The Casual Vacancy

IX


‘And where are you going?’ asked Simon, planting himself squarely in the middle of the tiny hall.

The front door was open, and the glass porch behind him, full of shoes and coats, was blinding in the bright Saturday morning sun, turning Simon into a silhouette. His shadow rippled up the stairs, just touching the one on which Andrew stood.

‘Into town with Fats.’

‘Homework all finished, is it?’

‘Yeah.’

It was a lie; but Simon would not bother to check.

‘Ruth? Ruth!’

She appeared at the kitchen door, wearing an apron, flushed, with her hands covered in flour.

‘What?’

‘Do we need anything from town?’

‘What? No, I don’t think so.’

‘Taking my bike, are you?’ demanded Simon of Andrew.

‘Yeah, I was going to—’

‘Leaving it at Fats’ house?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What time do we want him back?’ Simon asked, turning to Ruth again.

‘Oh, I don’t know, Si,’ said Ruth impatiently. The furthest she ever went in irritation with her husband was on occasions when Simon, though basically in a good mood, started laying down the law for the fun of it. Andrew and Fats often went into town together, on the vague understanding that Andrew would return before it became dark.

‘Five o’clock, then,’ said Simon arbitrarily. ‘Any later and you’re grounded.’

‘Fine,’ Andrew replied.

He kept his right hand in his jacket pocket, clenched over a tightly folded wad of paper, intensely aware of it, like a ticking grenade. The fear of losing this piece of paper, on which was inscribed a line of meticulously written code, and a number of crossed-out, reworked and heavily edited sentences, had been plaguing him for a week. He had been keeping it on him at all times, and sleeping with it inside his pillowcase.

Simon barely moved aside, so that Andrew had to edge past him into the porch, his fingers clamped over the paper. He was terrified that Simon would demand that he turn out his pockets, ostensibly looking for cigarettes.

‘Bye, then.’

Simon did not answer. Andrew proceeded into the garage, where he took out the note, unfolded it and read it. He knew that he was being irrational, that mere proximity to Simon could not have magically switched the papers, but still he made sure. Satisfied that all was safe, he refolded it, tucked it deeper into his pocket, which fastened with a stud, then wheeled the racing bike out of the garage and down through the gate into the lane. He could tell that his father was watching him through the glass door of the porch, hoping, Andrew was sure, to see him fall off or mistreat the bicycle in some way.

Pagford lay below Andrew, slightly hazy in the cool spring sun, the air fresh and tangy. Andrew sensed the point at which Simon’s eyes could no longer follow him; it felt as though pressure had been removed from his back.

Down the hill into Pagford he streaked, not touching the brakes; then he turned into Church Row. Approximately halfway along the street he slowed down and cycled decorously into the drive of the Walls’ house, taking care to avoid Cubby’s car.

‘Hello, Andy,’ said Tessa, opening the front door to him.

‘Hi, Mrs Wall.’

Andrew accepted the convention that Fats’ parents were laughable. Tessa was plump and plain, her hairstyle was odd and her dress sense embarrassing, while Cubby was comically uptight; yet Andrew could not help but suspect that if the Walls had been his parents, he might have been tempted to like them. They were so civilized, so courteous. You never had the feeling, in their house, that the floor might suddenly give way and plunge you into chaos.

Fats was sitting on the bottom stair, putting on his trainers. A packet of loose tobacco was clearly visible, peeking out of the breast pocket of his jacket.

‘Arf.’

‘Fats.’

‘D’you want to leave your father’s bicycle in the garage, Andy?’

‘Yeah, thanks, Mrs Wall.’

(She always, he reflected, said ‘your father’, never ‘your dad’. Andrew knew that Tessa detested Simon; it was one of the things that made him pleased to overlook the horrible shapeless clothes she wore, and the unflattering blunt-cut fringe.

Her antipathy dated from that horrific epoch-making occasion, years and years before, when a six-year-old Fats had come to spend Saturday afternoon at Hilltop House for the first time. Balancing precariously on top of a box in the garage, trying to retrieve a couple of old badminton racquets, the two boys had accidentally knocked down the contents of a rickety shelf.

Andrew remembered the tin of creosote falling, smashing onto the roof of the car and bursting open, and the terror that had engulfed him, and his inability to communicate to his giggling friend what they had brought upon themselves.

Simon had heard the crash. He ran out to the garage and advanced on them with his jaw jutting, making his low, moaning animal noise, before starting to roar threats of dire physical punishment, his fists clenched inches from their small, upturned faces.

Fats had wet himself. A stream of urine had spattered down the inside of his shorts onto the garage floor. Ruth, who had heard the yelling from the kitchen, had run from the house to intervene: ‘No, Si – Si, no – it was an accident.’ Fats was white and shaking; he wanted to go home straight away; he wanted his mum.

