‘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
‘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.
