The Casual Vacancy

VI


The next Parish Council meeting, the first since Barry had died, would be crucial in the ongoing battle over the Fields. Howard had refused to postpone the votes on the future of Bellchapel Addiction Clinic, or the town’s wish to transfer jurisdiction of the estate to Yarvil.

Parminder therefore suggested that she, Colin and Kay ought to meet up the evening before the meeting to discuss strategy.

‘Pagford can’t unilaterally decide to alter the parish boundary, can it?’ asked Kay.

‘No,’ said Parminder patiently (Kay could not help being a newcomer), ‘but the District Council has asked for Pagford’s opinion, and Howard’s determined to make sure it’s his opinion that gets passed on.’

They were holding their meeting in the Walls’ sitting room, because Tessa had put subtle pressure on Colin to invite the other two where she could listen in. Tessa handed around glasses of wine, put a large bowl of crisps on the coffee table, then sat back in silence, while the other three talked.

She was exhausted and angry. The anonymous post about Colin had brought on one of his most debilitating attacks of acute anxiety, so severe that he had been unable to go to school. Parminder knew how ill he was – she had signed him off work – yet she invited him to participate in this pre-meeting, not caring, it seemed, what fresh effusions of paranoia and distress Tessa would have to deal with tonight.

‘There’s definitely resentment out there about the way the Mollisons are handling things,’ Colin was saying, in the lofty, knowledgeable tone he sometimes adopted when pretending to be a stranger to fear and paranoia. ‘I think it’s starting to get up people’s noses, the way they think that they can speak for the town. I’ve got that impression, you know, while I’ve been canvassing.’

It would have been nice, thought Tessa bitterly, if Colin could have summoned these powers of dissimulation for her benefit occasionally. Once, long ago, she had liked being Colin’s sole confidante, the only repository of his terrors and the font of all reassurance, but she no longer found it flattering. He had kept her awake from two o’clock until half-past three that morning, rocking backwards and forwards on the edge of the bed, moaning and crying, saying that he wished he were dead, that he could not take it, that he wished he had never stood for the seat, that he was ruined …

Tessa heard Fats on the stairs, and tensed, but her son passed the open door on his way to the kitchen with nothing worse than a scathing glance at Colin, who was perched in front of the fire on a leather pouffe, his knees level with his chest.

‘Maybe Miles’ standing for the empty seat will really antagonize people – even the Mollisons’ natural supporters?’ said Kay hopefully.

‘I think it might,’ said Colin, nodding.

Kay turned to Parminder.

‘D’you think the council will really vote to force Bellchapel out of their building? I know people get uptight about discarded needles, and addicts hanging around the neighbourhood, but the clinic’s miles away … why does Pagford care?’

‘Howard and Aubrey are scratching each other’s backs,’ explained Parminder, whose face was taut, with dark brown patches under her eyes. (It was she who would have to attend the council meeting the next day, and fight Howard Mollison and his cronies without Barry by her side.) ‘They need to make cuts in spending at District level. If Howard turfs the clinic out of its cheap building, it’ll be much more expensive to run and Fawley can say the costs have increased, and justify cutting council funding. Then Fawley will do his best to make sure that the Fields get reassigned to Yarvil.’

Tired of explaining, Parminder pretended to examine the new stack of papers about Bellchapel that Kay had brought with her, easing herself out of the conversation.

Why am I doing this? she asked herself.

She could have been sitting at home with Vikram, who had been watching comedy on television with Jaswant and Rajpal as she left. The sound of their laughter had jarred on her; when had she last laughed? Why was she here, drinking nasty warm wine, fighting for a clinic that she would never need and a housing development inhabited by people she would probably dislike if she met them? She was not Bhai Kanhaiya, who could not see a difference between the souls of allies and enemies; she saw no light of God shining from Howard Mollison. She derived more pleasure from the thought of Howard losing, than from the thought of Fields children continuing to attend St Thomas’s, or from Fields people being able to break their addictions at Bellchapel, although, in a distant and dispassionate way, she thought that these were good things …

(But she knew why she was doing it, really. She wanted to win for Barry. He had told her all about coming to St Thomas’s. His classmates had invited him home to play; he, who had been living in a caravan with his mother and two brothers, had relished the neat and comfortable houses of Hope Street, and been awed by the big Victorian houses on Church Row. He had even attended a birthday party in that very cow-faced house that he had subsequently bought, and where he had raised his four children.

He had fallen in love with Pagford, with the river and the fields and the solid-walled houses. He had fantasized about having a garden to play in, a tree from which to hang a swing, space and greenness everywhere. He had collected conkers and taken them back to the Fields. After shining at St Thomas’s, top of his class, Barry had gone on to be the first in his family to go to university.