Tessa had arrived, and Fats had run to her in his soaking shorts, sobbing. It was the only time in his life that Andrew had seen his father at a loss, backing down. Somehow Tessa had conveyed white-hot fury without raising her voice, without threatening, without hitting. She had written out a cheque and forced it into Simon’s hand, while Ruth said, ‘No, no, there’s no need, there’s no need.’ Simon had followed her to her car, trying to laugh it all off; but Tessa had given him a look of contempt while loading the still-sobbing Fats into the passenger seat, and slammed the driver’s door in Simon’s smiling face. Andrew had seen his parents’ expressions: Tessa was taking away with her, down the hill into the town, something that usually remained hidden in the house on top of the hill.)

Fats courted Simon these days. Whenever he came up to Hilltop House, he went out of his way to make Simon laugh; and in return, Simon welcomed Fats’ visits, enjoyed his crudest jokes, liked hearing about his antics. Still, when alone with Andrew, Fats concurred wholeheartedly that Simon was a Grade A, 24-carat cunt.

‘I reckon she’s a lezzer,’ said Fats, as they walked past the Old Vicarage, dark in the shadow of the Scots pine, with ivy covering its front.

‘Your mum?’ asked Andrew, barely listening, lost in his own thoughts.

‘What?’ yelped Fats, and Andrew saw that he was genuinely outraged. ‘F*ck off! Sukhvinder Jawanda.’

‘Oh, yeah. Right.’

Andrew laughed, and so, a beat later, did Fats.

The bus into Yarvil was crowded; Andrew and Fats had to sit next to each other, rather than in two double seats, as they preferred. As they passed the end of Hope Street, Andrew glanced along it, but it was deserted. He had not run into Gaia outside school since the afternoon when they had both secured Saturday jobs at the Copper Kettle. The café would open the following weekend; he experienced waves of euphoria every time he thought of it.

‘Si-Pie’s election campaign on track, is it?’ asked Fats, busy making roll-ups. One long leg was stuck out at an angle into the aisle of the bus; people were stepping over it rather than asking him to move. ‘Cubby’s cacking it already, and he’s only making his pamphlet.’

‘Yeah, he’s busy,’ said Andrew, and he bore without flinching a silent eruption of panic in the pit of his stomach.

He thought of his parents at the kitchen table, as they had been, nightly, for the past week; of a box of stupid pamphlets Simon had had printed at work; of the list of talking points Ruth had helped Simon compile, which he used as he made telephone calls, every evening, to every person he knew within the electoral boundary. Simon did all of it with an air of immense effort. He was tightly wound at home, displaying heightened aggression towards his sons; he might have been shouldering a burden that they had shirked. The only topic of conversation at meals was the election, with Simon and Ruth speculating about the forces ranged against Simon. They took it very personally that other candidates were standing for Barry Fairbrother’s old seat, and seemed to assume that Colin Wall and Miles Mollison spent most of their time plotting together, staring up at Hilltop House, focused entirely on defeating the man who lived there.

Andrew checked his pocket again for the folded paper. He had not told Fats what he intended to do. He was afraid that Fats might broadcast it; Andrew was not sure how to impress upon his friend the necessity for absolute secrecy, how to remind Fats that the maniac who had made little boys piss themselves was still alive and well, and living in Andrew’s house.

‘Cubby’s not too worried about Si-Pie,’ said Fats. ‘He thinks the big competition is Miles Mollison.’

‘Yeah,’ said Andrew. He had heard his parents discussing it. Both of them seemed to think that Shirley had betrayed them; that she ought to have forbidden her son from challenging Simon.

‘This is a holy f*cking crusade for Cubby, y’know,’ said Fats, rolling a cigarette between forefinger and thumb. ‘He’s picking up the regimental flag for his fallen comrade. Ole Barry Fairbrother.’

He poked strands of tobacco into the end of the roll-up with a match.

‘Miles Mollison’s wife’s got gigantic tits,’ said Fats.

An elderly woman sitting in front of them turned her head to glare at Fats. Andrew began to laugh again.

‘Humungous bouncing jubblies,’ Fats said loudly, into the scowling, crumpled face. ‘Great big juicy double-F mams.’

She turned her red face slowly to face the front of the bus again. Andrew could barely breathe.

They got off the bus in the middle of Yarvil, near the precinct and main pedestrian-only shopping street, and wove their way through the shoppers, smoking Fats’ roll-ups. Andrew had virtually no money left: Howard Mollison’s wages would be very welcome.

The bright-orange sign of the internet café seemed to blaze at Andrew from a distance, beckoning him on. He could not concentrate on what Fats was saying. Are you going to? he kept asking himself. Are you going to?

He did not know. His feet kept moving, and the sign was growing larger and larger, luring him, leering at him.

If I find out you’ve breathed a word about what’s said in this house, I’ll skin you alive.

But the alternative … the humiliation of having Simon show what he was to the world; the toll it would take on the family when, after weeks of anticipation and idiocy, he was defeated, as he must be. Then would come rage and spite, and a determination to make everybody else pay for his own lunatic decisions. Only the previous evening Ruth had said brightly, ‘The boys will go through Pagford and post your pamphlets for you.’ Andrew had seen, in his peripheral vision, Paul’s look of horror and his attempt to make eye contact with his brother.

