The Casual Vacancy

III


Andrew, Fats and twenty-seven others spent the last period on Wednesday afternoon in what Fats called ‘spazmatics’. This was the second-from-bottom maths set, taken by the department’s most incompetent teacher: a blotchy-faced young woman fresh from teacher training, who was incapable of keeping good order, and who often seemed to be on the verge of tears. Fats, who had set himself on a course of determined underachievement over the previous year, had been demoted to spazmatics from the top set. Andrew, who had struggled with numbers all his life, lived in fear that he would be relegated to the very bottom set, along with Krystal Weedon and her cousin, Dane Tully.

Andrew and Fats sat at the back of the room together. Occasionally, when he had tired of entertaining the class or whipping it into further disruption, Fats would show Andrew how to do a sum. The level of noise was deafening. Miss Harvey shouted over the top of them all, begging for quiet. Worksheets were defaced by obscenities; people got up constantly to visit each other’s desks, scraping their chair legs across the floor; small missiles flew across the room whenever Miss Harvey looked away. Sometimes Fats made excuses to walk up and down the room, imitating Cubby’s bouncy up-and-down stiff-armed walk. Fats’ humour was at its broadest here; in English, where he and Andrew were both in the top set, he did not bother to use Cubby for material.

Sukhvinder Jawanda was sitting directly in front of Andrew. Long ago, in primary school, Andrew, Fats and the other boys had pulled Sukhvinder’s long, blue-black plait; it was the easiest thing to catch hold of when playing tag, and it had once presented an irresistible temptation when dangling, like now, down her back, hidden from the teacher. But Andrew no longer had any desire to tug it, nor to touch any part of Sukhvinder; she was one of the few girls over whom his eyes glided without the slightest interest. Since Fats had pointed it out, he had noticed the soft dark down on her upper lip. Sukhvinder’s older sister, Jaswant, had a lithe curvy figure, a tiny waist and a face that, prior to the advent of Gaia, had seemed beautiful to Andrew, with its high cheekbones, smooth golden skin and almond-shaped liquid-brown eyes. Naturally, Jaswant had always been completely beyond his reach: two years older and the cleverest girl in the sixth form, with an aura of being aware, to the last hard-on, of her own attractions.

Sukhvinder was the only person in the room who was making absolutely no noise. With her back hunched and her head bent low over her work, she appeared to be cocooned in concentration. She had pulled the left sleeve of her jumper down so that it completely covered her hand, enclosing the cuff to make a woolly fist. Her total stillness was almost ostentatious.

‘The great hermaphrodite sits quiet and still,’ murmured Fats, his eyes fixed on the back of Sukhvinder’s head. ‘Moustachioed, yet large-mammaried, scientists remain baffled by the contradictions of the hairy man-woman.’

Andrew sniggered, yet he was not entirely at his ease. He would have enjoyed himself more if he knew that Sukhvinder could not hear what Fats was saying. The last time that he had been over at Fats’ house, Fats had shown him the messages he was sending regularly to Sukhvinder’s Facebook page. He had been scouring the internet for information and pictures about hirsutism, and was sending a quotation or an image a day.

It was sort of funny, but it made Andrew uncomfortable. Strictly speaking, Sukhvinder was not asking for it: she seemed a very easy target. Andrew liked it best when Fats directed his savage tongue towards figures of authority, the pretentious or the self-satisfied.

‘Separated from its bearded, bra-wearing herd,’ said Fats, ‘it sits, lost in thought, wondering whether it would suit a goatee.’

Andrew laughed, then felt guilty, but Fats lost interest, and turned his attention to transforming every zero on his worksheet into a puckered anus. Andrew reverted to trying to guess where the decimal point should go, and contemplating the prospect of the school bus home, and Gaia. It was always much more difficult to find a seat where he might keep her in his eye-line on the school-to-home trip, because she was frequently boxed in before he got there, or too far away. Their shared amusement in Monday morning’s assembly had led nowhere. She had not made eye contact with him on the bus either morning since, nor in any other way demonstrated that she knew he existed. In the four weeks of his infatuation, Andrew had never actually spoken to Gaia. He attempted to formulate opening lines while the din of spazmatics crashed around him. ‘That was funny, Monday, in assembly …’

‘Sukhvinder, are you all right?’

Miss Harvey, who had bent down over Sukhvinder’s work to mark it, was gawping into the girl’s face. Andrew watched Sukhvinder nod and draw in her hands, obscuring her face, still hunched up over her work.

‘Wallah!’ stage-whispered Kevin Cooper, from two rows in front. ‘Wallah! Peanut!’

