The Casual Vacancy

hollow far below, was emerging into chilly sunlight. Ruth saw none of it: her mind was still at the hospital, watching Mary emerge from the room where Barry lay, all futile aids to life removed. Ruth Price’s pity flowed most freely and sincerely for those whom she believed to be like herself. ‘No, no, no, no,’ Mary had moaned, and that instinctive denial had reverberated inside Ruth, because she had been afforded a glimpse of herself in an identical situation…

Hardly able to bear the thought, she turned to look at Simon. His light-brown hair was still thick, his frame was almost as wiry as it had been in his twenties and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes were merely attractive, but Ruth’s return to nursing after a long break had confronted her anew with the million and one ways the human body could malfunction. She had had more detachment when she was young; now she realized how lucky they all were to be alive.

‘Couldn’t they do anything for him?’ asked Simon. ‘Couldn’t they plug it up?’

He sounded frustrated, as though the medical profession had, yet again, bungled the business by refusing to do the simple and obvious thing.

Andrew thrilled with savage pleasure. He had noticed lately that his father had developed a habit of countering his mother’s use of medical terms with crude, ignorant suggestions. Cerebral haemorrhage. Plug it up. His mother didn’t realize what his father was up to. She never did. Andrew ate his Weetabix and burned with hatred.

‘It was too late to do anything by the time they got him out to us,’ said Ruth, dropping teabags into the pot. ‘He died in the ambulance, right before they arrived.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Simon. ‘What was he, forty?’

But Ruth was distracted.

‘Paul, your hair’s completely matted at the back. Have you brushed it at all?’

She pulled a hairbrush from her handbag and pushed it into her younger son’s hand.

‘No warning signs or anything?’ asked Simon, as Paul dragged the brush through the thick mop of his hair.

‘He’d had a bad headache for a couple of days, apparently.’

‘Ah,’ said Simon, chewing toast. ‘And he ignored it?’

‘Oh, yes, he didn’t think anything of it.’

Simon swallowed.

‘Goes to show, doesn’t it?’ he said portentously. ‘Got to watch yourself.’

That’s wise, thought Andrew, with furious contempt; that’s profound. So it was Barry Fairbrother’s own fault his brain had burst open. You self- satisfied fucker, Andrew told his father, loudly, inside his own head.

Simon pointed his knife at his elder son and said, ‘Oh, and by the way. He’s going to be getting a job. Old Pizza Face there.’

Startled, Ruth turned from her husband to her son. Andrew’s acne stood out, livid and shiny, from his empurpling cheek, as he stared down into his bowl of beige mush.

‘Yeah,’ said Simon. ‘Lazy little shit’s going to start earning some money. If he wants to smoke, he can pay for it out of his own wages. No more pocket money.’

‘Andrew!’ wailed Ruth. ‘You haven’t been—?’

‘Oh, yes, he has. I caught him in the woodshed,’ said Simon, his expression a distillation of spite.

‘Andrew!’

‘No more money from us. You want fags, you buy ’em,’ said Simon.

‘But we said,’ whimpered Ruth, ‘we said, with his exams coming—’

‘Judging by the way he fucked up his mocks, we’ll be lucky if he gets any qualifications. He can get himself out to McDonald’s early, get some experience,’ said Simon, standing up and pushing in his chair, relishing the sight of Andrew’s hanging head, the dark pimpled edge of his face. ‘Because we’re not supporting you through any resits, pal. It’s now or never.’

‘Oh, Simon,’ said Ruth reproachfully.

‘What?’

Simon took two stamping steps towards his wife. Ruth shrank back against the sink. The pink plastic brush fell out of Paul’s hand.

‘I’m not going to fund the little fucker’s filthy habit! Fucking cheek of him, puffing away in my fucking shed!’

Simon hit himself on the chest on the word ‘my’; the dull thunk made Ruth wince.

‘I was bringing home a salary when I was that spotty little shit’s age. If he wants fags, he can pay for them himself, all right? All right?’

He had thrust his face to within six inches of Ruth’s.

‘Yes, Simon,’ she said very quietly.

Andrew’s bowels seemed to have become liquid. He had made a vow to himself not ten days previously: had the moment arrived so soon? But his father stepped away from his mother and marched out of the kitchen towards the porch. Ruth, Andrew and Paul remained quite still; they might have promised not to move in his absence.

‘Did you fill up the tank?’ Simon shouted, as he always did when she had been working a night shift.

‘Yes,’ Ruth called back, striving for brightness, for normality.

The front door rattled and slammed.

Ruth busied herself with the teapot, waiting for the billowing atmosphere to shrink back to its usual proportions. Only when Andrew was about to leave the room to clean his teeth did she speak.

‘He worries about you, Andrew. About your health.’

Like fuck he does, the cunt.

Inside his head, Andrew matched Simon obscenity for obscenity. Inside his head, he could take Simon in a fair fight.

Aloud, to his mother, he said, ‘Yeah. Right.’

III

Evertree Crescent was a sickle moon of 1930s bungalows, which lay two minutes from Pagford’s main square. In number thirty-six, a house tenanted longer than any other in the street, Shirley Mollison sat, propped up against her pillows, sipping the tea that her husband had brought her. The reflection facing her in the mirrored doors of the built-in wardrobe had a misty quality, due partly to the fact that she was not wearing glasses, and partly to the soft glow cast over the room by her rose-patterned curtains. In this flattering, hazy light, the dimpled pink and white face beneath the short silver hair was cherubic.

The bedroom was just large enough to accommodate Shirley’s single bed and Howard’s double, crammed together, non-identical twins. Howard’s mattress, which still bore his prodigious imprint, was empty. The soft purr and hiss of the shower was audible from where Shirley and her rosy reflection sat facing each other, savouring the news that seemed still to effervesce in the atmosphere, like bubbling champagne.

Barry Fairbrother was dead. Snuffed out. Cut down. No event of national importance, no war, no stock- market collapse, no terrorist attack, could have sparked in Shirley the awe, the avid interest and feverish speculation that currently consumed her.

She had hated Barry Fairbrother. Shirley and her husband, usually as one in all their friendships and enmities, had been a little out of step in this. Howard had sometimes confessed himself entertained by the bearded little man who opposed him so relentlessly across the long scratched tables in Pagford Church Hall; but Shirley made no distinction between the political and the personal. Barry had opposed Howard in the central quest of his life, and this made Barry Fairbrother her bitter enemy.

Loyalty to her husband was the main, but not the only, reason for Shirley’s passionate dislike. Her instincts about people were finely honed in one direction only, like a dog that has been trained to sniff out narcotics. She was perennially aquiver to detect condescension, and had long detected its reek in the attitudes of Barry