‘I wanna go in here,’ mumbled Andrew, turning right.

They bought tickets with codes on them, and sat down at different computers, two occupied seats apart. The middle-aged man on Andrew’s right stank of body odour and old fags, and kept sniffing.

Andrew logged onto the internet, and typed in the name of the website: Pagford … Parish … Council … dot … co … dot … uk …

The homepage bore the council arms in blue and white, and a picture of Pagford that had been taken from a point close to Hilltop House, with Pargetter Abbey silhouetted against the sky. The site, as Andrew already knew, from looking at it on a school computer, looked dated and amateurish. He had not dared go near it on his own laptop; his father might be immensely ignorant about the internet, but Andrew did not rule out the possibility that Simon might find somebody at work who could help him investigate, once the thing was done …

Even in this bustling anonymous place, there was no avoiding the fact that today’s date would be on the posting, or of pretending that he had not been in Yarvil when it happened; but Simon had never visited an internet café in his life, and might not be aware that they existed.

The rapid contraction of Andrew’s heart was painful. Swiftly, he scrolled down the message board, which did not seem to enjoy a lot of traffic. There were threads entitled: refuse collection – a Query and school catchment areas in Crampton and Little manning? Every tenth entry or so was a posting from the Administrator, attaching Minutes of the Last Council Meeting. Right at the bottom of the page was a thread entitled: Death of Cllr Barry Fairbrother. This had received 152 views and forty-three responses. Then, on the second page of the message board, he found what he hoped to find: a post from the dead man.

A couple of months previously, Andrew’s computing set had been supervised by a young supply teacher. He had been trying to look cool, trying to get the class onside. He shouldn’t have mentioned SQL injections at all, and Andrew was quite sure that he had not been the only one who went straight home and looked them up. He pulled out the piece of paper on which he had written the code he had researched in odd moments at school, and brought up the log-in page on the council website. Everything hinged on the premise that the site had been set up by an amateur a long time ago; that it had never been protected from the simplest of classical hacks.

Carefully, using only his index finger, he input the magic line of characters.

He read them through twice, making sure that every apostrophe was where it should be, hesitated for a second on the brink, his breathing shallow, then pressed return.

He gasped, as gleeful as a small child, and had to fight the urge to shout out or punch the air. He had penetrated the tin-pot site at his first attempt. There, on the screen in front of him, were Barry Fairbrother’s user details: his name, his password, his entire profile.

Andrew smoothed out the magic paper he had kept under his pillow all week, and set to work. Typing up his next paragraph, with its many crossings out and reworkings, was a much more laborious process.

He had been trying for a style that was as impersonal and impenetrable as possible; for the dispassionate tone of a broadsheet journalist.

Aspiring Parish Councillor Simon Price hopes to stand on a platform of cutting wasteful council spending. Mr Price is certainly no stranger to keeping down costs, and should be able to give the council the benefit of his many useful contacts. He saves money at home by furnishing it with stolen goods – most recently a PC – and he is the go-to man for any cut-price printing jobs that may need doing for cash, once senior management has gone home, at the Harcourt-Walsh Printworks.

Andrew read the message through twice. He had been over it time and again in his mind. There were many accusations he could have levelled at Simon, but the court did not exist in which Andrew could have laid the real charges against his father, in which he would have presented as evidence memories of physical terror and ritual humiliation. All he had were the many petty infractions of the law of which he had heard Simon boast, and he had selected these two specific examples – the stolen computer and the out-of-hours printing jobs done on the sly – because both were firmly connected to Simon’s workplace. People at the printer’s knew that Simon did these things, and they could have talked to anybody: their friends, their families.

His guts were juddering, the way they did when Simon truly lost control and laid about anyone within reach. Seeing his betrayal in black and white on the screen was terrifying.

‘What the f*ck are you doing?’ asked Fats’ quiet voice in his ear.

The stinking, middle-aged man had gone; Fats had moved up; he was reading what Andrew had written.

‘F*cking hell,’ said Fats.

Andrew’s mouth was dry. His hand lay quiescent on the mouse.

‘How’d you get in?’ Fats whispered.

‘SQL injection,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s all on the net. Their security’s shit.’

Fats looked exhilarated; wildly impressed. Andrew was half pleased, half scared, by the reaction.

‘You’ve gotta keep this to—’

‘Lemme do one about Cubby!’

‘No!’

Andrew’s hand on the mouse skidded away from Fats’ reaching fingers. This ugly act of filial disloyalty had sprung from the primordial soup of anger, frustration and fear that had slopped inside him all his rational life, but he knew no better way to convey this to Fats than by saying, ‘I’m not just having a laugh.’

He read the message through a third time, then added a title to the message. He could feel Fats’ excitement beside him, as if they were having another porn session. Andrew was seized by a desire to impress further.

