Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  The olives and peanuts were not a sex tip, although the book did suggest doing something with popcorn that Amelia considered belonged in a blue movie, not a front-of-counter woman’s magazine. You would never think that sex was meant for procreation of the species, that it was simply about male and female organs accommodating each other for a biological purpose. Certainly not according to the authors of ‘Sex Tips to Drive Him Wild’, for whom it seemed to be a case of stuffing every orifice with anything that came to hand.

  For five nights in a row, she waited. By the sixth night Amelia began to wonder if she had misheard him, if he had offered to ‘oblige’ her with something else, the loan of a book or a computer program. In the staff room, no mention was made between them of coffee or sex; the only conversation of any kind they had was about how you had to pretend that the slaters had fulfilled all their criteria-based topics of learning in order to get them through the course and off your hands. She stopped preparing herself every night, her legs grew bristles and she had forgotten all the sex tips so, of course, Sod’s law, Andrew Vardy turned up at the door when she was in her oldest clothes, painting a little bedside table she had bought in an auction.

  No flowers, no chocolates, no wooing – she had rather expected some wooing – and when she said, ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he actually smirked and she only offered the good wine because she knew she couldn’t go through with the experience in a stone-cold sober state. She emptied the peanuts and the olives into glass dishes and put them on the coffee table. Is this what other people did? Other women, preparing for a lover? Didn’t they rub themselves with perfumed oils and unguents and comb out their hair, lie down on silken sheets and present their pomegranate breasts for their lover’s kisses? Not put out hors d’oeuvres, surely?

  As soon as they sat on the sofa he started kissing her and she could feel how dry and chapped his lips were. He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn to college that day and he smelt stale. Then he was tugging at her paint-stained T-shirt and pawing at her breasts, kneading them as if they were lumps of plasticine, at the same time as he was undoing his trousers, so that she wondered what had been the point of mugging up on all that foreplay. Squashed into the sofa cushions, she couldn’t really see what he was doing and when she realized he was putting on a condom she felt incredibly embarrassed (which was ridiculous), although part of her wanted to tell him to stop right there so that they could have a discussion about Catholicism and the ethics of contraception – he had five children, after all, was it one rule for his wife and one for his mistress (there was definitely a certain frisson in applying that word to herself)? And, in general, did he really believe in papal infallibility because she had often wondered how an intelligent person (Sylvia, for example) could believe such nonsense, but the moment for an argument over dogma had already passed because he was fitting himself inside her (so much smoother and colder than she’d expected) and she had to stifle the instinct to push him off because it felt so uncomfortable and unnatural. Then they rolled about awkwardly for a bit, scattering the peanuts everywhere and knocking over the wine (which was incredibly careless of him) and then suddenly he let out a low animal sound like a cow giving birth and the next second his limp thing had slid out of her and flopped like a small dead goldfish on her thigh.

  Amelia looked at the ceiling and saw a crack she’d never noticed. Had it always been there or was the house subsiding? She looked at the floor where the peanuts had been broadcast and where the Bordeaux had made a huge stain on the pale carpet, like weak blood, and she wondered if even professional cleaning would be able to remove it.

  Andrew Vardy pulled himself and his clothing together – there was a patch of curdled white foam on the shoulder of his jacket that Amelia suspected was baby sick. Her insides seemed to sag. ‘I’m sorry, I’m going to have to go, Amelia,’ he said, as if she’d been begging him to stay. ‘I promised Bernie I’d pick up a pint of milk.’ Amelia supposed she had been fitted in with the groceries. Pint of milk and a quick shag. So she’d seen him to the door and he’d kissed her on the cheek and said, ‘That was bloody fantastic,’ and then he tossed an olive into his mouth as if it was a party trick and then he was gone! Almost skipping down the stairs while Henry, the Pekinese, yapped furiously at him from somewhere down below. There was another, darker stain on the sofa and it took Amelia a few seconds to realize that it was not the Bordeaux but her own blood. Her knees felt weak and she slumped down on to the floor. She felt damaged. She heard Andrew Vardy’s child-soiled Passat drive away and started to cry.

