The holiday at Howdale had been a reprieve from the bleak afterlife he was sharing with his father, an angry man with a heart of coal. At the time, Jackson didn’t analyse his feelings of grief, nor did he wonder why a pleasant, elderly man he had never met before (‘I’m what they call a volunteer, lad’) drove him from his small, soot-encrusted terraced home to the green outback of the Dales, dropping him in a farmyard where a herd of black-and-white cows were in the act of shouldering their way into a milking parlour. Jackson had never been close up to a cow before.
The farm was run by a couple called Reg and Joan Atwell. They had a grown-up son and daughter. The son worked for an insurance company in York and the daughter was a nurse at St James’s Infirmary in Leeds and neither of them was interested in running the Atwells’ fifth-generation farm. The wolf child that Jackson had become must have been a severe trial for the Atwells’ patience, but they had been unusually tolerant and kind people and Jackson hoped he hadn’t disappointed them, and if he had he was certainly sorry now.
He could still see the farmhouse kitchen with the Rayburn that was always hot and was home to a big brown teapot containing tea the colour of old oak leaves. He could still smell the huge breakfasts, porridge with cream and brown sugar, fried eggs, ham, bread and home-made marmalade that Mrs Atwell served up. Two farm workers joined them at breakfast, men who had already put in half a day’s work by the time they sat down to breakfast.
There was an ancient sofa in the kitchen, covered with a scratchy crocheted throw, where they sat in the evenings. The Atwells more or less lived in the kitchen. The sheepdog, a Border collie, Jess, would lie on the rag rug in front of the Rayburn. Mr Atwell would say, ‘Make room on the sofa for the boy, Mother,’ but Jackson often as not sat on the rag rug with Jess. It was the only time before or since that Jackson could recollect feeling close to a dog. His family never had a pet and, when he had his own family, his wife, Josie, had restricted their pet ownership to the small end of Creation – hamsters, guinea pigs, mice. When she was little his daughter, Marlee, used to have a pet rabbit, Muffin, a big brute of a thing with floppy ears that used to square up to Jackson as if he was in the ring with it and prepared to go the distance. ‘Pet’ wouldn’t have been the word Jackson would have used to describe it.
He had given a Border collie to Louise. A puppy. It had been an unconscious choice. He had fled from Scotland, and DCI Louise Monroe, and in his place he had – unconsciously – left a creature close to his emotional heart. She was better off with the dog than with him. He could never be with Louise now. She was within the law, he was outside it.
There had been some talk of him staying on at Howdale at the end of the summer but unfortunately he had been returned, by the same mysterious, elderly gentleman, to the grim comforts of home. Jackson wrote to the Atwells (the first letter he had ever written), thanking them for their hospitality, but heard nothing back until several months later their daughter wrote to him (the first letter Jackson had ever received) to ‘inform’ him that her parents had died within a month of each other, her father first, of an unhealthy heart, and then his wife of a broken one. Jackson, having imbibed guilt in his Catholic mother’s milk, felt the unspoken accusation that he had somehow contributed to their untimely deaths.
He sometimes wondered, if the Atwells had been in possession of stronger hearts, would they have kept him? Would he have become a farm boy, would he even now be driving a tractor up on the hills with a sheepdog riding shotgun? (For want of a nail.)
For a while, after his annus horribilis (the Queen had helpfully taught him the phrase), Jackson had fantasized that he had another family somewhere, Irish diaspora that his mother had carelessly omitted to mention. He imagined her coming back from the dead to tell him about them (Ah, for sure, the McGurks in Pontefract, they’ll look after you, Jackson). Perfectly ordinary people, the kind he saw on television and read about in comics and (occasionally) in books – cousins who worked in offices and shops, drove taxis, delivered babies. Uncles who hung their own wallpaper and kept allotments, aunts who baked cakes and knew the value of love and money – they all existed somewhere, inhabitants of his personal soap opera, waiting for him to find them and be crushed to their collective, comforting bosom. But these people never manifested themselves and for the next three years Jackson inhabited an emotional void, just himself and his father locked together in mute disregard.
When he was sixteen Jackson joined the army. He embraced his new austere existence with the zeal of a warrior monk discovering the profit of discipline. He was broken down and then built up again, his one and only allegiance to his new, brutal family. The army was tough but it was nothing compared to the life before. Jackson was just relieved to have a future at last. Any future.
If his mother had gone to a doctor sooner with her cancer instead of suffering the archetypal ancient martyrdom of the Irish mother, then perhaps she would have hit his brother about the head with a rolled-up newspaper (a common form of communication in their family) and told him to get off his backside (he was nursing a foul hangover) and get out into the rain and meet his sister off the bus. Then Niamh wouldn’t have been attacked by her unknown assailant who raped her and strangled her and then threw her body into the canal. For want of a nail.
After his visit to Jervaulx, Jackson had gone on a pilgrimage to find Howdale again. Working on instinct, with a little help and some hindrance from SatNav Jane, he made his way down back roads until he came to a sign that announced Howdale Farm Holiday Homes. He turned down the drive, once a muddy track but now weed-free and fresh with tarmac, and saw the farmhouse still sitting squarely at the end. The adjacent dairy and a scattering of farm workers’ cottages that he had forgotten about were now all done up in matching white-and-green-painted livery. No sign of cows or sheep, no smell of manure and silage, none of the usual rusting litter of old farm machinery. The place had been transformed into a sanitized, storybook kind of farm. Once upon a time Jackson had erased his past, now his past had erased him.
Jackson climbed out of the car and looked around. There was a small children’s play area where Joan Atwell had hung her washing, a large gravelled turning circle where a run-down old barn had once stood. A group of people of all ages (they called that a family, Jackson reminded himself) was hanging out, drinks in hand, on a lawn that had once been the farmyard. He caught the primitive smell of searing meat. At the sight of Jackson, the adults in the group looked uneasy and one of the men raised his voice, ready for belligerence, a pair of barbecue tongs clutched in his hand like a weapon, and said, ‘Can I help you?’
Jackson had no taste for hostility in these surroundings and so he shrugged and said, ‘No,’ a response which seemed to unsettle the group further.
He climbed back in the Saab and caught a glimpse of himself in the rear-view mirror. Someone slightly feral looked back. He hadn’t shaved for several days and his hair flopped dirtily in his eyes. There was a lean and hungry look about him that he didn’t recognize. At least he still had his own hair. Every guy you saw these days had shaved away his male-pattern baldness in a futile attempt to look hard rather than merely hairless. Jackson had recently turned fifty, a fact he still hadn’t entirely come to terms with. The golden years. (Yeah, right.) ‘A milestone,’ Josie laughed as if it were a huge joke. He had avoided the birthday altogether, spending the weekend miserably on his own in Prague, side-stepping drunken English stag and hen parties. On his return he had set off on this journey.