Love and hate, Parminder thought, a little frightened by her own honesty. Love and hate, that’s why I’m here … )

She turned over a page of Kay’s documents, feigning concentration.

Kay was pleased that the doctor was scrutinizing her papers so carefully, because she had put a lot of time and thought into them. She could not believe that anybody reading her material would not be convinced that the Bellchapel clinic ought to remain in situ.

But through all the statistics, the anonymous case studies and first-person testimonies, Kay really thought of the clinic in terms of only one patient: Terri Weedon. There had been a change in Terri, Kay could feel it, and it made her both proud and frightened. Terri was showing faint glimmerings of an awakened sense of control over her life. Twice lately, Terri had said to Kay, ‘They ain’ takin’ Robbie, I won’ lerrem,’ and these had not been impotent railings against fate, but statements of intent.

‘I took ’im ter nursery yest’day,’ she told Kay, who had made the mistake of looking astonished. ‘Why’s tha’ so f*ckin’ shockin’? Aren’ I good enough ter go ter the f*ckin’ nurs’ry?’

If Bellchapel’s door was slammed shut against Terri, Kay was sure it would blow to pieces that delicate structure they were trying to build out of the wreckage of a life. Terri seemed to have a visceral fear of Pagford that Kay did not understand.

‘I ’ate that f*ckin’ place,’ she had said, when Kay had mentioned it in passing.

Beyond the fact that her dead grandmother had lived there, Kay knew nothing of Terri’s history with the town, but she was afraid that if Terri was asked to travel there weekly for her methadone her self-control would crumble, and with it the family’s fragile new safety.

Colin had taken over from Parminder, explaining the history of the Fields; Kay nodded, bored, and said ‘mm’, but her thoughts were a long way away.

Colin was deeply flattered by the way this attractive young woman was hanging on his every word. He felt calmer tonight than at any point since he had read that awful post, which was gone from the website. None of the cataclysms that Colin had imagined in the small hours had come to pass. He was not sacked. There was no angry mob outside his front door. Nobody on the Pagford Council website, or indeed anywhere else on the internet (he had performed several Google searches), was demanding his arrest or incarceration.

Fats walked back past the open door, spooning yoghurt into his mouth as he went. He glanced into the room, and for a fleeting moment met Colin’s gaze. Colin immediately lost the thread of what he had been saying.

‘… and … yes, well, that’s it in a nutshell,’ he finished lamely. He glanced towards Tessa for reassurance, but his wife was staring stonily into space. Colin was a little hurt; he would have thought that Tessa would be glad to see him feeling so much better, so much more in control, after their wretched, sleepless night. Dreadful swooping sensations of dread were agitating his stomach, but he drew much comfort from the proximity of his fellow underdog and scapegoat Parminder, and from the sympathetic attention of the attractive social worker.

Unlike Kay, Tessa had listened to every word that Colin had just said about the Fields’ right to remain joined to Pagford. There was, in her opinion, no conviction behind his words. He wanted to believe what Barry had believed, and he wanted to defeat the Mollisons, because that was what Barry had wanted. Colin did not like Krystal Weedon, but Barry had liked her, so he assumed that there was more worth in her than he could see. Tessa knew her husband to be a strange mixture of arrogance and humility, of unshakeable conviction and insecurity.

They’re completely deluded, Tessa thought, looking at the other three, who were poring over some graph that Parminder had extracted from Kay’s notes. They think they’ll reverse sixty years of anger and resentment with a few sheets of statistics. None of them was Barry. He had been a living example of what they proposed in theory: the advancement, through education from poverty to affluence, from powerlessness and dependency to valuable contributor to society. Did they not see what hopeless advocates they were, compared to the man who had died?

‘People are definitely getting irritable with the Mollisons trying to run everything,’ Colin was saying.

‘I do think,’ said Kay, ‘that they’ll be hard-pushed, if they read this stuff, to pretend that the clinic isn’t doing crucial work.’

‘Not everybody’s forgotten Barry, on the council,’ said Parminder, in a slightly shaky voice.

Tessa realized that her greasy fingers were groping vainly in space. While the others had talked, she had single-handedly finished the entire bowl of crisps.





VII


It was a bright, balmy morning, and the computing lab at Winterdown Comprehensive became stuffy as lunchtime approached, the dirty windows speckling the dusty monitors with distracting spots of light. Even though there was no Fats or Gaia here to distract him, Andrew Price could not concentrate. He could think of nothing but what he had overheard his parents discussing the previous evening.

They had been talking, quite seriously, about moving to Reading, where Ruth’s sister and brother-in-law lived. With his ear turned towards the open kitchen door, Andrew had hovered in the tiny dark hall and listened: Simon, it appeared, had been offered a job, or the possibility of a job, by the uncle whom Andrew and Paul barely knew, because Simon disliked him so much.