He was trying to draw their attention to what they already knew: that Sukhvinder, judging by the gentle quivering of her shoulders, was crying, and that Miss Harvey was making hopeless, harried attempts to find out what was wrong. The class, detecting a further lapse in their teacher’s vigilance, raged louder than ever.

‘Peanut! Wallah!’

Andrew could never decide whether Kevin Cooper irritated intentionally or accidentally, but he had an infallible knack for grating on people. The nickname ‘Peanut’ was a very old one, which had clung to Andrew in primary school; he had always hated it. Fats had forced the name out of fashion by never using it; Fats had always been the final arbiter in such matters. Cooper was even getting Fats’ name wrong: ‘Wallah’ had enjoyed only a brief popularity, last year.

‘Peanut! Wallah!’

‘F*ck off, Cooper, you glans-headed moron,’ said Fats under his breath. Cooper was hanging over the back of his seat, staring at Sukhvinder, who had curled over, her face almost touching the desk, while Miss Harvey crouched beside her, her hands fluttering comically, forbidden to touch her, and unable to elicit any explanation for her distress. A few more people had noticed this unusual disturbance and were staring; but at the front of the room, several boys continued to rampage, oblivious to everything but their own amusement. One of them seized the wood-backed board rubber from Miss Harvey’s vacated desk. He threw it.

The rubber soared right across the room and crashed into the clock on the back wall, which plummeted to the ground and shattered: shards of plastic and metal innards flew everywhere, and several girls, including Miss Harvey, shrieked in shock.

The door of the classroom flew open and bounced, with a bang, off the wall. The class fell quiet. Cubby was standing there, flushed and furious.

‘What is going on in this room? What is all this noise?’

Miss Harvey shot up like a jack-in-a-box beside Sukhvinder’s desk, looking guilty and frightened.

‘Miss Harvey! Your class is making an almighty racket. What’s going on?’

Miss Harvey seemed struck dumb. Kevin Cooper hung over the back of his chair, grinning, looking from Miss Harvey to Cubby to Fats and back again.

Fats spoke.

‘Well, to be perfectly frank, Father, we’ve been running rings around this poor woman.’

Laughter exploded. Miss Harvey’s neck was disfigured by a rising maroon rash. Fats balanced himself nonchalantly on the rear legs of his chair, his face perfectly straight, looking at Cubby with challenging detachment.

‘That’s enough,’ said Cubby. ‘If I hear any more noise like that from this class, I’ll put the whole lot of you in detention. Do you understand? All of you.’

He shut the door on their laughter.

‘You heard the deputy headmaster!’ cried Miss Harvey, scurrying to the front of the room. ‘Be quiet! I want quiet! You – Andrew – and you, Stuart – you can clear up that mess! Pick up all those bits of clock!’

They set up a routine cry of injustice at this, supported shrilly by a couple of the girls. The actual perpetrators of the destruction, of whom everybody knew Miss Harvey was afraid, sat smirking at their desks. As there were only five minutes remaining until the end of the school day, Andrew and Fats set about stringing out the clearing up until they would be able to abandon it unfinished. While Fats garnered further laughs by bouncing hither and thither, stiff-armed, doing the Cubby walk, Sukhvinder wiped her eyes surreptitiously with her wool-covered hand and sank back into obscurity.

When the bell rang, Miss Harvey made no attempt to control or contain the thunderous clamour or rush for the door. Andrew and Fats kicked various bits of clock under the cupboards at the back of the room, and swung their school bags over their shoulders again.

‘Wallah! Wallah!’ called Kevin Cooper, hurrying to catch up with Andrew and Fats as they headed down the corridor. ‘Do you call Cubby “Father” at home? Seriously? Do you?’

He thought he had something on Fats; he thought he had got him.

‘You’re a dickhead, Cooper,’ said Fats wearily, and Andrew laughed.





IV


‘Dr Jawanda’s running about fifteen minutes late,’ the receptionist told Tessa.

‘Oh, that’s fine,’ said Tessa. ‘I’m in no hurry.’

It was early evening, and the waiting-room windows made patches of clear royal blue against the walls. There were only two other people there: a misshapen, wheezing old woman wearing carpet slippers, and a young mother who was reading a magazine while her toddler rummaged in the toy box in the corner. Tessa took a battered old Heat magazine from the table in the middle, sat down and flicked through the pages, looking at the pictures. The delay gave her more time to think about what she was going to say to Parminder.

They had spoken, briefly, on the telephone this morning. Tessa had been full of contrition that she had not called at once to let Parminder know about Barry. Parminder had said it was fine, for Tessa not to be silly, that she was not upset at all; but Tessa, with her lengthy experience of the thin-skinned and fragile, could tell that Parminder, beneath her prickly carapace, was wounded. She had tried to explain that she had been utterly exhausted the last couple of days, and that she had had to deal with Mary, Colin, Fats, Krystal Weedon; that she had felt overwhelmed, lost and incapable of thinking of more than the immediate problems that had been thrown at her. But Parminder had cut her off in the middle of her rambling excuses and said calmly that she would see her later at the surgery.

