The Casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy - By J. K. Rowling

Sunday


Barry Fairbrother did not want to go out to dinner. He had endured a thumping headache for most of the weekend and was struggling to make a deadline for the local newspaper.

However, his wife had been a little stiff and uncommunicative over lunch, and Barry deduced that his anniversary card had not mitigated the crime of shutting himself away in the study all morning. It did not help that he had been writing about Krystal, whom Mary disliked, although she pretended otherwise.

‘Mary, I want to take you out to dinner,’ he had lied, to break the frost. ‘Nineteen years, kids! Nineteen years, and your mother’s never looked lovelier.’

Mary had softened and smiled, so Barry had telephoned the golf club, because it was nearby and they were sure of getting a table. He tried to give his wife pleasure in little ways, because he had come to realize, after nearly two decades together, how often he disappointed her in the big things. It was never intentional. They simply had very different notions of what ought to take up most space in life.

Barry and Mary’s four children were past the age of needing a babysitter. They were watching television when he said goodbye to them for the last time, and only Declan, the youngest, turned to look at him, and raised his hand in farewell.

Barry’s headache continued to thump behind his ear as he reversed out of the drive and set off through the pretty little town of Pagford, where they had lived as long as they had been married. They drove down Church Row, the steeply sloping street where the most expensive houses stood in all their Victorian extravagance and solidity, around the corner by the mock-Gothic church, where he had once watched his twin girls perform Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and across the Square, where they had a clear view of the dark skeleton of the ruined abbey that dominated the town’s skyline, set high on a hill, melding with the violet sky.

All Barry could think of as he twiddled the steering wheel, navigating the familiar turns, were the mistakes he was sure he had made, rushing to finish the article he had just emailed to the Yarvil and District Gazette. Garrulous and engaging in person, he found it difficult to carry his personality onto paper.

The golf club lay a mere four minutes away from the Square, a little beyond the point where the town petered out in a final wheeze of old cottages. Barry parked the people-carrier outside the club restaurant, the Birdie, and stood for a moment beside the car, while Mary reapplied her lipstick. The cool evening air was pleasant on his face. As he watched the contours of the golf course disintegrating into the dusk, Barry wondered why he kept up his membership. He was a bad golfer: his swing was erratic and his handicap was high. He had so many other calls on his time. His head throbbed worse than ever.

Mary switched off the mirror light and closed the passenger side door. Barry pressed the auto-lock on the key-ring in his hand; his wife’s high heels clacked on the tarmac, the car’s locking system beeped, and Barry wondered whether his nausea might abate once he had eaten.

Then pain such as he had never experienced sliced through his brain like a demolition ball. He barely noticed the smarting of his knees as they smacked onto the cold tarmac; his skull was awash with fire and blood; the agony was excruciating beyond endurance, except that endure it he must, for oblivion was still a minute away.

Mary screamed – and kept screaming. Several men came running from the bar. One of them sprinted back inside the building to see whether either of the club’s retired doctors was present. A married couple, acquaintances of Barry and Mary’s, heard the commotion from the restaurant, abandoned their starters and hurried outside to see what they could do. The husband called 999 on his mobile.

The ambulance had to come from the neighbouring city of Yarvil, and it took twenty-five minutes to reach them. By the time the pulsing blue light slid over the scene, Barry was lying motionless and unresponsive on the ground in a pool of his own vomit; Mary was crouching beside him, the knees of her tights ripped, clutching his hand, sobbing and whispering his name.





Monday





I


‘Brace yourself,’ said Miles Mollison, standing in the kitchen of one of the big houses in Church Row.

He had waited until half-past six in the morning to make the call. It had been a bad night, full of long stretches of wakefulness punctuated by snatches of restless sleep. At four in the morning, he had realized that his wife was awake too, and they had talked quietly for a while in the darkness. Even as they discussed what they had been forced to witness, each trying to drive out vague feelings of fright and shock, feathery little ripples of excitement had tickled Miles’ insides at the thought of delivering the news to his father. He had intended to wait until seven, but fear that somebody else might beat him to it had propelled him to the telephone early.

‘What’s happened?’ boomed Howard’s voice, with a slightly tinny edge; Miles had put him on speakerphone for Samantha’s benefit. Mahogany brown in her pale pink dressing gown, she had taken advantage of their early waking to apply another handful of Self-Sun to her fading natural tan. The kitchen was full of the mingled smells of instant coffee and synthetic coconut.