  She wanted Jackson. Desperately. And yes, she did lie in her bed and think about him and pleasure herself, Christ what a stupid term. Mr Brodie would save you, Julia had said when she declared he was a German shepherd. Amelia wanted to be saved by Jackson, she wanted that more than anything. Jackson, the idea of Jackson, was a hope and a promise and a comfort, it was a sun-warmed pebble in the hand, the scent of wet roses in the rain, it was the possibility of change. Maybe she should just say to him, ‘If you ever feel like sex, Jackson, I’d be happy to oblige.’

  She started to undress for bed. It was early, too early to go to bed really. There was still light in the sky outside and she remembered how when she was a child she used to like going to bed in summer when it was still light because she was afraid of the dark. That was before Olivia disappeared. After that time there was no safety to be had in either the light or the dark.

  She regarded her naked body in the foxed, silver-spotted mirror on Sylvia’s small wardrobe. Her flesh looked like curd cheese, she had rolls of fat like the Michelin man, her belly folded over, her breasts swinging with their own weight, she looked as if she’d borne a dozen children, she looked like one of those ancient fertility symbols carved from stone. Yet there was nothing fertile about her, was there? She was passing the point of childbearing, her womb was shrinking unseen inside her. ‘I’ve still got time to push one out,’ Julia said to her yesterday in her usual disgusting way. Amelia no longer had time to push one out and soon the planet would have no further use for her. No one had ever found her attractive, no one had ever wanted her, even Victor hadn’t wanted her, her own father had found her too ugly to seduce—

  A howl cut into her thoughts, a terrifying noise as though Julia was having her bowels ripped out, a noise that presaged absolute horror, and Amelia grabbed her dressing gown and ran downstairs.

  Julia was lying on the floor in a corner of the kitchen and at first Amelia thought something dreadful had happened to her but then she realized that she had her arms clasped around Sammy’s body. His eyes were dull, everything about him was dull as if he was fading but when he heard Amelia’s distressed voice his tail gave a weak little beat. ‘I’ll call the vet, shall I?’ Amelia said, and Julia, her voice muffled because her face was pressed into Sammy’s neck, said, ‘I think it’s too late. I think he’s had a stroke.’

  ‘Then we have to call the vet.’

  ‘No, really, Milly, he’s on his way out, he’s an old dog. Don’t upset him.’ Julia held one of his paws and kissed it. She murmured soothing words into the dying dog’s ear, she kissed his ears, his nose, his mouth, rubbed her face on the white hairs of his muzzle. Amelia hated her for being the one who thought she was doing the right thing. ‘Just stroke him,’ Julia said, but Amelia was raking through the Yellow Pages looking for the number for an out-of-hours vet and so she missed the moment when the dog died and only realized he was gone when Julia got up from the floor, covered in dog hair and her face all creased. She looked as if she had been hanging on to the dog for a long time.

  She couldn’t bear it. She had phoned Jackson because she wanted him to stop the pain. She didn’t want anyone else to stop the pain, just Jackson. She wanted him to take her in his arms and soothe her the way Julia had soothed the dog. (‘Please, Jackson, please come, I need you’ – there had been something thrilling about speaking such passionate, desperate words. She had felt passionate. She had felt desperate.) What sh
e hadn’t wanted was for him to arrive on the doorstep looking pissed off (oh God, slater language) and she certainly hadn’t wanted him arriving on the doorstep with a small child in tow. His small child. She had never imagined him having a child, of course; she had never asked. Did he have a wife? She asked him that, when he was hardly over the threshold, accusing like a madwoman; she knew she looked like a madwoman, her hair all over the place, her face ravaged by crying, her breasts flapping around inside the oversized dressing gown. ‘I didn’t know you were married, Mr Brodie,’ spitting out the words as if he had betrayed her. The girl looked upset and Jackson was even more annoyed because she was upsetting the girl and it was Julia who calmed the situation, saying, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Brodie, we’re not ourselves tonight, I’m afraid poor Sammy passed away.’ After that it was all a little shadowy, Julia kept pouring from the brandy bottle, and the child had been almost unnaturally interested in the dead dog, stroking its lifeless fur, saying, ‘Poor dead dog,’ until Amelia wanted to slap her because the dog didn’t belong to her, forgetting that it was actually Victor’s dog. Jackson had explained to the girl that the dog was happy in dog heaven and then Julia had helped Amelia up to bed and that’s where she’d been ever since, sobbing her heart out in a quiet but nonetheless ugly fashion, and it was a crying that wouldn’t stop because it encompassed too much.