‘It’s less money,’ Simon had said.

‘You don’t know that. He hasn’t said—’

‘Bound to be. And it’ll be more expensive all round, living there.’

Ruth made a noncommital noise. Scarcely daring to breathe in the hall, Andrew could tell, by the mere fact that his mother was not rushing to agree with Simon, that she wanted to go.

Andrew found it impossible to imagine his parents in any house but Hilltop House, or against any backdrop but Pagford. He had taken it for granted that they would remain there for ever. He, Andrew, would leave one day for London, but Simon and Ruth would remain rooted to the hillside like trees, until they died.

He had crept back upstairs to his bedroom and stared out of the window at the twinkling lights of Pagford, cupped in the deep black hollow between the hills. He felt as though he had never seen the view before. Somewhere down there, Fats was smoking in his attic room, probably looking at porn on his computer. Gaia was there too, absorbed in the mysterious rites of her gender. It occurred to Andrew that she had been through this; she had been torn away from the place she knew and transplanted. They had something profoundly in common at last; there was almost melancholy pleasure in the idea that, in leaving, he would share something with her.

But she had not caused her own displacement. With a squirming unease in his guts, he had picked up his mobile and texted Fats: Si-Pie offered job in Reading. Might take it.

Fats had still not responded, and Andrew had not seen him all morning, because they shared none of their classes. He had not seen Fats for the previous two weekends either, because he had been working at the Copper Kettle. Their longest conversation, recently, had concerned Fats’ posting about Cubby on the council website.

‘I think Tessa suspects,’ Fats had told Andrew casually. ‘She keeps looking at me like she knows.’

‘What’re you gonna say?’ Andrew had muttered, scared.

He knew Fats’ desire for glory and credit, and he knew Fats’ passion for wielding the truth as a weapon, but he was not sure that his friend understood that his own pivotal role in the activities of the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother must never be revealed. It had never been easy to explain to Fats the reality of having Simon as a father, and, somehow, Fats was becoming more difficult to explain things to.

When his IT teacher had passed by out of sight, Andrew looked up Reading on the internet. It was huge compared with Pagford. It had an annual music festival. It was only forty miles from London. He contemplated the train service. Perhaps he would go up to the capital at weekends, the way he currently took the bus to Yarvil. But the whole thing seemed unreal: Pagford was all he had ever known; he still could not imagine his family existing anywhere else.

At lunchtime Andrew headed straight out of school, looking for Fats. He lit up a cigarette just out of sight of the grounds, and was delighted to hear, as he was slipping his lighter casually back into his pocket, a female voice that said, ‘Hey’. Gaia and Sukhvinder caught up with him.

‘All right,’ he said, blowing smoke away from Gaia’s beautiful face.

The three of them had something these days that nobody else had. Two weekends’ work at the café had created a fragile bond between them. They knew Howard’s stock phrases, and had endured Maureen’s prurient interest in all of their home lives; they had smirked together at her wrinkled knees in the too-short waitress’s dress and had exchanged, like traders in a foreign land, small nuggets of personal information. Thus the girls knew that Andrew’s father had been sacked; Andrew and Sukhvinder knew that Gaia was working to save for a train ticket back to Hackney; and he and Gaia knew that Sukhvinder’s mother hated her working for Howard Mollison.

‘Where’s your Fat friend?’ she asked, as the three of them fell into step together.

‘Dunno,’ said Andrew. ‘Haven’t seen him.’

‘No loss,’ said Gaia. ‘How many of those do you smoke a day?’

‘Don’t count,’ said Andrew, elated by her interest. ‘D’you want one?’

‘No,’ said Gaia. ‘I don’t like smoking.’

He wondered instantly whether the dislike extended to kissing people who smoked. Niamh Fairbrother had not complained when he had stuck his tongue into her mouth at the school disco.

‘Doesn’t Marco smoke?’ asked Sukhvinder.

‘No, he’s always in training,’ said Gaia.

Andrew had become almost inured to the thought of Marco de Luca by now. There were advantages to Gaia being safeguarded, as it were, by an allegiance beyond Pagford. The power of the photographs of them together on her Facebook page had been blunted by his familiarity with them. He did not think it was his own wishful thinking that the messages she and Marco left for each other were becoming less frequent and less friendly. He could not know what was happening by telephone or email, but he was sure that Gaia’s air, when he was mentioned, was dispirited.

‘Oh, there he is,’ said Gaia.

It was not the handsome Marco who had come into view, but Fats Wall, who was talking to Dane Tully outside the newsagent’s.

Sukhvinder braked, but Gaia grabbed her upper arm.

‘You can walk where you like,’ she said, tugging her gently onwards, her flecked green eyes narrowing as they approached the place where Fats and Dane were smoking.