‘Fairbrother’s dead. Collapsed at the golf club last night. Sam and I were having dinner at the Birdie.’

‘Fairbrother’s dead?’ roared Howard.

The inflection implied that he had been expecting some dramatic change in the status of Barry Fairbrother, but that even he had not anticipated actual death.

‘Collapsed in the car park,’ repeated Miles.

‘Good God,’ said Howard. ‘He wasn’t much past forty, was he? Good God.’

Miles and Samantha listened to Howard breathing like a blown horse. He was always short of breath in the mornings.

‘What was it? Heart?’

‘Something in his brain, they think. We went with Mary to the hospital and—’

But Howard was not paying attention. Miles and Samantha heard him speaking away from his mouthpiece.

‘Barry Fairbrother! Dead! It’s Miles!’

‘Sam and I went in the ambulance,’ Miles enunciated clearly. ‘With Mary and the body.’

Samantha noticed how Miles’ second version emphasized what you might call the more commercial aspect of the story. Samantha did not blame him. Their reward for enduring the awful experience was the right to tell people about it. She did not think she would ever forget it: Mary wailing; Barry’s eyes still half open above the muzzle-like mask; she and Miles trying to read the paramedic’s expression; the cramped jolting; the dark windows; the terror.

‘Good God,’ said Howard for the third time, ignoring Shirley’s soft background questioning, his attention all Miles’. ‘He just dropped down dead in the car park?’

‘Yep,’ said Miles. ‘Moment I saw him it was pretty obvious there was nothing to be done.’

It was his first lie, and he turned his eyes away from his wife as he told it. She remembered his big protective arm around Mary’s shaking shoulders: He’ll be OK … he’ll be OK …

But after all, thought Samantha, giving Miles his due, how were you supposed to know one way or the other, when they were strapping on masks and shoving in needles? It had seemed as though they were trying to save Barry, and none of them had known for certain that it was no good until the young doctor had walked towards Mary at the hospital. Samantha could still see, with awful clarity, Mary’s naked, petrified face, and the expression of the bespectacled, sleek-haired young woman in the white coat: composed, yet a little wary … they showed that sort of thing on television dramas all the time, but when it actually happened …

‘Not at all,’ Miles was saying. ‘Gavin was only playing squash with him on Thursday.’

‘And he seemed all right then?’

‘Oh yeah. Thrashed Gavin.’

‘Good God. Just goes to show you, doesn’t it? Just goes to show. Hang on, Mum wants a word.’

A clunk and a clatter, and Shirley’s soft voice came on the line.

‘What a dreadful shock, Miles,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

Samantha took a clumsy mouthful of coffee; it trickled from the corners of her mouth down the sides of her chin, and she mopped her face and chest with her sleeve. Miles had adopted the voice he often used when speaking to his mother: deeper than usual, a take-command nothing-fazes-me voice, punchy and no-nonsense. Sometimes, especially when drunk, Samantha would imitate Miles and Shirley’s conversations. ‘Not to worry, Mummy. Miles here. Your little soldier.’ ‘Darling, you are wonderful: so big and brave and clever.’ Once or twice, lately, Samantha had done this in front of other people, leaving Miles cross and defensive, though pretending to laugh. There had been a row, last time, in the car going home.

‘You went all the way to the hospital with her?’ Shirley was saying from the speakerphone.

No, thought Samantha, we got bored halfway there and asked to be let out.

‘Least we could do. Wish we could have done more.’

Samantha got up and walked over to the toaster.

‘I’m sure Mary was very grateful,’ said Shirley. Samantha crashed the lid of the bread bin and rammed four pieces of bread into the slots. Miles’ voice became more natural.

‘Yeah, well, once the doctors had told – confirmed that he was dead, Mary wanted Colin and Tessa Wall. Sam phoned them, we waited until they arrived and then we left.’

‘Well, it was very lucky for Mary that you were there,’ said Shirley. ‘Dad wants another word, Miles, I’ll put him on. Speak later.’

‘“Speak later,”’ Samantha mouthed at the kettle, waggling her head. Her distorted reflection was puffy after their sleepless night, her chestnut-brown eyes bloodshot. In her haste to witness the telling of Howard, Samantha had carelessly rubbed fake tanning lotion into the rims.