‘Look,’ he said, and he changed Barry’s username to The_Ghost_ of_Barry_Fairbrother.

Fats laughed loudly. Andrew’s fingers twitched on the mouse. He rolled it sideways. Whether he would have gone through with it if Fats had not been watching, he would never know. With a single click, a new thread appeared at the top of the Pagford Parish Council message board: Simon Price Unfit to Stand for Council.

Outside on the pavement, they faced each other, breathless with laughter, slightly overawed by what had happened. Then Andrew borrowed Fats’ matches, set fire to the piece of paper on which he had drafted the message, and watched it disintegrate into fragile black flakes, which drifted onto the dirty pavement and vanished under passing feet.





X


Andrew left Yarvil at half-past three, to be sure of getting back to Hilltop House before five. Fats accompanied him to the bus stop and then, apparently on a whim, told Andrew that he thought he would stay in town for a bit, after all.

Fats had made a loose arrangement to meet Krystal in the shopping centre. He strolled back towards the shops, thinking about what Andrew had done in the internet café, and trying to disentangle his own reactions.

He had to admit that he was impressed; in fact, he felt somewhat upstaged. Andrew had thought the business through, and kept it to himself, and executed it efficiently: all of this was admirable. Fats experienced a twinge of pique that Andrew had formulated the plan without saying a word to him, and this led Fats to wonder whether, perhaps, he ought not to deplore the undercover nature of Andrew’s attack on his father. Was there not something slippery and over-sophisticated about it; would it not have been more authentic to threaten Simon to his face or to take a swing at him?

Yes, Simon was a shit, but he was undoubtedly an authentic shit; he did what he wanted, when he wanted, without submitting to societal constraints or conventional morality. Fats asked himself whether his sympathies ought not to lie with Simon, whom he liked entertaining with crude, crass humour focused mainly on people making tits of themselves or suffering slapstick injuries. Fats often told himself that he would rather have Simon, with his volatility, his unpredictable picking of fights – a worthy opponent, an engaged adversary – than Cubby.

On the other hand, Fats had not forgotten the falling tin of creosote, Simon’s brutish face and fists, the terrifying noise he had made, the sensation of hot wet piss running down his own legs, and (perhaps most shameful of all) his whole-hearted, desperate yearning for Tessa to come and take him away to safety. Fats was not yet so invulnerable that he was unsympathetic to Andrew’s desire for retribution.

So Fats came full circle: Andrew had done something daring, ingenious and potentially explosive in its consequences. Again Fats experienced a small pang of chagrin that it had not been he who had thought of it. He was trying to rid himself of his own acquired middle-class reliance on words, but it was difficult to forgo a sport at which he excelled, and as he trod the polished tiles of the shopping centre forecourt, he found himself turning phrases that would blow Cubby’s self-important pretensions apart and strip him naked before a jeering public …

He spotted Krystal among a small crowd of Fields kids, grouped around the benches in the middle of the thoroughfare between shops. Nikki, Leanne and Dane Tully were among them. Fats did not hesitate, nor appear to gather himself in the slightest, but continued to walk at the same speed, his hands in his pockets, into the battery of curious critical eyes, raking him from the top of his head to his trainers.

‘All righ’, Fatboy?’ called Leanne.

‘All right?’ responded Fats. Leanne muttered something to Nikki, who cackled. Krystal was chewing gum energetically, colour high in her cheeks, throwing back her hair so that her earrings danced, tugging up her tracksuit bottoms.

‘All right?’ Fats said to her, individually.

‘Yeah,’ she said.

‘Duz yer mum know yer out, Fats?’ asked Nikki.

‘Yeah, she brought me,’ said Fats calmly, into the greedy silence. ‘She’s waiting outside in the car; she says I can have a quick shag before we go home for tea.’

They all burst out laughing except Krystal, who squealed, ‘F*ck off, you cheeky bastard!’ but looked gratified.

‘You smokin’ rollies?’ grunted Dane Tully, his eyes on Fats’ breast pocket. He had a large black scab on his lip.

‘Yeah,’ said Fats.

‘Me uncle smokes them,’ said Dane. ‘Knackered his f*ckin’ lungs.’

He picked idly at the scab.

‘Where’re you two goin’?’ asked Leanne, squinting from Fats to Krystal.

‘Dunno,’ said Krystal, chewing her gum, glancing sideways at Fats.

He did not enlighten either of them, but indicated the exit of the shopping centre with a jerk of his thumb.

‘Laters,’ Krystal said loudly to the rest.

Fats gave them a careless half-raised hand in farewell and walked away, Krystal striding along beside him. He heard more laughter in their wake, but did not care. He knew that he had acquitted himself well.

‘Where’re we goin’?’ asked Krystal.

‘Dunno,’ said Fats. ‘Where d’you usually go?’

She shrugged, walking and chewing. They left the shopping centre and walked on down the high street. They were some distance from the recreation ground, where they had previously gone to find privacy.

