Started Early, Took My Dog Read online

  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.

  His definition of elderly had changed as he himself had moved nearer to the event horizon of death. When he was twenty, old people were forty. Now he was over the hill of his half-century the definition began to stretch towards something more yielding, but nonetheless once you hit fifty there was no escaping the fact that you had a one-way ticket on a non-stop service to the terminus.

  He drove off, aware that the barbecuing family were watching him all the way down the drive. He understood, he would have been wary of himself as well.<
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  In Knaresborough Jackson had sought out Old Mother Shipton’s Cave, a destination that had once been a stopover on that school trip to Fountains. The schoolboy Jackson had gazed in surprise at the petrified items in Old Mother Shipton’s Cave – umbrella, boots, teddy bears – hanging beneath the well. The alchemy of the Dropping Well was due simply to the high mineral content of the water and yet even now the adult Jackson still found something strangely affecting in its preservation of mundane objects. His younger self had thought that ‘petrified’ meant ‘terrified’ and had wondered if he were to become too frightened by something, or someone, would he end up like those inert, everyday objects? It didn’t work like that, he knew now. It wasn’t being frightened that turned you into stone, it was being the one who did the frightening.

  After Jackson had almost died in the train crash he was grateful to have survived but there was a part of him that had feared that being saved would turn him soft and he would become one of those grateful evangelists of positive living (Every day is a gift, I’m going to make my time on earth count, et cetera). However, somewhat to his surprise, the new version of Jackson that emerged from this harrowing was a colder and harder one than he had expected. ‘The leaner, meaner Jackson,’ Julia laughed. ‘Ooh, I’m scared.’ Perhaps she should be.

  He would never be free of her now that they were united through their son. Two become one. As the Spice Girls might say.

  *

  He had met Julia at Rievaulx. He tended to meet her on neutral territory these days. There had been an unfortunate incident a couple of years ago when a tired and emotional Jackson had turned up on the doorstep of the Dales cottage she was sharing with her arty, überbourgeois husband, Jonathan Carr, and bluntly ‘explained’ to him that Nathan was not, as Jonathan thought, his child. And he had the evidence to prove it, Jackson said, triumphantly waving the results of a DNA test in his face.

  There was, naturally, some violence but it hardly mattered. Jackson had threatened a custody suit but he was aware that he was blustering and Julia knew it too. ( Jonathan Carr’s opinion didn’t count, not to Jackson anyway.) Jackson didn’t want to bring up another child, with or without Julia, he just wanted to establish the fundamental principle of ownership.

  Now there was an unstated delicacy in their triangular relationship. The man who fathered the boy, the man who was raising him and the treacherous woman at the apex. My Son Calls Another Man Daddy. Trust Hank to tell it how it is.

  He had met Julia and Nathan not at Rievaulx itself but on the Terraces above, from where there was a panoramic vista of breathtaking beauty. It brought out the Romantic soul in Jackson, once hidden in a dark, deep mineshaft but lately peeking its head, unabashedly, into the daylight. He might have become a harder version of himself on the outside but on the inside the spirit could still soar. Rievaulx, Beethoven’s Fifth, a mother and child reunion.

  They had strolled between the two Grecian temples – follies, built to amuse eighteenth-century aristocrats, now in the custody of the National Trust. ‘Crikey, fancy having all this as your private picnic ground,’ Julia said. ‘Imagine.’ She sounded even more husky than usual. ‘High pollen count,’ she said, shaking a packet of Zyrtec at him. Jackson was relieved that Nathan showed no sign of having inherited his mother’s lungs (or, indeed, her histrionic disposition).

  ‘No one should be allowed to own a view like this,’ Jackson said.

  ‘Ah, you can take the boy out of his collectivist past, but you can’t take the collectivist past out of the boy.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ Jackson said.

  ‘Is it?’

  Nathan skipped ahead of them on the grass. ‘The boy’, Julia called him, bonhomous with love. The only boy. Men were a continual presence in Julia’s life but always of peripheral importance, including, Jackson suspected, her arty-farty husband (hats off to the man who managed to stay married to inconstant Julia). But not the boy, the boy beamed hotly at the centre of her universe.

  ‘Does Jonathan know you’re here?’ he asked.

  ‘Why should he?’ Julia said.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’ Jackson said.

  She ignored the question. There was nothing you could do with her, she was impossible. (In that, at least, she was constant.)

  ‘Bare ruined choirs and all that,’ Julia said, changing the subject. ‘Shakespeare, the dissolution of the monasteries,’ she added instructively, having over the years realized the great black holes in Jackson’s general knowledge.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that. I’m not entirely ignorant.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, absent-mindedly rather than ironically. Her attention was all on the boy, none on the man. Jackson had, in fact, learned a great deal about the shock and awe of the Reformation in the course of his wanderings around the abbeys of Yorkshire but there was no point in being didactic with Julia, she was always going to know more about everything than him. She was the product of a sound education and a good memory, while, let’s face it, Jackson was in possession of neither.