‘Why don’t you and Sam come over this evening?’ Howard was booming. ‘No, hang on – Mum’s reminded me we’re playing bridge with the Bulgens. Come over tomorrow. For dinner. ’Bout seven.’

‘Maybe,’ said Miles, glancing at Samantha. ‘I’ll have to see what Sam’s got on.’

She did not indicate whether or not she wanted to go. A strange sense of anti-climax filled the kitchen as Miles hung up.

‘They can’t believe it,’ he said, as if she hadn’t heard everything.

They ate their toast and drank fresh mugs of coffee in silence. Some of Samantha’s irritability lifted as she chewed. She remembered how she had woken with a jerk in their dark bedroom in the early hours, and had been absurdly relieved and grateful to feel Miles beside her, big and paunchy, smelling of vetiver and old sweat. Then she imagined telling customers at the shop about how a man had dropped dead in front of her, and about the mercy dash to hospital. She thought of ways to describe various aspects of the journey, and of the climactic scene with the doctor. The youth of that self-possessed woman had made the whole thing seem worse. They ought to give the job of breaking the news to someone older. Then, with a further lift of her spirits, she recollected that she had an appointment with the Champêtre sales rep tomorrow; he had been pleasantly flirty on the telephone.

‘I’d better get moving,’ said Miles, and he drained his coffee mug, his eyes on the brightening sky beyond the window. He heaved a deep sigh and patted his wife on her shoulder as he passed on the way to the dishwasher with his empty plate and mug.

‘Christ, it puts everything in perspective, though, doesn’t it, eh?’

Shaking his close-cropped, greying head, he left the kitchen.

Samantha sometimes found Miles absurd and, increasingly, dull. Every now and then, though, she enjoyed his pomposity in precisely the same spirit as she liked, on formal occasions, to wear a hat. It was appropriate, after all, to be solemn and a little worthy this morning. She finished her toast and cleared away her breakfast things, mentally refining the story she planned to tell her assistant.





II


‘Barry Fairbrother’s dead,’ panted Ruth Price.

She had almost run up the chilly garden path so as to have a few more minutes with her husband before he left for work. She didn’t stop in the porch to take off her coat but, still muffled and gloved, burst into the kitchen where Simon and their teenage sons were eating breakfast.

Her husband froze, a piece of toast halfway to his lips, then lowered it with theatrical slowness. The two boys, both in school uniform, looked from one parent to the other, mildly interested.

‘An aneurysm, they think,’ said Ruth, still a little breathless as she tweaked off her gloves finger by finger, unwinding her scarf and unbuttoning her coat. A thin dark woman with heavy, mournful eyes, the stark blue nurse’s uniform suited her. ‘He collapsed at the golf club – Sam and Miles Mollison brought him in – and then Colin and Tessa Wall came …’

She darted out to the porch to hang up her things, and was back in time to answer Simon’s shouted question.

‘What’s ananeurysm?’

‘An. Aneurysm. A burst artery in the brain.’

She flitted over to the kettle, switched it on, then began to sweep crumbs from the work surface around the toaster, talking all the while.

‘He’ll have had a massive cerebral haemorrhage. His poor, poor wife … she’s absolutely devastated …’

Momentarily stricken, Ruth gazed out of her kitchen window over the crisp whiteness of her frost-crusted lawn, at the abbey across the valley, stark and skeletal against the pale pink and grey sky, and the panoramic view that was the glory of Hilltop House. Pagford, which by night was no more than a cluster of twinkling lights in a dark hollow far below, was emerging into chilly sunlight. Ruth saw none of it: her mind was still at the hospital, watching Mary emerge from the room where Barry lay, all futile aids to life removed. Ruth Price’s pity flowed most freely and sincerely for those whom she believed to be like herself. ‘No, no, no, no,’ Mary had moaned, and that instinctive denial had reverberated inside Ruth, because she had been afforded a glimpse of herself in an identical situation …

Hardly able to bear the thought, she turned to look at Simon. His light-brown hair was still thick, his frame was almost as wiry as it had been in his twenties and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes were merely attractive, but Ruth’s return to nursing after a long break had confronted her anew with the million and one ways the human body could malfunction. She had had more detachment when she was young; now she realized how lucky they all were to be alive.

‘Couldn’t they do anything for him?’ asked Simon. ‘Couldn’t they plug it up?’

