The Casual Vacancy

III


Gavin cooked for Kay at his house that evening, opening tins and crushing garlic with a sense of ill-usage.

After a row, you had to say certain things to secure a truce: those were the rules, everyone knew that. Gavin had telephoned Kay from his car on the way back from Barry’s burial and told her that he wished she had been there, that the whole day had been horrible and that he hoped he could see her that night. He considered these humble admissions no more or less than the price he had to pay for an evening of undemanding companionship.

But Kay seemed to consider them more in the light of a down payment on a renegotiated contract. You missed me. You needed me when you were upset. You’re sorry we didn’t go as a couple. Well, let’s not make that mistake again. There had been a certain complacency about the way she had treated him since; a briskness, a sense of renewed expectation.

He was making spaghetti Bolognese tonight; he had deliberately omitted to buy a pudding or to lay the table in advance; he was at pains to show her that he had not made much of an effort. Kay seemed oblivious, even determined to take this casual attitude as a compliment. She sat at his small kitchen table, talking to him over the pitter-patter of rain on the skylight, her eyes wandering over the fixtures and fittings. She had not often been here.

‘I suppose Lisa chose this yellow, did she?’

She was doing it again: breaking taboos, as though they had recently passed to a deeper level of intimacy. Gavin preferred not to talk about Lisa if he could avoid it; surely she knew that by now? He shook oregano onto the mince in his frying pan and said, ‘No, this was all the previous owner. I haven’t got round to changing it yet.’

‘Oh,’ she said, sipping wine. ‘Well, it’s quite nice. A bit bland.’

This rankled with Gavin, as, in his opinion, the interior of the Smithy was superior in every way to that of Ten Hope Street. He watched the pasta bubbling, keeping his back to her.

‘Guess what?’ she said. ‘I met Samantha Mollison this afternoon.’

Gavin wheeled around; how did Kay even know what Samantha Mollison looked like?

‘Just outside the deli in the Square; I was on my way in to get this,’ said Kay, clinking the wine bottle beside her with a flick of her nail. ‘She asked me whether I was Gavin’s girlfriend.’

Kay said it archly, but actually she had been heartened by Samantha’s choice of words, relieved to think that this was how Gavin described her to his friends.

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said – I said yes.’

Her expression was crestfallen. Gavin had not meant to ask the question quite so aggressively. He would have given a lot to prevent Kay and Samantha ever meeting.

‘Anyway,’ Kay proceeded with a slight edge to her voice, ‘she’s asked us for dinner next Friday. Week today.’

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Gavin crossly.

A lot of Kay’s cheerfulness deserted her.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Nothing. It’s – nothing,’ he said, prodding the bubbling spaghetti. ‘It’s just that I see enough of Miles during work hours, to be honest.’

It was what he had dreaded all along: that she would worm her way in and they would become Gavin-and-Kay, with a shared social circle, so that it would become progressively more difficult to excise her from his life. How had he let this happen? Why had he allowed her to move down here? Fury at himself mutated easily into anger with her. Why couldn’t she realize how little he wanted her, and take herself off without forcing him to do the dirty? He drained the spaghetti in the sink, swearing under his breath as he speckled himself with boiling water.

‘You’d better call Miles and Samantha and tell them “no”, then,’ said Kay.

Her voice had hardened. As was Gavin’s deeply ingrained habit, he sought to deflect an imminent conflict and hoped that the future would look after itself.

‘No, no,’ he said, dabbing at his wet shirt with a tea towel. ‘We’ll go. It’s fine. We’ll go.’

But in his undisguised lack of enthusiasm, he sought to put down a marker to which he could refer, retrospectively. You knew I didn’t want to go. No, I didn’t enjoy it. No, I don’t want it to happen again.

They ate for several minutes in silence. Gavin was afraid that there would be another row, and that Kay would force him to discuss underlying issues again. He cast around for something to say, and so started telling her about Mary Fairbrother and the life insurance company.

‘They’re being real bastards,’ he said. ‘He was heavily insured, but their lawyers are looking for a way not to pay out. They’re trying to make out he didn’t make a full disclosure.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, an uncle died of an aneurysm, too. Mary swears Barry told the insurance agent that when he signed the policy, but it’s nowhere in the notes. Presumably the bloke didn’t realize it can be a genetic thing. I don’t know that Barry did, come to …’

Gavin’s voice broke. Horrified and embarrassed, he bowed his flushing face over his plate. There was a hard chunk of grief in his throat and he couldn’t shift it. Kay’s chair legs scraped on the floor; he hoped that she was off to the bathroom, but then felt her arms around his shoulders, drawing him to her. Without thinking, he put a single arm around her, too.

It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?

He had dribbled snot onto the back of her top.

‘Sorry,’ he said thickly, wiping it away with his napkin.

He withdrew from her and blew his nose. She dragged her chair to sit beside him and put a hand on his arm. He liked her so much better when she was silent, and her face was soft and concerned, as it was now.

‘I still can’t … he was a good bloke,’ he said. ‘Barry. He was a good bloke.’

‘Yes, everyone says that about him,’ said Kay.

She had never been allowed to meet this famous Barry Fairbrother, but she was intrigued by the show of emotion from Gavin, and by the person who had caused it.

‘Was he funny?’ she asked, because she could imagine Gavin in thrall to a comedian, to a rowdy ringleader, propping up the bar.

‘Yeah, I s’pose. Well, not particularly. Normal. He liked a laugh … but he was just such a … such a nice bloke. He liked people, you know?’