‘Didjer mum really drop yeh?’ Krystal asked.

‘Course she bloody didn’t. I got the bus in, didn’t I?’

Krystal accepted the rebuke without rancour, glancing sideways into the shop windows at their paired reflections. Stringy and strange, Fats was a school celebrity. Even Dane thought he was funny.

‘He’s on’y usin’ yeh, yeh stupid bitch,’ Ashlee Mellor had spat at her, three days ago, on the corner of Foley Road, ‘because yer a f*ckin’ whore, like yer mum.’

Ashlee had been a member of Krystal’s gang until the two of them had clashed over another boy. Ashlee was notoriously not quite right in the head; she was prone to outbursts of rage and tears, and divided most of her time between learning support and guidance when at Winterdown. If further proof were needed of her inability to think through consequences, she had challenged Krystal on her home turf, where Krystal had back-up and she had none. Nikki, Jemma and Leanne had helped corner and hold Ashlee, and Krystal had pummelled and slapped her everywhere she could reach, until her knuckles came away bloody from the other girl’s mouth.

Krystal was not worried about repercussions.

‘Soft as shite an’ twice as runny,’ she said of Ashlee and her family.

But Ashlee’s words had stung a tender, infected place in Krystal’s psyche, so it had been balm to her when Fats had sought her out at school the next day and asked her, for the first time, to meet him over the weekend. She had told Nikki and Leanne immediately that she was going out with Fats Wall on Saturday, and had been gratified by their looks of surprise. And to cap it all, he had turned up when he had said he would (or within half an hour of it) right in front of all her mates, and walked away with her. It was like they were properly going out.

‘So what’ve you been up to?’ Fats asked, after they had walked fifty yards in silence, back past the internet café. He knew a conventional need to keep some form of communication going, even while he wondered whether they would find a private place before the rec, a half-hour’s walk away. He wanted to screw her while they were both stoned; he was curious to know what that was like.

‘I bin ter see my Nana in hospital this mornin’, she’s ’ad a stroke,’ said Krystal.

Nana Cath had not tried to speak this time, but Krystal thought she had known that she was there. As Krystal had expected, Terri was refusing to visit, so Krystal had sat beside the bed on her own for an hour until it was time to leave for the precinct.

Fats was curious about the minutiae of Krystal’s life; but only in so far as she was an entry point to the real life of the Fields. Particulars such as hospital visits were of no interest to him.

‘An’,’ Krystal added, with an irrepressible spurt of pride, ‘I’ve gave an interview to the paper.’

‘What?’ said Fats, startled. ‘Why?’

‘Jus’ about the Fields,’ said Krystal. ‘What it’s like growin’ up there.’

(The journalist had found her at home at last, and when Terri had given her grudging permission, taken her to a café to talk. She had kept asking her whether being at St Thomas’s had helped Krystal, whether it had changed her life in any way. She had seemed a little impatient and frustrated by Krystal’s answers.

‘How are your marks at school?’ she had said, and Krystal had been evasive and defensive.

‘Mr Fairbrother said that he thought it broadened your horizons.’

Krystal did not know what to say about horizons. When she thought of St Thomas’s, it was of her delight in the playing field with the big chestnut tree, which rained enormous glossy conkers on them every year; she had never seen conkers before she went to St Thomas’s. She had liked the uniform at first, liked looking the same as everybody else. She had been excited to see her great-grandfather’s name on the war memorial in the middle of the Square: Pte Samuel Weedon. Only one other boy had his surname on the war memorial, and that was a farmer’s son, who had been able to drive a tractor at nine, and who had once brought a lamb into class for Show and Tell. Krystal had never forgotten the sensation of the lamb’s fleece under her hand. When she told Nana Cath about it, Nana Cath had said that their family had been farm labourers once.

Krystal had loved the river, green and lush, where they had gone for nature walks. Best of all had been rounders and athletics. She was always first to be picked for any kind of sporting team, and she had delighted in the groan that went up from the other team whenever she was chosen. And she thought sometimes of the special teachers she had been given, especially Miss Jameson, who had been young and trendy, with long blonde hair. Krystal had always imagined Anne-Marie to be a little bit like Miss Jameson.

Then there were snippets of information that Krystal had retained in vivid, accurate detail. Volcanoes: they were made by plates shifting in the ground; they had made model ones and filled them with bicarbonate of soda and washing-up liquid, and they had erupted onto plastic trays. Krystal had loved that. She knew about Vikings too: they had longships and horned helmets, though she had forgotten when they arrived in Britain, or why.

But other memories of St Thomas’s included the muttered comments made about her by little girls in her class, one or two of whom she had slapped. When Social Services had allowed her to go back to her mother, her uniform became so tight, short and grubby that letters were sent from school, and Nana Cath and Terri had a big row. The other girls at school had not wanted her in their groups, except for their rounders teams. She could still remember Lexie Mollison handing everyone in the class a little pink envelope containing a party invitation, and walking past Krystal with – as Krystal remembered it – her nose in the air.