  Jackson ignored Julia in turn, gazing meditatively (some – mostly women – might say mindlessly) at the amphitheatre, nature’s heavenly bowl, that contained Rievaulx. Even in ruins the abbey was matchless, celestial. Awesome. Awesome, his daughter Marlee’s blasé teenage voice sounded in his head. By the time Nathan was a teenager Jackson would be into his sixties. His diamond years.

  ‘Cheer up, sweetie,’ Julia said, ‘it may never happen.’

  ‘It already has,’ Jackson said gloomily.

  *

  Jackson had occasionally to remind himself that there was a third purpose to his leisurely Byzantine progress around the country. Everything came (and went) in threes, as far as he could see. Three Fates, three Furies, three Graces, three Kings, three monkeys, a threepersoned God.

  ‘Three-headed dogs,’ Julia added. ‘To the Pythagoreans, three was the first real number, because they saw it as having a beginning, a middle and an end.’

  Jackson was working on behalf of a client. Despite the fact that he was no longer a private detective, despite the fact that he no longer had clients, that he no longer dabbled in the soul-destroying tedium of divorce cases and debt chasing and missing pets, despite all that, he had somehow acquired a woman called Hope McMaster who lived as far away from Yorkshire as you could get without getting closer again. New Zealand, in other words.

  He should have said no, in fact, he was pretty sure he did say no when Hope McMaster sent him a long email (too long, a life story) out of the blue at the end of the previous year. I was adopted and I wondered if you could find out some information about my biological parents? How uncomplicated that sounded to his ears now.

  Exactly how Hope McMaster had got hold of a contact address for him was unclear but somewhere along the line – as was so often the case – it seemed to involve Julia (‘a friend of a friend of a friend’). Nowhere in the world was safe. Julia probably had friends on the moon (or friends of friends of friends, ad infinitum). And somehow six degrees of separation from Julia always ended up at Jackson.

  In the course of his lackadaisical odyssey around the country Jackson had been able to dovetail neatly the stalking of his thieving false wife with the pursuit of Hope McMaster’s case. Cornwall, Gwynedd, Doncaster, Harrogate were all locations where he had tried unsuccessfully to hunt down Hope McMaster’s mysterious identity. ‘So,’ Julia said, as they left Rievaulx Terraces behind them and headed towards the comforting arms of the Black Swan in Helmsley, ‘you’re basically looking for two women, your wife and Hope McMaster, and you have no idea who either of them really are.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jackson said. ‘Exactly so.’

  On the outskirts of Leeds, he had netted Kirkstall Abbey. It was the first abbey he had come across whose stones were incongruously blackened with industrial soot from the days when all the golden fleeces were turned into bolts of cloth. Tomorrow he had an appointment with a woman called Linda Pallister, an adoption counsellor with S
ocial Services who Hope McMaster had already been in contact with. Hope’s lawyer in Christchurch had drawn up a power of attorney, instructing Jackson to act on her behalf. Jackson had hopes for Leeds. Leeds was the place where it had all started for Hope McMaster and he very much hoped it would be the place where it would all finish.

  Linda Pallister failed to keep the appointment. ‘Linda’s had to go home, I’m afraid. A family emergency,’ a woman on reception at Social Services told him. ‘But she said to reschedule for tomorrow.’

  After Linda Pallister had failed to keep her appointment with him, Jackson had spent what was left of the afternoon wandering around – a boulevardier – in Briggate, the Calls, the Arcades. The Corn Exchange, the town hall (that great monument to municipal clout), the Merrion Centre, Roundhay Park – all constituted a city that seemed both familiar and at the same time utterly strange. He felt as though he was looking for something that he would only recognize when he found it. His lost youth, perhaps. Or the lost youth that he himself had been. The dirty old town he remembered had been overlaid by something new and shiny. It didn’t mean the dirty old town wasn’t still there, of course.

  He reckoned that the last time he was in Leeds must have been more than thirty years ago. He used to come here as a boy when it represented the height of metropolitan sophistication, not that ‘metropolitan’ was a word in his vocabulary in those days and ‘sophistication’ didn’t rise much above buying a packet of ten Embassy and sneaking into an X-rated film. Jackson remembered shoplifting in Woolworths in Leeds. Petty things – sweets, key rings, batteries. His father would have flayed him alive if he had found out but it had never really seemed like stealing, just a cheeky flouting of authority. Now Woolworths didn’t even exist any more. Who would have thought it? Perhaps it would still be going if kids hadn’t kept on nicking the sweets and key rings and batteries. Over the years all that ill-gotten loot probably added up to a fortune.