She waited, but Gavin did not seem able to elucidate further on the niceness of Barry.

‘And the kids … and Mary … poor Mary … God, you’ve got no idea.’

Kay continued to pat his arm gently, but her sympathy had chilled a little. No idea, she thought, what it was to be alone? No idea how hard it was to be left in sole charge of a family? Where was his pity for her, Kay?

‘They were really happy,’ said Gavin, in a cracked voice. ‘She’s in pieces.’

Wordlessly, Kay stroked his arm, reflecting that she had never been able to afford to go to pieces.

‘I’m all right,’ he said, wiping his nose on his napkin and picking up his fork. By the smallest of twitches, he indicated that she should remove her hand.





IV


Samantha’s dinner invitation to Kay had been motivated by a mixture of vengefulness and boredom. She saw it as retaliation against Miles, who was always busy with schemes in which he gave her no say but with which he expected her to co-operate; she wanted to see how he liked it when she arranged things without consulting him. Then she would be stealing a march on Maureen and Shirley, those nosy old crones, who were so fascinated by Gavin’s private affairs but knew next to nothing about the relationship between him and his London girlfriend. Finally, it would afford her another opportunity to sharpen her claws on Gavin for being pusillanimous and indecisive about his love life: she might talk about weddings in front of Kay or say how nice it was to see Gavin making a commitment at last.

However, her plans for the discomfiture of others gave Samantha less pleasure than she had hoped. When on Saturday morning she told Miles what she had done, he reacted with suspicious enthusiasm.

‘Great, yeah, we haven’t had Gavin round for ages. And nice for you to get to know Kay.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, you always got on with Lisa, didn’t you?’

‘Miles, I hated Lisa.’

‘Well, OK … maybe you’ll like Kay better!’

She glared at him, wondering where all this good humour was coming from. Lexie and Libby, home for the weekend and cooped up in the house because of the rain, were watching a music DVD in the sitting room; a guitar-laden ballad blared through to the kitchen where their parents stood talking.

‘Listen,’ said Miles, brandishing his mobile, ‘Aubrey wants to have a talk with me about the council. I’ve just called Dad, and the Fawleys have invited us all to dinner tonight at Sweetlove—’

‘No thanks,’ said Samantha, cutting him off. She was suddenly full of a fury she could barely explain, even to herself. She walked out of the room.

They argued in low voices all over the house through the day, trying not to spoil their daughters’ weekend. Samantha refused to change her mind or to discuss her reasons. Miles, afraid of getting angry at her, was alternately conciliatory and cold.

‘How do you think it’s going to look if you don’t come?’ he said at ten to eight that evening, standing in the doorway of the sitting room, ready to leave, wearing a suit and tie.

‘It’s nothing to do with me, Miles,’ Samantha said. ‘You’re the one running for office.’

She liked watching him dither. She knew that he was terrified of being late, yet wondering whether he could still persuade her to go with him.

‘You know they’ll be expecting both of us.’

‘Really? Nobody sent me an invitation.’

‘Oh, come off it, Sam, you know they meant – they took it for granted—’

‘More fool them, then. I’ve told you, I don’t fancy it. You’d better hurry. You don’t want to keep Mummy and Daddy waiting.’

He left. She listened to the car reversing out of the drive, then went into the kitchen, opened a bottle of wine and brought it back into the sitting room with a glass. She kept picturing Howard, Shirley and Miles all having dinner together at Sweetlove House. It would surely be the first orgasm Shirley had had in years.

Her thoughts swerved irresistibly to what her accountant had said to her during the week. Profits were way down, whatever she had pretended to Howard. The accountant had actually suggested closing the shop and concentrating on the online side of the business. This would be an admission of failure that Samantha was not prepared to make. For one thing, Shirley would love it if the shop closed; she had been a bitch about it from the start. I’m sorry, Sam, it’s not really my taste … just a teeny bit over the top … But Samantha loved her little red and black shop in Yarvil; loved getting away from Pagford every day, chatting to customers, gossiping with Carly, her assistant. Her world would be tiny without the shop she had nurtured for fourteen years; it would contract, in short, to Pagford.

(Pagford, bloody Pagford. Samantha had never meant to live here. She and Miles had planned a year out before starting work, a round-the-world trip. They had their itinerary mapped out, their visas ready. Samantha had dreamed about walking barefoot and hand in hand on long white Australian beaches. And then she had found out that she was pregnant.

She had come down to visit him at ‘Ambleside’, a day after she had taken the pregnancy test, one week after their graduation. They were supposed to be leaving for Singapore in eight days’ time.

Samantha had not wanted to tell Miles in his parents’ house; she was afraid that they would overhear. Shirley seemed to be behind every door Samantha opened in the bungalow.

So she waited until they were sitting at a dark corner table in the Black Canon. She remembered the rigid line of Miles’ jaw when she told him; he seemed, in some indefinable way, to become older as the news hit him.

He did not speak for several petrified seconds. Then he said, ‘Right. We’ll get married.’

He told her that he had already bought her a ring, that he had been planning to propose somewhere good, somewhere like the top of Ayers Rock. Sure enough, when they got back to the bungalow, he unearthed the little box from where he had already hidden it in his rucksack. It was a small solitaire diamond from a jeweller’s in Yarvil; he had bought it with some of the money his grandmother had left him. Samantha had sat on the edge of Miles’ bed and cried and cried. They had married three months later.)

