Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

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.