The Casual Vacancy

I

‘…ran out of here, screaming blue murder, calling her a Paki bitch – and now the paper’s called for a comment, because she’s…’

Parminder heard the receptionist’s voice, barely louder than a whisper, as she passed the door of the staff meeting room, which was ajar. One swift light step, and Parminder had pulled it open to reveal one of the receptionists and the practice nurse in close proximity. Both jumped and spun round.

‘Doct’ Jawan—’

‘You understand the confidentiality agreement you signed when you took this job, don’t you, Karen?’

The receptionist looked aghast.

‘Yeah, I – I wasn’t – Laura already – I was coming to give you this note. The Yarvil and District Gazette’s rang. Mrs Weedon’s died and one of her granddaughters is saying—’

‘And are those for me?’ asked Parminder coldly, pointing at the patient records in Karen’s hand.

‘Oh – yeah,’ said Karen, flustered. ‘He wanted to see Dr Crawford, but—’

‘You’d better get back to the front desk.’

Parminder took the patient records and strode back out to reception, fuming. Once there, and facing the patients, she realized that she did not know whom to call, and glanced down at the folder in her hand.

‘Mr – Mr Mollison.’

Howard heaved himself up, smiling, and walked towards her with his familiar rocking gait. Dislike rose like bile in Parminder’s throat. She turned and walked back to her surgery, Howard following her.

‘All well with Parminder?’ he asked, as he closed her door and settled himself, without invitation, on the patient’s chair.

It was his habitual greeting, but today it felt like a taunt.

‘What’s the problem?’ she asked brusquely.

‘Bit of an irritation,’ he said. ‘Just here. Need a cream, or something.’

He tugged his shirt out of his trousers and lifted it a few inches. Parminder saw an angry red patch of skin at the edge of the fold where his stomach spilt out over his upper legs.

‘You’ll need to take your shirt off,’ she said.

‘It’s only here that’s itching.’

‘I need to see the whole area.’

He sighed and got to his feet. As he unbuttoned his shirt he said, ‘Did you get the agenda I sent through this morning?’

‘No, I haven’t checked emails today.’

This was a lie. Parminder had read his agenda and was furious about it, but this was not the moment to tell him so. She resented his trying to bring council business into her surgery, his way of reminding her that there was a place where she was his subordinate, even if here, in this room, she could order him to strip.

‘Could you, please – I need to look under…’

He hoisted the great apron of flesh upwards; the upper legs of his trousers were revealed, and finally the waistband. With his arms full of his own fat he smiled down at her. She drew her chair nearer, her head level with his belt.

An ugly scaly rash had spread in the hidden crease of Howard’s belly: a bright scalded red, it stretched from one side to the other of his torso like a huge, smeared smile. A whiff of rotting meat reached her nostrils.

‘Intertrigo,’ she said, ‘and lichen simplex there, where you’ve scratched. All right, you can put your shirt back on.’

He dropped his belly and reached for his shirt, unfazed.

‘You’ll see I’ve put the Bellchapel building on the agenda. It’s generating a bit of press interest at the moment.’

She was tapping something into the computer, and did not reply.

‘Yarvil and District Gazette,’ Howard said. ‘I’m doing them an article. Both sides,’ he said, buttoning up his shirt, ‘of the question.’

She was trying not to listen to him, but the sound of the newspaper’s name caused the knot in her stomach to tighten.

‘When did you last have your blood pressure done, Howard? I’m not seeing a test in the last six months.’

‘It’ll be fine. I’m on medication for it.’

‘We should check, though. As you’re here.’

He sighed again, and laboriously rolled up his sleeve.

‘They’ll be printing Barry’s article before mine,’ he said. ‘You know he sent them an article? About the Fields?’

‘Yes,’ she said, against her own better judgement.

‘Haven’t got a copy, have you? So I don’t duplicate anything he’s said?’

Her fingers trembled a little on the cuff. It would not meet around Howard’s arm. She unfastened it and got up to fetch a bigger one.

‘No,’ she said, her back to him. ‘I never saw it.’

He watched her work the pump, and observed the pressure dial with the indulgent smile of a man observing some pagan ritual.

‘Too high,’ she told him, as the needle registered one hundred and seventy over a hundred.

‘I’m on pills for it,’ he said, scratching where the cuff had been, and letting down his sleeve. ‘Dr Crawford seems happy.’

She scanned the list of his medications onscreen.

‘You’re on amlodipine and bendroflumethiazide for your blood pressure, yes? And simvastatin for your heart… no beta-blocker…’

‘Because of my asthma,’ said Howard, tweaking his sleeve straight.

‘…right… and aspirin.’ She turned to face him. ‘Howard, your weight is the single biggest factor in all of your health problems. Have you ever been referred to the nutritionist?’

‘I’ve run a deli for thirty-five years,’ he said, still smiling. ‘I don’t need teaching about food.’

‘A few lifestyle changes could make a big difference. If you were able to lose…’

With the ghost of a wink, he said comfortably, ‘Keep it simple. All I need is cream for the itch.’

Venting her temper on the keyboard, Parminder banged out prescriptions for anti-fungal and steroid creams, and when they were printed, handed them to Howard without another word.

‘Thank you kindly,’ he said, as he heaved himself out of the chair, ‘and a very good day to you.’

II

‘Wha’ d’you wan’?’

Terri Weedon’s shrunken body was dwarfed by her own doorway. She put claw-like hands on either jamb, trying to make herself more imposing, barring the entrance. It was eight in the morning; Krystal had just left with Robbie.

‘Wanna talk ter yeh,’ said her sister. Broad and mannish in her white vest and tracksuit bottoms, Cheryl sucked on a cigarette and squinted at Terri through the smoke. ‘Nana Cath’s died,’ she said.

‘Wha’?’

‘Nana Cath’s died,’ repeated Cheryl loudly. ‘Like you fuckin’ care.’

But Terri had heard the first time. The news had hit her so hard in the guts that she had asked to hear it again out of confusion.

‘Are you blasted?’ demanded Cheryl, glaring into the taut and empty face.

‘Fuck off. No, I ain’t.’

It was the truth. Terri had not used that morning; she had not used for three weeks. She took no pride in it; there was no star chart pinned up in the kitchen; she had managed longer than this before, months, even. Obbo had been away for the past fortnight, so it had been easier. But her works were still in the old biscuit tin, and the craving burned like an eternal flame inside her frail body.

‘She died yesterday. Danielle on’y fuckin’ bothered to lemme know this mornin’,’ said Cheryl. ‘An’ I were gonna go up the ’ospital an’ see ’er again today. Danielle’s after the ’ouse. Nana Cath’s ’ouse. Greedy bitch.’

Terri had not been inside the little terraced house on Hope Street for a long time, but when Cheryl spoke she saw, very vividly, the knick-knacks on the sideboard and the net curtains. She imagined Danielle there, pocketing things, ferreting in cupboards.

‘Funeral’s Tuesday at nine, up the crematorium.’

‘Right,’ said Terri.

‘It’s our ’ouse as much as Danielle’s,’ said Cheryl. ‘I’ll tell ’er we wan’ our share. Shall I?’

‘Yeah,’ said Terri.

She watched until Cheryl’s canary hair and tattoos had vanished around the corner, then retreated inside.

Nana Cath dead. They had not spoken for a long time. I’m washin’ my ’ands of yeh. I’ve ’ad enough, Terri, I’ve ’ad it. She had never stopped seeing Krystal, though. Krystal had become her blue-eyed girl. She had been to watch Krystal row in her stupid boat races. She had said Krystal’s name on her deathbed, not Terri’s.

Fine, then, you old bitch. Like I care. Too late now.

Tight-chested and trembling, Terri moved through her stinking kitchen in search of cigarettes, but really craving the spoon, the flame and the needle.

Too late, now, to say to the old lady what she ought to have said. Too late, now, to become again her Terri-Baby. Big girls don’t cry… big girls don’t cry… It had been years before she had realized that the song Nana Cath had sung her, in her rasping smoker’s voice, was really ‘Sherry Baby’.

Terri’s hands scuttled like vermin through the debris on the work tops, searching for fag packets, ripping them apart, finding them all empty. Krystal had probably had the last of them; she was a greedy little cow, just like Danielle, riffling through Nana Cath’s possessions, trying to keep her death quiet from the rest of them.

There was a long stub lying on a greasy plate; Terri wiped it off on her T-shirt and lit it on the gas cooker. Inside her head, she heard her own eleven-year-old voice.

I wish you was my mummy.

She did not want to remember. She leaned up against the sink, smoking, trying to look forward, to imagine the clash that was coming between her two older sisters. Nobody messed with Cheryl and Shane: they were both handy with their fists, and Shane had put burning rags through some poor bastard’s letter box not so long ago; it was why he’d done his last stretch, and he would still be inside if the house had not been empty at the time. But Danielle had weapons Cheryl did not: money and her own home, and a landline. She knew official people and how to talk to them. She was the kind that had spare keys, and mysterious bits of paperwork.

Yet Terri doubted that Danielle would get the house, even with her secret weapons. There were more than just the three of them; Nana Cath had had loads of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. After Terri had been taken into care, her father had had more kids. Nine in total, Cheryl reckoned, to five different mothers. Terri had never met her half-siblings, but Krystal had told her that Nana Cath saw them.

‘Yeah?’ she had retorted. ‘I hope they rob her blind, the stupid old bitch.’

So she saw the rest of the family, but they weren’t exactly angels, from all that Terri had heard. It was only she, who had once been Terri-Baby, whom Nana Cath had cut adrift for ever.

When you were straight, evil thoughts and memories came pouring up out of the darkness inside you; buzzing black flies clinging to the insides of your skull.

I wish you was my mummy.

In the vest top that Terri was wearing today, her scarred arm, neck and upper back were fully exposed, swirled into unnatural folds and creases like melted ice cream. She had spent six weeks in the burns unit of South West General when she was eleven.

(‘How did it happen, love?’ asked the mother of the child in the next bed.

Her father had thrown a pan of burning chip fat at her. Her Human League T-shirt had caught fire.

‘’Naccident,’ Terri muttered. It was what she had told everyone, including the social worker and the nurses. She would no sooner have shopped her father than chosen to burn alive.

Her mother had walked out shortly after Terri’s eleventh birthday, leaving all three daughters behind. Danielle and Cheryl had moved in with their boyfriends’ families within days. Terri had been the only one left, trying to make chips for her father, clinging to the hope that her mother would come back. Even through the agony and the terror of those first days and nights in the hospital, she had been glad it had happened, because she was sure that her mum would hear about it and come and get her. Every time there was movement at the end of the ward, Terri’s heart would leap.

But in six long weeks of pain and loneliness, the only visitor had been Nana Cath. Through quiet afternoons and evenings, Nana Cath had come to sit beside her granddaughter, reminding her to say thank you to the nurses, grim-faced and strict, yet leaking unexpected tenderness.

She brought Terri a cheap plastic doll in a shiny black mac, but when Terri undressed her, she had nothing on underneath.

‘She’s got no knickers, Nana.’

And Nana Cath had giggled. Nana Cath never giggled.

I wish you was my mummy.

She had wanted Nana Cath to take her home. She had asked her to, and Nana Cath had agreed. Sometimes Terri thought that those weeks in hospital had been the happiest of her life, even with the pain. It had been so safe, and people had been kind to her and looked after her. She had thought that she was going home with Nana Cath, to the house with the pretty net curtains, and not back to her father; not back to the bedroom door flying open in the night, banging off the David Essex poster Cheryl had left behind, and her father with his hand on his fly, approaching the bed where she begged him not to… )

The adult Terri threw the smoking filter of the cigarette stub down onto the kitchen floor and strode to her front door. She needed more than nicotine. Down the path and along the street she marched, walking in the same direction as Cheryl. Out of the corner of her eye she saw them, two of her neighbours chatting on the pavement, watching her go by. Like a fucking picture? It’ll last longer. Terri knew that she was a perennial subject of gossip; she knew what they said about her; they shouted it after her sometimes. The stuck-up bitch next door was forever whining to the council about the state of Terri’s garden. Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them…

She was jogging along, trying to outrun the memories.

You don’t even know who the father is, do yeh, yer whore? I’m washin’ my ’ands of yeh, Terri, I’ve ’ad enough.

That had been the last time they had ever spoken, and Nana Cath had called her what everyone else called her, and Terri had responded in kind.

Fuck you, then, you miserable old cow, fuck you.

She had never said, ‘You let me down, Nana Cath.’ She had never said, ‘Why didn’t you keep me?’ She had never said, ‘I loved you more than anyone, Nana Cath.’

She hoped to God Obbo was back. He was supposed to be back today; today or tomorrow. She had to have some. She had to.

‘All righ’, Terri?’

‘Seen Obbo?’ she asked the boy who was smoking and drinking on the wall outside the off licence. The scars on her back felt as though they were burning again.

He shook his head, chewing, leering at her. She hurried on. Nagging thoughts of the social worker, of Krystal, of Robbie: more buzzing flies, but they were like the staring neighbours, judges all; they did not understand the terrible urgency of her need.

(Nana Cath had collected her from the hospital and taken her home to the spare room. It had been the cleanest, prettiest room Terri had ever slept in. On each of the three evenings she had spent there, she had sat up in bed after Nana Cath had kissed her goodnight, and rearranged the ornaments beside her on the windowsill. There had been a tinkling bunch of glass flowers in a glass vase, a plastic pink paperweight with a shell in it and Terri’s favourite, a rearing pottery horse with a silly smile on its face.

‘I like horses,’ she had told Nana Cath.

There had been a school trip to the agricultural show, in the days before Terri’s mother had left. The class had met a gigantic black Shire covered in horse brasses. She was the only one brave enough to stroke it. The smell had intoxicated her. She had hugged its column of a leg, ending in the massive feathered white hoof, and felt the living flesh beneath the hair, while her teacher said, ‘Careful, Terri, careful!’ and the old man with the horse had smiled at her and told her it was quite safe, Samson wouldn’t hurt a nice little girl like her.

The pottery horse was a different colour: yellow with a black mane and tail.

‘You can ’ave it,’ Nana Cath told her, and Terri had known true ecstasy.

But on the fourth morning her father had arrived.

‘You’re comin’ home,’ he had said, and the look on his face had terrified her. ‘You’re not stayin’ with that fuckin’ grassin’ old cow. No, you ain’t. No, you ain’t, you little bitch.’

Nana Cath was as frightened as Terri.

‘Mikey, no,’ she kept bleating. Some of the neighbours were peering through the windows. Nana Cath had Terri by one arm, and her father had the other.

‘You’re coming home with me!’

He blacked Nana Cath’s eye. He dragged Terri into his car. When he got her back to the house, he beat and kicked every bit of her he could reach.)

‘Seen Obbo?’ Terri shouted at Obbo’s neighbour, from fifty yards away. ‘Is ’e back?’

‘I dunno,’ said the woman, turning away.

(When Michael was not beating Terri, he was doing the other things to her, the things she could not talk about. Nana Cath did not come any more. Terri ran away at thirteen, but not to Nana Cath’s; she did not want her father to find her. They caught her anyway, and put her into care.)