Dr Crawford emerged, white-haired and bearlike, from his room, gave Tessa a cheery wave, and said, ‘Maisie Lawford?’ The young mother had some difficulty in persuading her daughter to abandon the old toy telephone on wheels that the latter had found in the toy box. While being pulled gently by the hand after Dr Crawford, the little girl gazed longingly over her shoulder at the telephone, whose secrets she would never now discover.

When the door closed on them, Tessa realized that she was smiling fatuously, and hastily rearranged her own features. She was going to become one of those awful old ladies who cooed indiscriminately over small children and frightened them. She would have loved a chubby little blonde daughter to go with her skinny, dark boy. How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.

Parminder’s door opened; Tessa looked up.

‘Mrs Weedon,’ said Parminder. Her eyes met Tessa’s, and she gave a smile that was no smile at all, but a mere tightening of the mouth. The little old lady in carpet slippers got up with difficulty and hobbled away around the partition wall after Parminder. Tessa heard Parminder’s surgery door snap shut.

She read the captions to a series of photographs showing a footballer’s wife in all the different outfits she had worn over the previous five days. Studying the young woman’s long thin legs, Tessa wondered how different her life would have been if she had had legs like that. She could not help but suspect that it would have been almost entirely different. Tessa’s legs were thick, shapeless and short; she would have hidden them perpetually in boots, only it was difficult to find many that would zip up over her calves. She remembered telling a sturdy little girl in guidance that looks did not matter, that personality was much more important. What rubbish we tell children, thought Tessa, turning the page of her magazine.

An out-of-sight door opened with a bang. Somebody was shouting in a cracked voice.

‘You’re makin’ me bloody worse. This in’t right. I’ve come to you for help. It’s your job – it’s your—’

Tessa and the receptionist locked eyes, then turned towards the sound of the shouting. Tessa heard Parminder’s voice, its Brummie accent still discernible after all these years in Pagford.

‘Mrs Weedon, you’re still smoking, which affects the dose I have to prescribe you. If you’d give up your cigarettes – smokers metabolize Theophylline more quickly, so the cigarettes are not only worsening your emphysema, but actually affecting the ability of the drug to—’

‘Don’ you shout at me! I’ve ’ad enough of you! I’ll report you! You’ve gave me the wrong f*ckin’ pills! I wanna see someone else! I wanna see Dr Crawford!’

The old lady appeared around the wall, wobbling, wheezing, her face scarlet.

‘She’ll be the death of me, that Paki cow! Don’ you go near ’er!’ she shouted at Tessa. ‘She’ll f*ckin’ kill yer with her drugs, the Paki bitch!’

She tottered towards the exit, spindle-shanked, unsteady on her slippered feet, her breath rattling, swearing as loudly as her beleaguered lungs would permit. The door swung shut behind her. The receptionist exchanged another look with Tessa. They heard Parminder’s surgery door close again.

It was five minutes before Parminder reappeared. The receptionist stared ostentatiously at her screen.

‘Mrs Wall,’ said Parminder, with another tight non-smile.

‘What was that about?’ Tessa asked, when she had taken a seat at the end of Parminder’s desk.

‘Mrs Weedon’s new pills are upsetting her stomach,’ said Parminder calmly. ‘So we’re doing your bloods today, aren’t we?’

‘Yes,’ said Tessa, both intimidated and hurt by Parminder’s cold professional demeanour. ‘How are you doing, Minda?’

‘Me?’ said Parminder. ‘I’m fine. Why?’

‘Well … Barry … I know what he meant to you and what you meant to him.’

Tears welled in Parminder’s eyes and she tried to blink them away, but too late; Tessa had seen them.

‘Minda,’ she said, laying her plump hand on Parminder’s thin one, but Parminder whipped it away as if Tessa had stung her; then, betrayed by her own reflex, she began to cry in earnest, unable to hide in the tiny room, though she had turned her back as nearly as she could in her swivel chair.

‘I felt sick when I realized I hadn’t phoned you,’ Tessa said, over Parminder’s furious attempts to quell her own sobs. ‘I wanted to curl up and die. I meant to call,’ she lied, ‘but we hadn’t slept, we spent almost the whole night at the hospital, then we had to go straight out to work. Colin broke down at assembly when he announced it, then he caused a bloody awful scene with Krystal Weedon in front of everyone. And then Stuart decided to play truant. And Mary’s falling apart … but I’m so sorry, Minda, I should’ve called.’