‘All right, Arf,’ called Fats, as the three of them came close.

‘Fats,’ said Andrew.

Trying to head off trouble, especially Fats bullying Sukhvinder in front of Gaia, he asked, ‘Did you get my text?’

‘What text?’ said Fats. ‘Oh yeah – that thing about Si? You leaving, then, are you?’

It was said with a cavalier indifference that Andrew could only attribute to the presence of Dane Tully.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Andrew.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Gaia.

‘My old man’s been offered a job in Reading,’ said Andrew.

‘Oh, that’s where my dad lives!’ said Gaia in surprise. ‘We could hang out when I go and stay. The festival’s awesome. D’you wanna get a sandwich, then, Sooks?’

Andrew was so stupefied by her voluntary offer to spend time with him, that she had disappeared into the newsagent’s before he could gather his wits and agree. For a moment, the dirty bus stop, the newsagent’s, even Dane Tully, tattooed and shabby in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, seemed to glow with an almost celestial light.

‘Well, I got things to do,’ said Fats.

Dane sniggered. Before Andrew could say anything or offer to accompany him, he had loped away.

Fats was sure that Andrew would be nonplussed and hurt by his cool attitude, and he was glad of it. Fats did not ask himself why he was glad, or why a general desire to cause pain had become his overriding emotion in the last few days. He had lately decided that questioning your own motives was inauthentic; a refinement of his personal philosophy that had made it altogether easier to follow.

As he headed into the Fields, Fats thought about what had happened at home the previous evening, when his mother had entered his bedroom for the first time since Cubby had punched him.

(‘That message about your father on the Parish Council website,’ she had said. ‘I’ve got to ask you this, Stuart, and I wish – Stuart, did you write it?’

It had taken her a few days to summon the courage to accuse him, and he was prepared.

‘No,’ he said.

Perhaps it would have been more authentic to say yes, but he had preferred not to, and he did not see why he should have to justify himself.

‘You didn’t?’ she repeated, with no change of tone or expression.

‘No,’ he repeated.

‘Because very, very few people know what Dad … what he worries about.’

‘Well, it wasn’t me.’

‘The post went up the same evening that Dad and you had the row, and Dad hit—’

‘I’ve told you, I didn’t do it.’

‘You know he’s ill, Stuart.’

‘Yeah, so you keep telling me.’

‘I keep telling you because it’s true! He can’t help it – he’s got a serious mental illness that causes him untold distress and misery.’

Fats’ mobile had beeped, and he had glanced down at a text from Andrew. He read it and experienced an air punch to the midriff: Arf leaving for good.

‘I’m talking to you, Stuart—’

‘I know – what?’

‘All these posts – Simon Price, Parminder, Dad – these are all people you know. If you’re behind all this—’

‘I’ve told you, I’m not.’

‘—you’re causing untold damage. Serious, awful damage, Stuart, to people’s lives.’

Fats was trying to imagine life without Andrew. They had known each other since they were four.

‘It’s not me,’ he had said.)

Serious, awful damage to people’s lives.

They had made their lives, Fats thought scornfully as he turned into Foley Road. The victims of the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother were mired in hypocrisy and lies, and they didn’t like the exposure. They were stupid bugs running from bright light. They knew nothing about real life.

He could see a house ahead that had a bald tyre lying on the grass in front of it. He had a strong suspicion that that was Krystal’s, and when he saw the number, he knew he was right. He had never been here before. He would never have agreed to meet her at her home during the lunch hour a couple of weeks ago, but things changed. He had changed.

They said that her mother was a prostitute. She was certainly a junkie. Krystal had told him that the house would be empty because her mother would be at Bellchapel Addiction Clinic, receiving her allotted amount of methadone. Fats walked up the garden path without slowing, but with unexpected trepidation.

Krystal had been on the watch for him, from her bedroom window. She had closed the doors of every room downstairs, so that all he would see was the hall; she had thrown everything that had spilt into it back into the sitting room and kitchen. The carpet was gritty and burnt in places, and the wallpaper stained, but she could do nothing about that. There had been none of the pine-scented disinfectant left, but she had found some bleach and sloshed that around the kitchen and bathroom, both of them sources of the worst smells in the house.

When he knocked, she ran downstairs. They did not have long; Terri would probably be back with Robbie at one. Not long to make a baby.

‘Hiya,’ she said, when she opened the door.

‘All right?’ said Fats, blowing out smoke through his nostrils.

He did not know what he had expected. His first glimpse of the interior of the house was of a grimy bare box. There was no furniture. The closed doors to his left and ahead were strangely ominous.

‘Are we the only ones here?’ he asked as he crossed the threshold.

‘Yeah,’ said Krystal. ‘We c’n go upstairs. My room.’