Terri thumped on Obbo’s door and waited. She tried again, but nobody came. She sank onto the doorstep, shaking and began to cry.

Two truanting Winterdown girls glanced at her as they passed.

‘Tha’s Krystal Weedon’s mum,’ one of them said loudly.

‘The prozzie?’ the other replied at the top of her voice.

Terri could not muster the strength to swear at them, because she was crying so hard. Snorting and giggling, the girls strode out of sight.

‘Whore!’ one of them called back from the end of the street.

III

Gavin could have invited Mary into his office to discuss the most recent exchange of letters with the insurance company, but decided to visit her at home instead. He had kept the late afternoon free of appointments, on the off-chance that she might ask him to stay for something to eat; she was a fantastic cook.

His instinctive shying away from her naked grief had been dissipated by regular contact. He had always liked Mary, but Barry had eclipsed her in company. Not that she ever appeared to dislike her supporting role; on the contrary, she had seemed delighted to beautify the background, happy laughing at Barry’s jokes, happy simply to be with him.

Gavin doubted that Kay had ever been happy to play second fiddle in her life. Crashing the gears as he drove up Church Row, he thought that Kay would have been outraged by any suggestion that she modify her behaviour or suppress her opinions for the sake of her partner’s enjoyment, his happiness or his self-esteem.

He did not think that he had ever been unhappier in a relationship than he was now. Even in the death throes of the affair with Lisa, there had been temporary truces, laughs, sudden poignant reminders of better times. The situation with Kay was like war. Sometimes he forgot that there was supposed to be any affection between them; did she even like him?

They had had their worst ever argument by telephone on the morning after Miles and Samantha’s dinner party. Eventually, Kay had slammed down the receiver, cutting Gavin off. For a full twenty-four hours he had believed that their relationship was at an end, and although this was what he wanted he had experienced more fear than relief. In his fantasies, Kay simply disappeared back to London, but the reality was that she had tethered herself to Pagford with a job and a daughter at Winterdown. He faced the prospect of bumping into her wherever he went in the tiny town. Perhaps she was already poisoning the well of gossip against him; he imagined her repeating some of the things she had said to him on the telephone to Samantha, or to that nosy old woman in the delicatessen who gave him goose-flesh.

I uprooted my daughter and left my job and moved house for you, and you treat me like a hooker you don’t have to pay.

People would say that he had behaved badly. Perhaps he had behaved badly. There must have been a crucial point when he ought to have pulled back, but he had not seen it.

Gavin spent the whole weekend brooding on how it would feel to be seen as the bad guy. He had never been in that position before. After Lisa had left him, everybody had been kind and sympathetic, especially the Fairbrothers. Guilt and dread dogged him until, on Sunday evening, he cracked and called Kay to apologize. Now he was back where he did not want to be, and he hated Kay for it.

Parking his car in the Fairbrothers’ drive, as he had done so often when Barry was alive, he headed for the front door, noticing that somebody had mowed the lawn since he had last called. Mary answered his ring on the doorbell almost instantaneously.

‘Hi, how – Mary, what’s wrong?’

Her whole face was wet, her eyes brimming with diamond-bright tears. She gulped once or twice, shook her head, and then, without quite knowing how it had happened, Gavin found himself holding her in his arms on the doorstep.

‘Mary? Has something happened?’

He felt her nod. Acutely aware of their exposed position, of the open road behind him, Gavin manoeuvred her inside. She was small and fragile in his arms; her fingers clutched at him, her face pressed into his coat. He relinquished his briefcase as gently as he could, but the sound of it hitting the floor made her withdraw from him, her breath short as she covered her mouth with her hands.

‘I’m sorry… I’m sorry… oh God, Gav…’

‘What’s happened?’

His voice sounded different from usual: forceful, take command, more like the way Miles sometimes talked in a crisis at work.

‘Someone’s put… I don’t… someone’s put Barry’s…’

She beckoned him into the home office, cluttered, shabby and cosy, with Barry’s old rowing trophies on the shelves, and a big framed photograph on the wall of eight teenage girls punching the air, with medals around their necks. Mary pointed a trembling finger at the computer screen. Still in his coat, Gavin dropped into the chair and stared at the message board of Pagford Parish Council’s website.

‘I w-was in the delicatessen this morning, and Maureen Lowe told me that lots of people had put messages of condolence on the site… so I was going to p-post a message to s-say thank you. And – look…’

He spotted it as she spoke. Simon Price Unfit to Stand for Council, posted by The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Gavin in disgust.

Mary dissolved into tears again. Gavin wanted to put his arms back around her, but was afraid to, especially here, in this snug little room so full of Barry. He compromised by taking hold of her thin wrist and leading her through the hall into the kitchen.

‘You need a drink,’ he told her, in that unfamiliarly strong and commanding voice. ‘Sod coffee. Where’s the proper stuff?’

But he remembered before she answered; he had seen Barry take the bottles out of the cupboard often enough, so he mixed her a small gin and tonic, which was the only thing he had ever known her drink before dinner.

‘Gav, it’s four in the afternoon.’

‘Who gives a damn?’ said Gavin, in his new voice. ‘Get that down you.’

An unbalanced laugh broke her sobs; she accepted the glass and sipped. He fetched her kitchen roll to mop her face and eyes.

‘You’re so kind, Gav. Don’t you want anything? Coffee or… or beer?’ she asked, on another weak laugh.

He fetched himself a bottle from the fridge, took off his coat and sat down opposite her at the island in the middle of the room. After a while, when she had drunk most of her gin, she became calm and quiet again, the way he always thought of her.

‘Who d’you think did it?’ she asked him.

‘Some total bastard,’ said Gavin.

‘They’re all fighting over his council seat, now. Squabbling away over the Fields as usual. And he’s still in there, putting his two cents in. The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother. Maybe it really is him, posting on the message board?’

Gavin did not know whether this was meant as a joke, and settled for a slight smile that might be quickly removed.

‘You know, I’d love to think that he’s worrying about us, wherever he is; about me and the kids. But I doubt it. I’ll bet he’s still most worried about Krystal Weedon. Do you know what he’d probably say to me if he was here?’

She drained her glass. Gavin had not thought that he had mixed the gin very strong, but there were patches of high colour on her cheeks.

‘No,’ he said cautiously.

‘He’d tell me that I’ve got support,’ said Mary, and to Gavin’s astonishment, he heard anger in the voice he always thought of as gentle. ‘Yeah, he’d probably say, “You’ve got all the family and our friends and the kids to comfort you, but Krystal,”’ Mary’s voice was becoming louder, ‘“Krystal’s got nobody to look out for her.” D’you know what he spent our wedding anniversary doing?’

‘No,’ said Gavin again.

‘Writing an article for the local paper about Krystal. Krystal and the Fields. The bloody Fields. If I never hear them mentioned again, it’ll be too soon. I want another gin. I don’t drink enough.’

Gavin picked up her glass automatically and returned to the drinks cupboard, stunned. He had always regarded her and Barry’s marriage as literally perfect. Never had it occurred to him that Mary might be other than one hundred per cent approving of every venture and crusade with which the ever-busy Barry concerned himself.

‘Rowing practice in the evenings, driving them to races at the weekends,’ she said, over the tinkling of ice he was adding to her glass, ‘and most nights he was on the computer, trying to get people to support him about the Fields, and getting stuff on the agenda for council meetings. And everyone always said, “Isn’t Barry marvellous, the way he does it all, the way he volunteers, he’s so involved with the community.”’ She took a big gulp of her fresh gin and tonic. ‘Yes, marvellous. Absolutely marvellous. Until it killed him. All day long, on our wedding anniversary, struggling to meet that stupid deadline. They haven’t even printed it yet.’

Gavin could not take his eyes off her. Anger and alcohol had restored colour to her face. She was sitting upright, instead of cowed and hunched over, as she had been recently.

‘That’s what killed him,’ she said clearly, and her voice echoed a little in the kitchen. ‘He gave everything to everybody. Except to me.’

Ever since Barry’s funeral, Gavin had dwelled, with a sense of deep inadequacy, on the comparatively small gap that he was sure he would leave behind in his community, should he die. Looking at Mary, he wondered whether it would not be better to leave a huge hole in one person’s heart. Had Barry not realized how Mary felt? Had he not realized how lucky he was?

The front door opened with a loud clatter, and he heard the sound of the four children coming in; voices and footsteps and the thumping of shoes and bags.

‘Hi, Gav,’ said eighteen-year-old Fergus, kissing his mother on top of her head. ‘Are you drinking, Mum?’

‘It’s my fault,’ said Gavin. ‘Blame me.’

They were such nice kids, the Fairbrother kids. Gavin liked the way they talked to their mother, hugged her, chatted to each other and to him. They were open, polite and funny. He thought of Gaia, her vicious asides, silences like jagged glass, the snarling way she addressed him.

‘Gav, we haven’t even talked about the insurance,’ said Mary, as the children surged around the kitchen, finding themselves drinks and snacks.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Gavin, without thinking, before correcting himself hastily; ‘shall we go through to the sitting room or…?’

‘Yes, let’s.’

She wobbled a little getting down from the high kitchen stool, and he caught her arm again.

‘Are you staying for dinner, Gav?’ called Fergus.

‘Do, if you want to,’ said Mary.

A surge of warmth flooded him.

‘I’d love to,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

IV

‘Very sad,’ said Howard Mollison, rocking a little on his toes in front of his mantelpiece. ‘Very sad indeed.’

Maureen had just finished telling them all about Catherine Weedon’s death; she had heard everything from her friend Karen the receptionist that evening, including the complaint from Cath Weedon’s granddaughter. A look of delighted disapproval was crumpling her face; Samantha, who was in a very bad mood, thought she resembled a monkey nut. Miles was making conventional sounds of surprise and pity, but Shirley was staring up at the ceiling with a bland expression on her face; she hated it when Maureen held centre stage with news that she ought to have heard first.

‘My mother knew the family of old,’ Howard told Samantha, who already knew it. ‘Neighbours in Hope Street. Cath was decent enough in her way, you know. The house was always spotless, and she worked until she was into her sixties. Oh, yes, she was one of the world’s grafters, Cath Weedon, whatever the rest of the family became.’

Howard was enjoying giving credit where credit was due.

‘The husband lost his job when they closed the steelworks. Hard drinker. No, she didn’t always have it easy, Cath.’

Samantha was barely managing to look interested, but fortunately Maureen interrupted.

‘And the Gazette’s on to Dr Jawanda!’ she croaked. ‘Imagine how she must be feeling, now the paper’s got it! Family’s kicking up a stink – well, you can’t blame them, alone in that house for three days. D’you know her, Howard? Which one is Danielle Fowler?’

Shirley got up and stalked out of the room in her apron. Samantha slugged a little more wine, smiling.

‘Let’s think, let’s think,’ said Howard. He prided himself on knowing almost everyone in Pagford, but the later generations of Weedons belonged more to Yarvil. ‘Can’t be a daughter, she had four boys, Cath. Granddaughter, I expect.’

‘And she wants an inquiry,’ said Maureen. ‘Well, it was always going to come to this. It’s been on the cards. If anything, I’m surprised it’s taken this long. Dr Jawanda wouldn’t give the Hubbards’ son antibiotics and he ended up hospitalized for his asthma. Do you know, did she train in India, or—?’

Shirley, who was listening from the kitchen while she stirred the gravy, felt irritated, as she always did, by Maureen’s monopolization of the conversation; that, at least, was how Shirley put it to herself. Determined not to return to the room until Maureen had finished, Shirley turned into the study and checked to see whether anyone had sent in apologies for the next Parish Council meeting; as secretary, she was already putting together the agenda.

‘Howard – Miles – come and look at this!’

Shirley’s voice had lost its usual soft, flutey quality; it rang out shrilly.

Howard waddled out of the sitting room followed by Miles, who was still in the suit he had worn all day at work. Maureen’s droopy, bloodshot, heavily mascara-ed eyes were fixed on the empty doorway like a bloodhound’s; her hunger to know what Shirley had found or seen was almost palpable. Maureen’s fingers, a clutch of bulging knuckles covered in translucent leopard-spotted skin, slid the crucifix and wedding ring up and down the chain around her neck. The deep creases running from the corners of Maureen’s mouth to her chin always reminded Samantha of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Why are you always here? Samantha asked the older woman loudly, inside her own head. You couldn’t make me lonely enough to live in Howard and Shirley’s pocket.

Disgust rose in Samantha like vomit. She wanted to seize the over-warm cluttered room and mash it between her hands, until the royal china, and the gas fire, and the gilt-framed pictures of Miles broke into jagged pieces; then, with wizened and painted Maureen trapped and squalling inside the wreckage, she wanted to heave it, like a celestial shot-putter, away into the sunset. The crushed lounge and the doomed crone inside it, soared in her imagination through the heavens, plunging into the limitless ocean, leaving Samantha alone in the endless stillness of the universe.

She had had a terrible afternoon. There had been another frightening conversation with her accountant; she could not remember much of her drive home from Yarvil. She would have liked to offload on Miles, but after dumping his briefcase and pulling off his tie in the hall he had said, ‘You haven’t started dinner yet, have you?’

He sniffed the air ostentatiously, then answered himself.

‘No, you haven’t. Well, good, because Mum and Dad have invited us over.’ And before she could protest, he had added sharply, ‘It’s nothing to do with the council. It’s to discuss arrangements for Dad’s sixty-fifth.’

Anger was almost a relief; it eclipsed her anxiety, her fear. She had followed Miles out to the car, cradling her sense of ill-usage. When he asked, at last, on the corner of Evertree Crescent, ‘How was your day?’ she answered, ‘Absolutely bloody fantastic.’

‘Wonder what’s up?’ said Maureen, breaking the silence in the sitting room.

Samantha shrugged. It was typical of Shirley to have summoned her menfolk and left the women in limbo; Samantha was not going to give her mother-in-law the satisfaction of showing interest.

Howard’s elephantine footsteps made the floorboards under the hall carpet creak. Maureen’s mouth was slack with anticipation.

‘Well, well, well,’ boomed Howard, lumbering back into the room.

‘I was checking the council website for apologies,’ said Shirley, a little breathless in his wake. ‘For the next meeting—’

‘Someone’s posted accusations about Simon Price,’ Miles told Samantha, pressing past his parents, seizing the role of announcer.

‘What kind of accusations?’ asked Samantha.

‘Receiving stolen goods,’ said Howard, firmly reclaiming the spotlight, ‘and diddling his bosses at the printworks.’

Samantha was pleased to find herself unmoved. She had only the haziest idea who Simon Price was.

‘They’ve posted under a pseudonym,’ Howard continued, ‘and it’s not a particularly tasteful pseudonym, either.’

‘Rude, you mean?’ Samantha asked. ‘Big-Fat-Cock or something?’

Howard’s laughter boomed through the room, Maureen gave an affected shriek of horror, but Miles scowled and Shirley looked furious.