‘… iculous,’ said Parminder thickly, her face hidden behind a tissue she had pulled out from her sleeve. ‘… Mary … most important …’

‘You would have been one of the very first people Barry called,’ said Tessa sadly, and, to her horror, she burst into tears too.

‘Minda, I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed, ‘but I was having to deal with Colin and all the rest of them.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Parminder, gulping as she dabbed at her thin face. ‘We’re being silly.’

No, we’re not. Oh, let go for once, Parminder …

But the doctor squared her thin shoulders, blew her nose and sat up straight again.

‘Did Vikram tell you?’ asked Tessa timidly, tweaking a handful of tissues from the box on Parminder’s desk.

‘No,’ said Parminder. ‘Howard Mollison. In the deli.’

‘Oh God, Minda, I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s fine.’

Crying had made Parminder feel slightly better; friendlier towards Tessa, who was wiping her own plain, kind face. This was a relief, for now that Barry was gone, Tessa was Parminder’s only real friend in Pagford. (She always said ‘in Pagford’ to herself, pretending that somewhere beyond the little town she had a hundred loyal friends. She never quite admitted to herself that these consisted only of the memories of her gang of school mates back in Birmingham, from whom the tide of life had long since separated her; and the medical colleagues with whom she had studied and trained, who still sent Christmas cards, but who never came to see her, and whom she never visited.)

‘How’s Colin?’

Tessa moaned.

‘Oh, Minda … Oh God. He says he’s going to run for Barry’s seat on the Parish Council.’

The pronounced vertical furrow between Parminder’s thick, dark brows deepened.

‘Can you imagine Colin running for election?’ Tessa asked, her sodden tissues crumpled tightly in her fist. ‘Coping with the likes of Aubrey Fawley and Howard Mollison? Trying to fill Barry’s shoes, telling himself he’s got to win the battle for Barry – all the responsibility—’

‘Colin copes with a lot of responsibility at work,’ said Parminder.

‘Barely,’ said Tessa, without thinking. She felt instantly disloyal and started to cry again. It was so strange; she had entered the surgery thinking that she would offer comfort to Parminder, but instead here she was, pouring out her own troubles instead. ‘You know what Colin’s like, he takes everything to heart so much, he takes everything so personally …’

‘He copes very well, you know, all things considered,’ said Parminder.

‘Oh, I know he does,’ said Tessa wearily. The fight seemed to go out of her. ‘I know.’

Colin was almost the only person towards whom stern, self-contained Parminder showed ready compassion. In return, Colin would never hear a word against her; he was her dogged champion in Pagford; ‘An excellent GP’, he would snap at anyone who dared to criticize her in his hearing. ‘Best I’ve ever had.’ Parminder did not have many defenders; she was unpopular with the Pagford old guard, having a reputation for being grudging with antibiotics and repeat prescriptions.

‘If Howard Mollison gets his way, there won’t be an election at all,’ said Parminder.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘He’s sent round an email. It came in half an hour ago.’

Parminder turned to her computer monitor, typed in a password, and brought up her inbox. She angled the monitor so that Tessa could read Howard’s message. The first paragraph expressed regret at Barry’s death. The next suggested that, in view of the fact that a year of Barry’s term had already expired, co-opting a replacement might be preferable to going through the onerous process of a full election.

‘He’s lined someone up already,’ said Parminder. ‘He’s trying to crowbar in some crony before anyone can stop him. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Miles.’

‘Oh, surely not,’ said Tessa instantly. ‘Miles was at the hospital with Barry … no, he was very upset by it—’

‘You’re so damn naive, Tessa,’ said Parminder, and Tessa was shocked by the savagery in her friend’s voice. ‘You don’t understand what Howard Mollison’s like. He’s a vile man, vile. You didn’t hear him when he found out that Barry had written to the paper about the Fields. You don’t know what he’s trying to do with the methadone clinic. You wait. You’ll see.’

Her hand was trembling so much that it took her a few attempts to close down Mollison’s email.

‘You’ll see,’ she repeated. ‘All right, we’d better get on, Laura needs to go in a minute. I’ll check your blood pressure first.’

Parminder was doing Tessa a favour, seeing her late like this, after school. The practice nurse, who lived in Yarvil, was going to drop off Tessa’s blood sample to the hospital lab on her way home. Feeling nervous and oddly vulnerable, Tessa rolled up the sleeve of the old green cardigan. The doctor wound the Velcro cuff around her upper arm. At close quarters, Parminder’s strong resemblance to her second daughter was revealed, for their different builds (Parminder being wiry, and Sukhvinder buxom) became indiscernible, and the similarity of their facial features emerged: the hawkish nose, the wide mouth with its full lower lip, and the large, round, dark eyes. The cuff tightened painfully around Tessa’s flabby upper arm, while Parminder watched the gauge.

