The Casual Vacancy

the only one who had remembered the talk that their teacher had given the class, explaining Andrew’s life- threatening condition; the only one to recognize his symptoms.

Krystal ought to have been given a gold merit star, and perhaps a certificate at assembly as Pupil of the Week, but the very next day (Andrew remembered it as clearly as his own collapse) she had hit Lexie Mollison so hard in the mouth that she had knocked out two of Lexie’s teeth.

He wheeled Simon’s bike carefully into the Walls’ garage, then rang the doorbell with a reluctance that had never been there before. Tessa Wall answered, dressed in her best grey coat. Andrew was annoyed with her; it was down to her that he had a black eye.

‘Come in, Andy,’ said Tessa, and her expression was tense. ‘We’ll just be a minute.’

He waited in the hallway, where the coloured glass over the door cast its paintboxy glow on the floorboards. Tessa marched into the kitchen, and Andrew glimpsed Fats in his black suit, crumpled up in a kitchen chair like a crushed spider, with one arm over his head, as if he were fending off blows.

Andrew turned his back. The two boys had had no communication since Andrew had led Tessa to the Cubby Hole. Fats had not been to school for a fortnight. Andrew had sent a couple of texts, but Fats had not replied. His Facebook page remained frozen as it had been on the day of Howard Mollison’s party.

A week ago, without warning, Tessa had telephoned the Prices, told them that Fats had admitted to having posted the messages under the name The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother, and offered her deepest apologies for the consequences they had suffered.

‘So how did he know I had that computer?’ Simon had roared, advancing on Andrew. ‘How did fucking Fats Wall know I did jobs after-hours at the printworks?’

Andrew’s only consolation was that if his father had known the truth, he might have ignored Ruth’s protests and continued to pummel Andrew until he was unconscious.

Why Fats had decided to pretend he had authored all the posts, Andrew did not know. Perhaps it was Fats’ ego at work, his determination to be the mastermind, the most destructive, the baddest of them all. Perhaps he had thought he was doing something noble, taking the fall for both of them. Either way, Fats had caused much more trouble than he knew; he had never realized, thought Andrew, waiting in the hall, what it was like to live with a father like Simon Price, safe in his attic room, with his reasonable, civilized parents.

Andrew could hear the adult Walls talking in quiet voices; they had not closed the kitchen door.

‘We need to leave now,’ Tessa was saying. ‘He’s got a moral obligation and he’s going.’

‘He’s had enough punishment,’ said Cubby’s voice.

‘I’m not asking him to go as a—’

‘Aren’t you?’ said Cubby sharply. ‘For God’s sake, Tessa. D’you think they’ll want him there? You go. Stu can stay here with me.’

A minute later Tessa emerged from the kitchen, closing the door firmly behind her.

‘Stu isn’t coming, Andy,’ she said, and he could tell that she was furious about it. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘No problem,’ he muttered. He was glad. He could not imagine what they had left to talk about. This way he could sit with Gaia.

A little way down Church Row, Samantha Mollison was standing at her sitting-room window, holding a coffee and watching mourners pass her house on their way to St Michael and All Saints. When she saw Tessa Wall, and what she thought was Fats, she let out a little gasp.

‘Oh my God, he’s going,’ she said out loud, to nobody.

Then she recognized Andrew, turned red, and backed hastily away from the glass.

Samantha was supposed to be working from home. Her laptop lay open behind her on the sofa, but that morning she had put on an old black dress, half wondering whether she would attend Krystal and Robbie Weedon’s funeral. She supposed that she had only a few more minutes in which to make up her mind.

She had never spoken a kind word about Krystal Weedon, so surely it would be hypocritical to attend her funeral, purely because she had wept over the account of her death in the Yarvil and District Gazette, and because Krystal’s chubby face grinned out of every one of the class photographs that Lexie had brought home from St Thomas’s?

Samantha set down her coffee, hurried to the telephone and rang Miles at work.

‘Hello, babe,’ he said.

(She had held him while he sobbed with relief beside the hospital bed, where Howard lay connected to machines, but alive.)

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘Not bad. Busy morning. Lovely to hear from you,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

(They had made love the previous night, and she had not pretended that he was anybody else.)

‘The funeral’s about to start,’ said Samantha. ‘People going by…’

She had suppressed what she wanted to say for nearly three weeks, because of Howard, and the hospital, and not wanting to remind Miles of their awful row, but she could not hold it back any longer.

‘…Miles, I saw that boy. Robbie Weedon. I saw him, Miles.’ She was panicky, pleading. ‘He was in the St Thomas’s playing field when I walked across it that morning.’

‘In the playing field?’

In the last three weeks, a desire to be absorbed in something bigger than herself had grown in Samantha. Day by day she had waited for the strange new need to subside (this is how people go religious, she thought, trying to laugh herself out of it) but it had, if anything, intensified.

‘Miles,’ she said, ‘you know the council… with your dad – and Parminder Jawanda resigning too – you’ll want to co-opt a couple of people, won’t you?’ She knew all the terminology; she had listened to it for years. ‘I mean, you won’t want another election, after all this?’

‘Bloody hell, no.’

‘So Colin Wall could fill one seat,’ she rushed on, ‘and I was thinking, I’ve got time – now the business is all online – I could do the other one.’

‘You?’ said Miles, astonished.

‘I’d like to get involved,’ said Samantha.

Krystal Weedon, dead at sixteen, barricaded inside the squalid little house on Foley Road… Samantha had not drunk a glass of wine in two weeks. She thought that she might like to hear the arguments for Bellchapel Addiction Clinic.

The telephone was ringing in number ten Hope Street. Kay and Gaia were already late leaving for Krystal’s funeral. When Gaia asked who was speaking, her lovely face hardened: she seemed much older.

‘It’s Gavin,’ she told her mother.

‘I didn’t call him!’ whispered Kay, like a nervous schoolgirl as she took the phone.

‘Hi,’ said Gavin. ‘How are you?’

‘On my way out to a funeral,’ said Kay, with her eyes locked on her daughter’s. ‘The Weedon children’s. So, not fabulous.’

‘Oh,’ said Gavin. ‘Christ, yeah. Sorry. I didn’t realize.’

He had spotted the familiar surname in a Yarvil and District Gazette headline, and, vaguely interested at last, bought a copy. It had occurred to him that he might have walked close by the place where the teenagers and the boy had been, but he had no actual memory of seeing Robbie Weedon.

Gavin had had an odd couple of weeks. He was missing Barry badly. He did not understand himself: when he should have been mired in misery that Mary had turned him down, all he wanted was a beer with the man whose wife he had hoped to take as his own…

(Muttering aloud as he had walked away from her house, he had said to himself, ‘That’s what you get for trying to steal your best friend’s life,’ and failed to notice the slip of the tongue.)

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I was wondering whether you fancied a drink later?’

Kay almost laughed.

‘Turn you down, did she?’