‘Not quite that, Sammy, no,’ said Howard. ‘No, they’ve called themselves “The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother”.’

‘Oh,’ said Samantha, her grin evaporating. She did not like that. After all, she had been in the ambulance while they had forced needles and tubes into Barry’s collapsed body; she had watched him dying beneath the plastic mask; seen Mary clinging to his hand, heard her groans and sobs.

‘Oh, no, that’s not nice,’ said Maureen, relish in her bullfrog’s voice. ‘No, that’s nasty. Putting words into the mouths of the dead. Taking names in vain. That’s not right.’

‘No,’ agreed Howard. Almost absent-mindedly, he strolled across the room, picked up the wine bottle and returned to Samantha, topping up her empty glass. ‘But someone out there doesn’t care about good taste it seems, if they can put Simon Price out of the running.’

‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, Dad,’ said Miles, ‘wouldn’t they have gone for me rather than Price?’

‘How do you know they haven’t, Miles?’

‘Meaning?’ asked Miles swiftly.

‘Meaning,’ said Howard, the happy cynosure of all eyes, ‘that I got sent an anonymous letter about you a couple of weeks ago. Nothing specific. Just said you were unfit to fill Fairbrother’s shoes. I’d be very surprised if the letter didn’t come from the same source as the online post. The Fairbrother theme in both, you see?’

Samantha tilted her glass a little too enthusiastically, so that wine trickled down the sides of her chin, exactly where her own ventriloquist’s doll grooves would no doubt appear in time. She mopped her face with her sleeve.

‘Where is this letter?’ asked Miles, striving not to look rattled.

‘I shredded it. It was anonymous; it didn’t count.’

‘We didn’t want to upset you, dear,’ said Shirley, and she patted Miles’ arm.

‘Anyway, they can’t have anything on you,’ Howard reassured his son, ‘or they’d have dished the dirt, the same as they have on Price.’

‘Simon Price’s wife is a lovely girl,’ said Shirley with gentle regret. ‘I can’t believe Ruth knows anything about it, if her husband’s been on the fiddle. She’s a friend from the hospital,’ Shirley elaborated to Maureen. ‘An agency nurse.’

‘She wouldn’t be the first wife who hasn’t spotted what’s going on under her nose,’ retorted Maureen, trumping insider knowledge with worldly wisdom.

‘Absolutely brazen, using Barry Fairbrother’s name,’ said Shirley, pretending not to have heard Maureen. ‘Not a thought for his widow, his family. All that matters is their agenda; they’ll sacrifice anything to it.’

‘Shows you what we’re up against,’ said Howard. He scratched the overfold of his belly, thinking. ‘Strategically, it’s smart. I saw from the get-go that Price was going to split the pro-Fields vote. No flies on Bends-Your-Ear; she’s realized it too and she wants him out.’

‘But,’ said Samantha, ‘it mightn’t have anything to do with Parminder and that lot at all. It could be from someone we don’t know, someone who’s got a grudge against Simon Price.’

‘Oh, Sam,’ said Shirley, with a tinkling laugh, shaking her head. ‘It’s easy to see you’re new to politics.’

Oh, fuck off, Shirley.

‘So why have they used Barry Fairbrother’s name, then?’ asked Miles, rounding on his wife.

‘Well, it’s on the website, isn’t it? It’s his vacant seat.’

‘And who’s going to trawl through the council website for that kind of information? No,’ he said gravely, ‘this is an insider.’

An insider… Libby had once told Samantha that there could be thousands of microscopic species inside one drop of pond water. They were all perfectly ridiculous, Samantha thought, sitting here in front of Shirley’s commemorative plates as if they were in the Cabinet Room in Downing Street, as though one bit of tittle-tattle on a Parish Council website constituted an organized campaign, as though any of it mattered.

Consciously and defiantly, Samantha withdrew her attention from the lot of them. She fixed her eyes on the window and the clear evening sky beyond, and she thought about Jake, the muscular boy in Libby’s favourite band. At lunchtime today, Samantha had gone out for sandwiches, and brought back a music magazine in which Jake and his bandmates were interviewed. There were lots of pictures.

‘It’s for Libby,’ Samantha had told the girl who helped her in the shop.

‘Wow, look at that. I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating toast,’ replied Carly, pointing at Jake, naked from the waist up, his head thrown back to reveal that thick strong neck. ‘Oh, but he’s only twenty-one, look. I’m not a cradle-snatcher.’

Carly was twenty-six. Samantha did not care to subtract Jake’s age from her own. She had eaten her sandwich and read the interview, and studied all the pictures. Jake with his hands on a bar above his head, biceps swelling under a black T-shirt; Jake with his white shirt open, abdominal muscles chiselled above the loose waistband of his jeans.

Samantha drank Howard’s wine and stared out at the sky above the black privet hedge, which was a delicate shade of rose pink; the precise shade her nipples had been before they had been darkened and distended by pregnancy and breast-feeding. She imagined herself nineteen to Jake’s twenty-one, slender-waisted again, taut curves in the right places, and a strong flat stomach of her own, fitting comfortably into her white, size ten shorts. She vividly recalled how it felt to sit on a young man’s lap in those shorts, with the heat and roughness of sun-warmed denim under her bare thighs, and big hands around her lithe waist. She imagined Jake’s breath on her neck; she imagined turning to look into the blue eyes, close to the high cheekbones and that firm, carved mouth…

‘…at the church hall, and we’re getting it catered by Bucknoles,’ said Howard. ‘We’ve invited everyone: Aubrey and Julia – everyone. With luck it will be a double celebration, you on the council, me, another year young…’

Samantha felt tipsy and randy. When were they going to eat? She realized that Shirley had left the room, hopefully to put food on the table.

The telephone rang at Samantha’s elbow, and she jumped. Before any of them could move, Shirley had bustled back in. She had one hand in a flowery oven glove, and picked up the receiver with the other.

‘Double-two-five-nine?’ sang Shirley on a rising inflection. ‘Oh… hello, Ruth, dear!’

Howard, Miles and Maureen became rigidly attentive. Shirley turned to look at her husband with intensity, as if she were transmitting Ruth’s voice through her eyes into her husband’s mind.

‘Yes,’ fluted Shirley. ‘Yes…’

Samantha, sitting closest to the receiver, could hear the other woman’s voice but not make out the words.

‘Oh, really…?’

Maureen’s mouth was hanging open again; she was like an ancient baby bird, or perhaps a pterodactyl, hungering for regurgitated news.

‘Yes, dear, I see… oh, that shouldn’t be a problem… no, no, I’ll explain to Howard. No, no trouble at all.’

Shirley’s small hazel eyes had not wavered from Howard’s big, popping blue ones.

‘Ruth, dear,’ said Shirley, ‘Ruth, I don’t want to worry you, but have you been on the council website today?… Well… it’s not very nice, but I think you ought to know… somebody’s posted something nasty about Simon… well, I think you’d better read it for yourself, I wouldn’t want to… all right, dear. All right. See you Wednesday, I hope. Yes. Bye bye.’

Shirley replaced the receiver.

‘She didn’t know,’ Miles stated.

Shirley shook her head.

‘Why was she calling?’

‘Her son,’ Shirley told Howard. ‘Your new potboy. He’s got a peanut allergy.’

‘Very handy, in a delicatessen,’ said Howard.

‘She wanted to ask whether you could store a needleful of adrenalin in the fridge for him, just in case,’ said Shirley.

Maureen sniffed.

‘They’ve all got allergies these days, children.’

Shirley’s ungloved hand was still clutching the receiver. She was subconsciously hoping to feel tremors down the line from Hilltop House.

V

Ruth stood alone in her lamp-lit sitting room, continuing to grip the telephone she had just replaced in its cradle.

Hilltop House was small and compact. It was always easy to tell the location of each of the four Prices, because voices, footfalls and the sounds of doors opening and shutting carried so effectively in the old house. Ruth knew that her husband was still in the shower, because she could hear the hot water boiler under the stairs hissing and clanking. She had waited for Simon to turn on the water before telephoning Shirley, worried that he might think that even her request about the EpiPen was fraternizing with the enemy.

The family PC was set up in a corner of the sitting room, where Simon could keep an eye on it, and make sure nobody was running up large bills behind his back. Ruth relinquished her grip on the phone and hurried to the keyboard.

It seemed to take a very long time to bring up the Pagford Council website. Ruth pushed her reading glasses up her nose with a trembling hand as she scanned the various pages. At last she found the message board. Her husband’s name blazed out at her, in ghastly black and white: Simon Price Unfit to Stand for Council.

She double-clicked the title, brought up the full paragraph and read it. Everything around her seemed to reel and spin.

‘Oh God,’ she whispered.

The boiler had stopped clanking. Simon would be putting on the pyjamas he had warmed on the radiator. He had already drawn the sitting-room curtains, turned on the side lamps and lit the wood-burner, so that he could come down and stretch out on the sofa to watch the news.

Ruth knew that she would have to tell him. Not doing so, letting him find out for himself, was simply not an option; she would have been incapable of keeping it to herself. She felt terrified and guilty, though she did not know why.

She heard him jogging down the stairs and then he appeared at the door in his blue brushed-cotton pyjamas.

‘Si,’ she whispered.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, immediately irritated. He knew that something had happened; that his luxurious programme of sofa, fire and news was about to be disarranged.

She pointed at the computer monitor, one hand pressed foolishly over her mouth, like a little girl. Her terror infected him. He strode to the PC and scowled down at the screen. He was not a quick reader. He read every word, every line, painstakingly, carefully.

When he had finished, he remained quite still, passing for review, in his mind, all the likely grasses. He thought of the gum-chewing forklift driver, whom he had left stranded in the Fields when they had picked up the new computer. He thought of Jim and Tommy, who did the cash-in-hand jobs on the sly with him. Someone from work must have talked. Rage and fear collided inside him and set off a combustive reaction.

He strode to the foot of the stairs and shouted, ‘You two! Get down here NOW!’

Ruth still had her hand over her mouth. He had a sadistic urge to slap her hand away, to tell her to fucking pull herself together, it was he who was in the shit.

Andrew entered the room first with Paul behind him. Andrew saw the arms of Pagford Parish Council onscreen, and his mother with her hand over her mouth. Walking barefoot across the old carpet, he had the sensation that he was plummeting through the air in a broken lift.

‘Someone,’ said Simon, glaring at his sons, ‘has talked about things I’ve mentioned inside this house.’

Paul had brought his chemistry exercise book downstairs with him; he was holding it like a hymnal. Andrew kept his gaze fixed on his father, trying to project an expression of mingled confusion and curiosity.

‘Who’s told other people we’ve got a stolen computer?’ asked Simon.

‘I haven’t,’ said Andrew.

Paul stared at his father blankly, trying to process the question. Andrew willed his brother to speak. Why did he have to be so slow?

‘Well?’ Simon snarled at Paul.

‘I don’t think I—’

‘You don’t think? You don’t think you told anyone?’

‘No, I don’t think I told any—’

‘Oh, this is interesting,’ said Simon, pacing up and down in front of Paul. ‘This is interesting.’

With a slap he sent Paul’s exercise book flying out of his hands.

‘Try and think, dipshit,’ he growled. ‘Try and fucking think. Did you tell anyone we’ve got a stolen computer?’

‘Not stolen,’ said Paul. ‘I never told anyone – I don’t think I told anyone we had a new one, even.’

‘I see,’ said Simon. ‘So the news got out by magic then, did it?’

He was pointing at the computer monitor.

‘Someone’s fucking talked!’ he yelled, ‘because it’s on the fucking internet! And I’ll be fucking lucky not – to – lose – my – job!’

On each of the five last words he thumped Paul on the head with his fist. Paul cowered and ducked; black liquid trickled from his left nostril; he suffered nosebleeds several times a week.

‘And what about you?’ Simon roared at his wife, who was still frozen beside the computer, her eyes wide behind her glasses, her hand clamped like a yashmak over her mouth. ‘Have you been fucking gossiping?’

Ruth ungagged herself.

‘No, Si,’ she whispered, ‘I mean, the only person I told we had a new computer was Shirley – and she’d never—’

You stupid woman, you stupid fucking woman, what did you have to tell him that for?

‘You did what?’ asked Simon quietly.

‘I told Shirley,’ whimpered Ruth. ‘I didn’t say it was stolen, though, Si. I only said you were bringing it home—’

‘Well, that’s fucking it then, isn’t it?’ roared Simon; his voice became a scream. ‘Her fucking son’s standing for election, of course she wants to get the fucking goods on me!’

‘But she’s the one who told me, Si, just now, she wouldn’t have—’

He ran at her and hit her in the face, exactly as he had wanted to when he had first seen her silly frightened expression; her glasses spun into the air and smashed against the bookcase; he hit her again and she crashed down onto the computer table she had bought so proudly with her first month’s wages from South West General.

Andrew had made himself a promise: he seemed to move in slow motion, and everything was cold and clammy and slightly unreal.

‘Don’t hit her,’ he said, forcing himself between his parents. ‘Don’t—’

His lip split against his front tooth, Simon’s knuckle behind it, and he fell backwards on top of his mother, who was draped over the keyboard; Simon threw another punch, which hit Andew’s arms as he protected his face; Andrew was trying to get off his slumped, struggling mother, and Simon was in a frenzy, pummelling both of them wherever he could reach—

‘Don’t you fucking dare tell me what to do – don’t you dare, you cowardly little shit, you spotty streak of piss—’

Andrew dropped to his knees to get out of the way, and Simon kicked him in the ribs. Andrew heard Paul say pathetically, ‘Stop it!’ Simon’s foot swung for Andrew’s ribcage again, but Andrew dodged it; Simon’s toes collided with the brick fireplace and he was suddenly, absurdly, howling in pain.

Andrew scrambled out of the way; Simon was gripping the end of his foot, hopping on the spot and swearing in a high-pitched voice; Ruth had collapsed into the swivel chair, sobbing into her hands. Andrew got to his feet; he could taste his own blood.

‘Anyone could have talked about that computer,’ he panted, braced for further violence; he felt braver now that it had begun, now that the fight was really on; it was waiting that told on your nerves, watching Simon’s jaw begin to jut, and hearing the urge for violence building in his voice. ‘You told us a security guard got beaten up. Anyone could have talked. It’s not us—’

‘Don’t you – fucking little shit – I’ve broken my fucking toe!’ Simon gasped, falling backwards into an armchair, still nursing his foot. He seemed to expect sympathy.

Andrew imagined picking up a gun and shooting Simon in the face, watching his features blast apart, his brains spattering the room.

‘And Pauline’s got her fucking period again!’ Simon yelled at Paul, who was trying to contain the blood dripping through his fingers from his nose. ‘Get off the carpet! Get off the fucking carpet, you little pansy!’

Paul scuttled out of the room. Andrew pressed the hem of his T-shirt to his stinging mouth.