Only a couple of people had asked her to parties. She wondered whether Fats or his mother remembered that she had once attended a birthday party at their house. The whole class had been invited, and Nana Cath had bought Krystal a party dress. So she knew that Fats’ huge back garden had a pond and a swing and an apple tree. They had eaten jelly and had sack races. Tessa had told Krystal off because, trying desperately hard to win a plastic medal, she had pushed other children out of the way. One of them had had a nosebleed.

‘You enjoyed St Thomas’s, though, did you?’ the journalist had asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Krystal, but she knew that she had not conveyed what Mr Fairbrother had wanted her to convey, and wished he could have been there with her to help. ‘Yeah, I enjoyed it.’)

‘How come they wanted to talk to you about the Fields?’ asked Fats.

‘It were Mr Fairbrother’s idea,’ said Krystal.

After another few minutes, Fats asked, ‘D’you smoke?’

‘Wha’, like spliffs? Yeah, I dunnit with Dane.’

‘I’ve got some on me,’ said Fats.

‘Get it off Skye Kirby, didja?’ asked Krystal. He wondered whether he imagined a trace of amusement in her voice; because Skye was the soft, safe option, the place the middle-class kids went. If so, Fats liked her authentic derision.

‘Where d’you get yours, then?’ he asked, interested now.

‘I dunno, it were Dane’s,’ she said.

‘From Obbo?’ suggested Fats.

‘Tha’ f*ckin’ tosser.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

But Krystal had no words for what was wrong with Obbo; and even if she had, she would not have wanted to talk about him. Obbo made her flesh crawl; sometimes he came round and shot up with Terri; at other times he f*cked her, and Krystal would meet him on the stairs, tugging up his filthy fly, smiling at her through his bottle-bottom glasses. Often Obbo had little jobs to offer Terri, like hiding the computers, or giving strangers a place to stay for a night, or agreeing to perform services of which Krystal did not know the nature, but which took her mother out of the house for hours.

Krystal had had a nightmare, not long ago, in which her mother had become stretched, spread and tied on a kind of frame; she was mostly a vast, gaping hole, like a giant, raw, plucked chicken; and in the dream, Obbo was walking in and out of this cavernous interior, and fiddling with things in there, while Terri’s tiny head was frightened and grim. Krystal had woken up feeling sick and angry and disgusted.

‘’E’s a f*cker,’ said Krystal.

‘Is he a tall bloke with a shaved head and tattoos all up the back of his neck?’ asked Fats, who had truanted for a second time that week, and sat on a wall for an hour in the Fields, watching. The bald man had interested him, fiddling around in the back of an old white van.

‘Nah, tha’s Pikey Pritchard,’ said Krystal, ‘if yeh saw him down Tarpen Road.’

‘What does he do?’

‘I dunno,’ said Krystal. ‘Ask Dane, ’e’s mates with Pikey’s brother.’

But she liked his genuine interest; he had never shown this much inclination to talk to her before.

‘Pikey’s on probation.’

‘What for?’

‘He glassed a bloke down the Cross Keys.’

‘Why?’

‘’Ow the f*ck do I know? I weren’t there,’ said Krystal.

She was happy, which always made her cocky. Setting aside her worry about Nana Cath (who was, after all, still alive, so might yet recover), it had been a good couple of weeks. Terri was adhering to the Bellchapel regime again, and Krystal was making sure that Robbie went to nursery. His bottom had mostly healed over. The social worker seemed as pleased as her sort ever did. Krystal had been to school every day too, though she had not attended either her Monday or her Wednesday morning guidance sessions with Tessa. She did not know why. Sometimes you got out of the habit.

She glanced sideways at Fats again. She had never once thought of fancying him; not until he had targeted her at the disco in the drama hall. Everyone knew Fats; some of his jokes were passed around like funny stuff that happened on the telly. (Krystal pretended to everyone that they had a television at home. She watched enough at friends’ houses, and at Nana Cath’s, to be able to bluff her way through. ‘Yeah, it were shit, weren’t it?’ ‘I know, I nearly pissed meself,’ she would say, when the others talked about programmes they had seen.)

Fats was imagining how it would feel to be glassed, how the jagged shard would slice through the tender flesh on his face; he could feel the searing nerves and the sting of the air against his ripped skin; the warm wetness as blood gushed. He felt a tickly over-sensitivity in the skin around his mouth, as if it was already scarred.

‘Is he still carrying a blade, Dane?’ he asked.

‘’Ow d’you know ’e’s gotta blade?’ demanded Krystal.

‘He threatened Kevin Cooper with it.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Krystal conceded. ‘Cooper’s a twat, innee?’

‘Yeah, he is,’ said Fats.

‘Dane’s on’y carryin’ ’cos o’ the Riordon brothers,’ said Krystal.