He sounded frustrated, as though the medical profession had, yet again, bungled the business by refusing to do the simple and obvious thing.

Andrew thrilled with savage pleasure. He had noticed lately that his father had developed a habit of countering his mother’s use of medical terms with crude, ignorant suggestions. Cerebral haemorrhage. Plug it up. His mother didn’t realize what his father was up to. She never did. Andrew ate his Weetabix and burned with hatred.

‘It was too late to do anything by the time they got him out to us,’ said Ruth, dropping teabags into the pot. ‘He died in the ambulance, right before they arrived.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Simon. ‘What was he, forty?’

But Ruth was distracted.

‘Paul, your hair’s completely matted at the back. Have you brushed it at all?’

She pulled a hairbrush from her handbag and pushed it into her younger son’s hand.

‘No warning signs or anything?’ asked Simon, as Paul dragged the brush through the thick mop of his hair.

‘He’d had a bad headache for a couple of days, apparently.’

‘Ah,’ said Simon, chewing toast. ‘And he ignored it?’

‘Oh, yes, he didn’t think anything of it.’

Simon swallowed.

‘Goes to show, doesn’t it?’ he said portentously. ‘Got to watch yourself.’

That’s wise, thought Andrew, with furious contempt; that’s profound. So it was Barry Fairbrother’s own fault his brain had burst open. You self-satisfied f*cker, Andrew told his father, loudly, inside his own head.

Simon pointed his knife at his elder son and said, ‘Oh, and by the way. He’s going to be getting a job. Old Pizza Face there.’

Startled, Ruth turned from her husband to her son. Andrew’s acne stood out, livid and shiny, from his empurpling cheek, as he stared down into his bowl of beige mush.

‘Yeah,’ said Simon. ‘Lazy little shit’s going to start earning some money. If he wants to smoke, he can pay for it out of his own wages. No more pocket money.’

‘Andrew!’ wailed Ruth. ‘You haven’t been—?’

‘Oh, yes, he has. I caught him in the woodshed,’ said Simon, his expression a distillation of spite.

‘Andrew!’

‘No more money from us. You want fags, you buy ’em,’ said Simon.

‘But we said,’ whimpered Ruth, ‘we said, with his exams coming—’

‘Judging by the way he f*cked up his mocks, we’ll be lucky if he gets any qualifications. He can get himself out to McDonald’s early, get some experience,’ said Simon, standing up and pushing in his chair, relishing the sight of Andrew’s hanging head, the dark pimpled edge of his face. ‘Because we’re not supporting you through any resits, pal. It’s now or never.’

‘Oh, Simon,’ said Ruth reproachfully.

‘What?’

Simon took two stamping steps towards his wife. Ruth shrank back against the sink. The pink plastic brush fell out of Paul’s hand.

‘I’m not going to fund the little f*cker’s filthy habit! F*cking cheek of him, puffing away in my f*cking shed!’

Simon hit himself on the chest on the word ‘my’; the dull thunk made Ruth wince.

‘I was bringing home a salary when I was that spotty little shit’s age. If he wants fags, he can pay for them himself, all right? All right?’

He had thrust his face to within six inches of Ruth’s.

‘Yes, Simon,’ she said very quietly.

Andrew’s bowels seemed to have become liquid. He had made a vow to himself not ten days previously: had the moment arrived so soon? But his father stepped away from his mother and marched out of the kitchen towards the porch. Ruth, Andrew and Paul remained quite still; they might have promised not to move in his absence.

‘Did you fill up the tank?’ Simon shouted, as he always did when she had been working a night shift.

‘Yes,’ Ruth called back, striving for brightness, for normality.

The front door rattled and slammed.

Ruth busied herself with the teapot, waiting for the billowing atmosphere to shrink back to its usual proportions. Only when Andrew was about to leave the room to clean his teeth did she speak.

‘He worries about you, Andrew. About your health.’

Like f*ck he does, the cunt.

Inside his head, Andrew matched Simon obscenity for obscenity. Inside his head, he could take Simon in a fair fight.

Aloud, to his mother, he said, ‘Yeah. Right.’





III


Evertree Crescent was a sickle moon of 1930s bungalows, which lay two minutes from Pagford’s main square. In number thirty-six, a house tenanted longer than any other in the street, Shirley Mollison sat, propped up against her pillows, sipping the tea that her husband had brought her. The reflection facing her in the mirrored doors of the built-in wardrobe had a misty quality, due partly to the fact that she was not wearing glasses, and partly to the soft glow cast over the room by her rose-patterned curtains. In this flattering, hazy light, the dimpled pink and white face beneath the short silver hair was cherubic.