‘What about all the cash-in-hand jobs?’ Ruth sobbed, her cheek pink from his punch, tears dripping from her chin. Andrew hated to see her humiliated and pathetic like this; but he half hated her too for landing herself in it, when any idiot could have seen… ‘It says about the cash-in-hand jobs. Shirley doesn’t know about them, how could she? Someone at the printworks has put that on there. I told you, Si, I told you you shouldn’t do those jobs, they’ve always worried the living daylights out of—’

‘Fucking shut up, you whining cow, you didn’t mind spending the money!’ yelled Simon, his jaw jutting again; and Andrew wanted to roar at his mother to stay silent: she blabbed when any idiot could have told her she should keep quiet, and she kept quiet when she might have done good by speaking out; she never learned, she never saw any of it coming.

Nobody spoke for a minute. Ruth dabbed at her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffed intermittently. Simon clutched his toe, his jaw clenched, breathing loudly. Andrew licked the blood from his stinging lip, which he could feel swelling.

‘This’ll cost me my fucking job,’ said Simon, staring wild-eyed around the room, as if there might be somebody there he had forgotten to hit. ‘They’re already talking about fucking redundancies. This’ll be it. This’ll—’ He slapped the lamp off the end table, but it didn’t break, merely rolled on the floor. He picked it up, tugged the lead out of the wall socket, raised it over his head and threw it at Andrew, who dodged.

‘Who’s fucking talked?’ Simon yelled, as the lamp base broke apart on the wall. ‘Someone’s fucking talked!’

‘It’s some bastard at the printworks, isn’t it?’ Andrew shouted back; his lip was thick and throbbing; it felt like a tangerine segment. ‘D’you think we’d have – d’you think we don’t know how to keep our mouths shut by now?’

It was like trying to read a wild animal. He could see the muscles working in his father’s jaw, but he could tell that Simon was considering Andrew’s words.

‘When was that put on there?’ he roared at Ruth. ‘Look at it! What’s the date on it?’

Still sobbing, she peered at the screen, needing to approach the tip of her nose within two inches of it, now that her glasses were broken.

‘The fifteenth,’ she whispered.

‘Fifteenth… Sunday,’ said Simon. ‘Sunday, wasn’t it?’

Neither Andrew nor Ruth put him right. Andrew could not believe his luck; nor did he believe it would hold.

‘Sunday,’ said Simon, ‘so anyone could’ve – my fucking toe,’ he yelled, as he pulled himself up and limped exaggeratedly towards Ruth. ‘Get out of my way!’

She hastened out of the chair and watched him read the paragraph through again. He kept snorting like an animal to clear his airways. Andrew thought that he might be able to garrotte his father as he sat there, if only there was a wire to hand.

‘Someone’s got all this from work,’ said Simon, as if he had just reached this conclusion, and had not heard his wife or son urging the hypothesis on him. He placed his hands on the keyboard and turned to Andrew. ‘How do I get rid of it?’

‘What?’

‘You do fucking computing! How do I get this off here?’

‘You can’t get – you can’t,’ said Andrew. ‘You’d need to be the administrator.’

‘Make yourself the administrator, then,’ said Simon, jumping up and pointing Andrew into the swivel chair.

‘I can’t make myself the administrator,’ said Andrew. He was afraid that Simon was working himself up into a second bout of violence. ‘You need to input the right user name and passwords.’

‘You’re a real fucking waste of space, aren’t you?’

Simon shoved Andrew in the middle of his sternum as he limped past, knocking him back into the mantelpiece.

‘Pass me the phone!’ Simon shouted at his wife, as he sat back down in the armchair.

Ruth took the telephone and carried it the few feet to Simon. He ripped it out of her hands and punched in a number.

Andrew and Ruth waited in silence as Simon called, first Jim, and then Tommy, the men with whom he had completed the after-hours jobs at the printworks. Simon’s fury, his suspicion of his own accomplices, was funnelled down the telephone in curt short sentences full of swearwords.

Paul had not returned. Perhaps he was still trying to staunch his bleeding nose, but more likely he was too scared. Andrew thought his brother unwise. It was safest to leave only after Simon had given you permission.

His calls completed, Simon held out the telephone to Ruth without speaking; she took it and hurried it back into its stand.

Simon sat thinking while his fractured toe pulsated, sweating in the heat of the wood-burner, awash with impotent fury. The beating to which he had subjected his wife and son was nothing, he did not give them a thought; a terrible thing had just happened to him, and naturally his rage had exploded on those nearest him; that was how life worked. In any case, Ruth, the silly bitch, had admitted to telling Shirley…

Simon was building his own chain of evidence, as he thought things must have happened. Some fucker (and he suspected that gum-chewing forklift driver, whose expression, as Simon had sped away from him in the Fields, had been outraged) talking about him to the Mollisons (somehow, illogically, Ruth’s admission that she had mentioned the computer to Shirley made this seem more likely), and they (the Mollisons, the establishment, the smooth and the snide, guarding their access to power) had put up this message on their website (Shirley, the old cow, managed the site, which set the seal on the theory).

‘It’s your fucking friend,’ Simon told his wet-faced, trembling-lipped wife. ‘It’s your fucking Shirley. She’s done this. She’s got some dirt on me to get me off her son’s case. That’s who it is.’

‘But Si—’

Shut up, shut up, you silly cow, thought Andrew.

‘Still on her side, are you?’ roared Simon, making to stand again.

‘No!’ squealed Ruth, and he sank back into the chair, glad to keep the weight off his pounding foot.

The Harcourt-Walsh management would not be happy about those after-hours jobs, Simon thought. He wouldn’t put it past the bloody police to come nosing around the computer. A desire for urgent action filled him.

‘You,’ he said, pointing at Andrew. ‘Unplug that computer. All of it, the leads and everything. You’re coming with me.’

VI

Things denied, things untold, things hidden and disguised.

The muddy River Orr gushed over the wreckage of the stolen computer, thrown from the old stone bridge at midnight. Simon limped to work on his fractured toe and told everyone that he had slipped on the garden path. Ruth pressed ice to her bruises and concealed them inexpertly with an old tube of foundation; Andrew’s lip scabbed over, like Dane Tully’s, and Paul had another nosebleed on the bus and had to go straight to the nurse on arrival at school.

Shirley Mollison, who had been shopping in Yarvil, did not answer Ruth’s repeated telephone calls until late afternoon, by which time Ruth’s sons had arrived home from school. Andrew listened to the one-sided conversation from the stairs outside the sitting room. He knew that Ruth was trying to take care of the problem before Simon came home, because Simon was more than capable of seizing the receiver from her and shouting and swearing at her friend.

‘…just silly lies,’ she was saying brightly, ‘but we’d be very grateful if you could remove it, Shirley.’

He scowled and the cut on his fat lip threatened to burst open again. He hated hearing his mother asking the woman for a favour. In that moment he was irrationally annoyed that the post had not been taken down already; then he remembered that he had written it, that he had caused everything: his mother’s battered face, his own cut lip and the atmosphere of dread that pervaded the house at the prospect of Simon’s return.

‘I do understand you’ve got a lot of things on…’ Ruth was saying cravenly, ‘but you can see how this might do Simon damage, if people believe…’

‘Yes.’ Ruth sounded tired. ‘She’s going to take those things about Dad off the site so, hopefully, that’ll be the end of it.’

Andrew knew his mother to be intelligent, and much handier around the house than his ham-fisted father. She was capable of earning her own living.

‘Why didn’t she take the post down straight away, if you’re friends?’ he asked, following her into the kitchen. For the first time in his life, his pity for Ruth was mingled with a feeling of frustration that amounted to anger.

‘She’s been busy,’ snapped Ruth.

One of her eyes was bloodshot from Simon’s punch.

‘Did you tell her she could be in trouble for leaving defamatory stuff on there, if she moderates the boards? We did that stuff in comput—’

‘I’ve told you, she’s taking it down, Andrew,’ said Ruth angrily.

She was not frightened of showing temper to her sons. Was it because they did not hit her, or for some other reason? Andrew knew that her face must ache as badly as his own.

‘So who d’you reckon wrote that stuff about Dad?’ he asked her recklessly.

She turned a face of fury upon him.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but whoever they are, it was a despicable, cowardly thing to do. Everyone’s got something they’d like to hide. How would it be if Dad put some of the things he knows about other people on the internet? But he wouldn’t do it.’

‘That’d be against his moral code, would it?’ said Andrew.

‘You don’t know your father as well as you think you do!’ shouted Ruth with tears in her eyes. ‘Get out – go and do your homework – I don’t care – just get out!’

Yet the deletion of the post could not remove it from the consciousness of those who were passionately interested in the forthcoming contest for Barry’s seat. Parminder Jawanda had copied the message about Simon Price onto her computer, and kept opening it, subjecting each sentence to the scrutiny of a forensic scientist examining fibres on a corpse, searching for traces of Howard Mollison’s literary DNA. He would have done all he could to disguise his distinctive phraseology, but she was sure that she recognized his pomposity in ‘Mr Price is certainly no stranger to keeping down costs’, and in ‘the benefit of his many useful contacts’.

‘Minda, you don’t know Simon Price,’ said Tessa Wall. She and Colin were having supper with the Jawandas in the Old Vicarage kitchen, and Parminder had started on the subject of the post almost the moment they had crossed the threshold. ‘He’s a very unpleasant man and he could have upset any number of people. I honestly don’t think it’s Howard Mollison. I can’t see him doing anything so obvious.’

‘Don’t kid yourself, Tessa,’ said Parminder. ‘Howard will do anything to make sure Miles is elected. You watch. He’ll go for Colin next.’

Tessa saw Colin’s knuckles whiten on his fork handle, and wished that Parminder would think before she spoke. She, of anyone, knew what Colin was like; she prescribed his Prozac.

Vikram was sitting at the end of the table in silence. His beautiful face fell naturally into a slightly sardonic smile. Tessa had always been intimidated by the surgeon, as she was by all very good-looking men. Although Parminder was one of Tessa’s best friends, she barely knew Vikram, who worked long hours and involved himself much less in Pagford matters than his wife.

‘I told you about the agenda, didn’t I?’ Parminder rattled on. ‘For the next meeting? He’s proposing a motion on the Fields, for us to pass to the Yarvil committee doing the boundary review, and a resolution on forcing the drug clinic out of their building. He’s trying to rush it all through, while Barry’s seat’s empty.’

She kept leaving the table to fetch things, opening more cupboard doors than was necessary, distracted and unfocused. Twice she forgot why she had got up, and sat down again, empty-handed. Vikram watched her, everywhere she moved, from beneath his thick eyelashes.

‘I rang Howard last night,’ Parminder said, ‘and I told him we ought to wait until we’re back up to the full complement of councillors before we vote on such big issues. He laughed; he says we can’t wait. Yarvil wants to hear our views, he said, with the boundary review coming up. What he’s really scared of is that Colin’s going to win Barry’s seat, because it won’t be so easy to foist it all on us then. I’ve emailed everyone I think will vote with us, to see if they can’t put pressure on him to delay the votes, for one meeting…

‘“The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother”,’ Parminder added breathlessly. ‘The bastard. He’s not using Barry’s death to beat him. Not if I can help it.’

Tessa thought she saw Vikram’s lips twitch. Old Pagford, led by Howard Mollison, generally forgave Vikram the crimes that it could not forget in his wife: brownness, cleverness and affluence (all of which, to Shirley Mollison’s nostrils, had the whiff of a gloat). It was, Tessa thought, grossly unfair: Parminder worked hard at every aspect of her Pagford life: school fêtes and sponsored bakes, the local surgery and the Parish Council, and her reward was implacable dislike from the Pagford old guard; Vikram, who rarely joined or participated in anything, was fawned upon, flattered and spoken of with proprietary approval.

‘Mollison’s a megalomaniac,’ Parminder said, pushing food nervously around her plate. ‘A bully and a megalomaniac.’

Vikram laid down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair.

‘So why,’ he asked, ‘is he happy being chair of the Parish Council? Why hasn’t he tried to get on the District Council?’

‘Because he thinks that Pagford is the epicentre of the universe,’ snapped Parminder. ‘You don’t understand: he wouldn’t swap being chair of Pagford Parish Council for being Prime Minister. Anyway, he doesn’t need to be on the council in Yarvil; he’s already got Aubrey Fawley there, pushing through the big agenda. All revved up for the boundary review. They’re working together.’

Parminder felt Barry’s absence like a ghost at the table. He would have explained it all to Vikram and made him laugh in the process; Barry had been a superb mimic of Howard’s speech patterns, of his rolling, waddling walk, of his sudden gastrointestinal interruptions.

‘I keep telling her, she’s letting herself get too stressed,’ Vikram told Tessa, who was appalled to find herself blushing slightly, with his dark eyes upon her. ‘You know about this stupid complaint – the old woman with emphysema?’

‘Yes, Tessa knows. Everyone knows. Do we have to discuss it at the dinner table?’ snapped Parminder, and she jumped to her feet and began clearing the plates.

Tessa tried to help, but Parminder told her crossly to stay where she was. Vikram gave Tessa a small smile of solidarity that made her stomach flutter. She could not help remembering, as Parminder clattered around the table, that Vikram and Parminder had had an arranged marriage.

(‘It’s only an introduction through the family,’ Parminder had told her, in the early days of their friendship, defensive and annoyed at something she had seen in Tessa’s face. ‘Nobody makes you marry, you know.’

But she had spoken, at other times, of the immense pressure from her mother to take a husband.

‘All Sikh parents want their kids married. It’s an obsession,’ Parminder said bitterly.)

Colin saw his plate snatched away without regret. The nausea churning in his stomach was even worse than when he and Tessa had arrived. He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.

Tessa was no help: she was being deliberately cool and unsympathetic about his campaign for Barry’s seat. The whole point of this supper was so that Colin could consult Parminder on the little leaflets he had produced, advertising his candidacy. Tessa was refusing to get involved, blocking discussion of the fear that was slowly engulfing him. She was refusing him an outlet.

Trying to emulate her coolness, pretending that he was not, after all, caving under self-imposed pressure, he had not told her about the telephone call from the Yarvil and District Gazette that he had received at school that day. The journalist on the end of the line had wanted to talk about Krystal Weedon.

Had he touched her?

Colin had told the woman that the school could not possibly discuss a pupil and that Krystal must be approached through her parents.

‘I’ve already talked to Krystal,’ said the voice on the end of the line. ‘I only wanted to get your—’

But he had put the receiver down, and terror had blotted out everything.

Why did they want to talk about Krystal? Why had they called him? Had he done something? Had he touched her? Had she complained?

The psychologist had taught him not to try and confirm or disprove the content of such thoughts. He was supposed to acknowledge their existence, then carry on as normal, but it was like trying not to scratch the worst itch you had ever known. The public unveiling of Simon Price’s dirty secrets on the council website had stunned him: the terror of exposure, which had dominated so much of Colin’s life, now wore a face, its features those of an ageing cherub, with a demonic brain seething beneath a deerstalker on tight grey curls, behind bulging inquisitive eyes. He kept remembering Barry’s tales of the delicatessen owner’s formidable strategic brain, and of the intricate web of alliances that bound the sixteen members of Pagford Parish Council.