Fats liked the matter-of-factness of Krystal’s tone; her acceptance of the need for a knife, because there was a grudge and a likelihood of violence. This was the raw reality of life; these were things that actually mattered … before Arf had arrived at the house that day, Cubby had been importuning Tessa to give him an opinion on whether his campaign leaflet should be printed on yellow or white paper …

‘What about in there?’ suggested Fats, after a while.

To their right was a long stone wall, its gates open to reveal a glimpse of green and stone.

‘Yeah, all righ’,’ said Krystal. She had been in the cemetery once before, with Nikki and Leanne; they had sat on a grave and split a couple of cans, a little self-conscious about what they were doing, until a woman had shouted at them and called them names. Leanne had lobbed an empty can back at the woman as they left.

But it was too exposed, Fats thought, as he and Krystal walked up the broad concreted walkway between the graves: green and flat, the headstones offering virtually no cover. Then he saw barberry hedges along the wall on the far side. He cut a path right across the cemetery, and Krystal followed, hands in her pockets, as they picked their way between rectangular gravel beds, headstones cracked and illegible. It was a large cemetery, wide and well tended. Gradually they reached the newer graves of highly polished black marble with gold lettering, places where fresh flowers had been laid for the recently dead.


To Lyndsey Kyle, September 15 1960–March 26 2008,

Sleep Tight Mum.

‘Yeah, we’ll be all right in there,’ said Fats, eyeing the dark gap between the prickly, yellow-flowered bushes and the cemetery wall.

They crawled into the damp shadows, onto the earth, their backs against the cold wall. The headstones marched away from them between the bushes’ trunks, but there were no human forms among them. Fats skinned up expertly, hoping that Krystal was watching, and was impressed.

But she was gazing out under the canopy of glossy dark leaves, thinking about Anne-Marie, who (Aunt Cheryl had told her) had come to visit Nana Cath on Thursday. If only she had skipped school and gone at the same time, they could have met at last. She had fantasized, many times, about how she would meet Anne-Marie, and say to her, ‘I’m yer sister.’ Anne-Marie, in these fantasies, was always delighted, and they saw each other all the time after that, and eventually Anne-Marie suggested that Krystal move in. The imaginary Anne-Marie had a house like Nana Cath’s, neat and clean, except that it was much more modern. Lately, in her fantasies, Krystal had added a sweet little pink baby in a frilly crib.

‘There you go,’ said Fats, handing Krystal the joint. She inhaled, held the smoke in her lungs for a few seconds, and her expression softened into dreaminess as the cannabis worked its magic.

‘You ain’ got brothers an’ sisters,’ she asked, ‘’ave yeh?’

‘No,’ said Fats, checking his pocket for the condoms he had brought.

Krystal handed back the joint, her head swimming pleasantly. Fats took an enormous drag and blew smoke rings.

‘I’m adopted,’ he said, after a while.

Krystal goggled at Fats.

‘Are yeh adopted, are yeh?’

With the senses a little muffled and cushioned, confidences peeled easily away, everything became easy.

‘My sister wuz adopted,’ said Krystal, marvelling at the coincidence, delighted to talk about Anne-Marie.

‘Yeah, I probably come from a family like yours,’ said Fats.

But Krystal was not listening; she wanted to talk.

‘I gottan older sister an’ an older brother, Liam, but they wuz taken away before I wuz born.’

‘Why?’ asked Fats.

He was suddenly paying close attention.

‘Me mum was with Ritchie Adams then,’ said Krystal. She took a deep drag on the joint and blew out the smoke in a long thin jet. ‘He’s a proper psycho. He’s doin’ life. He killed a bloke. Proper violent to Mum an’ the kids, an’ then John an’ Sue came an’ took ’em, and the social got involved an’ it ended up John an’ Sue kept ’em.’

She drew on the joint again, considering this period of her pre-life, which was doused in blood, fury and darkness. She had heard things about Ritchie Adams, mainly from her aunt Cheryl. He had stubbed out cigarettes on one-year-old Anne-Marie’s arms, and kicked her until her ribs cracked. He had broken Terri’s face; her left cheekbone was still receded, compared to the right. Terri’s addiction had spiralled catastrophically. Aunt Cheryl was matter of fact about the decision to remove the two brutalized, neglected children from their parents.

‘It ’ad to ’appen,’ said Cheryl.

John and Sue were distant, childless relatives. Krystal had never known where or how they fitted in her complex family tree, or how they had effected what, to hear Terri tell it, sounded like kidnap. After much wrangling with the authorities, they had been allowed to adopt the children. Terri, who had remained with Ritchie until his arrest, never saw Anne-Marie or Liam, for reasons Krystal did not entirely understand; the whole story was clotted and festering with hatred and unforgivable things said and threatened, restraining orders, lots more social workers.

‘Who’s your dad, then?’ asked Fats.

‘Banger,’ said Krystal. She struggled to recall his real name. ‘Barry,’ she muttered, though she had a suspicion that was not right. ‘Barry Coates. O’ny I uses me mum’s name, Weedon.’