  She was crying from a general sense of wretchedness (which everyone was allowed now and then, surely), and crying for herself and her dried-up meaningless little life. She couldn’t bear it, she really couldn’t. Crying for Victor and Olivia and Rosemary and for Rascal (who died two years after Olivia disappeared). And she was crying because she’d only ever had sex with Andrew Vardy and because Mozart had died young and Sammy had died old, and because she was fat and ugly and had to teach the slaters and was never going to be wrapped in the comfort of Jackson’s arms.

  And she was crying because she didn’t believe in Jesus or dog heaven and no one was ever going to lie in bed with her on a Sunday morning and read the papers or rub her back and say, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ And because there was no happiness, only emptiness. And because she wanted to be sixteen years old with long shiny hair (which she’d never had), and she wanted to be looking anxiously out of an upstairs window and hear her mother downstairs shouting, ‘He’s here,’ and then she would run lightly down the stairs and climb into the car where at the wheel would be her good-looking boyfriend and they would drive away and have warm, blurry sex somewhere and then he would bring her back home and her family would be waiting. Victor would acknowledge her with a gruff paternal nod as she came in the door, contrary teenage Julia would ignore her while willowy first-year student Sylvia would smile in a superior manner. Somewhere, in the guest bedroom perhaps, the vague unformed shape of a five-year-old Annabelle could be found sleeping. And Rosemary, her mother, would ask her, in a womanly, conspiratorial way, if she’d had a nice time and then would offer her hot milk and honey (which she was sure she had never done in real life) and perhaps before she dropped into the sweet untroubled sleep of a pretty sixteen-year-old, Amelia would look in on Olivia, eight years old and safely asleep in her own bed.

  Some time in the night, Julia came into her bedroom and lay down on the bed, putting her arms around her and holding her the way she had the dying Sammy. And Julia said, ‘Everything’s all right, Milly, really it is,’ which was such a huge, wonderful lie that it wasn’t even worth arguing about.

  14

  Jackson

  ‘JESUS, JACKSON, WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?’ THE SAME note of reproach in Deborah Arnold’s voice as in Josie’s, Jackson noticed.

  ‘Yes, thank you, I’m feeling much better,’ he said, making his way into the inner sanctum where Shirley Morrison was waiting for him. She visibly flinched when she saw him (and she was a nurse so he must look bad). He had a stunning black eye thanks to David Lastingham (the bastard), and he imagined that being hit over the head and lying unconscious all night in the open air had probably not improved his appearance.

  ‘Not as bad as it looks,’ he said to Shirley Morrison, although it probably was. Shirley Morrison was sitting in a neat lotus. She was straight-backed and had a thin dancer’s body. She was forty but could have passed for thirty until you looked in her eyes and saw that she’d lived enough for more than one lifetime. He knew who she was, she’d never changed her name; it was before Jackson’s time in Cambridge but when he’d asked Deborah to find out about Shirley Morrison she’d said, ‘Shirley Morrison – wasn’t she Michelle Fletcher’s sister? The axe murderer?’

  ‘… She was just sitting on the floor, still holding the axe. I don’t know how long she’d been there. Keith had been dead about an hour, according to the pathologist’s report.’ Shirley Morrison held her cup of coffee with two hands as if it was providing her with warmth, although it was as hot as hell inside Jackson’s office and the coffee must have gone cold a long time ago. She stared off into the distance and Jackson got the impression that she was mentally reviewing Keith Fletcher’s autopsy. ‘When I walked in,’ she continued, ‘she smiled at me and said, “Oh Shirley, I’m so glad you’re here, I made you a chocolate cake.” So I knew straight away that she’d lost it.’

  ‘Her defence pleaded temporary insanity,’ Jackson offered. Deborah had done the research for him, as well as giving him the gossip. Michelle Rose Fletcher, nee Morrison, eighteen years old, sent down for life for, in the esteemed judge’s words, ‘the cold-blooded, calculated murder of your spouse. An entirely innocent man.’ Jackson didn’t believe in the entire innocence of anyone apart from animals and children, and not all children at that. He offered her more coffee but she just shook her head as if he was a distracting insect.