Alone with her bottle of wine, Samantha turned on the television. It brought up the DVD Lexie and Libby had been watching: a frozen image of four young men singing to her in tight T-shirts; they looked barely out of their teens. She pressed play. After the boys finished their song, the DVD cut to an interview. Samantha slugged back her wine, watching the band joking with each other, then becoming earnest as they discussed how much they loved their fans. She thought that she would have known them as Americans even if the sound had been off. Their teeth were perfect.

It grew late; she paused the DVD, went upstairs and told the girls to leave the PlayStation and go to bed; then she returned to the sitting room, where she was three-quarters of the way down the bottle of wine. She had not turned on the lamps. She pressed play and kept drinking. When the DVD finished, she put it back to the beginning and watched the bit she had missed.

One of the boys appeared significantly more mature than the other three. He was broader across the shoulders; biceps bulged beneath the short sleeves of his T-shirt; he had a thick strong neck and a square jaw. Samantha watched him undulating, staring into the camera with a detached serious expression on his handsome face, which was all planes and angles and winged black eyebrows.

She thought of sex with Miles. It had last happened three weeks previously. His performance was as predictable as a Masonic handshake. One of his favourite sayings was ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it’.

Samantha emptied the last of the bottle into her glass and imagined making love to the boy on the screen. Her breasts looked better in a bra these days; they spilled everywhere when she lay down; it made her feel flabby and awful. She pictured herself, forced back against a wall, one leg propped up, a dress pushed up to her waist and that strong dark boy with his jeans round his knees, thrusting in and out of her …

With a lurch in the pit of her stomach that was almost like happiness, she heard the car turning back into the drive and the beams of the headlights swung around the dark sitting room.

She fumbled with the controls to turn over to the news, which took her much longer than it ought to have done; she shoved the empty wine bottle under the sofa and clutched her almost empty glass as a prop. The front door opened and closed. Miles entered the room behind her.

‘Why are you sitting here in the dark?’

He turned on a lamp and she glanced up at him. He was as well groomed as he had been when he left, except for the raindrops on the shoulders of his jacket.

‘How was dinner?’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You were missed. Aubrey and Julia were sorry you couldn’t make it.’

‘Oh, I’m sure. And I’ll bet your mother cried with disappointment.’

He sat down in an armchair at right angles to her, staring at her. She pushed her hair out of her eyes.

‘What’s this all about, Sam?’

‘If you don’t know, Miles—’

But she was not sure herself; or at least, she did not know how to condense this sprawling sense of ill-usage into a coherent accusation.

‘I can’t see how me standing for the Parish Council—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Miles!’ she shouted, and was then slightly taken aback by how loud her voice was.

‘Explain to me, please,’ he said, ‘what possible difference it can make to you?’

She glared at him, struggling to articulate it for his pedantic legal mind, which was like a fiddling pair of tweezers in the way that it seized on poor choices of word, yet so often failed to grasp the bigger picture. What could she say that he would understand? That she found Howard and Shirley’s endless talk about the council boring as hell? That he was quite tedious enough already, with his endlessly retold anecdotes about the good old days back at the rugby club and his self-congratulatory stories about work, without adding pontifications about the Fields?

‘Well, I was under the impression,’ said Samantha, in their dimly lit sitting room, ‘that we had other plans.’

‘Like what?’ said Miles. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘We said,’ Samantha articulated carefully over the rim of her trembling glass, ‘that once the girls were out of school, we’d go travelling. We promised each other that, remember?’

The formless rage and misery that had consumed her since Miles announced his intention to stand for the council had not once led her to mourn the year’s travelling she had missed, but at this moment it seemed to her that that was the real problem; or at least, that it came closest to expressing both the antagonism and the yearning inside her.

Miles seemed completely bewildered.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘When I got pregnant with Lexie,’ Samantha said loudly, ‘and we couldn’t go travelling, and your bloody mother made us get married in double-quick time, and your father got you a job with Edward Collins, you said, we agreed, that we’d do it when the girls were grown up; we said we’d go away and do all the things we missed out on.’

He shook his head slowly.

‘This is news to me,’ he said. ‘Where the hell has this come from?’

‘Miles, we were in the Black Canon. I told you I was pregnant, and you said – for Christ’s sake, Miles – I told you I was pregnant, and you promised me, you promised—’

‘You want a holiday?’ said Miles. ‘Is that it? You want a holiday?’

‘No, Miles, I don’t want a bloody holiday, I want – don’t you remember? We said we’d take a year out and do it later, when the kids were grown up!’

‘Fine, then.’ He seemed unnerved, determined to brush her aside. ‘Fine. When Libby’s eighteen; in four years’ time, we’ll talk about it again. I don’t see how me becoming a councillor affects any of this.’

‘Well, apart from the bloody boredom of listening to you and your parents whining about the Fields for the rest of our natural lives—’

‘Our natural lives?’ he smirked. ‘As opposed to—?’

‘Piss off,’ she spat. ‘Don’t be such a bloody smartarse, Miles, it might impress your mother—’

‘Well, frankly, I still don’t see what the problem—’

‘The problem,’ she shouted, ‘is that this is about our future, Miles. Our future. And I don’t want to bloody talk about it in four years’ time, I want to talk about it now!’

‘I think you’d better eat something,’ said Miles. He got to his feet. ‘You’ve had enough to drink.’

‘Screw you, Miles!’

‘Sorry, if you’re going to be abusive …’

He turned and walked out of the room. She barely stopped herself throwing her wine glass after him.