She led the way. The deeper inside they went, the worse the smell became: mingled bleach and filth. Fats tried not to care. All doors were closed on the landing, except one. Krystal went inside.

Fats did not want to be shocked, but there was nothing in the room except a mattress, which was covered with a sheet and a bare duvet, and a small pile of clothes heaped up in a corner. A few pictures ripped from tabloid newspapers were sellotaped to the wall; a mixture of pop stars and celebrities.

Krystal had made her collage the previous day, in imitation of the one on Nikki’s bedroom wall. Knowing that Fats was coming over, she had wanted to make the room more hospitable. She had drawn the thin curtains. They gave a blueish tinge to daylight.

‘Gimme a fag,’ she said. ‘I’m gasping.’

He lit it for her. She was more nervous than he had ever seen her; he preferred her cocky and worldly.

‘We ain’ got long,’ she told him, and with the cigarette in her mouth, she began to strip. ‘Me mum’ll be back.’

‘Yeah, at Bellchapel, isn’t she?’ said Fats, somehow trying to harden Krystal up again in his mind.

‘Yeah,’ said Krystal, sitting on the mattress and pulling off her tracksuit bottoms.

‘What if they close it?’ asked Fats, taking off his blazer. ‘I heard they’re thinking about it.’

‘I dunno,’ said Krystal, but she was frightened. Her mother’s willpower, fragile and vulnerable as a fledgling chick, could fail at the slightest provocation.

She had already stripped to her underwear. Fats was taking off his shoes when he noticed something nestled beside her heaped clothes: a small plastic jewellery box lying open, and curled inside, a familiar watch.

‘Is that my mum’s?’ he said, in surprise.

‘What?’ Krystal panicked. ‘No,’ she lied. ‘It was my Nana Cath’s. Don’t—!’

But he had already pulled it out of the box.

‘It is hers,’ he said. He recognized the strap.

‘It f*ckin’ ain’t!’

She was terrified. She had almost forgotten that she had stolen it, where it had come from. Fats was silent, and she did not like it.

The watch in Fats’ hand seemed to be both challenging and reproaching him. In quick succession he imagined walking out, slipping it casually into his pocket, or handing it back to Krystal with a shrug.

‘It’s mine,’ she said.

He did not want to be a policeman. He wanted to be lawless. But it took the recollection that the watch had been Cubby’s gift to make him hand it back to her and carry on taking off his clothes. Scarlet in the face, Krystal tugged off bra and pants and slipped, naked, beneath the duvet.

Fats approached her in his boxer shorts, a wrapped condom in his hand.

‘We don’ need that,’ said Krystal thickly. ‘I’m takin’ the pill now.’

‘Are you?’

She moved over on the mattress for him. Fats slid under the duvet. As he pulled off his boxers, he wondered whether she was lying about the pill, like the watch. But he had wanted to try without a condom for a while.

‘Go on,’ she whispered, and she tugged the little foil square out of his hand and threw it on top of his blazer, crumpled on the floor.

He imagined Krystal pregnant with his child; the faces of Tessa and Cubby when they heard. His kid in the Fields, his flesh and blood. It would be more than Cubby had ever managed.

He climbed on top of her; this, he knew, was real life.





VIII


At half-past six that evening, Howard and Shirley Mollison entered Pagford Church Hall. Shirley was carrying an armful of papers and Howard was wearing the chain of office decorated with the blue and white Pagford crest.

The floorboards creaked beneath Howard’s massive weight as he moved to the head of the scratched tables that had already been set end to end. Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women’s Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelt of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone. Beaten-brass lights hung from the rafters on thick black flexes, and the kitchen was reached through ornate mahogany doors.

Shirley bustled from place to place, setting out papers. She adored council meetings. Quite apart from the pride and enjoyment she derived from listening to Howard chair them, Maureen was necessarily absent; with no official role, she had to be content with the pickings Shirley deigned to share.

Howard’s fellow councillors arrived singly and in pairs. He boomed out greetings, his voice echoing from the rafters. The full complement of sixteen councillors rarely attended; he was expecting twelve of them today.

The table was half full when Aubrey Fawley arrived, walking, as he always did, as if into a high wind, with an air of reluctant forcefulness, slightly stooped, his head bowed.

‘Aubrey!’ called Howard joyfully, and for the first time he moved forward to greet the newcomer. ‘How are you? How’s Julia? Did you get my invitation?’

‘Sorry, I don’t—’

‘To my sixty-fifth? Here – Saturday – day after the election.’

‘Oh, yes, yes. Howard, there’s a young woman outside – she says she’s from the Yarvil and District Gazette. Alison something?’

‘Oh,’ said Howard. ‘Strange. I’ve just sent her my article, you know, the one answering Fairbrother’s … Maybe it’s something to do … I’ll go and see.’