  ‘Michelle was such a control freak, I mean I loved her to bits, she was my big sister, you know?’

  Jackson nodded, he knew what big sisters were like. His own big sister, Niamh.

  ‘But everything had to be just so for Michelle, all the time. All the bloody time. I can see why, I mean the way we were brought up – it was …’ Shirley Morrison shrugged, searching for a word. ‘Shambolic. Our mother couldn’t control a dog, let alone a house and kids. Dad was a drinker and Mum was not exactly capable. And so it was really important to Michelle not to be like them. But the baby did her head in. You can’t control babies.’

  ‘So do you think she was suffering from post-natal depression?’ Jackson remembered Josie after Marlee’s birth, crying all day with misery while Marlee cried all night with colic. Jackson had felt completely helpless because he didn’t know what to do for either of them. And then suddenly it was over, like the sun coming out, and Josie looked at Marlee sleeping peacefully in her cradle and laughed and said to Jackson, ‘She’s cute, let’s keep her.’ Way back when they were happy.

  Shirley Morrison gave him a look, as if she was wondering what he could know about post-partum misery, and then shrugged and said, ‘Maybe. Probably. She wasn’t getting any sleep, people go crazy if they don’t sleep. But they were out to get her, the press, Keith’s family. He didn’t do anything wrong, he didn’t beat her or anything. He was a nice guy, very easy-going. I liked him. Everyone liked him. And he loved Tanya.’

  ‘Michelle had bruising to her face,’ Jackson said.

  Shirley looked at him blankly. ‘Did she?’

  ‘It was in the arresting officer’s report. Why wasn’t it used in her defence?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Shirley’s slender feet were very brown, as if she went around barefoot a lot outside. She was wearing Indian sandals, embossed leather, which made her feet look even better. Jackson liked women’s feet, not in a fetishistic way (he hoped) and not ugly feet, and, for some mysterious reason, a lot of lovely women had ugly feet. He just thought nice feet were attractive. (Was he trying to justify something to himself here?) Nicola Spencer had big feet, he’d noticed. She was on an overnight to Copenhagen, doing God knows what.

  ‘The smell was incredible, aw
ful, that’s what I remember most, just … revolting. Tanya was in her playpen and she was screaming, really screaming, I’ve never heard a baby cry like that before or since. I’m a paediatric nurse,’ she added, ‘in the ICU,’ but Jackson already knew that because he’d phoned up the hospital and asked, ‘Shirley Morrison, what ward is she on again?’ and they’d told him. It was much easier to get information than most people thought. Ask a question and people give you the answer. Not the big questions, obviously, like who killed Laura Wyre and where were the remains of Olivia Land. Big questions like why the woman he had once promised to love and protect as long as there was breath in his body had decided to remove their only child to the opposite side of the world. Just like that. (‘Yes, Jackson, “just like that”.’)

  ‘The first thing I did was pick Tanya up but she still wouldn’t stop screaming. She was filthy, God knows when she’d last been changed, and there was blood spattered all over her.’ This image, and all it implied, tripped her up for a moment, breaking her composure. Shirley Morrison stared out of the office window but she wasn’t looking at anything to be found outside.

  ‘She was wearing these new dungarees I’d bought her. OshKosh. I had a job working in a corner shop, after school, on Saturdays. Michelle and I had always worked, we’d never have had anything if we hadn’t. I remember thinking how much those dungarees had cost and how the blood was never going to come out. My brother-in-law had just been killed by my sister and I was thinking about stain removal.’

  ‘The brain disassociates to stop us from going mad.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that, Mr Brodie?’

  Shirley Morrison’s toenails were painted with a pale polish and she was wearing a delicate gold chain around one ankle. Jackson remembered a time when only tarts and whores wore chains around their ankles. There used to be a prostitute lived on the same street as Jackson when he was young. She wore emerald-green eyeshadow and red stilettos and had white, veiny legs. Did she wear an anklet? Did she have a name? Jackson used to run past her house in terror in case she came out and caught him because his mother told him that she was ‘a servant of Satan’, which had confused him because Satan was the name of a dog – a big Rottweiler – owned by a guy on the allotments.