The council: if he got on it, he would never get off; he would never renounce his seat, the chance to be a proper Pagford big shot, like Howard. He was committing himself anew to Pagford, retaking his vows to the town of his birth, to a future quite different from the one he had promised his distraught new fiancée as she sat sobbing on his bed.

When had they last talked about travelling the world? She was not sure. Years and years ago, perhaps, but tonight Samantha decided that she, at least, had never changed her mind. Yes, she had always expected that some day they would pack up and leave, in search of heat and freedom, half the globe away from Pagford, Shirley, Mollison and Lowe, the rain, the pettiness and the sameness. Perhaps she had not thought of the white sands of Australia and Singapore with longing for many years, but she would rather be there, even with her heavy thighs and her stretch marks, than here, trapped in Pagford, forced to watch as Miles turned slowly into Howard.

She slumped back down on the sofa, groped for the controls, and switched back to Libby’s DVD. The band, now in black and white, was walking slowly along a long empty beach, singing. The broad-shouldered boy’s shirt was flapping open in the breeze. A fine trail of hair led from his navel down into his jeans.





V


Alison Jenkins, the journalist from the Yarvil and District Gazette, had at last established which of the many Weedon households in Yarvil housed Krystal. It had been difficult: nobody was registered to vote at the address and no landline number was listed for the property. Alison visited Foley Road in person on Sunday, but Krystal was out, and Terri, suspicious and antagonistic, refused to say when she would be back or confirm that she lived there.

Krystal arrived home a mere twenty minutes after the journalist had departed in her car, and she and her mother had another row.

‘Why din’t ya tell her to wait? She was gonna interview me abou’ the Fields an’ stuff!’

‘Interview you? F*ck off. Wha’ the f*ck for?’

The argument escalated and Krystal walked out again, off to Nikki’s, with Terri’s mobile in her tracksuit bottoms. She frequently made off with this phone; many rows were triggered by her mother demanding it back and Krystal pretending that she didn’t know where it was. Dimly, Krystal hoped that the journalist might know the number somehow and call her directly.

She was in a crowded, jangling café in the shopping centre, telling Nikki and Leanne all about the journalist, when the mobile rang.

‘’Oo? Are you the journalist, like?’

‘… o’s ’at … ’erri?’

‘It’s Krystal. ’Oo’s this?’

‘… ’m your … ’nt … other … ’ister.’

‘’Oo?’ shouted Krystal. One finger in the ear not pressed against the phone, she wove her way between the densely packed tables to reach a quieter place.

‘Danielle,’ said the woman, loud and clear on the other end of the telephone. ‘I’m yer mum’s sister.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Krystal, disappointed.

F*ckin’ snobby bitch, Terri always said when Danielle’s name came up. Krystal was not sure that she had ever met Danielle.

‘It’s abou’ your Great Gran.’

‘’Oo?’

‘Nana Cath,’ said Danielle impatiently. Krystal reached the balcony overlooking the shopping centre forecourt; reception was strong here; she stopped.

‘Wha’s wrong with ’er?’ said Krystal. It felt as though her stomach was flipping over, the way it had done as a little girl, turning somersaults on a railing like the one in front of her. Thirty feet below, the crowds surged, carrying plastic bags, pushing buggies and dragging toddlers.

‘She’s in South West General. She’s been there a week. She’s had a stroke.’

‘She’s bin there a week?’ said Krystal, her stomach still swooping. ‘Nobody told us.’

‘Yeah, well, she can’t speak prop’ly, but she’s said your name twice.’

‘Mine?’ asked Krystal, clutching the mobile tightly.

‘Yeah. I think she’d like to see yeh. It’s serious. They’re sayin’ she migh’ not recover.’

‘Wha’ ward is it?’ asked Krystal, her mind buzzing.

‘Twelve. High-dependency. Visiting hours are twelve till four, six till eight. All righ’?’

‘Is it—?’

‘I gotta go. I only wanted to let you know, in case you want to see her. ’Bye.’

The line went dead. Krystal lowered the mobile from her ear, staring at the screen. She pressed a button repeatedly with her thumb, until she saw the word ‘blocked’. Her aunt had withheld her number.

Krystal walked back to Nikki and Leanne. They knew at once that something was wrong.

‘Go an’ see ’er,’ said Nikki, checking the time on her own mobile. ‘Yeh’ll ge’ there fer two. Ge’ the bus.’

‘Yeah,’ said Krystal blankly.

She thought of fetching her mother, of taking her and Robbie to go and see Nana Cath too, but there had been a huge row a year before, and her mother and Nana Cath had had no contact since. Krystal was sure that Terri would take an immense amount of persuading to go to the hospital, and was not sure that Nana Cath would be happy to see her.

It’s serious. They’re saying she might not recover.

‘’Ave yeh gor enough cash?’ said Leanne, rummaging in her pockets as the three of them walked up the road towards the bus stop.

‘Yeah,’ said Krystal, checking. ‘It’s on’y a quid up the hospital, innit?’

They had time to share a cigarette before the number twenty-seven arrived. Nikki and Leanne waved her off as though she were going somewhere nice. At the very last moment, Krystal felt scared and wanted to shout ‘Come with me!’ But then the bus pulled away from the kerb, and Nikki and Leanne were already turning away, gossiping.

The seat was prickly, covered in some old smelly fabric. The bus trundled onto the road that ran by the precinct and turned right into one of the main thoroughfares that led through all the big-name shops.

