Case Histories

Chapter 20. CASE HISTORY NO. 4 1971

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 seventeen 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 sons 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 okay, 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, only pausing to pay his respects 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 shriveled, 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 seemed to have 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 of 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 twin-sets 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, "Okay," 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 to the Co-op all the time 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 secondhand 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 good-bye, 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, and the wind blew the rain onto 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 smelled 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 the 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 around the streets in a downpour. Jackson went with him, 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 windshield wipers of Francis's Ford Consul moving relentlessly back and forth 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.

Forty-eight hours later they took her body out of the canal. She was still wearing her skirt, knee-length green boucle that she'd bought with the Christmas money her father had given her. Her umbrella was found near the bus stop. Her shoes, and some of her clothes, including her good herringbone tweed coat, were found on the bank of the canal, and her handbag was found a week later by the side of the A636. Her blouse was never found, nor was the little gold crucifix that her mother had bought her for her first confirmation. The police thought the chain must have broken and perhaps her killer had taken it as a "souvenir." The only souvenir Jackson had was a little pottery wishing well that Niamh had brought back for him from a trip to Scarborough two years ago. It had wishing you well from Scarborough painted on the side.

What was known was that Niamh had caught her bus home from work as she did every day, and she had got off the bus at her usual stop, and then somewhere along the ten-minute walk from the bus stop to her front door someone must have persuaded (or forced) her into a car and taken her down to the canal, where they had raped her and strangled her, although not necessarily in that order. Jackson moved into her room that night and didn't move out of it until he left home to join the army. He didn't change the sheets on her bed for two months. Even then he was sure he could still smell the old-fashioned violet cologne that she liked to sprinkle on her sheets when she ironed them. For a long time he kept the teacup she had drunk from at breakfast that last day. She was always complaining that no one washed the pots after breakfast. The cup still carried the pink lipstick outline of her mouth, like the ghost of a kiss, and Jackson treasured it for weeks until one morning Francis caught sight of it and threw it out the window onto the concrete of the backyard. Jackson knew that Francis felt guilty that he hadn't picked her up from the bus stop that night. Some dark part of Jackson felt that he was right to feel guilty. After all, if he had picked her up she wouldn't now be under six feet of heavy, wet soil. She would be warm and living flesh, she would be complaining that no one did the washing up, she would be going off to work in the miserable winter mornings and her pink mouth would still be talking and laughing and eating, and kissing Jackson's reluctant cheek.

One day, six months after the funeral, Francis gave Jackson a lift to school. It was raining, a summer monsoon downpour, and Francis said, "Hop in, our kid." He parked the car at the school gates and took a pack of cigarettes out of the glove compartment and handed the whole pack to Jackson. Jackson said a surprised, "Thanks," and opened the car door, but Francis pulled him back and gave him a rough punch on the shoulder that made him yell with pain and then Francis said, "I should have picked her up, you know that, don't you?" and Jackson said, "Yes," which in retrospect was the wrong answer. "You know I love you, tyke, don't you?" Francis said and Jackson said, "Yes," embarrassed for Francis, who never used words like "love." Then Jackson scrambled out of the car because he was late and he could hear the bell ringing. In the middle of the most boring maths lesson that had ever been taught in the history of the school, Jackson remembered it was Niamh's nineteenth birthday, and he was so shocked at the realization that he leaped up from his desk. The maths teacher said, "Where are you going, Brodie?" and Jackson sat down and muttered, "Nowhere, sir," because she was dead and she was never coming back and she was never going to be nineteen. Ever.

When he came home from school and walked in the house it felt as if there were something missing, but it was only after he'd changed out of his school uniform and made himself a sandwich that he went into the living room to watch television, and that was where he found Francis's body hanging from the fake chandelier light fitting that had once been Fidelma's pride and joy. His sister's killer was never found.