Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

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 gite in the Ardeche 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 semicivilized exchange on the subject. Of course, David would have "friends who had a gite in the Ardeche," wouldn't he? He was sure it wasn't coincidence that "git" and "gite" 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 hometown. 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 paradisial in comparison. "Never forget this is what Margaret Thatcher did to your birthright," Jackson said to Marlee, and she said, "Okay, 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 wall-paper 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 anymore, 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 noticed a leaden feeling growing in his bowels that owed nothing to the miserable weather or the cheap, acidic coffee. "Okay, 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 colored 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 burned 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 been 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."

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.