Kate Atkinson: Case Histories

A woodcutting ax – how absurd was that? Everyone else had central heating or at least heating that came from somewhere that they didn't have to think about, they didn't have to go out in all weather and saw and chop wood to make a fire, they didn't have to wait for hours for the fire to heat a back boiler just so they could have hot water.

They didn't even have coal because the wood was free, from the estate. Woodcutting axes were things you had in fairy tales. Maybe that's what had happened to her, maybe she'd got stuck in some evil fairy tale, and until she'd picked every potato in the field or chopped down all the trees in the wood, she wouldn't be free. Unless she learned to spin time. Or her head exploded. So much toil and drudgery, it was like being a serf in the Middle Ages. It was feudal.

"Let me take the pushchair," Keith said. "You're going to give Tanya brain damage, carrying on like that." Michelle felt suddenly spent of all her fury, she was too tired all the time to sustain anything, even anger. They walked side by side now, at a slower pace, so that the baby finally fell asleep – which had been the purpose of the walk, a whole lifetime ago.

After a while, Keith put his arm round her shoulder and rubbed the top of her head with his chin and said, "I do love you, baby, you know that, don't you?" and it would have been quite a nice moment if it hadn't been raining and the bug-baby hadn't started crying again.

Michelle had been brought up in a chaotic house in Fen Ditton, one of the dreary satellite villages that the poor of Cambridge were banished to. Her father was a drinker and "a waste of space," according to Michelle's mother, but nonetheless she had stayed with him because she didn't want to be on her own, which Michelle and her sister were agreed was pathetic. Their mother drank too but at least she didn't get violent. Michelle's sister, Shirley, was fifteen and still at home and Michelle wished she could come and live with them but they didn't have the room. She missed Shirley, she really did. Shirley wanted to be a doctor, she was very clever, everyone said she was going "to make something of herself." They used to say that about Michelle, before Keith, before the bug was born. Now it seemed she had managed to make nothing of herself.

The cottage was tiny. Their bedroom was squashed into the eaves and the baby's bedroom was more like a cupboard, although it spent hardly any time in its room, in its cot, where it should be sleeping peacefully instead of always wanting to be picked up and lugged around. She hadn't read a book since the baby was born. She had tried, a novel propped awkwardly on a pillow while she breast-fed, but the baby wouldn't suck properly if it thought her attention was elsewhere. And then she had to give up the breastfeeding (thank goodness) because her milk ran out ("You have to try and relax and enjoy the baby," the midwife said, but what exactly was there to enjoy?), and maneuvering a bottle and a book and a baby would have needed three pairs of hands. Which would be another way of getting more time.

Michelle had spent a long time decorating the baby's room when she was pregnant. She'd painted the walls egg-yolk yellow and stenciled a frieze of ducklings and lambs and sewn cheerful yellow-and-white gingham curtains for the tiny window so that the whole place had been like a box of sunshine. Michelle had always done things properly. From an early age she'd been neat and tidy, and her mother used to laugh and say, "I don't know where she gets it from, not from me" (and how true that was). She'd been the same at school: her workbooks were never smudged, her illustrations and maps were always finely drawn, everything underlined and tabulated and indexed and she'd worked so hard and so methodically that even when the quality of her work hadn't been up to scratch her teachers gave her good marks. And she was supposed to go to university, to break free, and instead she'd been diverted, by someone with an HNC from agricultural college who worked on an estate farm and didn't have two beans to rub together.

She started going out with Keith Fletcher when she was sixteen and he was twenty-one and nearly everyone she knew had been jealous because he was older and had a motorbike and was just this incredibly sexy, handsome guy, with an earring and black hair and that foxy smile so that she used to think of him as a gypsy, which seemed very romantic but of course an earring and a foxy smile didn't make you into a gypsy. Didn't make you into anything in particular. And now he didn't even have the motorbike because he'd got rid of it and bought an old van instead.

And way back then, when all Michelle had to worry about was whether she could get an essay in on time or whether she had a decent pair of tights, back in that other time when she was young, she had thought that a country cottage was also romantic, and when she'd first seen the cottage she thought it was the quaintest, prettiest thing ever because it was so small and so old, more than two hundred years old, built of brick with patterns of flint bedded around the lintels and sills and it had once been – yes – the forester's cottage, and the estate had given it to them to live in when they got married. It was a "tied" cottage and Michelle thought that was funny (but not in a way that made her laugh) because it wasn't the cottage that was tied – it was Michelle.

She'd had a glimpse of a possible future – the pretty cottage, the garden full of flowers and vegetables, bread in the oven, a bowl of strawberries on the table, the happy baby hitched on her hip while she threw corn to the chickens. It would be like a Hardy novel, before it all goes wrong.

When she married, already six months' pregnant, she left school and quit her out-of-school-hours job in a cafe, and Keith said, "It's okay. After the baby comes you can still go to college and everything," although they both knew it would no longer be a good university but some crappy polytechnic in some crappy town (probably Cambridge, God help her), where she would end up doing an HND in business studies or hotel management, but nonetheless Michelle thought, "Yes, I will do that, of course I will," but in the meantime if she was going to be a wife and mother she was going to do it properly, which is why she spent all her days cleaning and scrubbing and baking and cooking, and assiduously reading housekeeping books, continually amazed at just how many skills and crafts could go into making "a lovely home" – the patchwork quilts you could sew, the curtains you could ruffle, the cucumbers you could pickle, the rhubarb you could make into jam, the icing-sugar decorations you could create for your Christmas cake – which you were supposed to make in September at the latest (for heaven's sake) – and at the same time remember to plant your indoor bulbs so they would also be ready for "the festive season," and it just went on and on, every month a list of tasks that would have defeated Hercules and that was without the everyday preparation of meals, which was doubly difficult now that the baby was weaned.

When her mother saw her pureeing cooked carrot and baking egg custards for the baby, she said, "For Christ's sake, Michelle, just give her a jar of Heinz baby food," but if she bought her jars of food she would eat them out of house and home, she was so greedy, fattening herself up like a pupa. She was always hungry, you could never give her enough. And anyway jars were cheating, you had to do things properly, although even Shirley, who was usually on her side, said, "Michelle, you don't have to put so much effort into everything." But she did because she was driven by something, only she didn't know what it was but she was sure that if one day she could get everything finished then she'd be free of whatever it was that was driving her. "You'll never get everything perfect, Michelle," Shirley said. "That's impossible." But it wasn't. Given enough time you could make anything perfect.