Colin had often imagined how he would find out that the game was up: a guarded article in the paper; faces turned away from him when he entered Mollison and Lowe’s; the headmistress calling him into her office for a quiet word. He had visualized his downfall a thousand times: his shame exposed and hung around his neck like a leper’s bell, so that no concealment would be possible, ever again. He would be sacked. He might end up in prison.

‘Colin,’ Tessa prompted quietly; Vikram was offering him wine.

She knew what was going on inside that big domed forehead; not the specifics, but the theme of his anxiety had been constant for years. She knew that Colin could not help it; it was the way he was made. Many years before, she had read, and recognized as true, the words of W. B. Yeats: ‘A pity beyond all telling is hid at the heart of love.’ She had smiled over the poem, and stroked the page, because she had known both that she loved Colin, and that compassion formed a huge part of her love.

Sometimes, though, her patience wore thin. Sometimes she wanted a little concern and reassurance too. Colin had erupted into a predictable panic when she had told him that she had received a firm diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes, but once she had convinced him that she was not in imminent danger of dying, she had been taken aback by how quickly he dropped the subject, how completely he reimmersed himself in his election plans.

(That morning, at breakfast, she had tested her blood sugar with the glucometer for the first time, then taken out the prefilled needle and inserted it into her own belly. It had hurt much more than when deft Parminder did it.

Fats had seized his cereal bowl and swung round in his chair away from her, sloshing milk over the table, the sleeve of his school shirt and onto the kitchen floor. Colin had let out an inchoate shout of annoyance as Fats spat his mouthful of cornflakes back into his bowl, and demanded of his mother, ‘Have you got to do that at the bloody table?’

‘Don’t be so damn rude and disgusting!’ shouted Colin. ‘Sit up properly! Wipe up that mess! How dare you speak to your mother like that? Apologize!’

Tessa withdrew the needle too fast; she had made herself bleed.

‘I’m sorry that you shooting up at breakfast makes me want to puke, Tess,’ said Fats from under the table, where he was wiping the floor with a bit of kitchen roll.

‘Your mother isn’t “shooting up”, she’s got a medical condition!’ shouted Colin. ‘And don’t call her “Tess”!’

‘I know you don’t like needles, Stu,’ said Tessa, but her eyes were stinging; she had hurt herself, and felt shaken and angry with both of them, feelings that were still with her this evening.)

Tessa wondered why Parminder did not appreciate Vikram’s concern. Colin never noticed when she was stressed. Perhaps, Tessa thought angrily, there’s something in this arranged marriage business… my mother certainly wouldn’t have chosen Colin for me…

Parminder was shoving bowls of cut fruit across the table for pudding. Tessa wondered a little resentfully what she would have offered a guest who was not diabetic, and comforted herself with the thought of a bar of chocolate lying at home in the fridge.

Parminder, who had talked five times as much as anybody else all through supper, had started ranting about her daughter, Sukhvinder. She had already told Tessa on the telephone about the girl’s betrayal; she went through it all again at the table.

‘Waitressing with Howard Mollison. I don’t, I really don’t know what she’s thinking. But Vikram—’

‘They don’t think, Minda,’ Colin proclaimed, breaking his long silence. ‘That’s teenagers. They don’t care. They’re all the same.’

‘Colin, what rubbish,’ snapped Tessa. ‘They aren’t all the same at all. We’d be delighted if Stu went and got himself a Saturday job – not that there’s the remotest chance of that.’

‘—but Vikram doesn’t mind,’ Parminder pressed on, ignoring the interruption. ‘He can’t see anything wrong with it, can you?’

Vikram answered easily: ‘It’s work experience. She probably won’t make university; there’s no shame in it. It’s not for everyone. I can see Jolly married early, quite happy.’

‘Waitressing…’

‘Well, they can’t all be academic, can they?’

‘No, she certainly isn’t academic,’ said Parminder, who was almost quivering with anger and tension. ‘Her marks are absolutely atrocious – no aspiration, no ambition – waitressing – “let’s face it, I’m not going to get into uni” – no, you certainly won’t, with that attitude – with Howard Mollison… oh, he must have absolutely loved it – my daughter going cap in hand for a job. What was she thinking – what was she thinking?’

‘You wouldn’t like it if Stu took a job with someone like Mollison,’ Colin told Tessa.

‘I wouldn’t care,’ said Tessa. ‘I’d be thrilled he was showing any kind of work ethic. As far as I can tell, all he seems to care about is computer games and—’

But Colin did not know that Stuart smoked; she broke off, and Colin said, ‘Actually, this would be exactly the kind of thing Stuart would do. Insinuate himself with somebody he knew we didn’t like, to get at us. He’d love that.’

‘For goodness sake, Colin, Sukhvinder isn’t trying to get at Minda,’ said Tessa.

‘So you think I’m being unreasonable?’ Parminder shot at Tessa.

‘No, no,’ said Tessa, appalled at how quickly they had been sucked into the family row. ‘I’m just saying, there aren’t many places for kids to work in Pagford, are there?’

‘And why does she need to work at all?’ said Parminder, raising her hands in a gesture of furious exasperation. ‘Don’t we give her enough money?’

‘Money you earn yourself is always different, you know that,’ said Tessa.

Tessa’s chair faced a wall that was covered in photographs of the Jawanda children. She had sat here often, and had counted how many appearances each child made: Jaswant, eighteen; Rajpal, nineteen; and Sukhvinder, nine. There was only one photograph on the wall celebrating Sukhvinder’s individual achievements: the picture of the Winterdown rowing team on the day that they had beaten St Anne’s. Barry had given all the parents an enlarged copy of this picture, in which Sukhvinder and Krystal Weedon were in the middle of the line of eight, with their arms around each other’s shoulders, beaming and jumping up and down so that they were both slightly blurred.

Barry, she thought, would have helped Parminder see things the right way. He had been a bridge between mother and daughter, both of whom had adored him.

Not for the first time, Tessa wondered how much difference it made that she had not given birth to her son. Did she find it easier to accept him as a separate individual than if he had been made from her flesh and blood? Her glucose-heavy, tainted blood…

Fats had recently stopped calling her ‘Mum’. She had to pretend not to care, because it made Colin so angry; but every time Fats said ‘Tessa’ it was like a needle jab to her heart.

The four of them finished their cold fruit in silence.

VII

Up in the little white house that sat high above the town, Simon Price fretted and brooded. Days passed. The accusatory post had vanished from the message boards, but Simon remained paralysed. To withdraw his candidacy might seem like an admission of guilt. The police had not come knocking about the computer; Simon half regretted throwing it off the old bridge now. On the other hand, he could not decide whether he had imagined a knowing grin from the man behind the till when he handed over his credit card in the garage at the foot of the hill. There was a lot of talk about redundancies at work, and Simon was still afraid of the contents of that post coming to the bosses’ ears, that they might save themselves redundancy pay by sacking himself, Jim and Tommy.

Andrew watched and waited, losing hope every day. He had tried to show the world what his father was, and the world, it seemed, had merely shrugged. Andrew had imagined that someone from the printworks or the council would rise up and tell Simon firmly, ‘no’; that he was not fit to set himself up in competition with other people, that he was unsuitable and sub-standard, and must not disgrace himself or his family. Yet nothing had happened, except that Simon stopped talking about the council or making telephone calls in the hope of garnering votes, and the leaflets that he had had printed out of hours at work sat untouched in a box in the porch.

Then, without warning or fanfare, came victory. Heading down the dark stairs in search of food on Friday evening, Andrew heard Simon talking stiffly on the telephone in the sitting room, and paused to listen.

‘…withdraw my candidacy,’ he was saying. ‘Yes. Well, my personal circumstances have changed. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that’s right. OK. Thank you.’

Andrew heard Simon replace the receiver.

‘Well, that’s that,’ his father said to his mother. ‘I’m well out of it, if that’s the kind of shit they’re throwing around.’

He heard his mother return some muffled, approving rejoinder, and before Andrew had time to move, Simon had emerged into the hall below, drawn breath into his lungs and yelled the first syllable of Andrew’s name, before realizing that his son was right in front of him.

‘What are you doing?’

Simon’s face was half in shadow, lit only by the light escaping the sitting room.

‘I wanted a drink,’ Andrew lied; his father did not like the boys helping themselves to food.

‘You start work with Mollison this weekend, don’t you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Right, well, you listen to me. I want anything you can get on that bastard, d’you hear me? All the dirt you can get. And on his son, if you hear anything.’

‘All right,’ said Andrew.

‘And I’ll put it up on the fucking website for them,’ said Simon, and he walked back into the sitting room. ‘Barry Fairbrother’s fucking ghost.’

As he scavenged an assortment of food that might not be missed, skimming off slices here, handfuls there, a jubilant jingle ran through Andrew’s mind: I stopped you, you bastard. I stopped you.

He had done exactly what he had set out to do: Simon had no idea who had brought his ambitions to dust. The silly sod was even demanding Andrew’s help in getting his revenge; a complete about-turn, because when Andrew had first told his parents that he had a job at the delicatessen, Simon had been furious.

‘You stupid little tit. What about your fucking allergy?’

‘I thought I’d try not eating any of the nuts,’ said Andrew.

‘Don’t get smart with me, Pizza Face. What if you eat one accidentally, like at St Thomas’s? D’you think we want to go through that crap again?’

But Ruth had supported Andrew, telling Simon that Andrew was old enough to take care, to know better. When Simon had left the room, she had tried to tell Andrew that Simon was only worried about him.

‘The only thing he’s worried about is that he’d have to miss bloody Match of the Day to take me to hospital.’

Andrew returned to his bedroom, where he sat shovelling food into his mouth with one hand and texting Fats with the other.

He thought that it was all over, finished, done with. Andrew had never yet had reason to observe the first tiny bubble of fermenting yeast, in which was contained an inevitable, alchemical transformation.

VIII

The move to Pagford had been the worst thing that had ever happened to Gaia Bawden. Excepting occasional visits to her father in Reading, London was all that she had ever known. So incredulous had Gaia been, when Kay had first said that she wanted to move to a tiny West Country town, that it had been weeks before she took the threat seriously. She had thought it one of Kay’s mad ideas, like the two chickens she had bought for their tiny back garden in Hackney (killed by a fox a week after purchase), or deciding to ruin half their saucepans and permanently scar her own hand by making marmalade, when she hardly ever cooked.

Wrenched from friends she had had since primary school, from the house she had known since she was eight, from weekends that were, increasingly, about every kind of urban fun, Gaia had been plunged, over her pleas, threats and protests, into a life she had never dreamed existed. Cobbled streets and no shops open past six o’clock, a communal life that seemed to revolve around the church, and where you could often hear birdsong and nothing else: Gaia felt as though she had fallen through a portal into a land lost in time.

She and Kay had clung tightly to each other all Gaia’s life (for her father had never lived with them, and Kay’s two successive relationships had never been formalized), bickering, condoling and growing steadily more like flat-mates with the passing years. Now, though, Gaia saw nothing but an enemy when she looked across the kitchen table. Her only ambition was to return to London, by any means possible, and to make Kay as unhappy as she could, in revenge. She could not decide whether it would punish Kay more to fail all her GCSEs, or to pass them, and try and get her father to agree to house her, while she attended a sixth-form college in London. In the meantime, she had to exist in alien territory, where her looks and her accent, once instant passports to the most select social circles, had become foreign currency.

Gaia had no desire to become one of the popular students at Winterdown: she thought they were embarrassing, with their West Country accents and their pathetic ideas of what constituted entertainment. Her determined pursuit of Sukhvinder Jawanda was, in part, a way of showing the in-crowd that she found them laughable, and partly because she was in a mood to feel kinship with anybody who seemed to have outsider status.

The fact that Sukhvinder had agreed to join Gaia as a waitress had moved their friendship to a different level. In their next period of double biology, Gaia unbent as she had never done before, and Sukhvinder glimpsed, at last, part of the mysterious reason why this beautiful, cool newcomer had selected her as a friend. Adjusting the focus on their shared microscope, Gaia muttered, ‘It’s so frigging white here, isn’t it?’

Sukhvinder heard herself saying ‘yeah’ before she had fully considered the question. Gaia was still talking, but Sukhvinder was only half listening. ‘So frigging white.’ She supposed that it was.

At St Thomas’s, she had been made to get up, the only brown person in the class, and talk about the Sikh religion. She had stood obediently at the front of the class and told the story of the Sikh religion’s founder Guru Nanak, who disappeared into a river, and was believed drowned, but re-emerged after three days underwater to announce: ‘There is no Hindu, there is no Moslem.’

The other children had sniggered at the idea of anyone surviving underwater for three days. Sukhvinder had not had the courage to point out that Jesus had died and then come back to life. She had cut the story of Guru Nanak short, desperate to get back to her seat. She had only ever visited a gurdwara a handful of times in her life; there was none in Pagford, and the one in Yarvil was tiny and dominated, according to her parents, by Chamars, a different caste from their own. Sukhvinder did not even know why that mattered, because she knew that Guru Nanak explicitly forbade caste distinctions. It was all very confusing, and she continued to enjoy Easter eggs and decorating the Christmas tree, and found the books that Parminder pressed upon her children, explaining the lives of the gurus and the tenets of Khalsa, extremely difficult to read.

‘Because my mother wanted to be near her twat of a boyfriend,’ muttered Gaia. ‘Gavin Hughes, d’you know him?’

Sukhvinder shook her head.

‘You’ve probably heard them shagging,’ said Gaia. ‘The whole street hears when they’re at it. Just keep your windows open some night.’

Sukhvinder tried not to look shocked, but the idea of overhearing her parents, her married parents, having sex was quite bad enough. Gaia herself was flushed; not, Sukhvinder thought, with embarrassment but with anger. ‘He’s going to ditch her. She’s so deluded. He can’t wait to leave after they’ve done it.’

Sukhvinder would never have talked about her mother like this, and nor would the Fairbrother twins (still, in theory, her best friends). Niamh and Siobhan were working together at a microscope not far away. Since their father had died, they seemed to have closed in on themselves, choosing each other’s company, drifting away from Sukhvinder.

Andrew Price was staring almost constantly at Gaia through a gap in the white faces all around them. Sukhvinder, who had noticed this, thought that Gaia had not, but she was wrong. Gaia was simply not bothering to stare back or preen herself, because she was used to boys staring at her; it had been happening since she was twelve. Two boys in the lower sixth kept turning up in the corridors as she moved between classes, far more often than the law of averages would seem to dictate, and both were better-looking than Andrew. However, none of them could compare to the boy to whom Gaia had lost her virginity shortly before moving to Pagford.

Gaia could hardly bear that Marco de Luca was still physically alive in the universe, and separated from her by a hundred and thirty-two miles of aching, useless space.

‘He’s eighteen,’ she told Sukhvinder. ‘He’s half Italian. He plays football really well. He’s supposed to be getting a try-out for Arsenal’s youth squad.’

Gaia had had sex with Marco four times before leaving Hackney, each time stealing condoms out of Kay’s bedside table. She had half wanted Kay to know to what lengths she was driven, to brand herself on Marco’s memory because she was being forced to leave him.