The bedroom was just large enough to accommodate Shirley’s single bed and Howard’s double, crammed together, non-identical twins. Howard’s mattress, which still bore his prodigious imprint, was empty. The soft purr and hiss of the shower was audible from where Shirley and her rosy reflection sat facing each other, savouring the news that seemed still to effervesce in the atmosphere, like bubbling champagne.

Barry Fairbrother was dead. Snuffed out. Cut down. No event of national importance, no war, no stock-market collapse, no terrorist attack, could have sparked in Shirley the awe, the avid interest and feverish speculation that currently consumed her.

She had hated Barry Fairbrother. Shirley and her husband, usually as one in all their friendships and enmities, had been a little out of step in this. Howard had sometimes confessed himself entertained by the bearded little man who opposed him so relentlessly across the long scratched tables in Pagford Church Hall; but Shirley made no distinction between the political and the personal. Barry had opposed Howard in the central quest of his life, and this made Barry Fairbrother her bitter enemy.

Loyalty to her husband was the main, but not the only, reason for Shirley’s passionate dislike. Her instincts about people were finely honed in one direction only, like a dog that has been trained to sniff out narcotics. She was perennially aquiver to detect condescension, and had long detected its reek in the attitudes of Barry Fairbrother and his cronies on the Parish Council. The Fairbrothers of the world assumed that their university education made them better than people like her and Howard, that their views counted for more. Well, their arrogance had received a nasty blow today. Fairbrother’s sudden death bolstered Shirley in the long-held belief that, whatever he and his followers might have thought, he had been of a lower and weaker order than her husband, who, in addition to all his other virtues, had managed to survive a heart attack seven years previously.

(Never for an instant had Shirley believed that her Howard would die, even while he was in the operating theatre. Howard’s presence on earth was, to Shirley, a given, like sunlight and oxygen. She had said as much afterwards, when friends and neighbours had spoken of miraculous escapes and how lucky that they had the cardiac unit so nearby in Yarvil, and how dreadfully worried she must have been.

‘I always knew he’d pull through,’ Shirley had said, unruffled and serene. ‘I never doubted it.’

And here he was, as good as ever; and there was Fairbrother in the morgue. It only went to show.)

In the elation of this early morning, Shirley was reminded of the day after her son Miles had been born. She had sat up in bed all those years ago, exactly like this, with sunlight streaming through the ward window, a cup of tea that somebody else had made her in her hands, waiting for them to bring in her beautiful new baby boy for feeding. Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance. The news of Barry Fairbrother’s sudden demise lay in her lap like a fat new baby to be gloated over by all her acquaintances; and she would be the fount, the source, for she was first, or nearly so, to receive the news.

None of the delight frothing and fizzing inside Shirley had been apparent while Howard had been in the room. They had merely exchanged the comments proper to sudden death before he had taken himself off to the shower. Naturally Shirley had known, as they slid stock words and phrases back and forth between them like beads on an abacus, that Howard must be as brimful of ecstasy as she was; but to express these feelings out loud, when the news of the death was still fresh in the air, would have been tantamount to dancing naked and shrieking obscenities, and Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.

Another happy thought came to Shirley. She set down her cup and saucer on the bedside table, slipped out of bed, pulled on her candlewick dressing gown and her glasses, and padded down the hall to tap on the bathroom door.

‘Howard?’

An interrogative noise answered over the steady patter of the shower.

‘Do you think I should put something on the website? About Fairbrother?’

‘Good idea,’ he called through the door, after a moment’s consideration. ‘Excellent idea.’

So she bustled along to the study. It had previously been the smallest bedroom in the bungalow, long since vacated by their daughter Patricia who had gone to London and was rarely mentioned.

Shirley was immensely proud of her skill on the internet. She had been to evening classes in Yarvil ten years previously, where she had been one of the oldest students and the slowest. Nevertheless, she had persevered, determined to be the administrator of Pagford Parish Council’s exciting new website. She logged herself in and brought up the Parish Council’s homepage.

The brief statement flowed so easily that it was as if her fingers themselves were composing it.