Fear fluttered inside Krystal’s belly like a foetus. She had known that Nana Cath was getting older and frailer, but somehow, vaguely, she had expected her to regenerate, to return to the heyday that had seemed to last so long; for her hair to turn black again, her spine to straighten and her memory to sharpen like her caustic tongue. She had never thought about Nana Cath dying, always associating her with toughness and invulnerability. If she had considered them at all, Krystal would have thought of the deformity to Nana Cath’s chest, and the innumerable wrinkles criss-crossing her face, as honourable scars sustained during her successful battle to survive. Nobody close to Krystal had ever died of old age.

(Death came to the young in her mother’s circle, sometimes even before their faces and bodies had become emaciated and ravaged. The body that Krystal had found in the bathroom when she was six had been of a handsome young man, as white and lovely as a statue, or that was how she remembered him. But sometimes she found that memory confusing and doubted it. It was hard to know what to believe. She had often heard things as a child that adults later contradicted and denied. She could have sworn that Terri had said, ‘It was yer dad.’ But then, much later, she had said, ‘Don’ be so silly. Yer dad’s not dead, ’e’s in Bristol, innee?’ So Krystal had had to try and reattach herself to the idea of Banger, which was what everybody called the man they said was her father.

But always, in the background, there had been Nana Cath. She had escaped foster care because of Nana Cath, ready and waiting in Pagford, a strong if uncomfortable safety net. Swearing and furious, she had swooped, equally aggressive to Terri and to the social workers, and taken her equally angry great-granddaughter home.

Krystal did not know whether she had loved or hated that little house in Hope Street. It was dingy and it smelt of bleach; it gave you a hemmed-in feeling. At the same time, it was safe, entirely safe. Nana Cath would only let approved individuals in through the door. There were old-fashioned bath cubes in a glass jar on the end of the bath.)

What if there were other people at Nana Cath’s bedside, when she got there? She would not recognize half her own family, and the idea that she might come across strangers tied to her by blood scared her. Terri had several half-sisters, products of her father’s multiple liaisons, whom even Terri had never met; but Nana Cath tried to keep up with them all, doggedly maintaining contact with the large disconnected family her sons had produced. Occasionally, over the years, relatives Krystal did not recognize had turned up at Nana Cath’s while she was there. Krystal thought that they eyed her askance and said things about her under their voices to Nana Cath; she pretended not to notice and waited for them to leave, so that she could have Nana Cath to herself again. She especially disliked the idea that there were any other children in Nana Cath’s life.

(‘’Oo are they?’ Krystal had asked Nana Cath when she was nine, pointing jealously at a framed photograph of two boys in Paxton High uniforms on Nana Cath’s sideboard.

‘Them’s two o’ my great-grandsons,’ said Nana Cath. ‘Tha’s Dan and tha’s Ricky. They’re your cousins.’

Krystal did not want them as cousins, and she did not want them on Nana Cath’s sideboard.

‘An’ who’s tha’?’ she demanded, pointing at a little girl with curly golden hair.

‘Tha’s my Michael’s little girl, Rhiannon, when she were five. Beau’iful, weren’t she? Bu’ she wen’ an’ married some wog,’ said Nana Cath.

There had never been a photograph of Robbie on Nana Cath’s sideboard.

Yeh don’t even know who the father is, do yeh, yer whore? I’m washin’ my ’ands of yeh. I’ve ’ad enough, Terri, I’ve ’ad it: you can look after it yourself.)

The bus trundled on through town, past all the Sunday afternoon shoppers. When Krystal had been small, Terri had taken her into the centre of Yarvil nearly every weekend, forcing her into a pushchair long past the age when Krystal needed it, because it was so much easier to hide nicked stuff with a pushchair, push it down under the kid’s legs, hide it under the bags in the basket under the seat. Sometimes Terri would go on tandem shoplifting trips with the sister she spoke to, Cheryl, who was married to Shane Tully. Cheryl and Terri lived four streets away from each other in the Fields, and petrified the air with their language when they argued, which was frequently. Krystal never knew whether she and her Tully cousins were supposed to be on speaking terms or not, and no longer bothered keeping track, but she spoke to Dane whenever she ran across him. They had shagged, once, after splitting a bottle of cider out on the rec when they were fourteen. Neither of them had ever mentioned it afterwards. Krystal was hazy on whether or not it was legal, doing your cousin. Something Nikki had said had made her think that maybe it wasn’t.

The bus rolled up the road that led to the main entrance of South West General, and stopped twenty yards from an enormous long rectangular grey and glass building. There were patches of neat grass, a few small trees and a forest of signposts.

Krystal followed two old ladies out of the bus and stood with her hands in her tracksuit pockets, looking around. She had already forgotten what kind of ward Danielle had told her Nana Cath was on; she recalled only the number twelve. She approached the nearest signpost with a casual air, squinting at it almost incidentally: it bore line upon line of impenetrable print, with words as long as Krystal’s arm and arrows pointing left, right, diagonally. Krystal did not read well; being confronted with large quantities of words made her feel intimidated and aggressive. After several surreptitious glances at the arrows, she decided that there were no numbers there at all, so she followed the two old ladies towards the double glass doors at the front of the main building.

The foyer was crowded and more confusing than the signposts. There was a bustling shop, which was separated from the main hall by floor to ceiling windows; there were rows of plastic chairs, which seemed to be full of people eating sandwiches; there was a packed café in the corner; and a kind of hexagonal counter in the middle of the floor, where women were answering enquiries as they checked their computers. Krystal headed there, her hands still in her pockets.

