from their small, upturned faces.
Fats had wet himself. A stream of urine had spattered down the inside of his shorts onto the garage floor. Ruth, who had heard the yelling from the kitchen, had run from the house to intervene: ‘No, Si – Si, no – it was an accident.’ Fats was white and shaking; he wanted to go home straight away; he wanted his mum.
Tessa had arrived, and Fats had run to her in his soaking shorts, sobbing. It was the only time in his life that Andrew had seen his father at a loss, backing down. Somehow Tessa had conveyed white-hot fury without raising her voice, without threatening, without hitting. She had written out a cheque and forced it into Simon’s hand, while Ruth said, ‘
Fats courted Simon these days. Whenever he came up to Hilltop House, he went out of his way to make Simon laugh; and in return, Simon welcomed Fats’ visits, enjoyed his crudest jokes, liked hearing about his antics. Still, when alone with Andrew, Fats concurred wholeheartedly that Simon was a Grade A, 24-carat cunt.
‘I reckon she’s a lezzer,’ said Fats, as they walked past the Old Vicarage, dark in the shadow of the Scots pine, with ivy covering its front.
‘Your mum?’ asked Andrew, barely listening, lost in his own thoughts.
‘What?’ yelped Fats, and Andrew saw that he was genuinely outraged. ‘Fuck off! Sukhvinder Jawanda.’
‘Oh, yeah. Right.’
Andrew laughed, and so, a beat later, did Fats.
The bus into Yarvil was crowded; Andrew and Fats had to sit next to each other, rather than in two double seats, as they preferred. As they passed the end of Hope Street, Andrew glanced along it, but it was deserted. He had not run into Gaia outside school since the afternoon when they had both secured Saturday jobs at the Copper Kettle. The cafe would open the following weekend; he experienced waves of euphoria every time he thought of it.
‘Si-Pie’s election campaign on track, is it?’ asked Fats, busy making roll-ups. One long leg was stuck out at an angle into the aisle of the bus; people were stepping over it rather than asking him to move. ‘Cubby’s cacking it already, and he’s only making his pamphlet.’
‘Yeah, he’s busy,’ said Andrew, and he bore without flinching a silent eruption of panic in the pit of his stomach.
He thought of his parents at the kitchen table, as they had been, nightly, for the past week; of a box of stupid pamphlets Simon had had printed at work; of the list of talking points Ruth had helped Simon compile, which he used as he made telephone calls, every evening, to every person he knew within the electoral boundary. Simon did all of it with an air of immense effort. He was tightly wound at home, displaying heightened aggression towards his sons; he might have been shouldering a burden that they had shirked. The only topic of conversation at meals was the election, with Simon and Ruth speculating about the forces ranged against Simon. They took it very personally that other candidates were standing for Barry Fairbrother’s old seat, and seemed to assume that Colin Wall and Miles Mollison spent most of their time plotting together, staring up at Hilltop House, focused entirely on defeating the man who lived there.
Andrew checked his pocket again for the folded paper. He had not told Fats what he intended to do. He was afraid that Fats might broadcast it; Andrew was not sure how to impress upon his friend the necessity for absolute secrecy, how to remind Fats that the maniac who had made little boys piss themselves was still alive and well, and living in Andrew’s house.
‘Cubby’s not too worried about Si-Pie,’ said Fats. ‘He thinks the big competition is Miles Mollison.’
‘Yeah,’ said Andrew. He had heard his parents discussing it. Both of them seemed to think that Shirley had betrayed them; that she ought to have forbidden her son from challenging Simon.
‘This is a holy fucking crusade for Cubby, y’know,’ said Fats, rolling a cigarette between forefinger and thumb. ‘He’s picking up the regimental flag for his fallen comrade. Ole Barry Fairbrother.’
He poked strands of tobacco into the end of the roll-up with a match.
‘Miles Mollison’s wife’s got gigantic tits,’ said Fats.
An elderly woman sitting in front of them turned her head to glare at Fats. Andrew began to laugh again.
‘Humungous bouncing jubblies,’ Fats said loudly, into the scowling, crumpled face. ‘Great big juicy double-F mams.’
She turned her red face slowly to face the front of the bus again. Andrew could barely breathe.
They got off the bus in the middle of Yarvil, near the precinct and main pedestrian-only shopping street, and wove their way through the shoppers, smoking Fats’ roll-ups. Andrew had virtually no money left: Howard Mollison’s wages would be very welcome.
The bright-orange sign of the internet cafe seemed to blaze at Andrew from a distance, beckoning him on. He could not concentrate on what Fats was saying.
He did not know. His feet kept moving, and the sign was growing larger and larger, luring him, leering at him.
But the alternative… the humiliation of having Simon show what he was to the world; the toll it would take on the family when, after weeks of anticipation and idiocy, he was defeated, as he must be. Then would come rage and spite, and a determination to make everybody else pay for his own lunatic decisions. Only the previous evening Ruth had said brightly, ‘The boys will go through Pagford and post your pamphlets for you.’ Andrew had seen, in his peripheral vision, Paul’s look of horror and his attempt to make eye contact with his brother.
‘I wanna go in here,’ mumbled Andrew, turning right.
They bought tickets with codes on them, and sat down at different computers, two occupied seats apart. The middle-aged man on Andrew’s right stank of body odour and old fags, and kept sniffing.
Andrew logged onto the internet, and typed in the name of the website: Pagford… Parish… Council… dot… co… dot… uk…
The homepage bore the council arms in blue and white, and a picture of Pagford that had been taken from a point close to Hilltop House, with Pargetter Abbey silhouetted against the sky. The site, as Andrew already knew, from looking at it on a school computer, looked dated and amateurish. He had not dared go near it on his own laptop; his father might be immensely ignorant about the internet, but Andrew did not rule out the possibility that Simon might find somebody at work who could help him investigate, once the thing was done…
Even in this bustling anonymous place, there was no avoiding the fact that today’s date would be on the posting, or of pretending that he had not been in Yarvil when it happened; but Simon had never visited an internet cafe in his life, and might not be aware that they existed.
The rapid contraction of Andrew’s heart was painful. Swiftly, he scrolled down the message board, which did not seem to enjoy a lot of traffic. There were threads entitled: refuse collection – a Query and school catchment areas in Crampton and Little manning? Every tenth entry or so was a posting from the Administrator, attaching Minutes of the Last Council Meeting. Right at the bottom of the page was a thread entitled: Death of Cllr Barry Fairbrother. This had received 152 views and forty-three responses. Then, on the second page of the message board, he found what he hoped to find: a post from the dead man.
A couple of months previously, Andrew’s computing set had been supervised by a young supply teacher. He had been trying to look cool, trying to get the class onside. He shouldn’t have mentioned SQL injections at all, and Andrew was quite sure that he had not been the only one who went straight home and looked them up. He pulled out the piece of paper on which he had written the code he had researched in odd moments at school, and brought up the log-in page on the council website. Everything hinged on the premise that the site had been set up by an amateur a long time ago; that it had never been protected from the simplest of classical hacks.
Carefully, using only his index finger, he input the magic line of characters.
He read them through twice, making sure that every apostrophe was where it should be, hesitated for a