Councillor Barry Fairbrother

It is with great regret that we announce the death of Councillor Barry Fairbrother. Our thoughts are with his family at this difficult time.

She read this through carefully, hit return and watched the message appear on the message board.

The Queen had lowered the flag on Buckingham Palace when Princess Diana had died. Her Majesty occupied a very special position in Shirley’s interior life. Contemplating the message on the website, she was satisfied and happy that she had done the right thing. Learning from the best …

She navigated away from the Parish Council message board and dropped into her favourite medical website, where she painstakingly entered the words ‘brain’ and ‘death’ in the search box.

The suggestions were endless. Shirley scrolled through the possibilities, her mild eyes rolling up and down, wondering to which of these deadly conditions, some of them unpronounceable, she owed her present happiness. Shirley was a hospital volunteer; she had developed quite a little interest in matters medical since starting work at South West General, and occasionally offered diagnoses to her friends.

But there was no concentrating on long words and symptoms this morning: her thoughts skittered away to the further dissemination of the news; already she was mentally assembling and reshuffling a list of telephone numbers. She wondered whether Aubrey and Julia knew, and what they would say; and whether Howard would let her tell Maureen or reserve that pleasure for himself.

It was all immensely exciting.




IV


Andrew Price closed the front door of the small white house and followed his younger brother down the steep garden path, crunchy with frost, that led to the icy metal gate in the hedge and the lane beyond. Neither boy spared a glance for the familiar view spread out below them: the tiny town of Pagford cupped in a hollow between three hills, one of which was crested with the remains of the twelfth-century abbey. A thin river snaked around the edge of the hill and through town, straddled by a toy stone bridge. The scene was dull as a flat-painted backdrop to the brothers; Andrew despised the way that, on the rare occasions when the family had guests, his father seemed to take credit for it, as though he had designed and built the whole thing. Andrew had lately decided that he would prefer an outlook of asphalt, broken windows and graffiti; he dreamed of London and of a life that mattered.

The brothers marched to the end of the lane, ambling to a halt on the corner where they met the wider road. Andrew reached into the hedge, groped around for a while, then drew out a half-full packet of Benson & Hedges and a slightly damp box of matches. After several false starts, the heads of the matches crumbling against the strike, he succeeded in lighting up. Two or three deep drags, and then the grumbling engine of the school bus broke the stillness. Andrew carefully knocked out the glowing head of his cigarette and stowed the rest back in the packet.

The bus was always two-thirds full by the time it reached the turning for Hilltop House, because it had already skirted outlying farms and houses. The brothers sat apart as usual, each of them taking a double seat and turning to stare out of the window as the bus rumbled and lurched on down into Pagford.

At the foot of their hill was a house that stood in a wedge-shaped garden. The four Fairbrother children usually waited outside the front gate, but there was nobody there today. The curtains were all closed. Andrew wondered whether you usually sat in the dark when somebody died.

A few weeks previously, Andrew had got off with Niamh Fairbrother, one of Barry’s twin daughters, at a disco in the school drama hall. She had shown a distasteful tendency to shadow his movements for a while afterwards. Andrew’s parents were barely acquainted with the Fairbrothers; Simon and Ruth had hardly any friends, but they seemed to have had a tepid liking for Barry, who had managed the minuscule branch of the only bank still present in Pagford. Fairbrother’s name had cropped up a lot in connection with such things as the Parish Council, town hall theatricals, and the Church Fun Run. These were things in which Andrew had no interest and from which his parents held themselves aloof, excepting the occasional sponsorship form or raffle ticket.

As the bus turned left and trundled down Church Row, past the spacious Victorian houses ranged in descending tiers, Andrew indulged in a little fantasy in which his father dropped dead, gunned down by an invisible sniper. Andrew visualized himself patting his sobbing mother on the back while he telephoned the undertaker. He had a cigarette in his mouth as he ordered the cheapest coffin.

The three Jawandas, Jaswant, Sukhvinder and Rajpal, got on the bus at the bottom of Church Row. Andrew had carefully chosen a seat with an empty place in front of it, and he willed Sukhvinder to sit in front of him, not for her own sake (Andrew’s best friend Fats referred to her as TNT, short for ‘Tits ’N’ Tash’), but because She so often chose to sit beside Sukhvinder. And whether because his telepathic promptings were particularly powerful this morning or not, Sukhvinder did indeed choose the seat in front. Jubilant, Andrew stared, unseeing, at the grimy window, and clutched his school bag more closely to him, to conceal the erection brought on by the heavy vibration of the bus.

