Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

After Rosemary died Victor employed a woman to cook and clean every day. She was called Mrs. Gordon and no one ever knew her first name. It was typical of Victor to employ someone who didn't like children and was a terrible cook. Sometimes Mrs. Gordon would make them the same tea every day for days on end – burned sausages, baked beans, and watery boiled potatoes were a particular favorite with her. Victor never seemed to notice. "Food is just fuel," he used to say. "It doesn't matter what it is." What an appalling childhood they'd had.

And really Jackson had been the last person she had wanted to see. Why was he sitting on the riverbank? Why him of all people? It wasn't fair. (Nothing was fair.) The gods were taunting her with him. She hadn't wanted to go to Grantchester, not at all, it was Julia who had persuaded her to go punting on the river, coaxing her as if she were a frail invalid or an agoraphobic. "Come on, Milly, you can't sit moping in front of the television all day." She wasn't moping. She was depressed, for God's sake. And she could be depressed if she wanted to be, she could sit and watch Dogs with Jobs on the National Geographic Channel and eat her way through a packet of chocolate bourbon biscuits if she felt like it because nobody cared about her. In fact, she could sit there all day, from Barney and Friends to Porn Babes Laid Bare, with hours of the Landscape Channel in between, and eat the contents of an entire biscuit factory until she was an obese, earthbound balloon whose dead and bloated body would have to be hydraulically lifted from the house by a fire crew because nobody cared. "I care, Milly." Yeah, right, as the slaters would say.

If Julia cared so much she wouldn't flirt with Jackson in front of her. She imagined them in the water together, Julia swimming like an otter around Jackson's naked body, her red lips closing around his – no! Don't think that, don't think that, don't think that.

One evening Amelia found the God Channel between Discovery Health and the Fashion Channel and discovered that there was a program called A Word from God that went on at midnight and she had actually watched it! To see if God had anything to say to her. But he didn't. Obviously.

Milly, do you want honey on your scones? And now she was talking about Rupert Brooke being naked. Couldn't she just shut up about naked people? Because actually it was quite nice being here, sitting in a deck chair in the orchard, soaking in the warmth of summer – why couldn't she be here on her own with Jackson, without Julia, why couldn't he be pouring her tea and buttering her scones, why did Julia have to be here with her breasts almost popping out of her bra when she leaned over him, drooling honey onto his scones.

And it was such a pretty bra, all white and lacy. Why had Amelia never had underwear like that? It wasn't fair.

She had made an utter fool of herself the other night ("Are you married, Mr. Brodie?"), like some ruined girl in a sentimental Victorian novel. She could tell by the way he looked at her that he thought she was delusional. (Was she?) She was so embarrassed that she couldn't look at him. Thank goodness she was wearing sun-glasses and a hat. (Did they make her look even the slightest bit mysterious and enigmatic?) And his lovely face was all beaten up (because, of course, she had looked at him), and she would have liked to comfort him, to take his face and hold it between her own breasts (which were just as big as Julia's, even if they didn't occupy the same horizontal plane). But that was never going to happen, was it?

She had seen them though. The others. Jackson and Julia thought it was just the man who was reading Principia Mathematica but she had seen the others, seven or eight them, all as equally naked as the Principia Mathematica man. A couple of them dived into the water. but the rest chatted to one another, reclining on the bank in various positions of repose as if they were enacting an ideal pastoral scene. Were they naturalists? Amelia had a sudden, unexpected memory of swimming in the river, her sun-warmed body moving smoothly through the cool, lucent water. She felt a sudden physical craving, like hunger. Why was she trapped in her clumsy, baggy body? Why couldn't she have the body of her childhood back? Why couldn't she have her childhood back?

Maybe they were situationists, creating their own bizarre piece of art, indifferent as to whether anyone viewed it or not. Or some kind of cult? A nudist coven? Most of them looked as if they were more than forty, and they had imperfect bodies – jodhpur thighs and drooping bottoms, gray pubic hair and moles and freckles and old operation scars and some of them were as wrinkled as a Neapolitan mastiff. They were tanned all over, so whatever it was they were doing they must be doing it frequently. And then they were gone, beyond a bend in the river, vanishing like a dream.

Amelia stomped off ahead of Julia because she was annoyed with her about everything but particularly for flirting so much with Jackson yesterday on the river. Julia ran to keep up but then they heard the chimes of an ice-cream van and Julia said, "Hark the chimes of midnight," and Amelia said, "Hardly an appropriate analogy," but Julia had responded as obediently as a Pavlovian dog to the sound and had trotted off to find ice cream.

Amelia strode on, across Christ's Pieces, past the Princess Diana Memorial Rose Garden, in whose direction she threw a contemptuous glance. What nonsense (dead or alive) the whole Princess Diana thing was. There was no memorial to Olivia anywhere on earth, neither a rose garden nor a bench, not even a headstone on an empty grave. And then, suddenly, out of the blue, Amelia was accosted by the homeless girl with the canary-colored hair. She grabbed Amelia by one arm and started pulling her back along the path and Amelia thought, I'm being mugged, how ludicrous, and tried to cry out but found she'd fallen into the voiceless state of nightmares. She struggled to look around, to see where Julia was – Julia would save her from the yellow-haired girl, Julia had always been a scrapper when they were children – but the girl was dragging her along the path as if she were a recalcitrant child. It was absurd because Amelia was at least twice the size of her captor, but the yellow-haired girl was unnervingly and uncharacteristically animated, besides which she was filthy and homeless and addicted to drugs and possibly retarded in some way and Amelia was frightened of her.

The yellow-haired girl's dog ran along beside them, jumping up and down like an excitable accomplice. If the girl would just loosen her grip on Amelia for a second she would give over her purse or her handbag, or whatever it was she wanted. The words "stand and deliver" suddenly came into Amelia's mind (the brain really did do the oddest things under stress). Highwayman girl – highwaygirl – you never heard of "highwaywomen," did you? Did they exist? Were Highwaymen like pirates and robber barons – more myth than fact? What was a robber baron? The highwaygirl wasn't saying, "Stand and deliver." She was saying what she usually said – "Help me."

No, she wasn't. She was saying, "Help him, help him," pointing at a fat man on a bench who was wheezing the same death wheeze as Victor except that Victor had suffocated passively and the fat man on the bench was fighting the air around him, as if he could scoop up oxygen with his hands. "Help him," the yellow-haired girl said again, but Amelia stood paralyzed, staring at the dying fat man. For the life of her she couldn't think of a single thing she could do that would be of any help to him.

Fortunately for the fat man, Julia appeared at that moment, triumphantly bearing aloft two cones like someone (an actress perhaps) carrying naming torches. When she saw what was happening she dropped the ice cream and ran toward the bench, pulling her Ventolin inhaler from her handbag and holding it to the fat man's gaping fish mouth. Then she produced her mobile and thrust it at Amelia, shouting, "Phone an ambulance!" as if she were back in Casualty, but Amelia couldn't even put out a hand to take the phone from her. "For fuck's sake, Milly," Julia snapped and gave the phone instead to the yellow-haired girl, who might be retarded and stupid and filthy and homeless and addicted to drugs, but at least, unlike Amelia, she was capable of dialing 999 and saving someone's life.