Sukhvinder listened, fascinated, but not admitting to Gaia that she had already seen Marco on her new friend’s Facebook page. There was nobody like that in the whole of Winterdown: he looked like Johnny Depp.

Gaia slumped against the desk, playing absent-mindedly with the focus on the microscope, and across the room Andrew Price continued to stare at Gaia whenever he thought Fats would not notice.

‘Maybe he’ll be faithful. Sherelle’s having a party on Saturday night. She’s invited him. She’s sworn she won’t let him get up to anything. But shit, I wish…’

She stared at the desk with her flecked eyes out of focus and Sukhvinder watched her humbly, marvelling at her good looks, lost in admiration for her life. The idea of having another world where you belonged completely, where you had a footballer boyfriend and a gang of cool, devoted friends, seemed to her, even if you had been forcibly removed from it all, an awe-inspiring and enviable state of affairs.

They walked together to the shops at lunchtime, something Sukhvinder almost never did; she and the Fairbrother twins usually ate in the canteen.

As they hung about on the pavement outside the newsagent’s where they had bought sandwiches, they heard words uttered in a piercing scream.

‘Your fucking mum killed my Nan!’

All the Winterdown students clustered by the newsagent’s looked around for the source of the shouting, puzzled, and Sukhvinder imitated them, as confused as everyone else. Then she spotted Krystal Weedon, who was standing on the other side of the road, pointing a stubby finger like a gun. She had four other girls with her, all of them strung along the pavement in a line, held back by the traffic.

‘Your fucking mum killed my Nan! She’s gonna get fucking done and so are you!’

Sukhvinder’s stomach seemed to melt clean away. People were staring at her. A couple of third-year girls scuttled out of sight. Sukhvinder sensed the bystanders nearby transforming into a watchful, eager pack. Krystal and her gang were dancing on tiptoes, waiting for a break in the cars.

‘What’s she talking about?’ Gaia asked Sukhvinder, whose mouth was so dry that she could not reply. There was no point in running. She would never make it. Leanne Carter was the fastest girl in their year. All that seemed to move in the world were the passing cars, giving her a few final seconds of safety.

And then Jaswant appeared, accompanied by several sixth-year boys.

‘All right, Jolly?’ she said. ‘What’s up?’

Jaswant had not heard Krystal; it was mere luck that she had drifted this way with her entourage. Over the road, Krystal and her friends had gone into a huddle.

‘Nothing much,’ said Sukhvinder, dizzy with relief at her temporary reprieve. She could not tell Jaz what was happening in front of the boys. Two of them were nearly six feet tall. All were staring at Gaia.

Jaz and her friends moved towards the newsagent’s door, and Sukhvinder, with an urgent look at Gaia, followed them. She and Gaia watched through the window as Krystal and her gang moved on, glancing back every few steps.

‘What was that about?’ Gaia asked.

‘Her great-gran was my mum’s patient, and she died,’ said Sukhvinder. She wanted to cry so much that the muscles in her throat were painful.

‘Silly bitch,’ said Gaia.

But Sukhvinder’s suppressed sobs were born not only from the shaky aftermath of fear. She had liked Krystal very much, and she knew that Krystal had liked her too. All those afternoons on the canal, all those journeys in the minibus; she knew the anatomy of Krystal’s back and shoulders better than she knew her own.

They returned to school with Jaswant and her friends. The best-looking of the boys struck up a conversation with Gaia. By the time they had turned in at the gates, he was teasing her about her London accent. Sukhvinder could not see Krystal anywhere, but she spotted Fats Wall at a distance, loping along with Andrew Price. She would have known his shape and his walk anywhere, the way something primal inside you helped you recognize a spider moving across a shadowy floor.

Wave upon wave of nausea rippled through her as she approached the school building. There would be two of them from now on: Fats and Krystal together. Everyone knew that they were seeing each other. And into Sukhvinder’s mind dropped a vividly coloured picture of herself bleeding on the floor, and Krystal and her gang kicking her, and Fats Wall watching, laughing.

‘Need the loo,’ she told Gaia. ‘Meet you up there.’

She dived into the first girls’ bathroom they passed, locked herself in a cubicle and sat down on the closed seat. If she could have died… if she could have disappeared for ever… but the solid surface of things refused to dissolve around her, and her body, her hateful hermaphrodite’s body, continued, in its stubborn, lumpen way, to live…

She heard the bell for the start of afternoon lessons, jumped up and hurried out of the bathroom. Queues were forming along the corridor. She turned her back on all of them and marched out of the building.

Other people truanted. Krystal did it and so did Fats Wall. If she could only get away and stay away this afternoon, she might be able to think of something to protect her before she had to go back in. Or she could walk in front of a car. She imagined it slamming into her body and her bones shattering. How quickly would she die, broken in the road? She still preferred the thought of drowning, of cool clean water putting her to sleep for ever: a sleep without dreams…

‘Sukhvinder? Sukhvinder!’

Her stomach turned over. Tessa Wall was hurrying towards her across the car park. For one mad moment Sukhvinder considered running, but then the futility of it overwhelmed her, and she stood waiting for Tessa to reach her, hating her, with her stupid plain face and her evil son.

‘Sukhvinder, what are you doing? Where are you going?’

She could not even think of a lie. With a hopeless gesture of her shoulders, she surrendered.

Tessa had no appointments until three. She ought to have taken Sukhvinder to the office and reported her attempted flight; instead, she took Sukhvinder upstairs to the guidance room, with its Nepalese wall-hanging and the posters for ChildLine. Sukhvinder had never been there before.

Tessa spoke, and left inviting little pauses, then spoke again, and Sukhvinder sat with sweaty palms, her gaze fixed on her shoes. Tessa knew her mother – Tessa would tell Parminder that she had tried to truant – but if she explained why? Would Tessa, could Tessa, intercede? Not with her son; she could not control Fats, that was common knowledge. But with Krystal? Krystal came to guidance…

How bad would the beating be, if she told? But there would be a beating even if she did not tell. Krystal had been ready to set her whole gang on her…

‘…anything happened, Sukhvinder?’

She nodded. Tessa said encouragingly, ‘Can you tell me what it was?’

So Sukhvinder told.

She was sure she could read, in the minute contraction of Tessa’s brow as she listened, something other than sympathy for herself. Perhaps Tessa was thinking about how Parminder might react to the news that her treatment of Mrs Catherine Weedon was being screamed about in the street. Sukhvinder had not forgotten to worry about that as she had sat in the bathroom cubicle, wishing for death. Or perhaps Tessa’s look of unease was reluctance to tackle Krystal Weedon; doubtless Krystal was her favourite too, as she had been Mr Fairbrother’s.

A fierce, stinging sense of injustice burst through Sukhvinder’s misery, her fear and her self-loathing; it swept aside that tangle of worries and terrors that encased her daily; she thought of Krystal and her mates, waiting to charge; she thought of Fats, whispering poisonous words from behind her in every maths lesson, and of the message that she had wiped off her Facebook page the previous evening:

Les-bian-ism n. Sexual orientation of women to women. Also called Sapphism. A native or inhabitant of Lesbos.

‘I don’t know how she knows,’ said Sukhvinder, with the blood thrumming in her ears.

‘Knows…?’ asked Tessa, her expression still troubled.

‘That there’s been a complaint about Mum and her great-gran. Krystal and her mum don’t talk to the rest of the family. Maybe,’ said Sukhvinder, ‘Fats told her?’

‘Fats?’ Tessa repeated uncomprehendingly.

‘You know, because they’re seeing each other,’ said Sukhvinder. ‘Him and Krystal? Going out together? So maybe he told her.’

It gave her some bitter satisfaction to see every vestige of professional calm drain from Tessa’s face.

IX

Kay Bawden never wanted to set foot in Miles and Samantha’s house again. She could not forgive them for witnessing Gavin’s parade of indifference, nor could she forget Miles’ patronizing laughter, his attitude to Bellchapel, or the sneery way that he and Samantha had spoken about Krystal Weedon.

In spite of Gavin’s apology and his tepid assurances of affection, Kay could not stop picturing him nose to nose with Mary on the sofa; jumping up to help her with the plates; walking her home in the dark. When Gavin told her, a few days later, that he had had dinner at Mary’s house, she had to fight down an angry response, because he had never eaten more than toast at her house in Hope Street.

She might not be allowed to say anything bad about The Widow, about whom Gavin spoke as though she were the Holy Mother, but the Mollisons were different.

‘I can’t say I like Miles very much.’

‘He’s not exactly my best mate.’

‘If you ask me, it’ll be a catastrophe for the addiction clinic if he gets elected.’

‘I doubt it’ll make any difference.’

Gavin’s apathy, his indifference to other people’s pain, always infuriated Kay.

‘Isn’t there anyone who’ll stick up for Bellchapel?’

‘Colin Wall, I suppose,’ said Gavin.

So, at eight o’clock on Monday evening, Kay walked up the Walls’ drive and rang their doorbell. From the front step, she could make out Samantha Mollison’s red Ford Fiesta, parked in the drive three houses along. The sight added a little extra zest to her desire for a fight.

The Walls’ door was opened by a short plain dumpy woman in a tie-dyed skirt.

‘Hello,’ said Kay. ‘My name’s Kay Bawden, and I was wondering whether I could speak to Colin Wall?’

For a split second, Tessa simply stared at the attractive young woman on the doorstep whom she had never seen before. The strangest idea flashed across her mind: that Colin was having an affair and that his lover had come to tell her so.

‘Oh – yes – come in. I’m Tessa.’

Kay wiped her feet conscientiously on the doormat and followed Tessa into a sitting room that was smaller, shabbier but cosier than the Mollisons’. A tall, balding man with a high forehead was sitting in an armchair with a notebook in his lap and a pen in his hand.

‘Colin, this is Kay Bawden,’ said Tessa. ‘She’d like to speak to you.’

Tessa saw Colin’s startled and wary expression, and knew at once that the woman was a stranger to him. Really, she thought, a little ashamed, what were you thinking?

‘I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, unannounced,’ said Kay, as Colin stood up to shake her hand. ‘I would have telephoned, but you’re—’

‘We’re ex-directory, yes,’ said Colin. He towered over Kay, his eyes tiny behind the lenses of his glasses. ‘Please, sit down.’

‘Thank you. It’s about the election,’ said Kay. ‘This Parish Council election. You’re standing, aren’t you, against Miles Mollison?’

‘That’s right,’ said Colin nervously. He knew who she must be: the reporter who had wanted to talk to Krystal. They had tracked him down – Tessa ought not to have let her in.

‘I was wondering whether I could help in any way,’ said Kay. ‘I’m a social worker, mostly working in the Fields. There are some facts and figures I could give you about the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic, which Mollison seems quite keen on closing. I’ve been told that you’re for the clinic? That you’d like to keep it open?’

The onrush of relief and pleasure made him almost giddy.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Colin, ‘yes, I would. Yes, that was my predecessor’s – that’s to say, the previous holder of the seat – Barry Fairbrother – was certainly opposed to closing the clinic. And I am, too.’

‘Well, I’ve had a conversation with Miles Mollison, and he made it quite clear that he doesn’t think the clinic’s worth keeping open. Frankly, I think he’s rather ignorant and naive about the causes and treatment of addiction, and about the very real difference Bellchapel is making. If the Parish refuses to renew the lease on the building, and the District cuts funding, then there’s a danger that some very vulnerable people will be left without support.’

‘Yes, yes, I see,’ said Colin. ‘Oh, yes, I agree.’

He was astonished and flattered that this attractive young woman would have walked through the evening to find him and offer herself as an ally.

‘Would you like a cup of tea or coffee, Kay?’ asked Tessa.

‘Oh, thanks very much,’ said Kay. ‘Tea, please, Tessa. No sugar.’

Fats was in the kitchen, helping himself from the fridge. He ate copiously and continually, but remained scrawny, never putting on an ounce of weight. In spite of his openly declared disgust for them, he seemed unaffected by Tessa’s pack of ready-filled syringes, which sat in a clinical white box next to the cheese.

Tessa moved to the kettle, and her thoughts returned to the subject that had consumed her ever since Sukhvinder had suggested it earlier: that Fats and Krystal were ‘seeing each other’. She had not questioned Fats, and she had not told Colin.

The more that Tessa thought about it, the more certain she was that it could not be true. She was sure that Fats held himself in such high regard that no girl would be good enough, especially a girl like Krystal. Surely he would not…

Demean himself? Is that it? Is that what you think?

‘Who’s here?’ Fats asked Tessa, through a mouthful of cold chicken, as she put on the kettle.

‘A woman who wants to help Dad get elected to the council,’ replied Tessa, foraging in the cupboard for biscuits.

‘Why? Does she fancy him?’

‘Grow up, Stu,’ said Tessa crossly.

He plucked several slices of thin ham out of an open pack and poked them, bit by bit, into his crammed mouth, like a magician inserting silk handkerchiefs into his fist. Fats sometimes stood for ten minutes at a time at the open fridge, ripping open clingfilm and packets and putting chunks of food directly into his mouth. It was a habit Colin deprecated, along with almost every other aspect of Fats’ behaviour.

‘Why’s she want to help him, seriously?’ he asked, having swallowed his mouthful of meat.

‘She wants the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic to stay open.’

‘What, a junkie, is she?’

‘No, she isn’t a junkie,’ said Tessa, noting with annoyance that Fats had finished the last three chocolate biscuits and left the empty wrappings on the shelf. ‘She’s a social worker, and she thinks the clinic is doing a good job. Dad wants to keep it open, but Miles Mollison doesn’t think it’s very effective.’

‘It can’t be doing that well. The Fields are full of glue-sniffers and smackheads.’

Tessa knew that if she had said that Colin wanted to close the clinic, Fats would have instantly produced an argument for its continuation.

‘You ought to be a barrister, Stu,’ she said as the kettle lid started to rattle.

When Tessa returned to the sitting room with her tray, she found Kay talking Colin through a sheaf of printed material she had brought out of her big tote bag.

‘…two drugs workers part-funded by the council, and partly by Action on Addiction, which is a really good charity. Then there’s a social worker attached to the clinic, Nina, she’s the one who gave me all this – oh, thanks very much,’ said Kay, beaming up at Tessa, who had set down a mug of tea on the table beside her.

Kay had taken to the Walls, in just a few minutes, as she had not taken to anybody else in Pagford. There had been no sweeping up-and-down glance from Tessa as she walked in, no gimlet-eyed assessment of her physical imperfections and dress sense. Her husband, though nervous, seemed decent and earnest in his determination to obstruct the abandonment of the Fields.

‘Is that a London accent, Kay?’ asked Tessa, dunking a plain biscuit in her tea. Kay nodded.

‘What brings you to Pagford?’

‘A relationship,’ said Kay. She took no pleasure saying it, even though she and Gavin were officially reconciled. She turned back to Colin.

‘I don’t quite understand the situation with regards to the Parish Council and the clinic.’

‘Oh, it owns the building,’ said Colin. ‘It’s an old church. The lease is coming up for renewal.’