The memory of the dead young man who had overdosed in Terri’s bathroom floated back to her through the sweet, heavy smoke. She passed the joint back to Fats and leaned her head against the stone wall, looking up at the sliver of sky, mottled with dark leaves.

Fats was thinking about Ritchie Adams, who had killed a man, and considering the possibility that his own biological father was in prison somewhere too; tattooed, like Pikey, spare and muscled. He mentally compared Cubby with this strong, hard authentic man. Fats knew that he had been parted from his biological mother as a very small baby, because there were pictures of Tessa holding him, frail and bird-like, with a woolly white cap on his head. He had been premature. Tessa had told him a few things, though he had never asked. His real mother had been very young when she had him, he knew that. Perhaps she had been like Krystal; the school bike …

He was properly stoned now. He put his hand behind Krystal’s neck and pulled her towards him, kissing her, sticking his tongue into her mouth. With his other hand, he groped for her breast. His brain was fuzzy and his limbs were heavy; even his sense of touch seemed affected. He fumbled a little to get his hand inside her T-shirt, to force it under her bra. Her mouth was hot and tasted of tobacco and dope; her lips were dry and chapped. His excitement was slightly blunted; he seemed to be receiving all sensory information through an invisible blanket. It took longer than the last time to prise her clothes loose from her body, and the condom was difficult, because his fingers had become stiff and slow; then he accidentally placed his elbow, with all his weight behind it, on her soft fleshy underarm and she shrieked in pain.

She was drier than before; he forced his way inside her, determined to accomplish what he had come for. Time was glue-like and slow, but he could hear his own rapid breathing, and it made him edgy, because he imagined someone else, crouching in the dark space with them, watching, panting in his ear. Krystal moaned a little. With her head thrown back, her nose became broad and snout-like. He pushed up her T-shirt to look at the smooth white breasts, jiggling a little, beneath the loose constraint of the undone bra. He came without expecting it, and his own grunt of satisfaction seemed to belong to the crouching eavesdropper.

He rolled off her, peeled off the condom and threw it aside, then zipped himself up, feeling jittery, looking around to check that they were definitely alone. Krystal was dragging her pants up with one hand, pulling down her T-shirt with the other, reaching behind herself to do up her bra.

It had become cloudy and darker while they had sat behind the bushes. There was a distant buzzing in Fats’ ears; he was very hungry; his brain was working slowly, while his ears were hypersensitive. The fear that they had been watched, perhaps over the top of the wall behind them, would not leave him. He wanted to go.

‘Let’s …’ he muttered, and without waiting for her, he crawled out between the bushes and got to his feet, brushing himself down. There was an elderly couple a hundred yards away, crouching at a graveside. He wanted to get right away from phantom eyes that might, or might not, have watched him screw Krystal Weedon; but at the same time, the process of finding the right bus stop and getting on the bus to Pagford seemed almost unbearably onerous. He wished he could simply be transported, this instant, to his attic bedroom.

Krystal had staggered out behind him. She was pulling down the bottom of her T-shirt and staring down at the grassy ground at her feet.

‘F*ck,’ she mumbled.

‘What?’ said Fats. ‘C’mon, let’s go.’

‘’S Mr Fairbrother,’ she said, without moving.

‘What?’

She pointed at the mound in front of them. There was no headstone yet; but fresh flowers lay all along it.

‘See?’ she said, crouching over and indicating cards stapled to the cellophane. ‘Tha’ sez Fairbrother.’ She recognized the name easily from all those letters that had gone home from school, asking her mother to give permission for her to go away on the minibus. ‘“Ter Barry”,’ she read carefully, ‘an’ this sez, “Ter Dad”,’ she sounded out the words slowly, ‘“from … ”’

But Niamh and Siobhan’s names defeated her.

‘So?’ demanded Fats; but in truth, the news gave him the creeps. That wickerwork coffin lay feet below them, and inside it the short body and cheery face of Cubby’s dearest friend, so often seen in their house, rotting away in the earth. The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother … he was unnerved. It seemed like some kind of retribution.

‘C’mon,’ he said, but Krystal did not move. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I rowed for ’im, di’n I?’ snapped Krystal.

‘Oh, yeah.’

Fats was fidgeting like a restive horse, edging backwards.

Krystal stared down at the mound, hugging herself. She felt empty, sad and dirty. She wished they had not done it there, so close to Mr Fairbrother. She was cold. Unlike Fats, she had no jacket.

‘C’mon,’ said Fats again.

She followed him out of the cemetery, and they did not speak to each other once. Krystal was thinking about Mr Fairbrother. He had always called her ‘Krys’, which nobody else had ever done. She had liked being Krys. He had been a good laugh. She wanted to cry.

Fats was thinking about how he would be able to work this into a funny story for Andrew, about being stoned and f*cking Krystal and getting paranoid and thinking they were being watched and crawling out almost onto old Barry Fairbrother’s grave. But it did not feel funny yet; not yet.