Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

"Shut up, Julia." Amelia could feel herself heating up and she walked faster to get away from Julia. Julia had to run to keep up. She sounded wheezy and Amelia thought it was insane for someone with hay fever to smoke so much. Amelia had absolutely no sympathy for her.

"Do we have to go so fast? Your legs are much longer than mine."

They were on Regent Street, approaching a girl who was sitting on the ground, on an old sheet, a dog – some kind of lurcher – stretched out at her side.

Jackson hadn't given two hoots that she'd thought he was an English pointer, but he looked downright pleased to know that Julia thought he was a German shepherd. And Julia would choose that because it was exactly the right dog, not a Doberman, not a rottweiler, and certainly not a pointer – he was German shepherd through and through. She had lied to Jackson, well not exactly lied, but she had led him to understand that she was an Oxford don when in fact she was just a lecturer at the poly, teaching "communication skills" (as it was so laughably called) to day-release slaters and apprentice bricklayers and other assorted riffraff. She wanted to like those boys, to think they were good – perhaps a little too rumbustious but at heart decent human beings – but they weren't. They were little shits who never listened to a word she said.

Julia was immediately attracted to the homeless girl's dog, of course, which meant that one or the other of them would have to give the girl money because you could hardly make a fuss of the dog and not give something in return, could you? Julia was on her knees on the pavement, letting the dog lick her face. Amelia wished she wouldn't do that, you didn't know where that dog's tongue had been – well, you did, that's why you didn't want it washing your face.

The girl had yellow hair, an odd canary color, and her face was sallow, almost jaundiced. Amelia used to give money to beggars and B ig Issue sellers, but these days she was more circumspect. She had once come across one of her own students begging on Oxford High Street. Amelia knew for a fact that the girl – Lisa, a day-release hairdresser – was living comfortably at home with her parents, and the dog she had with her (because they all had dogs, of course) was the family pet. Plus, it was a well-known fact that a lot of beggars actually had homes, and some of them even had cars. Was it a well-known fact? How did she know it? From the Sun probably. The slaters were always leaving copies of the Sun strewn around in their wake. What an extraordinary image that suddenly conjured up in her mind – copies of the sun broadcast carelessly around the universe like gold coins. She laughed, and the girl looked at her and asked, "Can you help me?" and Amelia said, "No." "Oh, Milly, for heaven's sake," Julia said, abandoning her puppy talk and raking through her bag for her purse. "There but for fortune and all that." Julia came up with a five-pound note – five pounds that she actually owed to Amelia – and handed it to the girl, who took it as if she were doing Julia a favor. It hadn't been the money, the girl hadn't wanted money, not really. She had asked Amelia if she could help her and Amelia had told the truth. She couldn't help her, she couldn't help anyone. Least of all herself.

"She'll spend it on drugs," she said to Julia as they walked away from the girl.

"She can spend it on what she wants," Julia said. "In fact drugs sound like a good idea. If I was in her position I would spend money on drugs."

"She's in that position because of drugs."

"You don't know that. You don't know anything about her."

"I know she's sponging off people who exhaust themselves working for a living." Oh God, she was turning into a fascist in her old age. She'd be demanding the return of hanging and flogging soon, well not flogging perhaps but capital punishment – after all, why not? There were enough people in the world, surely, without keeping space for the evil bastards who tortured children and animals and macheted innocent people. "Evil bastards" – that was tabloid language from the slaters' Suns. She may as well cancel her subscription to the Guardian right now, the way she was going.

"Is 'macheted' a verb?" Amelia asked Julia.

"Don't think so."

Well, that was the end then, she was Americanizing words. Civilization would fall.

They stopped outside a burger bar. Inside it was heaving with foreign-language students, they were spilling out onto the pavement and Amelia groaned at the sight of them. She was sure the only language they improved when they were in Cambridge was obscenities or vocabulary for junk food.

In London, Julia did a lot of mystery shopping for an agency – burger bars and pizza places, high-street clothes shops and big chemists' chains. As far as Julia was concerned it almost qualified as acting and as a bonus she usually got to keep the goods or eat the food. The agency was delighted when they discovered she was in Cambridge, where they no longer had a mystery shopper.

"Right," Julia said, consulting a piece of paper. "We have to ask for one burger with fries and one chickinlickin burger with no fries, a large Coke, a banana milk shake, and a strawberry slurry."

"Which is?"

"An ice cream. More or less."

"I'm not asking for a chickinlickin burger," Amelia said. "I wouldn't ask for a chickinlickin burger to save your life."

"Yes, you would. But you don't have to. I'm going to ask for it all. And it's not to take away. It's to sit in."

"That's not even grammatical," Amelia said.

"There's nothing grammatical about this meal. Grammar isn't the issue. We're looking for attitude. We're assessing quality of service."

"Can't I just have a coffee?"

"No." Julia started sneezing again. It was always embarrassing when Julia had a sneezing fit, one after the other, explosive, uncontrollable sounds, like a cannon firing. Amelia had once heard someone say that you could tell what a woman's orgasm would be like if you heard her sneeze. (As if you would want to know.) Just recollecting this thought made her uncomfortable. In case this was common knowledge, Amelia had made a point ever since then of never sneezing in public if she could help it. "For God's sake, take more Zyrtec," she said crossly to Julia.

Amelia was acutely uncomfortable in places like this. They made her feel old and elitist and she didn't want to feel either of those things, even if they were true. Julia, on the other hand, was a chameleon, adapting immediately to whatever was in hand, shouting her order to the spotted, callow youth behind the counter (did any of them wash their hands?) in a kind of Essex accent that she probably thought was plebeian but sounded completely at odds with the way she was dressed. The coat Julia was wearing was bizarre, like something from a Beardsley drawing. Amelia hadn't really looked at it properly until now. It was such a bright color that it would be impossible to lose sight of Julia, unless she were to lie down on a hill of green summer grass, which would have rendered her invisible. When Olivia became invisible she was wearing a cotton nightdress that had belonged to each of them in turn and had once been pink but by the time it reached Olivia was a washed-out kind of no color. Amelia could see her as clear as day, climbing into the tent in the washed-out nightdress, the pink rabbit slippers, one arm clamping Blue Mouse to her chest.

Julia's coat was too big for her. It flapped open and trailed on the floor as she maneuvered the tray of food through an impassable wad of foreign students. Amelia kept saying, "Excuse me, excuse me," in a pointed way but it was no good. The only way you could get them to move was by elbowing them roughly out of the way.

When they finally got a seat Julia commenced to tear into the burger with a kind of primitive gusto. "Mm, meat," she said to Amelia.