Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

And it was funny because she really had wanted to die, and now she really wanted to live. Just like that. Really and truly there wasn't much more she could ask for. She had a huge garden to look after, as many cats as she could handle, and she had experienced an orgasm. Was she really a lesbian? She still wanted Jackson. "Everyone's bi these days," Jean said nonchalantly. Amelia thought she might introduce Jean to Julia. She would have liked just once to see Julia look shocked ("Jean, this is Julia, my sister. Julia, this is Jean, my lover. Henry? Oh, everyone's bi, Julia, these days, didn't you know that?" Ha!) She must try to be nicer to Julia – she was her sister, after all.

They had been unsure what to do with Olivia. Neither of them wanted to cremate her, to lose what little they had, so hard-won after all this time. On the other hand, she had been buried in the dark alone for so long that it seemed wrong to put her back in the ground. If it hadn't been against all social practice (and probably illegal) Amelia would have kept her bones on display, made a kind of reliquary, a shrine. In the end they buried her, in a tiny white coffin, that was laid alongside Annabelle, the afterthought baby, on top of Rosemary's coffin in the family plot. Amelia and Julia both sobbed throughout the funeral. The local press had tried to take photographs ("Lost local tot finally laid to rest") and Jackson's big black friend had got very demonstrative with them. Amelia found Howell both terrifying and ravishing at the same time (thereby testifying to her bisexual nature, she supposed) and much more politically correct than Jean, of course. Jackson – utterly bizarre – was accompanied by the yellow-haired homeless girl, who was now pink haired and no longer homeless. "Why?" Amelia said to Jackson and Jackson said, "Why not?" and Amelia said, "Because –" but Julia came along and dragged her away.

Did it feel better to have found Olivia? To know that she had wandered off, wandered off while she was in her care? Amelia had been fast asleep and her sister had wandered off and died. Didn't that make it her fault? Then Jackson had taken her aside at the funeral and said, "I'm going to break the sanctity of the confessional," as if he were a priest. He would have made a very good priest. The thought of Jackson as a priest was very alluring, in a perverted kind of way. "I'm going to tell you what happened," he said, "and then you have to decide what you want to do about it." He didn't tell Julia, he told her. She finally became the keeper of a secret.

So Olivia would have a shrine, she would have a garden. And Amelia would fill Binky Rain's garden with roses, with Duchesse d'Angouleme and Felicite Parmentier, Eglantines and Gertrude Jekylls, the pale rosettes of the Boule de Neige and the fragrant peachy Perdita, for their own lost girl.

It was so hot. Too hot to sleep. The streetlight shone through the thin summer curtains like a secondary, sickly sun. She still had a headache, like a rope tied tightly round her skull. Perhaps this was what a crown of thorns felt like. God must be making her suffer for a reason. Was it a punishment? Had she done something bad? Something worse than usual? She'd slapped Julia earlier today, but she was always slapping Julia, and she'd put nettles in Amelia's bed yesterday but Amelia was being a prig and deserved it. And she'd been horrible to Mummy, but Mummy had been horrible to her.

Sylvia took three junior aspirins from a bottle in the bathroom cabinet. There were always a lot of bottles of medicine in the cabinet – some had been there forever. Their mother liked medicine. She liked medicine more than she liked them.

It said two o'clock on the illuminated dial of the big alarm clock beside her mother's bed. Sylvia swept her little Eveready torch over the bed. Their father was snoring like a pig. He was a pig, a big mathematical pig. He was wearing striped pajamas and her mother was wearing a cotton nightdress with a tired frill around the neck. Their parents had flung the covers off and were lying with their limbs askew, as if they had been dropped from a height onto the bed. If she was a murderer she could have killed them right there in their beds without them ever knowing what had happened to them – she could stab them or shoot them or chop them with an ax and there would be nothing they could do about it.

Sylvia liked wandering the house at night – it was her own secret life that no one else knew about. It made her powerful, as if she could see their secrets too. She wandered into Julia's room, no chance of disturbing her sleep. You could have pushed her out of bed onto the floor and jumped on Julia and she wouldn't have woken up. You could have put a pillow over her face and suffocated her and she would have known nothing about it. She was drenched in sweat, you couldn't even put your hand near her she was so hot, and you could hear her breath being squeezed in and out of her lungs.

Sylvia suddenly realized that Amelia's bed was empty. Where was she? Did she have a secret, wandering nightlife too? Not Amelia – she didn't have the initiative (Sylvia's new word) for a secret life. Was she sleeping with Olivia? Sylvia hurried to Olivia's room and found Olivia was gone from her bed too. Half of them missing – not taken by aliens, surely? If aliens existed – and Sylvia suspected they did – God must have created them, because God created everything, didn't he? Or had he not actually created everything, only the matter in our own galaxy? And if there were other worlds then they must have been created by other gods, alien gods. Was that a blasphemous thought?

There wasn't really anyone she could consult with over these knotty theological problems. She wasn't allowed to go to church, Daddy didn't believe in God (or aliens) and the religious education teacher at school had told her that she had to stop "bothering" her so much. Imagine Jesus saying, "Go away, don't bother me so much." God would probably send the religious education teacher straight to hell. It was very difficult when you had been brought up by an atheist who was a mathematical pig and a mother who couldn't care less and then you heard the voice of God. There was so much she didn't know – but then look at Joan of Arc: she was an ignorant French peasant and she'd managed, and Sylvia was neither ignorant nor a peasant. After God spoke to her Sylvia began to read the Bible, at night under the bedcovers by the light of her trusty Eveready torch. The Bible bore no relation to Sylvia's life in any way. That alone made it very attractive.

Sylvia tried to recollect bedtime the previous evening but she could only form a hazy memory. She had felt sick with the heat and the sun and had gone to bed before anyone else. The minute her back was turned had Mummy allowed Amelia and Olivia to sleep in the tent? Would she? Mummy had been so adamant all summer (for no good reason whatsoever) that they couldn't sleep outside.

Sylvia crept downstairs, avoiding the two steps that creaked. The back door was unlocked so that anyone could have walked right in and done the aforementioned murdering in the beds. It was unlocked, of course, because Amelia and Olivia were sleeping in the tent. It would be dawn soon, she could already hear a solitary bird greeting the morning. The grass on the lawn was wet. Where did all the dew come from when it was so hot and dry during the day? She must look it up in a book. She trod carefully across the lawn in case she stood on the soft, sluggy body of some other nocturnal creature leading its own secret life.

She lifted the flap of the tent. Yes, they were both there! What a cheek. Why should Amelia get the prize of sleeping all night in the tent, and not just sleeping in the tent but sleeping with Olivia and Rascal? It wasn't fair. Sylvia was the eldest, she should be in the tent. Rascal climbed out from beside Olivia and wagged his tail and licked Sylvia's nose.