‘Where’s ward twelve?’ Krystal asked one of the women in a surly voice.

‘Third floor,’ said the woman, matching her tone.

Krystal did not want to ask anything else out of pride, so she turned and walked away, until she spotted lifts at the far end of the foyer and entered one going up.

It took her nearly fifteen minutes to find the ward. Why didn’t they put up numbers and arrows, not these stupid long words? But then, walking along a pale green corridor with her trainers squeaking on the linoleum floor, someone called her name.

‘Krystal?’

It was her aunt Cheryl, big and broad in a denim skirt and tight white vest, with banana-yellow black-rooted hair. She was tattooed from her knuckles to the tops of her thick arms, and wore multiple gold hoops like curtain rings in each ear. There was a can of Coke in her hand.

‘She ain’ bothered, then?’ said Cheryl. Her bare legs were planted firmly apart, like a sentry guard.

‘’Oo?’

‘Terri. She din’ wanna come?’

‘She don’ know ye’. I on’y jus’ ’eard. Danielle called an’ tole me.’

Cheryl ripped off the ring-pull and slurped Coke, her tiny eyes sunken in a wide, flat face that was mottled like corned beef, scrutinizing Krystal over the top of the can.

‘I tole Danielle ter call yeh when it ’appened. Three days she were lyin’ in the ’ouse, and no one f*ckin’ found ’er. The state of ’er. F*ckin’ ’ell.’

Krystal did not ask Cheryl why she herself had not walked the short distance to Foley Road to tell Terri the news. Evidently the sisters had fallen out again. It was impossible to keep up.

‘Where is she?’ asked Krystal.

Cheryl led the way, her flip-flops making a slapping noise on the floor.

‘Hey,’ she said, as they walked. ‘I ’ad a call fr’m a journalist about you.’

‘Didja?’

‘She give me a number.’

Krystal would have asked more questions, but they had entered a very quiet ward, and she was suddenly frightened. She did not like the smell.

Nana Cath was almost unrecognizable. One side of her face was terribly twisted, as though the muscles had been pulled with a wire. Her mouth dragged to one side; even her eye seemed to droop. There were tubes taped to her, a needle in her arm. Lying down, the deformity in her chest was much more obvious. The sheet rose and fell in odd places, as if the grotesque head on its scrawny neck protruded from a barrel.

When Krystal sat down beside her, Nana Cath made no movement. She simply gazed. One little hand trembled slightly.

‘She ain’ talkin’, bu’ she said yer name, twice, las’ nigh’,’ Cheryl told her, staring gloomily over the rim of her can.

There was a tightness in Krystal’s chest. She did not know whether it would hurt Nana Cath to hold her hand. She edged her own fingers to within a few inches of Nana Cath’s, but let them rest on the bedspread.

‘Rhiannon’s bin in,’ said Cheryl. ‘An’ John an’ Sue. Sue’s tryin’ ter get hold of Anne-Marie.’

Krystal’s spirits leapt.

‘Where is she?’ she asked Cheryl.

‘Somewhere out Frenchay way. Y’know she’s got a baby now?’

‘Yeah, I ’eard,’ said Krystal. ‘Wha’ was it?’

‘Dunno,’ said Cheryl, swigging Coke.

Someone at school had told her: Hey, Krystal, your sister’s up the duff! She had been excited by the news. She was going to be an auntie, even if she never saw the baby. All her life, she had been in love with the idea of Anne-Marie, who had been taken away before Krystal was born; spirited into another dimension, like a fairy-tale character, as beautiful and mysterious as the dead man in Terri’s bathroom.

Nana Cath’s lips moved.

‘Wha’?’ said Krystal, bending low, half scared, half elated.

‘D’yeh wan’ somethin’, Nana Cath?’ asked Cheryl, so loudly that whispering guests at other beds stared over.

Krystal could hear a wheezing, rattling noise, but Nana Cath seemed to be making a definite attempt to form a word. Cheryl was leaning over the other side, one hand gripping the metal bars at the head of the bed.

‘… Oh … mm,’ said Nana Cath.

‘Wha’?’ said Krystal and Cheryl together.

The eyes had moved millimetres: rheumy, filmy eyes, looking at Krystal’s smooth young face, her open mouth, as she leaned over her great-grandmother, puzzled, eager and fearful.

‘… owin …’ said the cracked old voice.

‘She dunno wha’ she’s sayin’,’ Cheryl shouted over her shoulder at the timid couple visiting at the next bed. ‘Three days lef’ on the f*ckin’ floor, ’s’not surprisin’, is it?’

But tears had blurred Krystal’s eyes. The ward with its high windows dissolved into white light and shadow; she seemed to see a flash of bright sunlight on dark green water, fragmented into brilliant shards by the splashing rise and fall of oars.

‘Yeah,’ she whispered to Nana Cath. ‘Yeah, I goes rowin’, Nana.’

But it was no longer true, because Mr Fairbrother was dead.





VI


‘The f*ck have you done to your face? Come off the bike again?’ asked Fats.

‘No,’ said Andrew. ‘Si-Pie hit me. I was trying to tell the stupid cunt he’d got it wrong about Fairbrother.’

He and his father had been in the woodshed, filling the baskets that sat on either side of the wood-burner in the sitting room. Simon had hit Andrew around the head with a log, knocking him into the pile of wood, grazing his acne-covered cheek.

