The Casual Vacancy

Kay did not say she knew that Terri had used that morning.

‘Have either of you got any paracetamol?’ Kay asked Alex and Una, once the drug worker had given her full details of Terri’s attendance and lack of progress at the clinic, and rung off.

Kay took her painkillers with tepid tea, lacking the energy to get up and go to the water cooler in the corridor. The office was stuffy, the radiator cranked up high. As the daylight faded from the sky outside, the strip- lighting over her desk intensified: it turned her multitude of papers a bright yellow-white; buzzing black words marched in endless lines.

‘They’re going to close down Bellchapel Clinic, you watch,’ said Una, who was working at her PC with her back to Kay. ‘Got to make cuts. Council funds one of the drug workers. Pagford Parish owns the building. I heard they’re planning to tart it up and try and rent to a better-paying client. They’ve had it in for that clinic for years.’

Kay’s temple throbbed. The name of her new hometown made her feel sad. Without pausing to think, she did the thing that she had vowed not to do after he had failed to call the previous evening: she picked up her mobile and keyed in Gavin’s office number.

‘Edward Collins and Co,’ said a woman’s voice, after the third ring. They answered your calls immediately out in the private sector, when money might depend on it.

‘Could I speak to Gavin Hughes, please?’ said Kay, staring down at Terri’s file.

‘Who’s speaking, please?’

‘Kay Bawden,’ said Kay.

She did not look up; she did not want to catch either Alex’s or Una’s eyes. The pause seemed interminable.

(They had met in London at Gavin’s brother’s birthday party. Kay had not known anyone there, except for the friend who had dragged her along for support. Gavin had just split up with Lisa; he had been a little drunk, but had seemed decent, reliable and conventional, not at all the kind of man that Kay usually went for. He had poured out the story of his broken relationship, and then gone home with her to the flat in Hackney. He had been keen while the affair remained long-distance, visiting at weekends and telephoning her regularly; but when, by a miracle, she had got the job in Yarvil, for less money, and put her flat in Hackney on the market, he had seemed to take fright… )

‘His line’s still busy, would you like to hold?’

‘Yes, please,’ said Kay miserably.

(If she and Gavin did not work out… but they had to work out. She had moved for him, changed jobs for him, uprooted her daughter for him. He would never have let that happen, surely, unless his intentions were serious? He must have thought through the consequences if they split up: how awful and awkward it would be, running across each other constantly in a tiny town like Pagford?)

‘Putting you through,’ said the secretary, and Kay’s hopes soared.

‘Hi,’ said Gavin. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine,’ lied Kay, because Alex and Una were listening. ‘Are you having a good day?’

‘Busy,’ said Gavin. ‘You?’

‘Yes.’

She waited, the phoned pressed tightly against her ear, pretending that he was speaking to her, listening to the silence.

‘I wondered whether you wanted to meet up tonight,’ she asked finally, feeling sick.

‘Er… I don’t think I can,’ he said.

How can you not know? What have you got on?

‘I might have to do something… it’s Mary. Barry’s wife. She wants me to be a pall-bearer. So I might have to… I think I’ve got to find out what that involves and everything.’

Sometimes, if she simply remained quiet, and let the inadequacy of his excuses reverberate on the air, he became ashamed and backtracked.

‘I don’t suppose that’ll take all evening, though,’ he said. ‘We could meet up later, if you wanted.’

‘All right, then. Do you want to come over to mine, as it’s a school night?’

‘Er… yeah, OK.’

‘What time?’ she asked, wanting him to make one decision.

‘I dunno… nine-ish?’

After he had rung off, Kay kept the phone pressed tightly to her ear for a few moments, then said, for the benefit of Alex and Una, ‘I do, too. See you later, babe.’

V

As guidance teacher, Tessa’s hours varied more than her husband’s. She usually waited until the end of the school day to take their son home in her Nissan, leaving Colin (whom Tessa – although she knew what the rest of the world called him, including nearly all the parents who had caught the habit from their children – never addressed as Cubby) to follow them, an hour or two later, in his Toyota. Today, though, Colin met Tessa in the car park at twenty-past four, while the schoolchildren were still swarming out of the front gates into parental cars, or onto their free buses.

The sky was a cold iron-grey, like the underside of a shield. A sharp breeze lifted the hems of skirts and rattled the leaves on the immature trees; a spiteful, chill wind that sought out your weakest places, the nape of your neck and your knees, and which denied you the comfort of dreaming, of retreating a little from reality. Even after she had closed the car door on it, Tessa felt ruffled and put out, as she would have been by somebody crashing into her without apology.

Beside her in the passenger seat, his knees absurdly high in the cramped confines of her car, Colin told Tessa what the computing teacher had come to his office to tell him, twenty minutes previously.

‘…not there. Didn’t turn up for the whole double period. Said he thought he’d better come straight and tell me. So that’ll be all over the staff room, tomorrow. Exactly what he wants,’ said Colin furiously, and Tessa knew that they were not talking about the computing teacher any more. ‘He’s just sticking two fingers up at me, as usual.’

Her husband was pale with exhaustion, with shadows beneath his reddened eyes, and his hands were twitching slightly on the handle of his briefcase. Fine hands, with big knuckles and long slender fingers, they were not altogether dissimilar from their son’s. Tessa had pointed this out to her husband and son recently; neither had evinced the smallest pleasure at the thought that there was some faint physical resemblance between them.

‘I don’t think he’s—’ began Tessa, but Colin was talking again.

‘—So, he’ll get detention like everyone else and I’ll damn well punish him at home too. We’ll see how he likes that, shall we? We’ll see whether that’s a laughing matter. We can start by grounding him for a week, we’ll see how funny that is.’

Biting back her response, Tessa scanned the sea of black-clad students, walking with heads down, shivering, drawing their thin coats close, their hair blown into their mouths. A chubby-cheeked and slightly bewildered-looking first year was looking all around for a lift that had not arrived. The crowd parted and there was Fats, loping along with Arf Price as usual, the wind blowing his hair off his gaunt face. Sometimes, at certain angles, in certain lights, it was easy to see what Fats would look like as an old man. For an instant, from the depths of her tiredness, he seemed a complete stranger, and Tessa thought how extraordinary it was that he was turning away to walk towards her car, and that she would have to go back out into that horrible hyper-real breeze to let him in. But when he reached them, and gave her his small grimace of a smile, he reconstituted himself immediately into the boy she loved in spite of it all, and she got out again, and stood stoically in the knife-sharp wind while he folded himself into the car with his father, who had not offered to move.

They pulled out of the car park, ahead of the free buses, and set off through Yarvil, past the ugly, broken- down houses of the Fields, towards the bypass that would speed them back to Pagford. Tessa watched Fats in the rear-view mirror. He was slumped in the back, gazing out of the window, as though his parents were two people who had picked him up hitchhiking, connected to him merely by chance and proximity.