Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

"Are you sure?" Amelia said. She would have been sick if she'd eaten any of this food. "It's definitely meat," Julia said. "What animal it's from is another question. Or what part of the animal. We used to eat tail, after all. Oxen – what kind of a plural is that?"

"Old English. I think. There must be a whole generation of children thinking 'chicken' is spelled 'chickin.'"

"There are worse things."

"Such as?"

"Meteors."

"The possibility of a meteor colliding with the earth doesn't mean that we should embrace the Americanization of our language and culture."

"Oh, shut up, Milly, do."

Julia ate the chickinlickin burger, but the strawberry slurry defeated even her. Amelia sniffed the milk shake tentatively. It tasted completely artificial, as if it had been made in a laboratory. "This is made entirely of chemicals."

"Isn't everything?"

"Is it?"

"Come on," Julia said. "Enough of the chitchat, let's get to work." She took out a form and began to fill it in. "Did your server greet you? I'm sure he did."

"Why don't you wear your glasses? You can't see a thing without them."

"What did the server say?"

"You're so vain, Julia."

"I think he said, 'G'day there.'"

"I don't know, I wasn't paying attention. Julia?"

"They're all Australian. The entire British workforce is Australian."

"Julia. Julia, listen to me. When Victor went over your homework with you in his study, did he ever, you know, do anything? Did he ever interfere with you?"

"Who's doing their jobs in Australia, do you think? Come on, Milly, we have to get on with this. Now, Did your server smile? Did he? Gosh, I really can't remember."

She could tell Jackson thought she was foolish, a foolish woman. He had that masculine dourness about him that was so infuriating – the type that thought women were in thrall to their periods and chocolate and kittens (which was quite a good description of Julia) when Amelia really wasn't like that – well, perhaps the kittens. She wanted him to think better of her, she wanted him to like her. Oo-la-la, how serious you look, Mr. Brodie, like a Secret Service agent. Julia was so obvious. "Oo-la-la," for God's sake.

"Do you want tea?" she asked Julia when she floated into the kitchen, an empty glass in her hand.

"No. I'm going to have more gin," Julia said, searching through the kitchen cupboards for something to eat. Did Julia always drink this much? Did she drink on her own? Why was that worse than drinking with someone?

He liked Julia, of course. All men liked Julia which was no surprise since she offered herself on a plate to them. Julia had once told her that she loved giving a man oral sex (which was undoubtedly why she wore that red lipstick) and Amelia had a distressing vision of Julia on her knees in front of Jackson's – she wanted to say "cock" but the word wouldn't really form in her mind because it was too obscene, and "penis" always sounded so ridiculous. Amelia didn't want to be this prudish. She felt like someone who'd lost her way and ended up in the wrong generation. She would have been much more suited to a period with structure and rank and rules, where a button undone on a glove signaled licentiousness. She could have managed quite well living within those kinds of strictures. She had read too much James and Wharton. No one in Edith Wharton's world really wanted to be there but Amelia would have got along fine inside an Edith Wharton novel. In fact, she could have happily lived inside any nineteenth-century novel.

She could hear the bath running upstairs (it took forever) and she knew that Julia would take her gin up to the bathroom with her (and probably a joint as well) and lie there for hours. Amelia wondered what it felt like to be so self-indulgent. Julia tore a piece off a loaf of bread and stuffed it into her mouth. Why couldn't she use the knife and cut it? How did she manage to make eating a piece of bread look sexual? Amelia wished she hadn't had that vision of Julia giving Jackson – say it – a blow job. She'd never given anyone a blow job in her life, not that she would ever tell Julia that, as she would just start rattling on again about "Henry" and his sexual needs. Hah!

"Are you sure you don't want one?" Julia said, waving the gin bottle around, "it might help you to relax."

"I don't want to relax, thank you very much." How did this happen to her? How did she become this person she didn't want to be?

Amelia didn't understand how being "good at literature" had warped into teaching "communication skills." She'd applied to Oxbridge when she was in the sixth form at school. She wanted to show her teachers and Victor – mainly Victor – that she was clever enough. Her teachers had been dubious and hadn't helped her to prepare in any way so that she'd muddled her way through the entrance papers with their impenetrable questions about The Faerie Queene and The Dunciad – neither of which she'd read – and their absurd plots to test ingenuity in essay writing – "Imagine you are proposing the invention of the wheel" – fancy giving that to the slaters and brickies as an assignment, they would bring sex into it somehow, of course, they brought sex into everything. Amelia didn't know whether they did that because they knew it embarrassed her (it was ridiculous to be over forty and still blushing) or because they would do it anyway.

To Amelia's surprise, Newnham had given her an interview. It took her a long time to realize that Victor had probably pulled some strings, or the college, recognizing the name, had given her an interview as a courtesy. She'd wanted to go to Newnham as long as she could remember; when they were children they used to peer through the gates into the garden. She always imagined heaven looked like that. She didn't believe in heaven, of course. She didn't believe in religion. That didn't mean that she didn't want to believe in heaven.

Before her interview she imagined walking through those selfsame gardens, admiring the beautiful herbaceous border, discussing Middlemarch and War and Peace with an earnest new friend or being punted along the river by some handsome, no-good medical student, being someone that people wanted to know – "Oh, look, there's Amelia Land. Let's go and talk to her. She's so interesting" (or "such good fun," or "very pretty," or even "absolutely outrageous"), but it hadn't worked out like that at all. Her interview at Newnham was mortifying – they were kind, concerned even, treating her like she was slightly sick, or suffering a disability, but they asked her questions about works and authors she had never heard of. Worse than Spenser and Pope, now it was Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia and Ruskin's Unto This Last. It wasn't what Amelia thought of as literature. Literature was big books ( Middletnarch and War and Peace) that you could fall in love with and lose yourself in forever. And so she'd ended up at a far-flung, mediocre redbrick with no intellectual cachet but where at least they let you write long essays about your love affair with Middlemarch and War and Peace.

Julia came back into the kitchen and poured more gin. She was getting on Amelia's nerves. "I thought you were having a bath," she said irritably.

"I am. Who rattled your cage?"

"No one."

Amelia took her tea through to the living room and turned the television on. Sammy joined her on the sofa. There was some kind of celebrity reality show on. She didn't know who any of the "celebrities" were and there didn't seem to be anything real about the predicaments they found themselves in. She didn't want to go to bed, didn't want to sleep in Sylvia's cold bedroom that caught the light from the street lamp outside and had damp creeping down the walls from the roof. Maybe she could move into the guest bedroom? To Amelia's knowledge no one had ever slept in it. Would it call down a curse on her head from their mother? If their mother was a ghost, not that Amelia believed in ghosts, she thought the guest bedroom would be where she would take up residence. She imagined her lying on the narrow bed, its white coverlet now spotted with mold, lazing away her days with magazines and boxes of chocolates, discarding the wrappers on the floor now that she was no longer in thrall to housework. And what about Olivia's room, could Amelia bear to sleep in there? Could she lie in that small bed and stare at the peeling nursery-rhyme wallpaper and not feel her heart break?