He waddled away, full of vague misgivings. Parminder Jawanda entered as he approached the door; scowling as usual, she walked straight past without greeting him, and for once Howard did not ask ‘how’s Parminder?’.

Out on the pavement he found a young blonde woman, stocky and square, with an aura of impermeable cheerfulness that Howard recognized immediately as determination of his own brand. She was holding a notebook and looking up at the Sweetlove initials carved over the double doors.

‘Hello, hello,’ said Howard, his breathing a little laboured. ‘Alison, is it? Howard Mollison. Have you come all this way to tell me I can’t write for toffee?’

She beamed, and shook the hand he proffered.

‘Oh, no, we like the article,’ she assured him. ‘I thought, as things are getting so interesting, I’d come and sit in on the meeting. You don’t mind? Press are allowed, I think. I’ve looked up all the regulations.’

She was moving towards the door as she spoke.

‘Yes, yes, press are allowed,’ said Howard, following her and pausing courteously at the entrance to let her through first. ‘Unless we have to deal with anything in camera, that is.’

She glanced back at him, and he could make out her teeth, even in the fading light.

‘Like all those anonymous accusations on your message board? From the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother?’

‘Oh dear,’ wheezed Howard, smiling back at her. ‘They’re not news, surely? A couple of silly comments on the internet?’

‘Has it only been a couple? Somebody told me the bulk of them had been taken off the site.’

‘No, no, somebody’s got that wrong,’ said Howard. ‘There have only been two or three, to my knowledge. Nasty nonsense. Personally,’ he said, improvising on the spot, ‘I think it’s some kid.’

‘A kid?’

‘You know. Teenager having fun.’

‘Would teenagers target Parish councillors?’ she asked, still smiling. ‘I heard, actually, that one of the victims has lost his job. Possibly as a result of the allegations made against him on your site.’

‘News to me,’ said Howard untruthfully. Shirley had seen Ruth at the hospital the previous day and reported back to him.

‘I see on the agenda,’ said Alison, as the pair of them entered the brightly lit hall, ‘that you’ll be discussing Bellchapel. You and Mr Fairbrother made good points on both sides of the argument in your articles … we had quite a few letters to the paper after we printed Mr Fairbrother’s piece. My editor liked that. Anything that makes people write letters …’

‘Yes, I saw those,’ said Howard. ‘Nobody seemed to have much good to say about the clinic, did they?’

The councillors at the table were watching the pair of them. Alison Jenkins returned their gaze, still smiling imperturbably.

‘Let me get you a chair,’ said Howard, puffing slightly as he lifted one down from a nearby stack and settling Alison some twelve feet from the table.

‘Thank you.’ She pulled it six feet forward.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ called Howard, ‘we’ve got a press gallery here tonight. Miss Alison Jenkins of the Yarvil and District Gazette.’

A few of them seemed interested and gratified by Alison’s appearance, but most looked suspicious. Howard stumped back to the head of the table, where Aubrey and Shirley were questioning him with their eyes.

‘Barry Fairbrother’s Ghost,’ he told them in an undertone, as he lowered himself gingerly into the plastic chair (one of them had collapsed under him two meetings ago). ‘And Bellchapel. And there’s Tony!’ he shouted, making Aubrey jump. ‘Come on in, Tony … we’ll give Henry and Sheila another couple of minutes, shall we?’

The murmur of talk around the table was slightly more subdued than usual. Alison Jenkins was already writing in her notebook. Howard thought angrily, This is all bloody Fairbrother’s fault. He was the one who had invited the press in. For a split second, Howard thought of Barry and the Ghost as one and the same, a troublemaker alive and dead.

Like Shirley, Parminder had brought a stack of papers with her to the meeting, and these were piled up underneath the agenda she was pretending to read so that she did not have to speak to anybody. In reality, she was thinking about the woman sitting almost directly behind her. The Yarvil and District Gazette had written about Catherine Weedon’s collapse, and the family’s complaints against their GP. Parminder had not been named, but doubtless the journalist knew who she was. Perhaps Alison had got wind of the anonymous post about Parminder on the Parish Council website too.

Calm down. You’re getting like Colin.

Howard was already taking apologies and asking for revisions to the last set of minutes, but Parminder could barely hear over the sound of her own blood thudding in her ears.

‘Now, unless anybody’s got any objections,’ said Howard, ‘we’re going to deal with items eight and nine first, because District Councillor Fawley’s got news on both, and he can’t stay long—’

‘Got until eight thirty,’ said Aubrey, checking his watch.

‘—yes, so unless there are objections – no? – floor’s yours, Aubrey.’

