Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  The building had been a dwelling house originally, five floors in all from damp kitchen cellar to servants’ cold attics, the rooms piled together rather haphazardly but nonetheless a decent residence for a well-to-do family. After the war it had been broken up into businesses and flats and now only fragmented and ghostly traces of the interior remained – a decorative plasterwork border of swags and urns above the desk where Cheryl worked and the egg-and-dart frieze beneath the cornice in the hall.

  The drawing room, oval-ended and neo-classical in its restraint, with a view of Parker’s Piece from the windows, was now the boardroom for Holroyd, Wyre and Stanton and in winter there was always a real coal fire burning in the grate of the marble fireplace because David Holroyd was an old-fashioned sort. Theo had stood in the boardroom many times, sharing a glass of wine with his partners and associates, all of them full of the provincial bonhomie of successful professionals. And, of course, Jennifer and Laura had been in and out of that place all the time, ever since they were little, but it was still odd to think of her in there today, filing and fetching and carrying, and he knew how polite and willing she would be and felt proud because everyone in the office would be saying to each other, ‘Laura’s a lovely girl, isn’t she?’ the way that people always did.

  Sheep on the line. The ticket inspector did not elucidate whether it was a flock or a few stragglers. Enough of them anyway for everyone on the train to Cambridge to feel the bump and judder. The train had been stopped for ten minutes before the conductor made his way through the four carriages and informed them about the sheep, quashing speculation about cows, horses and suicidal humans. After half an hour the train was still stationary, so Theo supposed it must have been a flock rather than some solitary stray. He wanted to get back to Cambridge and take Laura out for lunch but it was ‘in the lap of the gods’, as the conductor put it. Theo wondered why it was the lap of the gods and not the hands of the gods.

  It was stifling in the train and someone, the guard presumably, opened the doors and people began to clamber out. Theo was sure it was against railway bylaws, but there was a narrow verge and an embankment at the side of the train so it seemed quite safe – there was no way another train could plough into them in the way that theirs had into the sheep. Theo alighted cautiously, and with difficulty, pleased with himself for being so adventurous. He was curious to see what sheep looked like after a close encounter with a train. Walking along the track he soon discovered the answer to his question – bits of sheep, like joints of meat with wool attached, had been flung about everywhere, as if they’d been torn apart in a bloody massacre by a pack of wolves. Theo was surprised how strong his stomach was for this carnage, but then he had always regarded lawyers as being rather like policemen and nurses in their ability to rise above the mess and tragedy of everyday life and deal with it in a disinterested way. Theo had a strange sense of triumph: he had travelled on a train that had almost been derailed but no harm had come. The odds surely dictated that his chances (and therefore those of people close to him) of being in another train accident had lessened.

  The driver was standing next to his engine, looking baffled, and Theo asked him if he was OK and he said, by way of answer, ‘I saw just the one and I thought, well, I probably don’t need to brake for that and then’– he made a dramatic gesture with his arms as if trying to re-enact a flock of disintegrating sheep – ‘and then the world went white.’

  Theo was so taken by this image that it occupied his mind for the rest of the journey, which recommenced once they had transferred to another train. He imagined describing the scene to Laura, imagined her reaction – horrified and yet darkly amused. When he finally got off the train he took a cab halfway but then got out and walked. It would make him even later but Laura would be pleased.

  Theo rested for a minute on the pavement before tackling the steep stairs up to the first-floor office of Holroyd, Wyre and Stanton. The GP was right, Laura was right, he had to lose some weight. The front door was propped open with a cast-iron doorstop. Every time Theo entered the building he admired this door to the office. It was painted a glossy dark green, and the handsome brass furniture – letterbox, keyhole, lion-headed doorknocker – was the original fittings. The brass plaque on the door, polished every morning by the office cleaner, announced ‘Holroyd, Wyre and Stanton – Solicitors and Attorneys-at-Law’. Theo took a deep breath and set off up the stairs.

  The inner door that led into the reception area was also – unusually – open and as soon as Theo walked in it was obvious that something was terribly wrong. Jean Stanton’s secretary was cowering on the floor, a trail of vomit on her clothes. The receptionist, Moira, was on the phone, dictating the address of the firm with a kind of hysterical patience. She had blood in her hair and on her face and Theo thought she was injured but when he went to help her she waved him away with her hand and he thought she was dismissing him until he realized she was trying to send him in the direction of the boardroom.

  Afterwards, again and again, Theo pieced together the events that preceded this moment.

  Laura had just finished photocopying a land registry form when a man came into reception, a man so nondescript that afterwards not one single person in Holroyd, Wyre and Stanton could give a half-decent description of his features and the only thing they could remember about him was that he was wearing a yellow golfing sweater.

  The man seemed confused and disorientated and when Moira, the receptionist, said, ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said, ‘Mr Wyre, where is he?’ in a high, strained voice, and Moira, alarmed by the man’s manner, said, ‘I’m afraid he’s late back from court. Do you have an appointment? Can I help with anything?’ but the man took off down the corridor, running in an odd way, like a child, and charged into the boardroom where the partners were having a lunchtime meeting, although not Theo, who was still on his way back from the station (he had forgotten about the meeting).