D’you think you know more about what goes on than I do, you spotty little shit? If I hear you’ve breathed a word of what goes on in this house—

I haven’t—

I’ll f*cking skin you alive, d’you hear me? How do you know Fairbrother wasn’t on the fiddle too, eh? And the other f*cker was the only one dumb enough to get caught?

And then, whether out of pride or defiance, or because his fantasies of easy money had taken too strong a hold on his imagination to become dislodged by facts, Simon had sent in his application forms. Humiliation, for which the whole family would surely pay, was a certainty.

Sabotage. Andrew brooded on the word. He wanted to bring his father crashing down from the heights to which his dreams of easy money had raised him, and he wanted to do it, if at all possible (for he preferred glory without death), in such a way that Simon would never know whose manoeuvrings had brought his ambitions to rubble.

He confided in nobody, not even Fats. He told Fats nearly everything, but the few omissions were the vast topics, the ones that occupied nearly all his interior space. It was one thing to sit in Fats’ room with hard-ons and look up ‘girl-on-girl action’ on the internet: quite another to confess how obsessively he pondered ways of engaging Gaia Bawden in conversation. Likewise, it was easy to sit in the Cubby Hole and call his father a cunt, but never would he have told how Simon’s rages turned his hands cold and his stomach queasy.

But then came the hour that changed everything. It started with nothing more than a yearning for nicotine and beauty. The rain had passed off at last, and the pale spring sun shone brightly on the fish-scale dirt on the school-bus windows as it jerked and lurched through the narrow streets of Pagford. Andrew was sitting near the back, unable to see Gaia, who was hemmed in at the front by Sukhvinder and the fatherless Fairbrother girls, newly returned to school. He had barely seen Gaia all day and faced a barren evening with only stale Facebook pictures to console him.

As the bus approached Hope Street, it struck Andrew that neither of his parents was at home to notice his absence. Three cigarettes that Fats had given him resided in his inside pocket; and Gaia was getting up, holding tightly to the bar on the back of the seat, readying herself to descend, still talking to Sukhvinder Jawanda.

Why not? Why not?

So he got up too, swung his bag over his shoulder, and when the bus stopped walked briskly up the aisle after the two girls as they got out.

‘See you at home,’ he threw out to a startled Paul as he passed.

He reached the sunny pavement and the bus rumbled away. Lighting up, he watched Gaia and Sukhvinder over the top of his cupped hands. They were not heading towards Gaia’s house in Hope Street, but ambling up towards the Square. Smoking and scowling slightly in unconscious imitation of the most unself-conscious person he knew – Fats – Andrew followed them, his eyes feasting on Gaia’s copper-brown hair as it bounced on her shoulder blades, the swing of her skirt as her hips swayed beneath it.

The two girls slowed down as they approached the Square, advancing towards Mollison and Lowe, which had the most impressive façade of them all: blue and gold lettering across the front and four hanging baskets. Andrew hung back. The girls paused to examine a small white sign pasted to the window of the new café, then disappeared into the delicatessen.

Andrew walked once around the Square, past the Black Canon and the George Hotel, and stopped at the sign. It was a hand-lettered advertisement for weekend staff.

Hyperconscious of his acne, which was particularly virulent at the moment, he knocked out the end of his cigarette, put the long stub back into his pocket and followed Gaia and Sukhvinder inside.

The girls were standing beside a little table piled high with boxed oatcakes and crackers, watching the enormous man in the deerstalker behind the counter talking to an elderly customer. Gaia looked around when the bell over the door tinkled.

‘Hi,’ Andrew said, his mouth dry.

‘Hi,’ she replied.

Blinded by his own daring, Andrew walked nearer, and the school bag over his shoulder bumped into the revolving stand of guides to Pagford and Traditional West Country Cooking. He seized the stand and steadied it, then hastily lowered his bag.

‘You after a job?’ Gaia asked him quietly, in her miraculous London accent.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You?’

She nodded.

‘Flag it up on the suggestion page, Eddie,’ Howard was booming at the customer. ‘Post it on the website, and I’ll get it on the agenda for you. Pagford Parish Council – all one word – dot co, dot UK, slash, Suggestion Page. Or follow the link. Pagford …’ He reiterated slowly, as the man pulled out paper and a pen with a quivering hand ‘… Parish …’

Howard’s eyes flicked over the three teenagers waiting quietly beside the savoury biscuits. They were wearing the half-hearted uniform of Winterdown, which permitted so much laxity and variation that it was barely a uniform at all (unlike that of St Anne’s, which comprised a neat tartan skirt and a blazer). For all that, the white girl was stunning; a precision-cut diamond set off by the plain Jawanda daughter, whose name Howard did not know, and a mouse-haired boy with violently erupted skin.

The customer creaked out of the shop, the bell tinkled.

‘Can I help you?’ Howard asked, his eyes on Gaia.

‘Yeah,’ she said, moving forwards. ‘Um. About the jobs.’ She pointed at the small sign in the window.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Howard, beaming. His new weekend waiter had let him down a few days previously; thrown over the café for Yarvil and a supermarket job. ‘Yes, yes. Fancy waitressing, do you? We’re offering minimum wage – nine to half-past five, Saturdays – twelve to half-past five, Sundays. Opening two weeks from today; training provided. How old are you, my love?’

She was perfect, perfect, exactly what he had been imagining: fresh-faced and curvy; he could just imagine her in a figure-hugging black dress with a lace-edged white apron. He would teach her to use the till, and show her around the stockroom; there would be a bit of banter, and perhaps a little bonus on days when the takings were up.

