Case Histories by Kate Atkinson Page A

could have made a fire with the logs, because it was still chilly in the evenings, and heat up the lasagna and settle down to watch some rubbish on the new color television they’d bought to replace the old black-and-white one. They would have gone to bed with full stomachs and had sex to make up and slept well so that they would be ready for another day of the same old, but what actually happened was that Keith made a move to put his arms round her and she spat at him, which was something new as well, and then she ran outside and got the ax from where it was stuck in a log beside the sawhorse, and then she ran back inside with it.
    I t was very cold, because of course the fire had never been lit. Michelle was sitting on the floor. The baby was asleep again. She looked exhausted, the way she did when she was left to cry herself to sleep, and every so often she gave a tiny little hiccup of grief. Michelle felt as if she had a stone inside her, something hard and unyielding that was making her feel sick. She hadn’t known it was possible to feel this bad. She looked at Keith and felt sorry for him. When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone’s head open it smelled like an abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you’d cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already in another life.
    If she could have had one wish—if her fairy godmother (noticeably absent from her life so far) were to suddenly appear in the cold living room of the cottage and offer to grant her whatever she wanted, Michelle knew exactly what she would ask for. She would ask to go back to the beginning of her life and start all over again.
    She wondered if she should get up from the floor and clean up a bit but she felt so tired that she thought she might just stay there and wait until the police came. She had all the time in the world now.

4
    Jackson
    J ackson switched on the radio and listened to the reassuring voice of Jenni Murray on
Woman’s Hour.
He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one because he had run out of matches, and faced with a choice between chain-smoking or abstinence, he’d taken the former option because it felt like there was enough abstinence in his life already. If he got the cigarette lighter on the dashboard fixed he wouldn’t have to smoke his way through the packet, but there were a lot of other things that needed fixing on the car and the cigarette lighter wasn’t high on the list. Jackson drove a black Alfa Romeo 156 that he’d bought secondhand four years ago for £13,000 and that was now probably worth less than the Emmelle Freedom mountain bike he had just given his daughter for her eighth birthday (on the proviso that she didn’t cycle on the road until she was at least forty).
    When he’d come home with the Alfa Romeo, his wife took one dismissive look at it and said, “You bought a policeman’s car then.” Four years ago Josie was driving her own Polo and was still married to Jackson, now she was living with a bearded English lecturer and driving his Volvo V70 with a CHILD ON BOARD sign in the rear window, testifying both to the permanence of their relationship and to the smug git’s need to show the world that he was protecting another man’s child. Jackson hated those signs.
    He was a born-again smoker, only starting up again six months ago. Jackson hadn’t touched a cigarette for fifteen years and now it was as if he’d never been off them. And for no reason. “Just like that,” he said, doing an unenthusiastic Tommy Cooper impression to his reflection in the rearview mirror. Of course it wasn’t “just like that.” Nothing ever was.
    She’d better hurry up. Her front door remained determinedly closed. It was made of cheap varnished wood, with a mock-Georgian fanlight, and was the spit of every other door on the estate in Cherry Hinton. Jackson could have kicked it in