  Laura had been sent out earlier to buy sandwiches for the meeting – prawn cocktail, cheese and coleslaw, roast beef, tuna and sweetcorn, and a chicken and salad (no mayonnaise) for her father because he really needed to think more about his weight, and she had thought affectionately what a dope he was because he’d forgotten his meeting when he’d suggested lunch to her this morning. The sandwiches and coffee and notebooks were all laid out on the mahogany boardroom table (oval to match the shape of the room) but no one had sat down at the table yet. David Holroyd was standing in front of the fireplace, telling one of the junior partners about the ‘bloody fantastic’ holiday he’d just returned from, when the stranger rushed into the room and from somewhere, probably from beneath the yellow golfing sweater he was wearing but no one was sure, pulled out a bowie knife and sliced through the dark worsted of David Holroyd’s Austin Reed suit, the white poplin of his Charles Tyrwhitt shirt, the tropical tan on the skin of his left arm and, finally, the artery in the arm. And Laura, who liked apricot yogurt and drank tea but not coffee and who had size six feet and who loved horses, who preferred plain chocolate to milk chocolate and had spent five years learning classical guitar but never played any more and who was still sad that their pet dog, Poppy, had been run over the previous summer, Laura who was Theo’s child and his best friend, dropped the land registry form and ran into the boardroom after the man – perhaps because she had a Red Cross certificate or because she had done a self-defence course at sixth-form college, or perhaps it was from simple curiosity or instinct, it was impossible to know what she was thinking as she ran into the boardroom where the man, this complete stranger, had spun on the balls of his feet with the agility and grace of a dancer, his hand still moving in the same arc that had cut through David Holroyd’s arm and which now scythed through Laura’s neck, carving through her carotid artery, sending a great plume of her precious, beautiful blood across the room.

  In a dream, in slow underwater motion, Theo hurried down the corridor and into the boardroom. He noticed coffee cups and sandwiches on the mahogany table and rea
lized he had forgotten about the meeting. There was blood spattered across the cream walls and David Holroyd was slumped like a bloody sack near the marble fireplace, while nearer to the door his own child lay on the floor, frothy blood bubbling gently from the gash in her throat. Theo was aware of someone sobbing uncontrollably, and someone else saying, ‘Why doesn’t the ambulance get here?’

  Theo dropped to his knees next to Laura. Cheryl, his secretary, was kneeling over her, incongruous in skirt and bra. She had removed her blouse and had tried to staunch the blood from Laura’s wound. She was still holding the blouse, now a wet bloody rag, and her bare skin was slick with blood that had run in rivulets down her cleavage. The word ‘bloodbath’ came into Theo’s mind. There was blood everywhere, Theo was kneeling in a pool of it, the carpet was soggy with it. Laura’s blood. Which was his blood also. Her white blouse was now dyed crimson. He could smell the blood – copper and salt and the rankness of a butcher’s shop. Theo wondered if there was a way of slitting open his own veins and arteries and siphoning off his blood and giving it to his daughter. And all the time Theo was praying, ‘Please God let her be all right,’ like a terrible unstoppable mantra and he felt that if he could keep on saying those words he could prevent this thing happening.

  Laura’s eyes were half open and Theo wasn’t sure whether she was dead or not. He remembered last year, comforting Poppy at the side of the road after she’d been knocked down by a car outside the house. The dog was small, a terrier, and he had held it in his arms while it died and had seen the same dull look in its eyes as it moved into an unreachable, inescapable place. He pressed his hand against Laura’s wound but there wasn’t really any blood to stem any more so now instead he held her hand, a hand that was soft and warm, and he bent close to her face and murmured in her ear, ‘Everything’s all right, Laura,’ and then he cradled her head in his lap and stroked her blood-matted hair and his secretary, Cheryl, wept and said, ‘God loves you, Laura.’

  At the moment he stopped praying, at the moment he knew she was dead, Theo understood it would never cease to happen. Every moment Laura would be standing by the photocopier, negotiating the complexities of the land registry form, wondering when her father would be back or whether she could take a lunch break because she was starving. Maybe regretting taking this job because it was actually quite boring but she’d done it to please her father, because she liked to make him happy, because she loved him. Laura, who slept curled up in a ball, who liked hot buttered toast and all the Indiana Jones movies but not Star Wars, whose first word was ‘dog’, who liked the rain but not the wind, who planned to have three children, Laura who would be forever standing by the photocopier in the office in Parkside waiting for the stranger and his knife, waiting for the world to go white.

  3

  Case History No. 3 1979

  Everything from Duty, Nothing from Love

  MICHELLE HAD BEEN SETTING HER ALARM FIVE MINUTES earlier every day. This morning it had gone off at twenty past five. Tomorrow it would be quarter past. She could see that she would have to call a halt eventually or she would be getting up before she went to bed. But not yet. She was only one step ahead of the baby who woke up with the birds and the dawn, and the birds and the dawn were coming earlier every day at this time of year.