‘One sixty-five over eighty-eight,’ said Parminder, frowning. ‘That’s high, Tessa; too high.’

Deft and skilful in all her movements, she stripped the wrapping from a sterile syringe, straightened out Tessa’s pale, mole-strewn arm and slid the needle into the crook.

‘I’m taking Stuart into Yarvil tomorrow night,’ Tessa said, looking up at the ceiling. ‘To get him a suit for the funeral. I can’t stand the scene there’ll be, if he tries to go in jeans. Colin’ll go berserk.’

She was trying to divert her own thoughts from the dark, mysterious liquid flowing up into the little plastic tube. She was afraid that it would betray her; that she had not been as good as she should have been; that all the chocolate bars and muffins she had eaten would show up as traitorous glucose.

Then she thought bitterly that it would be much easier to resist chocolate if her life were less stressful. Given that she spent nearly all her time trying to help other people, it was hard to see muffins as so very naughty. As she watched Parminder labelling vials of her blood, she found herself hoping, though her husband and friend might think it heresy, that Howard Mollison would triumph, and prevent an election happening at all.





V


Simon Price left the printworks on the stroke of five every day without fail. He had put in his hours, and that was that; home was waiting, clean and cool, high on the hill, a world away from the perpetual clank and whirr of the Yarvil plant. To linger in the factory after clocking-off time (though now a manager, Simon had never ceased to think in the terms of his apprenticeship) would constitute a fatal admission that your home life was lacking or, worse, that you were trying to brown-nose senior management.

Today, though, Simon needed to make a detour before going home. He met up with the gum-chewing forklift driver in the car park, and together they drove through the darkening streets, with the boy giving directions, into the Fields, actually passing the house in which Simon had grown up. He had not been past the place for years; his mother was dead, and he had not seen his father since he was fourteen and did not know where he was. It unsettled and depressed Simon to see his old home with one window boarded over and the grass ankle-deep. His late mother had been house proud.

The youth told Simon to park at the end of Foley Road, then got out, leaving Simon behind, and headed towards a house of particularly squalid appearance. From what Simon could see by the light of the nearest streetlamp, it seemed to have a pile of filth heaped beneath a downstairs window. It was only now that Simon asked himself how sensible it had been to come and pick up the stolen computer in his own car. These days, surely, they would have CCTV on the estate, to keep an eye on all the little thugs and hoodies. He glanced around, but he could not see any cameras; nobody seemed to be looking at him except a fat woman who was openly staring through one of the small, square institutional-looking windows. Simon scowled at her, but she continued to watch him as she smoked her cigarette, so he screened his face with his hand, glaring through the windscreen.

His passenger was already emerging from the house, straddling a little as he walked back towards the car, carrying the boxed computer. Behind him, in the doorway of the house he had left, Simon saw an adolescent girl with a small boy at her feet, who stepped out of sight as he watched, dragging the child with her.

Simon turned the key in the ignition, revving the engine as the gum-chewer came nearer.

‘Careful,’ said Simon, leaning across to unlock the passenger door. ‘Just put it down here.’

The boy set the box down on the still-warm passenger seat. Simon had intended to open it and check that it was what he had paid for, but a growing sense of his own imprudence overrode the desire. He contented himself with giving the box a shove: it was too heavy to move easily; he wanted to get going.

‘You all right if I leave you here?’ he called loudly to the boy, as if he was already speeding away from him in the car.

‘Can you give us a lift up to the Crannock Hotel?’

‘Sorry, mate, I’m going the other way,’ said Simon. ‘Cheers.’

Simon accelerated. In his rear-view mirror he saw the boy standing there, looking outraged; saw his lips form the words ‘f*ck you!’ But Simon didn’t care. If he cleared out quickly, he might avoid his number plate being captured on one of those grainy black and white films they played back on the news.

He reached the bypass ten minutes later, but even after he had left Yarvil behind, quitted the dual carriageway and driven up the hill towards the ruined abbey, he was ruffled and tense, and experienced none of the satisfaction that was usually his when he crested the peak in the evenings and caught the first glimpse of his own house, far across the hollow where Pagford lay, a tiny white handkerchief on the opposite hillside.

Though she had been home barely ten minutes, Ruth already had dinner on and was laying the table when Simon carried the computer inside; they kept early hours in Hilltop House, as was Simon’s preference. Ruth’s exclamations of excitement at the sight of the box irritated her husband. She did not understand what he had been through; she never understood that there were risks involved in getting stuff cheap. For her part, Ruth sensed at once that Simon was in one of the tightly wound moods that often presaged an explosion, and coped the only way she knew how: by jabbering brightly about her day, in the hope that the mood would dissolve once he had food inside him, and as long as nothing else happened to irritate him.