Anticipation mounted with every fresh pitch and heave, as the cumbersome vehicle edged its way through the narrow streets, around the tight corner into the village square and towards the corner of Her road.

Andrew had never experienced this intensity of interest in any girl. She was newly arrived; an odd time to change schools, the spring term of the GCSE year. Her name was Gaia, and that was fitting, because he had never heard it before, and she was something entirely new. She had walked onto the bus one morning like a simple statement of the sublime heights to which nature could reach and sat herself down two seats in front of him, while he sat transfixed by the perfection of her shoulders and the back of her head.

She would be here any minute, and if she sat beside square and sulky Sukhvinder, as she so often did, she would be close enough to smell the nicotine on him. He liked to see inanimate objects react to her body; liked to see the bus seat give a little as she dropped her weight into it, and that copper-gold mass of hair curve against the steel bar at the top.

The bus driver slowed, and Andrew turned his face away from the door, pretending to be lost in contemplation; he would look around when she got on, as if he had only just realized that they had stopped; he would make eye contact, possibly nod. He waited to hear the doors open, but the soft throb of the engine was not interrupted by the familiar grind and thump.

Andrew glanced around and saw nothing but short, shabby little Hope Street: two lines of small terraced houses. The bus driver was leaning over to make sure she was not coming. Andrew wanted to tell him to wait, because only the previous week she had burst from one of those little houses and come running up the pavement (it had been acceptable to watch, because everyone had been watching), and the sight of her running had been enough to occupy his thoughts for hours, but the driver hauled at the big wheel and the bus set off again. Andrew returned to his contemplation of the dirty window with an ache in his heart and in his balls.





V


The small terraces in Hope Street had once been labourers’ houses. Gavin Hughes was shaving slowly and with unnecessary care in the bathroom of number ten. He was so fair, and his beard so sparse, that the job really only needed to be done twice weekly; but the chilly, slightly grubby bathroom was the only place of sanctuary. If he dawdled in here until eight, he could plausibly say he needed to leave for work immediately. He dreaded having to talk to Kay.

He had only managed to head off discussion the previous evening by initiating the most prolonged and inventive coupling they had enjoyed since the very earliest days of their relationship. Kay had responded immediately and with unnerving enthusiasm: flicking herself from position to position; drawing up her strong, stocky legs for him; contorting like the Slavic acrobat she so closely resembled, with her olive skin and very short dark hair. Too late, he had realized that she was taking this uncharacteristic act of assertion as a tacit confession of those things he was determined to avoid saying. She had kissed him greedily; he had found her wet intrusive kisses erotic when the affair began, now he found them vaguely repellent. He took a long time to climax, his horror at what he had started constantly threatening to deflate his erection. Even this worked against him: she seemed to take his unusual stamina as a display of virtuosity.

When at last it was over, she had cuddled close to him in the darkness and stroked his hair for a while. Miserably he stared into the void, aware that after all his vague plans for loosening the ties, he had involuntarily tightened them. After she had fallen asleep, he had lain with one arm trapped underneath her, the damp sheet adhering unpleasantly to his thigh, on a mattress lumpy with old springs, and wished for the courage to be a bastard, to slip away and never return.

Kay’s bathroom smelt of mould and damp sponges. A number of hairs were stuck to the side of the small bath. Paint was peeling off the walls.

‘It needs some work,’ Kay had said.

Gavin had been careful not to volunteer any help. The things he had not said to her were his talisman and safeguard; he strung them together in his mind and checked them off like beads on a rosary. He had never said ‘love’. He had never talked about marriage. He had never asked her to move to Pagford. And yet, here she was, and somehow, she made him feel responsible.

His face stared back at him from out of the tarnished mirror. There were purple shadows under his eyes, and his thinning blond hair was wispy and dry. The naked bulb overhead lit the weak, goaty face with forensic cruelty.

Thirty-four, he thought, and I look at least forty.

He lifted the razor and delicately strafed off those two thick blond hairs that grew either side of his prominent Adam’s apple.

Fists pummelled the bathroom door. Gavin’s hand slipped and blood dripped from his thin neck to speckle his clean white shirt.

‘Your boyfriend,’ came a furious female scream, ‘is still in the bathroom and I am going to be late!’

