The Casual Vacancy

‘They think of themselves as from Yarvil,’ said the farmer. ‘Always have.’

‘I remember,’ said Betty, ‘when Krystal Weedon pushed another child into the river on a nature walk.’

‘No, she didn’t,’ said Parminder angrily, ‘my daughter was there – that was two boys who were fighting – anyway—’

‘I heard it was Krystal Weedon,’ said Betty.

‘You heard wrong,’ said Parminder, except that she did not say it, she shouted it.

They were shocked. She had shocked herself. The echo hummed off the old walls. Parminder could barely swallow; she kept her head down, staring at the agenda, and heard John’s voice from a long way off.

‘Barry would’ve done better to talk about himself, not that girl. He got a lot out of St Thomas’s.’

‘Trouble is, for every Barry,’ said another woman, ‘you get a load of yobs.’

‘They’re Yarvil people, bottom line,’ said a man, ‘they belong to Yarvil.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Parminder, keeping her voice deliberately low, but they all fell silent to listen to her, waiting for her to shout again. ‘It’s simply not true. Look at the Weedons. That was the whole point of Barry’s article. They were a Pagford family going back years, but—’

‘They moved to Yarvil!’ said Betty.

‘There was no housing here,’ said Parminder, fighting her own temper, ‘none of you wanted a new development on the outskirts of town.’

‘You weren’t here, I’m sorry,’ said Betty, pink in the face, looking ostentatiously away from Parminder. ‘You don’t know the history.’

Talk had become general: the meeting had broken into several little knots of conversation, and Parminder could not make out any of it. Her throat was tight and she did not dare meet anyone’s eyes.

‘Shall we have a show of hands?’ Howard shouted down the table, and silence fell again. ‘Those in favour of telling the District Council that Pagford will be happy for the parish boundary to be redrawn, to take the Fields out of our jurisdiction?’

Parminder’s fists were clenched in her lap and the nails of both her hands were embedded in their palms. There was a rustle of sleeves all around her.

‘Excellent!’ said Howard, and the jubilation in his voice rang triumphantly from the rafters. ‘Well, I’ll draft something with Tony and Helen and we’ll send it round for everyone to see, and we’ll get it off. Excellent!’

A couple of councillors clapped. Parminder’s vision blurred and she blinked hard. The agenda swam in and out of focus. The silence went on so long that finally she looked up: Howard, in his excitement, had had recourse to his inhaler, and most of the councillors were watching solicitously.

‘All right, then,’ wheezed Howard, putting the inhaler away again, red in the face and beaming, ‘unless anyone’s got anything else to add –’ an infinitesimal pause ‘– item nine. Bellchapel. And Aubrey’s got something to tell us here too.’

Barry wouldn’t have let it happen. He’d have argued. He’d have made John laugh and vote with us. He ought to have written about himself, not Krystal… I’ve let him down.

‘Thank you, Howard,’ said Aubrey, as the blood pounded in Parminder’s ears, and she dug her nails still more deeply into her palms. ‘As you know, we’re having to make some pretty drastic cuts at District level…’

She was in love with me, which she could barely hide whenever she laid eyes on me…

‘…and one of the projects we’ve got to look at is Bellchapel,’ said Aubrey. ‘I thought I’d have a word, because, as you all know, it’s the Parish that owns the building—’

‘—and the lease is almost up,’ said Howard. ‘That’s right.’

‘But nobody else is interested in that old place, are they?’ asked a retired accountant from the end of the table. ‘It’s in a bad state, from what I’ve heard.’

‘Oh, I’m sure we could find a new tenant,’ said Howard comfortably, ‘but that’s not really the issue. The point is whether we think the clinic is doing a good—’

‘That’s not the point at all,’ said Parminder, cutting across him. ‘It isn’t the Parish Council’s job to decide whether or not the clinic’s doing a good job. We don’t fund their work. They’re not our responsibility.’

‘But we own the building,’ said Howard, still smiling, still polite, ‘so I think it’s natural for us to want to consider—’

‘If we’re going to look at information on the clinic’s work, I think it’s very important that we get a balanced picture,’ said Parminder.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said Shirley, blinking down the table at Parminder, ‘but could you try not to interrupt the Chair, Dr Jawanda? It’s awfully difficult to take notes if people talk over other people. And now I’ve interrupted,’ she added with a smile. ‘Sorry!’

‘I presume the Parish wants to keep getting revenue from the building,’ said Parminder, ignoring Shirley. ‘And we have no other potential tenant lined up, as far as I know. So I’m wondering why we are even considering terminating the clinic’s lease.’

‘They don’t cure them,’ said Betty. ‘They just give them more drugs. I’d be very happy to see them out.’

‘We’re having to make some very difficult decisions at District Council level,’ said Aubrey Fawley. ‘The government’s looking for more than a billion in savings from local government. We cannot continue to provide services the way we have done. That’s the reality.’

Parminder hated the way that her fellow councillors acted around Aubrey, drinking in his deep modulated voice, nodding gently as he talked. She was well aware that some of them called her ‘Bends-Your-Ear’.

‘Research indicates that illegal drug use increases during recessions,’ said Parminder.

‘It’s their choice,’ said Betty. ‘Nobody makes them take drugs.’

She looked around the table for support. Shirley smiled at her.

‘We’re having to make some tough choices,’ said Aubrey.

‘So you’ve got together with Howard,’ Parminder talked over him, ‘and decided that you can give the clinic a little push by forcing them out of the building.’

‘I can think of better ways to spend money than on a bunch of criminals,’ said the accountant.

‘I’d cut off all their benefits, personally,’ said Betty.

‘I was invited to this meeting to put you all in the picture about what’s happening at District level,’ said Aubrey calmly. ‘Nothing more than that, Dr Jawanda.’

‘Helen,’ said Howard loudly, pointing to another councillor, whose hand was raised, and who had been trying to make her views heard for a minute.

Parminder heard nothing of what the woman said. She had quite forgotten about the stack of papers lying underneath her agenda, on which Kay Bawden had spent so much time: the statistics, the profiles of successful cases, the explanation of the benefits of methadone as against heroin; studies showing the cost, financial and social, of heroin addiction. Everything around her had become slightly liquid, unreal; she knew that she was going to erupt as she had never erupted in her life, and there was no room to regret it, or to prevent it, or do anything except watch it happen; it was too late, far too late…

‘…culture of entitlement,’ said Aubrey Fawley. ‘People who have literally not worked a day in their lives.’

‘And, let’s face it,’ said Howard, ‘this is a problem with a simple solution. Stop taking the drugs.’

He turned, smiling and conciliating, to Parminder. ‘They call it “cold turkey”, isn’t that right, Dr Jawanda?’

‘Oh, you think that they should take responsibility for their addiction and change their behaviour?’ said Parminder.

‘In a nutshell, yes.’

‘Before they cost the state any more money.’

‘Exact—’

‘And you,’ said Parminder loudly, as the silent eruption engulfed her, ‘do you know how many tens of thousands of pounds you, Howard Mollison, have cost the health service, because of your total inability to stop gorging yourself?’

A rich, red claret stain was spreading up Howard’s neck into his cheeks.