Promptly at six o’clock, by which time Simon had unboxed the computer and discovered that there was no instruction manual, the family sat down to eat.

Andrew could tell that his mother was on edge, because she was making random conversation with a familiar, artificially cheery note in her voice. She seemed to think, despite years of contrary experience, that if she made the atmosphere polite enough, his father would not dare shatter it. Andrew helped himself to shepherd’s pie (made by Ruth, and defrosted on work nights) and avoided eye contact with Simon. He had more interesting things to think about than his parents. Gaia Bawden had said ‘hi’ to him when he had come face to face with her outside the biology lab; said it automatically and casually, but had not looked at him once all lesson.

Andrew wished he knew more about girls; he had never got to know one well enough to fathom how their minds worked. The yawning gap in his knowledge had not mattered much until Gaia had walked onto the school bus for the first time, and provoked in him a laser-sharp interest focused on her as an individual; a quite different feeling to the wide and impersonal fascination that had been intensifying in him over several years, concerned with the sprouting of breasts and the appearance of bra straps through white school shirts, and his slightly squeamish interest in what menstruation actually entailed.

Fats had girl cousins who sometimes came to visit. Once, going into the Walls’ bathroom right after the prettiest of them had used it, Andrew had found a transparent Lil-Lets wrapper lying beside the bathroom bin. This actual, physical evidence that a girl in his vicinity was having a period there and then was, to thirteen-year-old Andrew, akin to the sighting of a rare comet. He had had enough sense not to tell Fats what he had seen or found or how exciting a discovery it had been. Instead he had picked up the wrapper between his fingernails, dropped it quickly into the bin, then washed his hands more vigorously than he had ever washed them in his life.

Andrew spent a lot of time staring at Gaia’s Facebook page on his laptop. It was almost more intimidating than she was in person. He spent hours poring over photographs of the people that she had left behind in the capital. She came from a different world: she had black friends, Asian friends, friends with names he could never have pronounced. There was a photograph of her in a swimsuit that was burnt into his brain, and another of her, leaning up against a filthily good-looking coffee-skinned boy. He had no spots, and actual stubble. By a process of careful examination of all her messages, Andrew had concluded that this was an eighteen-year-old called Marco de Luca. Andrew stared at Marco’s and Gaia’s communications with the concentration of a code-breaker, unable to decide whether they indicated a continuing relationship or not.

His Facebook browsing was often tinged with anxiety, because Simon, whose understanding of how the internet worked was limited, and who instinctively mistrusted it as the only area of his sons’ life where they were freer and more at ease than he, would sometimes erupt unexpectedly into their bedrooms to check what they were viewing. Simon claimed that he was making sure that they were not running up huge bills, but Andrew knew it to be one more manifestation of his father’s need to exert control, and the cursor hovered constantly over the box that would shut the page whenever he was perusing Gaia’s details online.

Ruth was still rattling from topic to topic, in a fruitless attempt to make Simon produce more than surly monosyllables.

‘Ooooh,’ she said suddenly. ‘I forgot: I spoke to Shirley today, Simon, about you maybe standing for the Parish Council.’

The words hit Andrew like a punch.

‘You’re standing for the council?’ he blurted.

Simon slowly raised his eyebrows. One of the muscles in his jaw was twitching.

‘Is that a problem?’ he asked, in a voice that throbbed with aggression.

‘No,’ lied Andrew.

You’ve got to be f*cking joking. You? Standing for election? Oh f*ck, no.

‘It sounds like you’ve got a problem with it,’ said Simon, still staring straight into Andrew’s eyes.

‘No,’ said Andrew again, dropping his gaze to his shepherd’s pie.

‘What’s wrong with me standing for the council?’ Simon continued. He was not about to let it go. He wanted to vent his tension in a cathartic outburst of rage.

‘Nothing’s wrong. I was surprised, that’s all.’

‘Should I have consulted you first?’ said Simon.

‘No.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ said Simon. His lower jaw was protruding, as it often did when he was working up to losing control. ‘Have you found a job yet, you skiving, sponging little shit?’

‘No.’

Simon glared at Andrew, not eating, but holding a cooling forkful of shepherd’s pie in mid-air. Andrew switched his attention back to his food, determined not to offer further provocation. The air pressure within the kitchen seemed to have increased. Paul’s knife rattled against his plate.

‘Shirley says,’ Ruth piped up again, her voice high-pitched, determined to pretend all was well until this became impossible, ‘that it’ll be on the council website, Simon. About how you put your name forward.’