‘I’ve finished!’ he shouted.

The gash stung, but what did that matter? Here was his excuse, ready-made: Look what your daughter made me do. I’ll have to go home and change my shirt before work. With an almost light heart he grabbed the tie and jacket he had hung over the hook on the back of the door, and unlocked it.

Gaia pushed past, slammed the door behind her and rammed the lock home. Out on the tiny landing, which was thick with an unpleasant smell of burnt rubber, Gavin remembered the headboard banging against the wall last night, the creaking of the cheap pine bed, Kay’s groans and yelps. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that her daughter was in the house.

He jogged down the carpetless stairs. Kay had told him of her plans to sand and polish them, but he doubted that she would ever do it; her flat in London had been shabby and in poor repair. In any case, he was convinced that she was expecting to move in with him quite soon, but he would not allow it; that was the final bastion, and there, if forced, he would make his stand.

‘What have you done to yourself?’ Kay squealed, catching sight of the blood on his shirt. She was wearing the cheap scarlet kimono that he did not like, but which suited her so well.

‘Gaia banged on the door and made me jump. I’m going to have to go home and change.’

‘Oh, but I’ve made you breakfast!’ she said quickly.

He realized that the smell of burning rubber was actually scrambled eggs. They looked anaemic and overcooked.

‘I can’t, Kay, I’ve got to change this shirt, I’ve got an early—’

She was already spooning the congealed mass onto plates.

‘Five minutes, surely you can stay five—?’

The mobile phone in his jacket pocket buzzed loudly and he pulled it out, wondering whether he would have the nerve to pretend that it was an urgent summons.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, in unfeigned horror.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Barry. Barry Fairbrother! He’s … f*ck, he’s … he’s dead! It’s from Miles. Jesus Christ. Jesus f*cking Christ!’

She laid down the wooden spoon.

‘Who’s Barry Fairbrother?’

‘I play squash with him. He’s only forty-four! Jesus Christ!’

He read the text message again. Kay watched him, confused. She knew that Miles was Gavin’s partner at the solicitor’s, but had never been introduced to him. Barry Fairbrother was no more than a name to her.

There came a thunderous banging from the stairs: Gaia was stamping as she ran.

‘Eggs,’ she stated, at the kitchen door. ‘Like you make me every morning. Not. And thanks to him,’ with a venomous look at the back of Gavin’s head, ‘I’ve probably missed the bloody bus.’

‘Well, if you hadn’t spent so long doing your hair,’ Kay shouted at the figure of her retreating daughter, who did not respond, but stormed down the hall, her bag bouncing off the walls, and slammed the front door behind her.

‘Kay, I’ve got to go,’ said Gavin.

‘But look, I’ve got it all ready, you could have it before—’

‘I’ve got to change my shirt. And, shit, I did Barry’s will for him, I’ll need to look it out. No, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go. I can’t believe it,’ he added, rereading Miles’ text. ‘I can’t believe it. We only played squash on Thursday. I can’t – Jesus.’

A man had died; there was nothing she could say, not without putting herself in the wrong. He kissed her briefly on her unresponsive mouth, and then walked away, up the dark narrow hall.

‘Will I see you—?’

‘I’ll call you later,’ he shouted over her, pretending not to hear.

Gavin hurried across the road to his car, gulping the crisp, cold air, holding the fact of Barry’s death in his mind like a phial of volatile liquid that he dare not agitate. As he turned the key in the ignition, he imagined Barry’s twin daughters crying, face down in their bunk beds. He had seen them lying like that, one above the other, each playing on a Nintendo DS, when he passed the door of their bedroom the very last time he had gone round for dinner.

The Fairbrothers had been the most devoted couple he knew. He would never eat at their house again. He used to tell Barry how lucky he was. Not so lucky after all.

Someone was coming down the pavement towards him; in a panic that it was Gaia, coming to shout at him or to demand a lift, he reversed too hard and hit the car behind him: Kay’s old Vauxhall Corsa. The passer-by drew level with his window, and was revealed to be an emaciated, hobbling old woman in carpet slippers. Sweating, Gavin swung his steering wheel around and squeezed out of the space. As he accelerated, he glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw Gaia letting herself back into Kay’s house.

He was having difficulty getting enough air into his lungs. There was a tight knot in his chest. Only now did he realize that Barry Fairbrother had been his best friend.