Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

When he moved out of the house he had shared with his wife and daughter, Jackson went round to every room in the house to check that nothing had been left behind, apart from their lives, of course. When he walked into the bathroom he realized that he could still smell Josie's perfume – L'Air du Temps – a scent she had worn long before he had ever met her. Now she wore the Joy by Patou that David Lastingham bought her, a scent so old-fashioned that it made her seem like a different woman, which she was, of course. The Josie he had known had rejected all the wifely attributes of her mother's generation. She was a lousy cook and didn't even possess a sewing basket, but she did all the DIY in their little box house. She said to him once that when women learned that wall anchors weren't the mysterious objects they thought they were, they would rule the world. Jackson had been under the impression that they already did and made the mistake of voicing this opinion, which resulted in a statistical lecture about global gender politics – "Two-thirds of the world's work is done by women, Jackson, yet they only own one-tenth of the world's property – do you see any problem with that?" (Yes, he did.) Now, of course, she had turned into retro woman, a kind of Stepford wife, who baked bread and was going to knitting classes. Knitting! What kind of a joke was that?

When he moved into the rented house he bought a bottle of L'Air du Temps and sprayed the tiny bathroom with it, but it wasn't the same.

Amelia and Julia had given him a photograph, a small, square, faded color photograph from another time. It was a close-up of Olivia, grinning for the camera, all her regular little teeth on show. There were freckles on her snub nose and her hair was looped up in short plaits, tied with green-and-white gingham ribbons, although all the colors in the photograph had acquired a yellow tint with age. She was wearing a dress that matched the ribbons, the smocking on the dress partly concealed by the blue mouse that she was clutching to her chest. Jackson could tell she was making the blue mouse pose for the camera – he could almost hear her telling it to smile, but its features, appliqued in black wool, carried the same air of gravity then that they did now, except that time had robbed the blue mouse of half an eye and a nostril.

It was the same photograph that the papers had used. Jackson had looked up the microfiche files on his way home. There were pages and pages about the search for Olivia Land, the story ran for weeks, and Amelia was right – the big story before Olivia had been the heat wave. Jackson tried to remember thirty-four years ago. He would have been eleven years old. Had it been hot? He had no idea. He couldn't remember eleven. The important thing about it was that it wasn't twelve. All the years before he was twelve shone with an unblemished and immaculate light. After twelve it was dark.

He listened to the messages on his answering machine. One from his daughter, Marlee, complaining that her mother wouldn't let her go to an open-air concert on Parker's Piece "and would Jackson talk to her, please, please?" (Marlee was eight, no way was she going to an open-air concert.) Another "Frisky" message from Binky Rain and one from his secretary, Deborah Arnold, berating him for not coming back into the office. She was ringing from home – he could hear two of her loutish teenagers talking in the background over the blare of MTV Deborah had to shout in order to inform him that there was "a Theo Wyre" trying to get in touch with him and she didn't know what it was about except that he "seemed to have lost something." The name "Theo Wyre" sounded startlingly familiar but he couldn't place it. Old age, he supposed.

Jackson fetched a Tiger Beer from the fridge, pulled off his boots (Magnum Stealths, the only boot as far as Jackson was concerned), lay down on the uncomfortable couch, and reached over to his CD player (the good thing about living in a tiny house was that he could touch almost everything in the room without getting up) and put on Trisha Yearwood's 1995 Thinkin' About You album, now unavailable for some reason. Trisha might be mainstream, but that didn't mean she wasn't good. She understood pain. He opened An Introduction to French Grammar and tried to focus on the correct use of the past using etre (although when he lived in France there would be no past and no future, only present), but it was difficult to concentrate because the gum above his rogue tooth was throbbing.

Jackson sighed and retrieved the blue mouse from the mantelpiece and placed it against his shoulder and patted its small, soft back, in much the same way he had once comforted Marlee when she was small. The blue mouse felt cold, as if it had been in a dark place for a long time. Not for a moment did Jackson think that he could find that little girl with the gingham ribbons in her plaits.

Jackson closed his eyes and opened them again immediately because he'd suddenly remembered who Theo Wyre was. Jackson groaned. He didn't want to remember Theo Wyre. He didn't want anything to do with Theo Wyre.

Trisha was singing "On a Bus to St. Cloud." Sometimes it seemed to him as if the entire world consisted of one accounting sheet – lost on the left-hand side, found on the right. Unfortunately the two never balanced. Amelia and Julia Land had found something, Theo Wyre had lost something. How easy life would be if it could be one and the same thing.

Victor died as he wished, in his own bed, in his own home, of nothing much more than old age. He was eighty-four and for as long as they could remember had been adamant that he wanted to be buried rather than cremated. Thirty-four years ago, when their baby sister Annabelle died, Victor had bought a "family plot" for three people in the local cemetery. Amelia and Julia hadn't really considered the arithmetic of this until Victor himself died, by which time the plot was two-thirds full – their mother having joined Annabelle with gratuitous haste – leaving just enough room for Victor but excluding his remaining children.

Julia said it demonstrated typically inconsiderate behavior on Victor's part, but Amelia said their father had probably deliberately planned it this way in case it turned out that there was an eternal afterlife and he might be forced to spend it with them. Amelia didn't really think this was likely – Victor was a staunch atheist and it wasn't in his stubborn, abrasive character to suddenly start hedging his bets at the end – it was just that proposing a contradictory viewpoint to Julia's came automatically to her. Julia was as tenacious (and as yappy) as a terrier when it came to disputes, so that they both constantly found themselves arguing the case for opinions that neither of them really cared about one way or the other, like a pair of bickering, jaded courtroom lawyers. Some days it felt as if they had returned to their turbulent childhood selves and any moment now would resort to the covert pinching, hair pulling, and name-calling of those earlier years.

They had been summoned. "Like attending the deathbed of a king," Julia said resentfully, and Amelia said, "You're thinking of King Lear," and Julia said, "What if I am?" and Amelia said, "You can only relate to life if you've seen it on the stage," and Julia said, "I never even mentioned fucking Lear" and so they were arguing before the train had even pulled out of King's Cross. Victor died a few hours after they arrived. "Thank fuck," Julia said, as they had been suspicious that Victor was trying to finesse them back into the family home to look after him. They both resented the word "home" – it was decades since either of them had lived there, yet they couldn't stop using the word.