Simon did not respond.

Her last, best attempt thwarted, Ruth fell silent too. She was afraid that she might know what was at the root of Simon’s bad mood. Anxiety gnawed at her; she was a worrier, she always had been; she couldn’t help it. She knew that it drove Simon mad when she begged him for reassurance. She must not say anything.

‘Si?’

‘What?’

‘It’s all right, isn’t it? About the computer?’

She was a dreadful actress. She tried to make her voice casual and calm, but it was brittle and high-pitched.

This was not the first time stolen goods had entered their home. Simon had found a way of fiddling the electricity meter too, and did small jobs on the side, at the printworks, for cash. All of it gave her little pains in the stomach, kept her awake at night; but Simon was contemptuous of people who did not dare take the shortcuts (and part of what she had loved about him, from the beginning, was that this rough and wild boy, who was contemptuous, rude and aggressive to nearly everyone, had taken the trouble to attract her; that he, who was so difficult to please, had selected her, alone, as worthy).

‘What are you talking about?’ Simon asked quietly. The full focus of his attention shifted from Andrew to Ruth, and was expressed by the same unblinking, venomous stare.

‘Well, there won’t be any … any trouble about it, will there?’

Simon was seized with a brutal urge to punish her for intuiting his own fears and for stoking them with her anxiety.

‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t going to say anything,’ he said, speaking slowly, giving himself time to make up a story; ‘but there was a bit of trouble when they were nicked, as it turns out.’ Andrew and Paul paused in their eating and stared. ‘Some security guard got beaten up. I didn’t know anything about it till it was too late. I only hope there’s no comeback.’

Ruth could barely breathe. She could not believe the evenness of his tone, the calmness with which he spoke of violent robbery. This explained his mood when he had come home; this explained everything.

‘That’s why it’s essential nobody mentions we’ve got it,’ said Simon.

He subjected each of them to a fierce glare, to impress the dangers on them by sheer force of personality.

‘We won’t,’ Ruth breathed.

Her rapid imagination was already showing her the police at the door; the computer examined; Simon arrested, wrongly accused of aggravated assault – jailed.

‘Did you hear Dad?’ she said to her sons, in a voice barely louder than a whisper. ‘You mustn’t tell anybody we’ve got a new computer.’

‘It should be all right,’ said Simon. ‘It should be fine. As long as everyone keeps their traps shut.’

He turned his attention back to his shepherd’s pie. Ruth’s eyes flittered from Simon to her sons and back again. Paul was pushing food around his plate, silent, frightened.

But Andrew had not believed a word his father said.

You’re a lying f*cking bastard. You just like scaring her.

When the meal was finished, Simon got up and said, ‘Well, let’s see whether the bloody thing works, at least. You,’ he pointed at Paul, ‘go and get it out of the box and put it carefully – carefully – on the stand. You,’ he pointed at Andrew, ‘you do computing, don’t you? You can tell me what to do.’

Simon led the way into the sitting room. Andrew knew that he was trying to catch them out, that he wanted them to mess up: Paul, who was small and nervous, might drop the computer, and he, Andrew, was sure to blunder. Behind them in the kitchen, Ruth was clattering around, clearing away the dinner things. She, at least, was out of the immediate line of fire.

Andrew went to assist Paul as he lifted the hard drive.

‘He can do it, he’s not that much of a p-ssy!’ snapped Simon.

By a miracle, Paul, his arms trembling, set it down on the stand without mishap, then waited with his arms dangling limply at his sides, blocking Simon’s access to the machine.

‘Get out of my way, you stupid little prick,’ Simon shouted. Paul scurried off to watch from behind the sofa. Simon picked up a lead at random and addressed Andrew.

‘Where do I put this?’

Up your arse, you bastard.

‘If you give it to me—’

‘I’m asking where I f*cking put it!’ roared Simon. ‘You do computing – tell me where it goes!’

Andrew leaned around the back of the computer; he instructed Simon wrong at first, but then, by chance, got the right socket.

They had nearly finished by the time Ruth joined them in the sitting room. Andrew could tell, from one fleeting look at her, that she did not want the thing to work; that she wanted Simon to dump it somewhere, and never mind the eighty quid.

Simon sat down in front of the monitor. After several fruitless attempts, he realized that the cordless mouse had no batteries in it. Paul was sent sprinting from the room to fetch some from the kitchen. When he held them out to his father on his return, Simon snatched them out of his hand, as if Paul might try and whip them away.

His tongue down between his lower teeth and his lip, so that his chin bulged out stupidly, Simon made an exaggerated over-fiddling business of inserting the batteries. He always pulled this mad, brutish face as a warning that he was reaching the end of his tether, descending into the place where he could not be held accountable for his actions. Andrew imagined walking out and leaving his father to it, depriving him of the audience he preferred when working himself up; he could almost feel the mouse hitting him behind the ear as, in his imagination, he turned his back.