  She needed more time, there simply wasn’t enough of it. This was the only way she could think of making it. Not making it exactly, if you could make it from scratch – brand new time – that would be fantastic. Michelle tried to think of ways in which you might manufacture something so abstract but all she could think of were examples from her own small-scale domestic economy – knitting and sewing and baking. Imagine if you could knit time, Christ, her needles would be clacking day and night. And what an advantage she would have over her friends, none of whom knew how to knit (or bake or sew), but then none of them had saddled themselves at the age of eighteen with a husband and a baby and a bloody cottage in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on all sides by nothing but horizon, so that it felt as if the sky was a huge stone that was pressing you into the ground. No, not saddled, she loved them. She really did.

  And anyway, where would she ever find the time to make time? There was no time. That was the whole point. What if she stopped going to bed altogether? She could shut herself away like someone in a fairy story, in a room at the top of a tower, and spin time like gold. She could stay awake until there was so much time, lying in golden hanks at her feet, that it would last her the rest of her life and she would never run out again. The idea of living in a tower, cut off from everyone and everything, sounded like heaven to Michelle.

  The baby was a parcel delivered to the wrong address, with no way of sending it back or getting it redelivered. (‘Call her by her name,’ Keith said to her all the time, ‘call her Tanya, not “it”.’) Michelle had only just left her own (unsatisfactory) childhood behind so how was she supposed to be in charge of someone else’s? She knew the term was ‘bonding’, it was in a baby book she had (How to Have a Happy Baby, hah!). She hadn’t bonded with the baby, instead she was shackled by it.

  All the people who had told her that having a termination and finishing her A levels was the sensible thing for her to do had been right after all. And if she could put the clock back – which would be another way of getting some time – then that’s exactly what she would do. She would be a student somewhere now if she hadn’t had the baby, she’d be drinking like a fish and taking drugs and handing in mediocre essays on the 1832 Reform Act or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall instead of sprinkling coriander seeds on a tray of compost while listening to the baby cry wherever it was she had left it when she couldn’t stand the noise any more. The bedroom, probably, so that even now the baby was wriggling its fat caterpillar body towards the edge of the bed or chewing on an electrical flex or suffocating itself with a pillow.

  Michelle put the tray of seeds on the kitchen windowsill where she would be able to watch them push their way into the light. From the window she could see the beginnings of her vegetable garden, neat drills of turned soil and geometric shapes marked out with pea sticks and string. Keith didn’t understand why she had started a vegetable garden. ‘We’re living on a bloody farm,’ he said, stretching his arms out expansively so he looked like a scarecrow – they were in a field at the time – ‘the place is full of vegetables. We’re allowed to take whatever we want.’ No, actually, the place was full of potatoes, which was different. And swede and kale – cattle food, peasant food. Michelle wanted courgettes and spinach and beetroot. And coriander. And she wanted flowers, beautiful scented flowers, roses and honeysuckle and lilies – pure white lilies, the kind you would give to a bride or a corpse.

  The field in which they were conducting this argument was empty of everything except for hummocky, uneven grass over which Michelle was striding furiously, bumping the pushchair along in front of her so that the baby bounced around inside like a crash-test dummy. Anger was making her walk so fast that Keith, despite his long legs, was having to trot to keep up with her.

  ‘What’s wrong with potatoes?’ he asked and Michelle said, except that she was shouting now, ‘It’s March, there aren’t any bloody potatoes, there isn’t anything, there’s nothing, nothing but mud, mud everywhere and rain, it’s like the bloody Somme!’ and he said, ‘Don’t be such a stupid bloody drama queen!’ And she thought how ridiculous his country accent sounded, like a yokel in a television comedy, a bloody potato-eating peasant. Michelle had got rid of her accent, listening to how middle-class people spoke on the television, how her teachers spoke at school, until she sounded so flat that she could have been from anywhere. She started walking even faster until she was almost jogging.

  ‘And anyway,’ he shouted after her, ‘maybe I don’t want to eat bloody coriander!’ She came to an abrupt halt, whiplashing the baby in the pushchair. She turned round and said, ‘Well, maybe I do,’ and glared at him for the longest time, wishing she had the woodcutting axe with her, the axe that would split hi
s skull like a melon or a pumpkin cleaved in two. No, not a melon, melons were sweet and exotic, not pedestrian enough for his head, and pumpkins were vegetables that belonged in fairy tales. A turnip. Turnips were brutal, yokel vegetables. And he would drop like a headless scarecrow, right here in the field, and sink into the soil and never be seen again, and she could give the baby to her mother and ruin another life.

  Or perhaps – nightmare idea – he would grow and divide and multiply out of sight, in the soil, and come the summer he would suddenly shoot up, a hundred Keiths, a thousand Keiths, nodding and swaying like sunflowers in the field.

  A woodcutting axe – 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 weathers and saw and chop wood to make a fire, and 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 story 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.