Case Histories

"You were lying there most of the night, Jackson. You were lucky it was so warm. Imagine if it had been winter." She said this accusingly rather than compassionately, as if it were his own fault that he'd been mugged. Actually, he really would like to see the other guy because he was pretty sure he'd done some damage back Jackson had been lucky, his reactions had been fast and he had moved intuitively when he saw the figure coming at him, enough to deflect the blow so that it only gave him a concussion rather than smashing his skull like an egg. And he'd got one back in, nothing as considered as a good right hook or a roundhouse kick, or any of the more refined tactics and moves he'd been taught at one time or another. Instead it had been the automatic brute response of the hard man out on a drunken Saturday night, and he had nutted the guy full in the face. He could still hear the nose squelching as his forehead connected with the soft tissue. It hadn't done his concus-sion much good, of course, and he must have passed out at that point because the next thing he remembered was the milkman try -ing to rouse him sometime before dawn.

Josie drove him home. "They want someone to stay with me for twenty-four hours," he said apologetically to Josie, "in case I lapse back into unconsciousness."

"Well, you'll just have to find someone else," she said as she pulled up at the top of the lane, not even driving down it. He re-alized he was still waiting for sympathy that wasn't going to come. He climbed awkwardly out of the Volvo's passenger seat. All the bones in his skull seemed to have been rearranged like tectonic plates slipping and sliding against one another. Every movement reverberated around his skull. He felt seriously damaged.

Josie rolled down the window so she could speak to him. For a second he thought she was going to lean out and give him a wifely kiss farewell or offer to stay and look after him, but instead she said, "Perhaps it's time you got another next of kin, Jackson."

When he got home Jackson propped Blue Mouse on the mantel-piece. He'd known that sooner or later he would start to capitalize the damn thing. He put Victor's urn (he'd forgotten to return it to Amelia and Julia amid all the hysteria) between Blue Mouse and the only ornament that adorned the mantelpiece – a cheap pot-tery wishing well that had wishing you well from Scarborough written on the side of it. After the split the marital property had been divided up in a way that Josie considered fair – Jackson took his "crap" (Josie's term for his country CDs and the little souvenir wishing well) and Josie took everything else. Perhaps Blue Mouse would watch over him, seeing as there was no one else who would. Jackson swallowed two of the Co-codamol that the hospital had given him (although what he wanted was morphine) and lay down on the sofa and listened to Emmylou singing "From Boulder to Birmingham," but there was too much pain going on tor even Emmylou to heal.

Chapter 12. Caroline

Caroline glanced at her stepchildren in the backseat of the Discovery and thanked God they didn't go to her school. They attended some small private place in the middle of nowhere where they did a lot of outdoor games and spoke French all day Wednesday. In principle, of course, there was nothing wrong with that and it would have been interesting to have applied it to the curriculum of some of the inner-city schools she used to teach in. Only two years but it seemed like a lifetime ago. Yet another lifetime. How many times could you shed your skin? Hannah and James were making faces at her in the rearview mirror, so they were either unbelievably stupid and didn't think she could see or they just didn't care. Either way they were inbred. Rowena, Jonathan's mother, talked all the time about "breeding" because she had a stable of hunters (big, frightening brutes), but sometimes she seemed to be applying the concept to her own family, and Caroline wanted to point out to her that natural selection led to a vigorous species whereas "breeding" resulted in congenital defects, in pale, blond children who spoke French on Wednesdays and whose blank Mid-wich Cuckoo faces suggested latent idiocy. In Caroline's professional opinion.