‘Get – f*cking – IN!’

Simon began to emit the low, animal noise, unique to him, that matched his aggressively wadded face.

‘Uhhlll … uhhlll … CUNTING THING! You f*cking do it! You! You’ve got pissy little girl’s fingers!’

Simon slammed the control and the batteries into Paul’s chest. Paul’s hands shook as he fitted the little metal tubes into place; he snapped the plastic cover shut and held the controls back out to his father.

‘Thank you, Pauline.’

Simon’s chin was still jutting like a Neanderthal’s. He habitually acted as though inanimate objects were conspiring to irritate him. Once again he placed the mouse on the mat.

Let it work.

A small white arrow appeared on screen and swooped cheerily around at Simon’s command.

A tourniquet of fear was released; relief gushed through three of the watchers; Simon stopped pulling his Neanderthal face. Andrew visualized a line of Japanese men and woman in white coats: the people who had assembled this flawless machine, all of them with delicate, dextrous fingers like Paul’s; they were bowing to him, sweetly civilized and gentle. Silently, Andrew blessed them and their families. They would never know how much had hung on this particular machine working.

Ruth, Andrew and Paul waited attentively while Simon put the computer through its paces. He brought up menus, had difficulty getting rid of them, clicked icons whose functions he did not understand, and was confused by the outcomes, but he had descended from the plateau of dangerous rage. Having blundered his way back to the desktop, he said, looking up at Ruth, ‘Seems all right, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s great!’ she said at once, forcing a smile, as though the last half-hour had not happened, he had bought the machine at Dixons, and connected it without the threat of violence. ‘It’s faster, Simon. Much faster than the last one.’

He hasn’t opened the internet yet, you silly woman.

‘Yeah, I thought that too.’

He glared at his two sons.

‘This is brand new and expensive, so you two treat it with respect, you understand? And don’t tell anyone we’ve got it,’ Simon added, and a gust of renewed malice chilled the room. ‘All right? Do you understand me?’

They nodded again. Paul’s face was tight and pinched. Unseen by his father, he traced a figure of eight on the outside of his leg with his slender forefinger.

‘And one of you draw the bloody curtains. Why are they still open?’

Because we’ve all been standing here, watching you behave like a prick.

Andrew pulled the curtains shut and left the room.

Even after he had reached his bedroom and lain back down on his bed, Andrew was unable to resume his pleasurable meditations on the person of Gaia Bawden. The prospect of his father standing for the council had loomed out of nowhere like some gigantic iceberg, casting its shadow over everything, even Gaia.

For all of Andrew’s life, Simon had been a contented prisoner of his own contempt for other people, making his house a fortress against the world where his will was law, and where his mood constituted the family’s daily weather. As he had grown older, Andrew had become aware that his family’s almost total isolation was not typical, and become slightly embarrassed by it. Friends’ parents would ask him where he lived, unable to place his family; they would ask casual questions about whether his mother or father intended to come to social events or fundraisers. Sometimes they remembered Ruth from the primary school years, when mothers mixed in the playground. She was much more sociable than Simon. Perhaps, if she had not married such an antisocial man, she would have been more like Fats’ mother, meeting friends for lunch or dinner, busily connected to the town.

On the very rare occasions that Simon came face to face with a person whom he felt it worth courting, he adopted a salt-of-the-earth bluff persona that made Andrew cringe. Simon would talk over them, crack clumsy jokes and often stepped, unwittingly, on all kinds of sensitivities, because he neither knew anything, nor cared much, about the people with whom he was forced to converse. Lately, Andrew had asked himself whether Simon even saw other humans as real.

Why his father had been seized with the aspiration to perform on a wider stage, Andrew could not fathom, but calamity was surely inevitable. Andrew knew other parents, the sort who did sponsored cycle rides to raise money for the Square’s new Christmas lights, or ran the Brownies, or set up book clubs. Simon did nothing that required collaboration, and had never evinced the smallest interest in anything that did not benefit him directly.

Awful visions surged in Andrew’s churning mind: Simon making a speech larded with the transparent lies that his wife swallowed whole; Simon pulling his Neanderthal face in an attempt to intimidate an opponent; Simon losing control and starting to spew all his favourite swearwords into a microphone: cunting, f*cking, pissy, shit …

Andrew pulled his laptop towards him, but pushed it away again almost at once. He made no move to touch the mobile on his desk. This magnitude of anxiety and shame could not be contained in an instant message or a text; he was alone with it, and even Fats would not understand, and he did not know what to do.