Aubrey stated the position simply and without emotion. There was a new boundary review coming and, for the first time, there was an appetite beyond Pagford to reassign the Fields to Yarvil. Absorbing Pagford’s relatively small costs seemed worthwhile to those who hoped to add anti-government votes to Yarvil’s tally, where they might make a difference, as opposed to being wasted in Pagford, which had been a safe Conservative seat since the 1950s. The whole thing could be done under the guise of simplifying and streamlining: Yarvil provided almost all services for the place as it was.

Aubrey concluded by saying that it would be helpful, should Pagford wish to cut the estate away, for the town to express its wishes for the benefit of the District Council.

‘… a good, clear message from you,’ he said, ‘and I really think that this time—’

‘It’s never worked before,’ said a farmer, to muttered agreement.

‘Well, now, John, we’ve never been invited to state our position before,’ said Howard.

‘Shouldn’t we decide what our position is, before we declare it publicly?’ asked Parminder, in an icy voice.

‘All right,’ said Howard blandly. ‘Would you like to kick off, Dr Jawanda?’

‘I don’t know how many people saw Barry’s article in the Gazette,’ said Parminder. Every face was turned towards her, and she tried not to think about the anonymous post or the journalist sitting behind her. ‘I thought it made the arguments for keeping the Fields part of Pagford very well.’

Parminder saw Shirley, who was writing busily, give her pen a tiny smile.

‘By telling us the likes of Krystal Weedon benefit?’ said an elderly woman called Betty, from the end of the table. Parminder had always detested her.

‘By reminding us that people living in the Fields are part of our community too,’ she answered.

‘They think of themselves as from Yarvil,’ said the farmer. ‘Always have.’

‘I remember,’ said Betty, ‘when Krystal Weedon pushed another child into the river on a nature walk.’

‘No, she didn’t,’ said Parminder angrily, ‘my daughter was there – that was two boys who were fighting – anyway—’

‘I heard it was Krystal Weedon,’ said Betty.

‘You heard wrong,’ said Parminder, except that she did not say it, she shouted it.

They were shocked. She had shocked herself. The echo hummed off the old walls. Parminder could barely swallow; she kept her head down, staring at the agenda, and heard John’s voice from a long way off.

‘Barry would’ve done better to talk about himself, not that girl. He got a lot out of St Thomas’s.’

‘Trouble is, for every Barry,’ said another woman, ‘you get a load of yobs.’

‘They’re Yarvil people, bottom line,’ said a man, ‘they belong to Yarvil.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Parminder, keeping her voice deliberately low, but they all fell silent to listen to her, waiting for her to shout again. ‘It’s simply not true. Look at the Weedons. That was the whole point of Barry’s article. They were a Pagford family going back years, but—’

‘They moved to Yarvil!’ said Betty.

‘There was no housing here,’ said Parminder, fighting her own temper, ‘none of you wanted a new development on the outskirts of town.’

‘You weren’t here, I’m sorry,’ said Betty, pink in the face, looking ostentatiously away from Parminder. ‘You don’t know the history.’

Talk had become general: the meeting had broken into several little knots of conversation, and Parminder could not make out any of it. Her throat was tight and she did not dare meet anyone’s eyes.

‘Shall we have a show of hands?’ Howard shouted down the table, and silence fell again. ‘Those in favour of telling the District Council that Pagford will be happy for the parish boundary to be redrawn, to take the Fields out of our jurisdiction?’

Parminder’s fists were clenched in her lap and the nails of both her hands were embedded in their palms. There was a rustle of sleeves all around her.

‘Excellent!’ said Howard, and the jubilation in his voice rang triumphantly from the rafters. ‘Well, I’ll draft something with Tony and Helen and we’ll send it round for everyone to see, and we’ll get it off. Excellent!’

A couple of councillors clapped. Parminder’s vision blurred and she blinked hard. The agenda swam in and out of focus. The silence went on so long that finally she looked up: Howard, in his excitement, had had recourse to his inhaler, and most of the councillors were watching solicitously.

‘All right, then,’ wheezed Howard, putting the inhaler away again, red in the face and beaming, ‘unless anyone’s got anything else to add –’ an infinitesimal pause ‘– item nine. Bellchapel. And Aubrey’s got something to tell us here too.’

Barry wouldn’t have let it happen. He’d have argued. He’d have made John laugh and vote with us. He ought to have written about himself, not Krystal … I’ve let him down.

‘Thank you, Howard,’ said Aubrey, as the blood pounded in Parminder’s ears, and she dug her nails still more deeply into her palms. ‘As you know, we’re having to make some pretty drastic cuts at District level …’

She was in love with me, which she could barely hide whenever she laid eyes on me …

‘… and one of the projects we’ve got to look at is Bellchapel,’ said Aubrey. ‘I thought I’d have a word, because, as you all know, it’s the Parish that owns the building—’

‘—and the lease is almost up,’ said Howard. ‘That’s right.’