‘So that would be an easy way to force them out.’

‘Exactly. When did you say you’d spoken to Miles Mollison?’ asked Colin, both hoping and dreading to hear that Miles had mentioned him.

‘We had dinner, Friday before last,’ Kay explained, ‘Gavin and I—’

‘Oh, you’re Gavin’s girlfriend!’ interjected Tessa.

‘Yes; and, anyway, the subject of the Fields came up—’

‘It would,’ said Tessa.

‘—and Miles mentioned Bellchapel, and I was quite – quite dismayed by the way he talked about the issues involved. I told him I’m dealing with a family at the moment,’ Kay remembered her indiscreet mention of the Weedons’ names and proceeded carefully, ‘and if the mother is deprived of methadone, she’ll almost certainly end up back on the game.’

‘That sounds like the Weedons,’ said Tessa, with a lowering sensation.

‘I – yes, I am talking about the Weedons, actually,’ said Kay.

Tessa reached for another biscuit.

‘I’m Krystal’s guidance teacher. This must be the second time her mother’s been through Bellchapel, is it?’

‘Third,’ said Kay.

‘We’ve known Krystal since she was five: she was in our son’s class at primary school,’ Tessa said. ‘She’s had an awful life, really.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Kay. ‘It’s astounding she’s as sweet as she is, actually.’

‘Oh, I agree,’ said Colin heartily.

Remembering Colin’s absolute refusal to rescind Krystal’s detention after the squawking incident in assembly, Tessa raised her eyebrows. Then she wondered, with a sick lurch in her stomach, what Colin would say if Sukhvinder was not lying or mistaken. But surely Sukhvinder was wrong. She was a shy, naive girl. Probably she had got the wrong end of the stick… misheard something…

‘The point is, about the only thing that motivates Terri is the fear of losing her kids,’ said Kay. ‘She’s back on track at the moment; her key worker at the clinic told me she senses a bit of a breakthrough in Terri’s attitude. If Bellchapel closes, it all goes belly-up again, and God knows what’ll happen to the family.’

‘This is all very useful,’ said Colin, nodding importantly, and starting to make notes on a clean page in his notebook. ‘Very useful indeed. Did you say you’ve got statistics on people going clean?’

Kay shuffled the printed pages, looking for the information. Tessa had the impression that Colin wanted to reclaim Kay’s attention for himself. He had always been susceptible to good looks and a sympathetic manner.

Tessa munched another biscuit, still thinking about Krystal. Their recent guidance sessions had not been very satisfactory. Krystal had been standoffish. Today’s had been no different. She had extracted a promise from Krystal that she would not pursue or harass Sukhvinder Jawanda again, but Krystal’s demeanour suggested that Tessa had let her down, that trust was broken. Possibly Colin’s detention was to blame. Tessa had thought that she and Krystal had forged a bond strong enough to withstand that, although it had never been quite like the one Krystal had with Barry.

(Tessa had been there, on the spot, the day that Barry had come into school with a rowing machine, looking for recruits to the crew he was trying to start. She had been summoned from the staff room to the gym, because the PE teacher was off sick, and the only supply teacher they could find at such short notice was male.

The fourth-year girls, in their shorts and Aertex tops, had been giggly when they had arrived in the gym to find Miss Jarvis absent, replaced by two strange men. Tessa had had to reprimand Krystal, Nikki and Leanne, who had pushed to the front of the class and were making lewd suggestive remarks about the supply teacher; he was a handsome young man with an unfortunate tendency to blush.

Barry, short, ginger-haired and bearded, was wearing a tracksuit. He had taken a morning off work to do this. Everybody thought his idea was strange and unrealistic: schools like Winterdown did not have rowing eights. Niamh and Siobhan had seemed half amused, half mortified by their dad’s presence.

Barry explained what he was trying to do: put together crews. He had secured the use of the old boathouse down on the canal at Yarvil; it was a fabulous sport, and an opportunity to shine, for themselves, for their school. Tessa had positioned herself right next to Krystal and her friends to keep them in check; the worst of their giggling had subsided, but was not entirely quelled.

Barry demonstrated the rowing machine and asked for volunteers. Nobody stepped forward.

‘Krystal Weedon,’ said Barry, pointing at her. ‘I’ve seen you dangling off the monkey bars down the park; that’s proper upper body strength you’ve got there. Come here and give it a go.’

Krystal was only too happy to step into the spotlight; she swaggered up to the machine and sat down on it. Even with Tessa glowering beside them, Nikki and Leanne had howled with laughter and the rest of the class joined in.

Barry showed Krystal what to do. The silent supply teacher had watched in professional alarm as Barry positioned her hands on the wooden handle.

She heaved on the handle, making a stupid face at Nikki and Leanne, and everyone laughed again.

‘Look at that,’ Barry had said, beaming. ‘She’s a natural.’

Had Krystal really been a natural? Tessa did not know anything about rowing; she could not tell.

‘Straighten your back,’ Barry told Krystal, ‘or you’ll injure it. That’s it. Pull… pull… look at that technique… have you done this before?’

Then Krystal really had straightened her back, and she really had done it properly. She stopped looking at Nikki and Leanne. She hit a rhythm.

‘Excellent,’ said Barry. ‘Look at that… excellent. That’s how you do it! Atta girl. And again. And again. And—’

‘It ’urts!’ shouted Krystal.

‘I know it does. That’s how you end up with arms like Jennifer Aniston, doing that,’ said Barry.

There had been a little ripple of laughter, but this time they laughed with him. What was it that Barry had had? He was always so present, so natural, so entirely without self-consciousness. Teenagers, Tessa knew, were riven with the fear of ridicule. Those who were without it, and God knew there were few enough of them in the adult world, had natural authority among the young; they ought to be forced to teach.

‘And rest!’ Barry said, and Krystal slumped, red in the face and rubbing her arms.

‘You’ll have to give up the fags, Krystal,’ said Barry, and he got a big laugh this time. ‘OK, who else wants a try?’

When Krystal rejoined her watching classmates, she was no longer laughing. She watched each new rower jealously, her eyes darting constantly to Barry’s bearded face to see what he thought of them. When Carmen Lewis messed it up completely, Barry said, ‘Show ’em, Krystal,’ and her face lit up as she returned to the machine.

But at the end of the exhibition, when Barry asked those who were interested in trying out for the team to raise their hands, Krystal kept her arms folded. Tessa watched her shake her head, sneering, as Nikki muttered to her. Barry carefully noted down the names of the interested girls, then looked up.

‘And you, Krystal Weedon,’ he said, pointing at her. ‘You’re coming too. Don’t you shake your head at me. I’ll be very annoyed if I don’t see you. That’s natural talent you’ve got there. I don’t like seeing natural talent wasted. Krys – tal,’ he said loudly, inscribing her name, ‘Wee – don.’

Had Krystal thought about her natural talent as she showered at the end of the lesson? Had she carried the thought of her new aptitude around with her that day, like an unexpected Valentine? Tessa did not know; but to the amazement of all, except perhaps Barry, Krystal had turned up at try-outs.)

Colin was nodding vigorously as Kay took him through relapse rates at Bellchapel.

‘Parminder should see this,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure she gets a copy. Yes, yes, very useful indeed.’

Feeling slightly sick, Tessa took a fourth biscuit.

X

Parminder worked late on Monday evenings, and as Vikram was usually at the hospital, the three Jawanda children laid the table and cooked for themselves. Sometimes they squabbled; occasionally they had a laugh; but today, each was absorbed in their own particular thoughts, and the job was completed with unusual efficiency in near silence.

Sukhvinder had not told her brother or her sister that she had tried to truant, or about Krystal Weedon’s threat to beat her up. The habit of secrecy was very strong in her these days. She was actively frightened of imparting confidences, because she feared that they might betray the world of oddness that lived inside her, the world that Fats Wall seemed able to penetrate with such terrifying ease. All the same, she knew that the events of the day could not be kept quiet indefinitely. Tessa had told her that she intended to telephone Parminder.

‘I’m going to have to call your mum, Sukhvinder, it’s what we always do, but I’m going to explain to her why you did it.’

Sukhvinder had felt almost warm towards Tessa, even though she was Fats Wall’s mother. Frightened though she was of her mother’s reaction, a tiny little glow of hope had kindled inside her at the thought of Tessa interceding for her. Would the realization of Sukhvinder’s desperation lead, at last, to some crack in her mother’s implacable disapproval, her disappointment, her endless stone-faced criticism?

When the front door opened at last, she heard her mother speaking Punjabi.

‘Oh, not the bloody farm again,’ groaned Jaswant, who had cocked an ear to the door.

The Jawandas owned a patch of ancestral land in the Punjab, which Parminder, the oldest, had inherited from their father in the absence of sons. The farm occupied a place in the family consciousness that Jaswant and Sukhvinder had sometimes discussed. To their slightly amused astonishment, a few of their older relatives seemed to live in the expectation that the whole family would move back there one day. Parminder’s father had sent money back to the farm all his life. It was tenanted and worked by second cousins, who seemed surly and embittered. The farm caused regular arguments among her mother’s family.

‘Nani’s gone off on one again,’ interpreted Jaswant, as Parminder’s muffled voice penetrated the door.

Parminder had taught her first-born some Punjabi, and Jaz had picked up a lot more from their cousins. Sukhvinder’s dyslexia had been too severe to enable her to learn two languages and the attempt had been abandoned.

‘…Harpreet still wants to sell off that bit for the road…’

Sukhvinder heard Parminder kicking off her shoes. She wished that her mother had not been bothered about the farm tonight of all nights; it never put her into a good mood; and when Parminder pushed open the kitchen door and she saw her mother’s tight mask-like face, her courage failed her completely.

Parminder acknowledged Jaswant and Rajpal with a slight wave of her hand, but she pointed at Sukhvinder and then towards a kitchen chair, indicating that she was to sit down and wait for the call to end.

Jaswant and Rajpal drifted back upstairs. Sukhvinder waited beneath the wall of photographs, in which her relative inadequacy was displayed for the world to see, pinned to her chair by her mother’s silent command. On and on went the call, until at long last Parminder said goodbye and cut the connection.

When she turned to look at her daughter Sukhvinder knew, instantly, before a word was spoken, that she had been wrong to hope.

‘So,’ said Parminder. ‘I had a call from Tessa while I was at work. I expect you know what it was about.’

Sukhvinder nodded. Her mouth seemed to be full of cotton wool.

Parminder’s rage crashed over her like a tidal wave, dragging Sukhvinder with it, so that she was unable to find her feet or right herself.

‘Why? Why? Is this copying the London girl, again – are you trying to impress her? Jaz and Raj never behave like this, never – why do you? What’s wrong with you? Are you proud of being lazy and sloppy? Do you think it’s cool to act like a delinquent? How do you think I felt when Tessa told me? Called at work – I’ve never been so ashamed – I’m disgusted by you, do you hear me? Do we not give you enough? Do we not help you enough? What is wrong with you, Sukhvinder?’

In desperation, Sukhvinder tried to break through her mother’s tirade, and mentioned the name Krystal Weedon—

‘Krystal Weedon!’ shouted Parminder. ‘That stupid girl! Why are you paying attention to anything she says? Did you tell her I tried to keep her damn great-grandmother alive? Did you tell her that?’

‘I – no—’

‘If you’re going to care about what the likes of Krystal Weedon says, there’s no hope for you! Perhaps that’s your natural level, is it, Sukhvinder? You want to play truant and work in a café and waste all your opportunities for education, because that’s easier? Is that what being in a team with Krystal Weedon taught you – to sink to her level?’

Sukhvinder thought of Krystal and her gang, raring to go on the opposite kerb, waiting for a break in the cars. What would it take to make her mother understand? An hour ago she had had the tiniest fantasy that she might confide in her mother, at last, about Fats Wall…

‘Get out of my sight! Go! I’ll speak to your father when he comes in – go!’

Sukhvinder walked upstairs. Jaswant called from her bedroom: ‘What was all that shouting about?’

Sukhvinder did not answer. She proceeded to her own room, where she closed the door and sat down on the edge of her bed.

What’s wrong with you, Sukhvinder?

You disgust me.

Are you proud of being lazy and sloppy?

What had she expected? Warm encircling arms and comfort? When had she ever been hugged and held by Parminder? There was more comfort to be had from the razor blade hidden in her stuffed rabbit; but the desire, mounting to a need, to cut and bleed, could not be satisfied by daylight, with the family awake and her father on his way.

The dark lake of desperation and pain that lived in Sukhvinder and yearned for release was in flames, as if it had been fuel all along.

Let her see how it feels.

She got up, crossed her bedroom in a few strides, and dropping into the chair by her desk, pounded at the keyboard of her computer.

Sukhvinder had been just as interested as Andrew Price when that stupid supply teacher had tried to impress them with his cool in computing. Unlike Andrew and a couple of the other boys, Sukhvinder had not plied the teacher with questions about the hacking; she had merely gone home quietly and looked it all up online. Nearly every modern website was proof against a classic SQL injection, but when Sukhvinder had heard her mother discussing the anonymous attack on the Pagford Parish Council website, it had occurred to Sukhvinder that the security on that feeble old site was probably minimal.

Sukhvinder always found it much easier to type than to write, and computer code easier to read than long strings of words. It did not take very long for her to retrieve a site that gave explicit instructions for the simplest form of SQL injection. Then she brought up the Parish Council website.

It took her five minutes to hack the site, and then only because she had transcribed the code wrong the first time. To her astonishment, she discovered that whoever was administering the site had not removed the user details of The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother from the database, but merely deleted the post. It would be child’s play, therefore, to post in the same name.

It took Sukhvinder much longer to compose the message than it had to hack into the site. She had carried the secret accusation with her for months, ever since New Year’s Eve, when she had noticed with wonder her mother’s face, at ten to midnight, from the corner of the party where she was hiding. She typed slowly. Autocorrect helped with her spelling.

She was not afraid that Parminder would check her computer history; her mother knew so little about her, and about what went on in this bedroom, that she would never suspect her lazy, stupid, sloppy daughter.

Sukhvinder pressed the mouse like a trigger.

XI

Krystal did not take Robbie to nursery on Tuesday morning, but dressed him for Nana Cath’s funeral instead. As she pulled up his least ripped trousers, which were a good two inches too short in the leg, she tried to explain to him who Nana Cath had been, but she might as well have saved her breath. Robbie had no memory of Nana Cath; he had no idea what Nana meant; no concept of any relative other than mother and sister. In spite of her shifting hints and stories, Krystal knew that Terri had no idea who his father was.

Krystal heard her mother’s footsteps on the stairs.

‘Leave it,’ she snapped at Robbie, who had reached for an empty beer can lying beneath Terri’s usual armchair. ‘C’m’ere.’

She pulled Robbie by the hand into the hall. Terri was still wearing the pyjama bottoms and dirty T-shirt in which she had spent the night, and her feet were bare.

‘Why intcha changed?’ demanded Krystal.

‘I ain’t goin’,’ said Terri, pushing past her son and daughter into the kitchen. ‘Changed me mind.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’ wanna,’ said Terri. She was lighting a cigarette off the ring of the cooker. ‘Don’ fuckin’ ’ave to.’

