, he didn’t doubt the fact for a second, and when she wasn’t, he jumped out of the car and ran after the bus because he thought she must have fallen asleep and missed her stop. He walked back to the car, shoulders hunched uselessly against the rain. He could see the windscreen wipers of Francis’s Ford Consul moving relentlessly back and forward against the curtain of rain and Francis’s face pale behind the glass.

  ‘Best go to the police,’ Francis said when Jackson climbed back in.