‘But nobody else is interested in that old place, are they?’ asked a retired accountant from the end of the table. ‘It’s in a bad state, from what I’ve heard.’

‘Oh, I’m sure we could find a new tenant,’ said Howard comfortably, ‘but that’s not really the issue. The point is whether we think the clinic is doing a good—’

‘That’s not the point at all,’ said Parminder, cutting across him. ‘It isn’t the Parish Council’s job to decide whether or not the clinic’s doing a good job. We don’t fund their work. They’re not our responsibility.’

‘But we own the building,’ said Howard, still smiling, still polite, ‘so I think it’s natural for us to want to consider—’

‘If we’re going to look at information on the clinic’s work, I think it’s very important that we get a balanced picture,’ said Parminder.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said Shirley, blinking down the table at Parminder, ‘but could you try not to interrupt the Chair, Dr Jawanda? It’s awfully difficult to take notes if people talk over other people. And now I’ve interrupted,’ she added with a smile. ‘Sorry!’

‘I presume the Parish wants to keep getting revenue from the building,’ said Parminder, ignoring Shirley. ‘And we have no other potential tenant lined up, as far as I know. So I’m wondering why we are even considering terminating the clinic’s lease.’

‘They don’t cure them,’ said Betty. ‘They just give them more drugs. I’d be very happy to see them out.’

‘We’re having to make some very difficult decisions at District Council level,’ said Aubrey Fawley. ‘The government’s looking for more than a billion in savings from local government. We cannot continue to provide services the way we have done. That’s the reality.’

Parminder hated the way that her fellow councillors acted around Aubrey, drinking in his deep modulated voice, nodding gently as he talked. She was well aware that some of them called her ‘Bends-Your-Ear’.

‘Research indicates that illegal drug use increases during recessions,’ said Parminder.

‘It’s their choice,’ said Betty. ‘Nobody makes them take drugs.’

She looked around the table for support. Shirley smiled at her.

‘We’re having to make some tough choices,’ said Aubrey.

‘So you’ve got together with Howard,’ Parminder talked over him, ‘and decided that you can give the clinic a little push by forcing them out of the building.’

‘I can think of better ways to spend money than on a bunch of criminals,’ said the accountant.

‘I’d cut off all their benefits, personally,’ said Betty.

‘I was invited to this meeting to put you all in the picture about what’s happening at District level,’ said Aubrey calmly. ‘Nothing more than that, Dr Jawanda.’

‘Helen,’ said Howard loudly, pointing to another councillor, whose hand was raised, and who had been trying to make her views heard for a minute.

Parminder heard nothing of what the woman said. She had quite forgotten about the stack of papers lying underneath her agenda, on which Kay Bawden had spent so much time: the statistics, the profiles of successful cases, the explanation of the benefits of methadone as against heroin; studies showing the cost, financial and social, of heroin addiction. Everything around her had become slightly liquid, unreal; she knew that she was going to erupt as she had never erupted in her life, and there was no room to regret it, or to prevent it, or do anything except watch it happen; it was too late, far too late …

‘… culture of entitlement,’ said Aubrey Fawley. ‘People who have literally not worked a day in their lives.’

‘And, let’s face it,’ said Howard, ‘this is a problem with a simple solution. Stop taking the drugs.’

He turned, smiling and conciliating, to Parminder. ‘They call it “cold turkey”, isn’t that right, Dr Jawanda?’

‘Oh, you think that they should take responsibility for their addiction and change their behaviour?’ said Parminder.

‘In a nutshell, yes.’

‘Before they cost the state any more money.’

‘Exact—’

‘And you,’ said Parminder loudly, as the silent eruption engulfed her, ‘do you know how many tens of thousands of pounds you, Howard Mollison, have cost the health service, because of your total inability to stop gorging yourself?’

A rich, red claret stain was spreading up Howard’s neck into his cheeks.

‘Do you know how much your bypass cost, and your drugs, and your long stay in hospital? And the doctor’s appointments you take up with your asthma and your blood pressure and the nasty skin rash, which are all caused by your refusal to lose weight?’

As Parminder’s voice became a scream, other councillors began to protest on Howard’s behalf; Shirley was on her feet; Parminder was still shouting, clawing together the papers that had somehow been scattered as she gesticulated.

‘What about patient confidentiality?’ shouted Shirley. ‘Outrageous! Absolutely outrageous!’

Parminder was at the door of the hall and striding through it, and she heard, over her own furious sobs, Betty calling for her immediate expulsion from the council; she was half running away from the hall, and she knew that she had done something cataclysmic, and she wanted nothing more than to be swallowed up by the darkness and to disappear for ever.