Kate Atkinson: Case Histories

The thought they should get some chickens of their own and perhaps a goat to milk, because maybe something was missing – maybe it would just take one fat white wyandotte to make the idyll possible. Or a Sicilian buttercup. Really, chickens had the prettiest names – the Brahma and the marsh daisy and the faverolles. She had a book from the library. She'd stolen the book because she hardly ever got the chance to get into town to go to the library. She didn't believe in stealing, but she didn't believe in being ignorant like a peasant, either. Or perhaps a goat – a LaMancha or a Bionda dell'Adamello. The goat book was stolen too. Country life had turned her into a common thief. Goats had ridiculous names – the West African dwarf and the Tennessee fainting goat. Or perhaps it would take a perfect strawberry patch, a wigwam of runner beans or a row of marrows and then, suddenly, like finding a magic key, it would all work. She hadn't mentioned the marsh daisy or the West African dwarf to Keith, because although he was country born and bred, he'd rather go to a supermarket any day than raise livestock. And anyway, he wasn't really speaking to her because every time he reached for her in bed she pushed him away and rolled over with her cold back to him and thought, "So this is what it's like to fall out of love with someone."

Sometimes Michelle tried to remember what it was like before the baby came, "when it had just been the two of them and they could lie in bed all day and have feverish, exhausting sex and then eat toast and jam and watch television on the tiny black-and-white set that they used to have at the foot of the bed until Michelle knocked it over because Keith was watching the snooker (on a black-and-white set, what was the point of that?) and the baby was screaming and she just couldn't do it anymore.

She did love them, she really did. She just couldn't feel it.

They weren't bonded together, like molecules, molecules that couldn't bond together into stable elements and instead bounced around like bingo balls. She should have studied science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.

And then she started getting up even earlier because if she wanted to get out of this mess she was going to have to study for her A Levels. If she got up at four in the morning – when everything was miraculously peaceful, even the birds and the baby – then she could prepare the evening meal, tidy the kitchen, and get a wash on, and then, if she was lucky, she could get her old schoolbooks out and take up her education again where she had left off. Because you couldn't make time, she'd been deluded about that. Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

It was just a normal day (normal for Michelle, anyway). It was a Saturday, and Michelle had been up since half past three and was feeling particularly satisfied with her strategy. A dish of lasagna, neatly cling filmed, was sitting in the fridge, waiting to be heated up later, and she had made a chocolate cake – Shirley's favorite, because her sister often took the bus and came to visit on a Saturday. She had read three chapters of Mowat's Britain Between the Wars and had made notes for an essay on King Lear. The baby was fed, washed, and dressed in the nice blue-and-white-striped OshKosh dungarees that Shirley had bought. Michelle washed the windows while the baby amused itself in the playpen. The sky was blue and the breeze was fresh and Michelle could see green shoots appearing in the vegetable plot, even the coriander had germinated.

After a while she glanced at the baby and saw that it was asleep, curled up like a bug on the floor of the playpen, and Michelle thought she could use the opportunity to get on with her geography, and at that moment Keith lumbered into the house with a pile of logs he'd just chopped and he dropped the logs onto the hearth with a great clatter, making the baby wake up with a start. Automatically, like a switch thrown, the baby began to scream and Michelle began to scream as well, just standing there in the middle of the room, with her arms by her side, screaming, until Keith slapped her on the face, hard, so that her cheek felt as if it had been branded.

Her throat was very sore from the screaming and she felt weak, as if she were going to drop to the floor, and what should have happened at that moment – because, let's face it, they had been here before (although not the slapping) – was that she would burst into tears and Keith would put his arms round her and say, "It's okay, baby, it's okay," and she would sob until she felt better and they would cuddle the baby between them until it felt better too.

Then they could have made a fire with the logs, because it was still chilly in the evenings, and heat up the lasagna and settle down to watch some rubbish on the new color television they'd bought to replace the old black-and-white one. They would have gone to bed with full stomachs and had sex to make up and slept well so that they would be ready for another day of the same old, but what actually happened was that Keith made a move to put his arms round her and she spat at him, which was something new as well, and then she ran outside and got the ax from where it was stuck in a log beside the sawhorse, and then she ran back inside with it.

It was very cold, because of course the fire had never been lit. Michelle was sitting on the floor. The baby was asleep again. She looked exhausted, the way she did when she was left to cry herself to sleep, and every so often she gave a tiny little hiccup of grief. Michelle felt as if she had a stone inside her, something hard and unyielding that was making her feel sick. She hadn't known it was possible to feel this bad. She looked at Keith and felt sorry for him. When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like an abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already in another life.

If she could have had one wish – if her fairy godmother (noticeably absent from her life so far) were to suddenly appear in the cold living room of the cottage and offer to grant her whatever she wanted, Michelle knew exactly what she would ask for. She would ask to go back to the beginning of her life and start all over again.

She wondered if she should get up from the floor and clean up a bit but she felt so tired that she thought she might just stay there and wait until the police came. She had all the time in the world now.

Jackson switched on the radio and listened to the reassuring voice of Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour. He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one because he had run out of matches, and faced with a choice between chain-smoking or abstinence, he'd taken the former option because it felt like there was enough abstinence in his life already. If he got the cigarette lighter on the dashboard fixed he wouldn't have to smoke his way through the packet, but there were a lot of other things that needed fixing on the car and the cigarette lighter wasn't high on the list. Jackson drove a black Alfa Romeo 156 that he'd bought secondhand four years ago for.Ј13,000 and that was now probably worth less than the Emmelle Freedom mountain bike he had just given his daughter for her eighth birthday (on the proviso that she didn't cycle on the road until she was at least forty).

When he'd come home with the Alfa Romeo, his wife took one dismissive look at it and said, "You bought a policeman's car then." Four years ago Josie was driving her own Polo and was still married to Jackson, now she was living with a bearded English lecturer and driving his Volvo V70 with a child on board sign in the rear window, testifying both to the permanence of their relationship and to the smug git's need to show the world that he was protecting another man's child. Jackson hated those signs.