Howard sidled out from behind the counter and, ignoring Sukhvinder and Andrew, took Gaia by the upper arm, and led her through the arch in the dividing wall. There were no tables and chairs there yet, but the counter had been installed and so had a tiled black and cream mural on the wall behind it, which showed the Square in Yesteryear. Crinolined women and men in top hats swarmed everywhere; a brougham carriage had drawn up outside a clearly marked Mollison and Lowe, and beside it was the little café, The Copper Kettle. The artist had improvised an ornamental pump instead of the war memorial.

Andrew and Sukhvinder were left behind, awkward and vaguely antagonistic to each other.

‘Yes? Can I help you?’

A stooping woman with a jet-black bouffant had emerged from out of a back room. Andrew and Sukhvinder muttered that they were waiting, and then Howard and Gaia reappeared in the archway. When he saw Maureen, Howard dropped Gaia’s arm, which he had been holding absent-mindedly while he explained to her what a waitress’s duties would be.

‘I might have found us some more help for the Kettle, Mo,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes?’ said Maureen, switching her hungry gaze to Gaia. ‘Have you got experience?’

But Howard boomed over her, telling Gaia all about the delicatessen and how he liked to think it was a bit of a Pagford institution, a bit of a landmark.

‘Thirty-five years, it’s been,’ said Howard, with a majestic disdain of his own mural. ‘The young lady’s new to town, Mo,’ he added.

‘And you two are after jobs as well, are you?’ Maureen asked Sukhvinder and Andrew.

Sukhvinder shook her head; Andrew made an equivocal movement with his shoulders; but Gaia said, with her eyes on the girl, ‘Go on. You said you might.’

Howard considered Sukhvinder, who would most certainly not appear to advantage in a tight black dress and frilly apron; but his fertile and flexible mind was firing in all directions. A compliment to her father – something of a hold over her mother – an unasked favour granted; there were matters beyond the purely aesthetic that ought, perhaps, to be considered here.

‘Well, if we get the business we’re expecting, we could probably do with two,’ he said, scratching his chins with his eyes on Sukhvinder, who had blushed unattractively.

‘I don’t …’ she said, but Gaia urged her.

‘Go on. Together.’

Sukhvinder was flushed, and her eyes were watering.

‘I …’

‘Go on,’ whispered Gaia.

‘I … all right.’

‘We’ll give you a trial, then, Miss Jawanda,’ said Howard.

Doused in fear, Sukhvinder could hardly breathe. What would her mother say?

‘And I suppose you’re wanting to be potboy, are you?’ Howard boomed at Andrew.

Potboy?

‘It’s heavy lifting we need, my friend,’ said Howard, while Andrew blinked at him nonplussed: he had only read the large type at the top of the sign. ‘Pallets into the stockroom, crates of milk up from the cellar and rubbish bagged up at the back. Proper manual labour. Do you think you can handle that?’

‘Yeah,’ said Andrew. Would he be there when Gaia was there? That was all that mattered.

‘We’ll need you early. Eight o’clock, probably. We’ll say eight till three, and see how it goes. Trial period of two weeks.’

‘Yeah, fine,’ said Andrew.

‘What’s your name?’

When Howard heard it, he raised his eyebrows.

‘Is your father Simon? Simon Price?’

‘Yeah.’

Andrew was unnerved. Nobody knew who his father was, usually.

Howard told the two girls to come back on Sunday afternoon, when the till was to be delivered, and he would be at liberty to instruct them; then, though he showed an inclination to keep Gaia in conversation, a customer entered, and the teenagers took their chance to slip outside.

Andrew could think of nothing to say once they found themselves on the other side of the tinkling glass door; but before he could marshal his thoughts, Gaia threw him a careless ‘bye’, and walked away with Sukhvinder. Andrew lit up the second of Fats’ three fags (this was no time for a half-smoked stub), which gave him an excuse to remain stationary while he watched her walk away into the lengthening shadows.

‘Why do they call him “Peanut”, that boy?’ Gaia asked Sukhvinder, once they were out of earshot of Andrew.

‘He’s allergic,’ said Sukhvinder. She was horrified at the prospect of telling Parminder what she had done. Her voice sounded like somebody else’s. ‘He nearly died at St Thomas’s; somebody gave him one hidden in a marshmallow.’

‘Oh,’ said Gaia. ‘I thought it might be because he had a tiny dick.’

She laughed, and so did Sukhvinder, forcing herself, as though jokes about penises were all she heard, day in, day out.

Andrew saw them both glance back at him as they laughed, and knew that they were talking about him. The giggling might be a hopeful sign; he knew that much about girls, anyway. Grinning at nothing but the cooling air, he walked off, school bag over his shoulder, cigarette in his hand, across the Square towards Church Row, and thence to forty minutes of steep climbing up out of town to Hilltop House.

The hedgerows were ghostly pale with white blossom in the dusk, blackthorn blooming on either side of him, celandine fringing the lane with tiny, glossy heart-shaped leaves. The smell of the flowers, the deep pleasure of the cigarette and the promise of weekends with Gaia; everything blended together into a glorious symphony of elation and beauty as Andrew puffed up the hill. The next time Simon said ‘got a job, Pizza Face?’ he would be able to say ‘yes’. He was going to be Gaia Bawden’s weekend workmate.

And, to cap it all, he knew at last exactly how he might plunge an anonymous dagger straight between his father’s shoulder blades.