Krystal was still holding Robbie’s hand, as he tugged and swung.

‘They’re all goin’,’ said Krystal. ‘Cheryl an’ Shane an’ all.’

‘So?’ said Terri aggressively.

Krystal had been afraid that her mother would pull out at the last minute. The funeral would bring her face to face with Danielle, the sister who pretended that Terri did not exist, not to mention all the other relatives who had disowned them. Anne-Marie might be there. Krystal had been holding on to that hope, like a torch in the darkness, through the nights she had sobbed for Nana Cath and Mr Fairbrother.

‘You gotta go,’ said Krystal.

‘No, I ain’.’

‘It’s Nana Cath, innit,’ said Krystal.

‘So?’ said Terri, again.

‘She done loads fer us,’ said Krystal.

‘No, she ain’,’ snapped Terri.

‘She did,’ said Krystal, her face hot and her hand clutching Robbie’s.

‘Fer you, maybe,’ said Terri. ‘She done fuck-all for me. Go an’ fuckin’ bawl all over ’er fuckin’ grave if yeh want. I’m waitin’ in.’

‘Wha’ for?’ said Krystal.

‘My bus’ness, innit.’

The old familiar shadow fell.

‘Obbo’s comin’ round, is ’e?’

‘My bus’ness,’ repeated Terri, with pathetic dignity.

‘Come to the funeral,’ said Krystal loudly.

‘You go.’

‘Don’ go fuckin’ usin’,’ said Krystal, her voice an octave higher.

‘I ain’,’ said Terri, but she turned away, looking out of the dirty back window over the patch of overgrown litter-strewn grass they called the back garden.

Robbie tugged his hand out of Krystal’s and disappeared into the sitting room. With her fists deep in her trackie pockets, shoulders squared, Krystal tried to decide what to do. She wanted to cry at the thought of not going to the funeral, but her distress was edged with relief that she would not have to face the battery of hostile eyes she had sometimes met at Nana Cath’s. She was angry with Terri, and yet felt strangely on her side. You don’t even know who the father is, do yeh, yer whore? She wanted to meet Anne-Marie, but was scared.

‘All righ’, then, I’ll stay an’ all.’

‘You don’ ’ave ter. Go, if yeh wan’. I don’ fuckin’ care.’

But Krystal, certain that Obbo would appear, stayed. Obbo had been away for more than a week, for some nefarious purpose of his own. Krystal wished that he had died, that he would never come back.

For something to do, she began to tidy the house, while smoking one of the roll-ups Fats Wall had given her. She didn’t like them, but she liked that he had given them to her. She had been keeping them in Nikki’s plastic jewellery box, along with Tessa’s watch.

She had thought that she might not see Fats any more, after their shag in the cemetery, because he had been almost silent afterwards and left her with barely a goodbye, but they had since met up on the rec. She could tell that he had enjoyed this time more than the last; they had not been stoned, and he had lasted longer. He lay beside her in the grass beneath the bushes, smoking, and when she had told him about Nana Cath dying, he had told her that Sukhvinder Jawanda’s mother had given Nana Cath the wrong drugs or something; he was not clear exactly what had happened.

Krystal had been horrified. So Nana Cath need not have died; she might still have been in the neat little house on Hope Street, there in case Krystal needed her, offering a refuge with a comfortable clean-sheeted bed, the tiny kitchen full of food and mismatched china, and the little TV in the corner of the sitting room: I don’ wanna watch no filth, Krystal, turn that off.

Krystal had liked Sukhvinder, but Sukhvinder’s mother had killed Nana Cath. You did not differentiate between members of an enemy tribe. It had been Krystal’s avowed intention to pulverize Sukhvinder; but then Tessa Wall had intervened. Krystal could not remember the details of what Tessa had told her; but it seemed that Fats had got the story wrong or, at least, not exactly right. She had given Tessa a grudging promise not to go after Sukhvinder, but such promises could only ever be stop-gaps in Krystal’s frantic ever-changing world.

‘Put it down!’ Krystal shouted at Robbie, because he was trying to prise the lid off the biscuit tin where Terri kept her works.

Krystal snatched the tin from him and held it in her hands like a living creature, something that would fight to stay alive, whose destruction would have tremendous consequences. There was a scratched picture on the lid: a carriage with luggage piled high on the roof, drawn through the snow by four chestnut horses, a coachman in a top hat carrying a bugle. She carried the tin upstairs with her, while Terri sat in the kitchen smoking, and hid it in her bedroom. Robbie trailed after her.

‘Wanna go play park.’

She sometimes took him and pushed him on the swings and the roundabout.

‘Not today, Robbie.’

He whined until she shouted at him to shut up.

Later, when it was dark – after Krystal had made Robbie his tea of spaghetti hoops and given him a bath; when the funeral was long since over – Obbo rapped on the front door. Krystal saw him from Robbie’s bedroom window and tried to get there first, but Terri beat her to it.

‘All righ’, Ter?’ he said, over the threshold before anyone had invited him in. ‘’Eard you was lookin’ fer me las’ week.’

Although she had told him to stay put, Robbie had followed Krystal downstairs. She could smell his shampooed hair over the smell of fags and stale sweat that clung to Obbo in his ancient leather jacket. Obbo had had a few; when he leered at her, she smelt the beer fumes.

‘All righ’, Obbo?’ said Terri, with the note in her voice Krystal never heard otherwise. It was conciliating, accommodating; it conceded that he had rights in their house. ‘Where you bin, then?’

‘Bristol,’ he said. ‘How’s you, Ter?’

‘She don’ wan’ nuthin’,’ said Krystal.

He blinked at her through his thick glasses. Robbie was clutching Krystal’s leg so tightly that she could feel his nails in her skin.

‘Oo’s this, Ter?’ asked Obbo. ‘Yer mum?’

Terri laughed. Krystal glared at him, Robbie’s grip tight on her thigh. Obbo’s bleary gaze dropped to him.

‘An’ ’ow’s me boy?’

‘He ain’ your fuckin’ boy,’ said Krystal.

‘’Ow d’you know?’ Obbo asked her quietly, grinning.

‘Fuck off. She don’ wan’ nuthin’. Tell ’im,’ Krystal virtually shouted at Terri. ‘Tell ’im you don’ wan’ nuthin’.’

Daunted, caught between two wills much stronger than her own, Terri said, ‘’E on’y come rounda see—’

‘No, ’e ain’t,’ said Krystal. ‘No, ’e fuckin’ ain’t. Tell ’im. She don’ wan’ nuthin’,’ she said fiercely into Obbo’s grinning face. ‘She’s bin off it fer weeks.’

‘Is tha’ right, Terri?’ said Obbo, still smiling.

‘Yeah, it is,’ said Krystal, when Terri did not answer. ‘She’s still at Bellchapel.’

‘Noffur much longer,’ said Obbo.

‘Fuck off,’ said Krystal, outraged.

‘Closin’ it,’ said Obbo.

‘Are they?’ said Terri in sudden panic. ‘They ain’t, are they?’

‘Course they are,’ said Obbo. ‘Cuts, innit?’

‘You don’t know nuthin’,’ Krystal told Obbo. ‘It’s bollocks,’ she told her mother. ‘They ’aven’ said nuthin’, ’ave they?’

‘Cuts,’ repeated Obbo, patting his bulging pockets for cigarettes.

‘We got the case review,’ Krystal reminded Terri. ‘Yeh can’t use. Yeh can’t.’

‘Wha’s that?’ asked Obbo, fiddling with his lighter, but neither woman enlightened him. Terri met her daughter’s gaze for a bare two seconds; her eyes fell, reluctantly, to Robbie in his pyjamas, still clinging tightly to Krystal’s leg.

‘Yeah, I wuz gonna go ter bed, Obbo,’ she mumbled, without looking at him. ‘I’ll mebbe see yer another time.’

‘I ’eard your Nan died,’ he said. ‘Cheryl wuz tellin’ me.’

Pain contorted Terri’s face; she looked as old as Nana Cath herself.

‘Yeah, I’m goin’ ter bed. C’mon, Robbie. Come wi’ me, Robbie.’

Robbie did not want to let go of Krystal while Obbo was still there. Terri held out her claw-like hand.

‘Yeah, go on, Robbie,’ Krystal urged him. In certain moods, Terri clutched her son like a teddy bear; better Robbie than smack. ‘Go on. Go wi’ Mum.’

He was reassured by something in Krystal’s voice, and allowed Terri to take him upstairs.

‘See yeh,’ said Krystal, without looking at Obbo, but stalking away from him into the kitchen, pulling the last of Fats Wall’s roll-ups out of her pocket and bending to light it off the gas ring. She heard the front door close and felt triumphant. Fuck him.

‘You got a lovely arse, Krystal.’

She jumped so violently that a plate slipped off the heaped side and smashed on the filthy floor. He had not gone, but had followed her. He was staring at her chest in its tight T-shirt.

‘Fuck off,’ she said.

‘Big girl, intcha?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘I ’eard you give it away free,’ said Obbo, closing in. ‘You could make better money’n yer mum.’

‘Fuck—’

His hand was on her left breast. She tried to knock it away; he seized her wrist in his other hand. Her lit cigarette grazed his face and he punched her, twice, to the side of the head; more plates shattered on the filthy floor and then, as they wrestled, she slipped and fell; the back of her head smacked on the floor, and he was on top of her: she could feel his hand at the waistband of her tracksuit bottoms, pulling.

‘No – fuck – no!’

His knuckles in her belly as he undid his own flies – she tried to scream and he smacked her across the face – the smell of him was thick in her nostrils as he growled in her ear, ‘Fuckin’ shout and I’ll cut yer.’

He was inside her and it hurt; she could hear him grunting and her own tiny whimper; she was ashamed of the noise she made, so frightened and so small.

He came and clambered off her. At once she pulled up her tracksuit bottoms and jumped up to face him, tears pouring down her face as he leered at her.

‘I’ll tell Mist’ Fairbrother,’ she heard herself sob. She did not know where it came from. It was a stupid thing to say.

‘The fuck’s he?’ Obbo tugged up his flies, lit a cigarette, taking his time, blocking her exit. ‘You fuckin’ ’im too, are yeh? Little slapper.’

He sauntered up the hall and was gone.

She was shaking as she had never done in her life. She thought she might be sick; she could smell him all over her. The back of her head throbbed; there was a pain inside her, and wetness seeping into her pants. She ran out of the room into the living room and stood, shivering, with her arms wrapped around herself; then she knew a moment of terror, that he would come back, and hurried to the front door to lock it.

Back in the sitting room she found a long stub in the ashtray and lit it. Smoking, shaking and sobbing, she sank into Terri’s usual chair, then jumped up because she heard footsteps on the stairs: Terri had reappeared, looking confused and wary.

‘Wha’ssa matter with you?’

Krystal gagged on the words.

‘He jus’ – he jus’ fucked me.’

‘Wha’?’ said Terri.

‘Obbo – ’e jus’—’

‘’E wouldn’.’

It was the instinctive denial with which Terri met all of life: he wouldn’t, no, I never, no, I didn’t.

Krystal flew at her and pushed her; emaciated as she was, Terri crumpled backwards into the hall, shrieking and swearing; Krystal ran to the door she had just locked, fumbled to unfasten it and wrenched it open.

Still sobbing, she was twenty yards along the dark street before she realized that Obbo might be waiting out here, watching. She cut across a neighbour’s garden at a run and took a zig-zag route through back ways in the direction of Nikki’s house, and all the time the wetness spread in her pants and she thought she might throw up.

Krystal knew that it was rape, what he had done. It had happened to Leanne’s older sister in the car park of a nightclub in Bristol. Some people would have gone to the police, she knew that; but you did not invite the police into your life when your mother was Terri Weedon.

I’ll tell Mist’ Fairbrother.

Her sobs came faster and faster. She could have told Mr Fairbrother. He had known what real life was like. One of his brothers had done time. He had told Krystal stories of his youth. It had not been like her youth – nobody was as low as her, she knew that – but like Nikki’s, like Leanne’s. Money had run out; his mother had bought her council house and then been unable to keep up the payments; they had lived for a while in a caravan lent by an uncle.

Mr Fairbrother took care of things; he sorted things out. He had come to their house and talked to Terri about Krystal and rowing, because there had been an argument and Terri was refusing to sign forms for Krystal to go away with the team. He had not been disgusted, or he had not shown it, which came to the same thing. Terri, who liked and trusted nobody, had said, ‘’E seems all righ’,’ and she had signed.

Mr Fairbrother had once said to her, ‘It’ll be tougher for you than these others, Krys; it was tougher for me. But you can do better. You don’t have to go the same way.’

He had meant working hard at school and stuff, but it was too late for that and, anyway, it was all bollocks. How would reading help her now?

’Ow’s me boy?

He ain’ your fuckin’ boy.

’Ow d’you know?

Leanne’s sister had had to get the morning-after pill. Krystal would ask Leanne about the pill and go and get it. She could not have Obbo’s baby. The thought of it made her retch.

I gotta get out of here.

She thought fleetingly of Kay, and then discarded her: as bad as the police, to tell a social worker that Obbo walked in and out of their house, raping people. She would take Robbie for sure, if she knew that.

A clear lucid voice in Krystal’s head was speaking to Mr Fairbrother, who was the only adult who had ever talked to her the way she needed, unlike Mrs Wall, so well-intentioned and so blinkered, and Nana Cath, refusing to hear the whole truth.

I gotta get Robbie out of here. How can I get away? I gotta get away.

Her one sure refuge, the little house in Hope Street, was already being gobbled up by squabbling relatives…

She scurried around a corner underneath a street lamp, looking over her shoulder in case he was watching her, following.

And then the answer came to her, as though Mr Fairbrother had shown her the way.

If she got knocked up by Fats Wall, she would be able to get her own place from the council. She would be able to take Robbie to live with her and the baby if Terri used again. And Obbo would never enter her house, not ever. There would be bolts and chains and locks on the door, and her house would be clean, always clean, like Nana Cath’s house.

Half running along the dark street, Krystal’s sobs slowed and subsided.

The Walls would probably give her money. They were like that. She could imagine Tessa’s plain, concerned face, bending over a cot. Krystal would have their grandchild.

She would lose Fats in getting pregnant; they always went, once you were expecting; she had watched it happen nearly every time in the Fields. But perhaps he would be interested; he was so strange. It did not much matter to her either way. Her interest in him, except as the essential component in her plan, had dwindled to almost nothing. What she wanted was the baby: the baby was more than a means to an end. She liked babies; she had always loved Robbie. She would keep the two of them safe, together; she would be like a better, kinder, younger Nana Cath to her family.

Anne-Marie might come and visit, once she was away from Terri. Their children would be cousins. A very vivid image of herself and Anne-Marie came to Krystal; they were standing at the school gates of St Thomas’s in Pagford, waving off two little girls in pale blue dresses and ankle socks.

The lights were on in Nikki’s house, as they always were. Krystal broke into a run.