The Casual Vacancy

Colin waited until they reached the bypass; then he asked, ‘Where were you when you should have been in computing this afternoon?’

Tessa glanced irresistibly into the mirror again. She saw her son yawn. Sometimes, even though she denied it endlessly to Colin, Tessa wondered whether Fats really was waging a dirty, personal war on his father with the whole school as audience. She knew things about her son she would not have known if she had not worked in guidance; students told her things, sometimes innocently, sometimes slyly.

Miss, do you mind Fats smoking? D’you let him do it at home?

She locked away this small repository of illicit booty, obtained unintentionally, and brought it to neither her husband’s nor her son’s attention, even though it dragged at her, weighed on her.

‘Went for a walk,’ Fats said calmly. ‘Thought I’d stretch the old legs.’

Colin twisted in his seat to look at Fats, straining against his seat belt as he shouted, his gestures further restricted and hampered by his overcoat and briefcase. When he lost control, Colin’s voice rose higher and higher, so that he was shouting almost in falsetto. Through it all, Fats sat in silence, an insolent half-smile curving his thin mouth, until his father was screaming insults at him, insults that were blunted by Colin’s innate dislike of swearing, his self-consciousness when he did it.

‘You cocky, self-centred little… little shit,’ he screamed, and Tessa, whose eyes were so full of tears that she could barely see the road, was sure that Fats would be duplicating Colin’s timid, falsetto swearing for the benefit of Andrew Price tomorrow morning.

Fats does a great imitation of Cubby’s walk, miss, have you seen it?

‘How dare you talk to me like that? How dare you skip classes?’

Colin screamed and raged, and Tessa had to blink the tears out of her eyes as she took the turning to Pagford and drove through the Square, past Mollison and Lowe, the war memorial and the Black Canon; she turned left at St Michael and All Saints into Church Row, and, at last, into the driveway of their house, by which time Colin had shouted himself into squeaky hoarseness and Tessa’s cheeks were glazed and salty. When they all got out, Fats, whose expression had not altered a whit during his father’s long diatribe, let himself in through the front door with his own key, and proceeded upstairs at a leisurely pace without looking back.

Colin threw his briefcase down in the dark hall and rounded on Tessa. The only illumination came from the stained-glass panel over the front door, which cast strange colours over his agitated, domed and balding head, half bloody, half ghostly blue.

‘D’you see?’ he cried, waving his long arms, ‘D’you see what I’m dealing with?’

‘Yes,’ she said, taking a handful of tissues from the box on the hall table and mopping her face, blowing her nose. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Not a thought in his head for what we’re going through!’ said Colin, and he started to sob, big whooping dry sobs, like a child with croup. Tessa hurried forward and put her arms around Colin’s chest, a little above his waist, for, short and stout as she was, that was the highest bit she could reach. He stooped, clinging to her; she could feel his trembling, and the heaving of his rib cage under his coat.

After a few minutes, she gently disengaged herself, led him into the kitchen and made him a pot of tea.

‘I’m going to take a casserole up to Mary’s,’ said Tessa, after she had sat for a while, stroking his hand. ‘She’s got half the family there. We’ll get an early night, once I’m back.’

He nodded and sniffed, and she kissed him on the side of his head before heading out to the freezer. When she came back, carrying the heavy, icy dish, he was sitting at the table, cradling his mug in his big hands, his eyes closed.

Tessa set down the casserole, wrapped in a polythene bag, on the tiles beside the front door. She pulled on the lumpy green cardigan she often wore instead of a jacket, but did not put on her shoes. Instead, she tiptoed upstairs to the landing and then, taking less trouble to be quiet, up the second flight to the loft conversion.

A swift burst of rat-like activity greeted her approach to the door. She knocked, giving Fats time to hide whatever it was he had been looking at online, or, perhaps, the cigarettes he did not know she knew about.

‘Yeah?’

She pushed open the door. Her son was crouching stagily over his school bag.

‘Did you have to play truant today, of all days?’

Fats straightened up, long and stringy; he towered over his mother.

‘I was there. I came in late. Bennett didn’t notice. He’s useless.’

‘Stuart, please. Please.’

She wanted to shout at the kids at work, sometimes, too. She wanted to scream, You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it’s whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.

‘Your father’s very upset, Stu. Because of Barry. Can’t you understand that?’

‘Yes,’ said Fats.

‘I mean, it’s like Arf dying would be to you.’

He did not respond, nor did his expression alter much, yet she sensed his disdain, his amusement.

‘I know you think you and Arf are very different orders of being to the likes of your father and Barry—’

‘No,’ said Fats, but only, she knew, in the hope of ending the conversation.

‘I’m going to take some food over to Mary’s house. I am begging you, Stuart, not to do anything else to upset your father while I’m gone. Please, Stu.’

‘Fine,’ he said, with half a laugh, half a shrug. She felt his attention swooping, swallow-like, back to his own concerns, even before she had closed the door.

VI

The spiteful wind blew away the low-hanging cloud of late afternoon and, at sunset, died out. Three houses along from the Walls’, Samantha Mollison sat facing her lamp-lit reflection in the dressing-table mirror, and found the silence and the stillness depressing.

It had been a disappointing couple of days. She had sold virtually nothing. The sales rep from Champetre had turned out to be a jowly man with an abrasive manner and a hold-all full of ugly bras. Apparently he reserved his charm for the preliminaries, for in person he was all business, patronizing her, criticizing her stock, pushing for an order. She had been imagining somebody younger, taller and sexier; she had wanted to get him and his garish underwear out of her little shop as quickly as possible.

She had bought a ‘with deepest sympathy’ card for Mary Fairbrother that lunchtime, but could not think what to write in it, because, after their nightmare journey to the hospital together, a simple signature did not seem enough. Their relationship had never been close. You bumped up against each other all the time in a place as small as Pagford, but she and Miles had not really known Barry and Mary. If anything, it might have been said that they were in opposing camps, what with Howard and Barry’s endless clashes about the Fields… not that she, Samantha, gave a damn one way or another. She held herself above the smallness of local politics.

Tired, out of sorts and bloated after a day of indiscriminate snacking, she wished that she and Miles were not going to dinner at her parents-in-law’s. Watching herself in the mirror, she put her hands flat against the sides of her face and pulled the skin gently back towards her ears. A younger Samantha emerged by millimetres. Turning her face slowly from side to side, she examined this taut mask. Better, much better. She wondered what it would cost; how much it would hurt; whether she would dare. She tried to imagine what her mother-in-law would say if she appeared with a firm new face. Shirley and Howard were, as Shirley frequently reminded them, helping to pay for their granddaughters’ education.

Miles entered the bedroom; Samantha released her skin and picked up her under-eye concealer, tilting her head back, as she always did when applying make-up: it pulled the slightly sagging skin at her jaw taut and minimized the pouches under her eyes. There were short, needle-deep lines at the edges of her lips. These could be filled, she had read, with a synthetic, injectable compound. She wondered how much difference that would make; it would surely be cheaper than a facelift, and perhaps Shirley would not notice. In the mirror over her