Case Histories

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.