The Casual Vacancy

I

Many, many times had Colin Wall imagined the police coming to his door. They arrived, at last, at dusk on Sunday evening: a woman and a man, not to arrest Colin, but to look for his son.

A fatal accident and ‘Stuart, is it?’ was a witness. ‘Is he at home?’

‘No,’ said Tessa, ‘oh, dear God… Robbie Weedon… but he lives in the Fields… why was he here?’

The policewoman explained, kindly, what they believed to have happened. ‘The teenagers took their eye off him’ was the phrase she used.

Tessa thought she might faint.

‘You don’t know where Stuart is?’ asked the policeman.

‘No,’ said Colin, gaunt and shadow-eyed. ‘Where was he last seen?’

‘When our colleague pulled up, Stuart seems to have, ah, run away.’

‘Oh, dear God,’ said Tessa again.

‘He’s not answering,’ said Colin calmly; he had already dialled Fats on his mobile. ‘We’ll need to go and look for him.’

Colin had rehearsed for calamity all his life. He was ready. He took down his coat.

‘I’ll try Arf,’ said Tessa, running to the telephone.

Isolated above the little town, no news of the calamities had yet reached Hilltop House. Andrew’s mobile rang in the kitchen.

‘’Lo,’ he said, his mouth full of toast.

‘Andy, it’s Tessa Wall. Is Stu with you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

But he was not at all sorry that Fats was not with him.

‘Something’s happened, Andy. Stu was down at the river with Krystal Weedon, and she had her little brother with her, and the boy’s drowned. Stu’s run – run off somewhere. Can you think where he might be?’

‘No,’ said Andrew automatically, because that was his and Fats’ code. Never tell the parents.

But the horror of what she had just told him crept through the phone like a clammy fog. Everything was suddenly less clear, less certain. She was about to hang up.

‘Wait, Mrs Wall,’ he said. ‘I might know… there’s a place down by the river…’

‘I don’t think he’d go near the river now,’ said Tessa.

Seconds flicked by, and Andrew was more and more convinced that Fats was in the Cubby Hole.

‘It’s the only place I can think of,’ he said.

‘Tell me where—’

‘I’d have to show you.’

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ she shouted.

Colin was already patrolling the streets of Pagford on foot. Tessa drove the Nissan up the winding hill road, and found Andrew waiting for her on the corner, where he usually caught the bus. He directed her down through the town. The street lights were feeble by twilight.

They parked by the trees where Andrew usually threw down Simon’s racing bike. Tessa got out of the car and followed Andrew to the edge of the water, puzzled and frightened.

‘He’s not here,’ she said.

‘It’s along there,’ said Andrew, pointing at the sheer dark face of Pargetter Hill, running straight down to the river with barely a lip of bank before the rushing water.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Tessa, horrified.

Andrew had known from the first that she would not be able to come with him, short and dumpy as she was.

‘I’ll go and see,’ he said. ‘If you wait here.’

‘But it’s too dangerous!’ she cried over the roar of the powerful river.

Ignoring her, he reached for the familiar hand and footholds. As he inched away along the tiny ledge, the same thought came to both of them; that Fats might have fallen, or jumped, into the river thundering so close to Andrew’s feet.

Tessa remained at the water’s edge until she could not make Andrew out any longer, then turned away, trying not to cry in case Stuart was there, and she needed to talk to him calmly. For the first time, she wondered where Krystal was. The police had not said, and her terror for Fats had obliterated every other concern…

Please God, let me find Stuart, she prayed. Let me find Stuart, please, God.

Then she pulled her mobile from her cardigan pocket and called Kay Bawden.

‘I don’t know whether you’ve heard,’ she shouted, over the rushing water, and she told Kay the story.

‘But I’m not her social worker any more,’ said Kay.

Twenty feet away, Andrew had reached the Cubby Hole. It was pitch black; he had never been here this late. He swung himself inside.

‘Fats?’

He heard something move at the back of the hole.

‘Fats? You there?’

‘Got a light, Arf?’ said an unrecognizable voice. ‘I dropped my bloody matches.’

Andrew thought of shouting out to Tessa, but she did not know how long it took to reach the Cubby Hole. She could wait a few more moments.

He passed over his lighter. By its flickering flame, Andrew saw that his friend’s appearance was almost as changed as his voice. Fats’ eyes were swollen; his whole face looked puffy.

The flame went out. Fats’ cigarette tip glowed bright in the darkness.

‘Is he dead? Her brother?’

Andrew had not realized that Fats did not know.

‘Yeah,’ he said, and then he added, ‘I think so. That’s what I – what I heard.’

There was a silence, and then a soft, piglet-like squeal reached him through the darkness.

‘Mrs Wall,’ yelled Andrew, sticking his head out of the hole as far as it would go, so that he could not hear Fats’ sobs over the sound of the river. ‘Mrs Wall, he’s here!’

II

The policewoman had been gentle and kind, in the cluttered cottage by the river, where dank water now covered blankets, chintzy chairs and worn rugs. The old lady who owned the place had brought a hot-water bottle and a cup of boiling tea, which Sukhvinder could not lift because she was shaking like a drill. She had disgorged chunks of information: her own name, and Krystal’s name, and the name of the dead little boy that they were loading onto an ambulance. The dog-walker who had pulled her from the river was rather deaf; he gave a statement to the police in the next room, and Sukhvinder hated the sound of his bellowed account. He had tethered his dog to a tree outside the window, and it whined persistently.

Then the police had called her parents and they had come, Parminder knocking over a table and smashing one of the old lady’s ornaments as she crossed the room with clean clothes in her arms. In the tiny bathroom, the deep dirty gash on Sukhvinder’s leg was revealed, peppering the fluffy bath mat with black spots, and when Parminder saw the wound she shrieked at Vikram, who was thanking everyone loudly in the hall, that they must take Sukhvinder to the hospital.

She had vomited again in the car, and her mother, who was beside her in the back seat, had mopped her up, and all the way there Parminder and Vikram had kept up a flow of loud talk; her father kept repeating himself, saying things like ‘she’ll need a sedative’ and ‘that cut will definitely need stitches’; and Parminder, who was in the back seat with the shaking and retching Sukhvinder, kept saying, ‘You might have died. You might have died.’

It was as if she was still underwater. Sukhvinder was somewhere she could not breathe. She tried to cut through it all, to be heard.

‘Does Krystal know he’s dead?’ she asked through chattering teeth, and Parminder had to ask her to repeat the question several times.

‘I don’t know,’ she answered at last. ‘You might have died, Jolly.’

At the hospital, they made her undress again, but this time her mother was with her in the curtained cubicle, and she realized her mistake too late when she saw the expression of horror on Parminder’s face.

‘My God,’ she said, grabbing Sukhvinder’s forearm. ‘My God. What have you done to yourself?’

Sukhvinder had no words, so she allowed herself to subside into tears and uncontrollable shaking, and Vikram shouted at everyone, including Parminder, to leave her alone, but also to damn well hurry up, and that her cut needed cleaning and she needed stitches and sedatives and X-rays…

Later, they put her in a bed with a parent on each side of her, and both of them stroked her hands. She was warm and numb, and there was no pain in her leg any more. The sky beyond the windows was dark.

‘Howard Mollison’s had another heart attack,’ she heard her mother tell her father. ‘Miles wanted me to go to him.’

‘Bloody nerve,’ said Vikram.

To Sukhvinder’s drowsy surprise, they talked no more about Howard Mollison. They merely continued to stroke her hands until, shortly afterwards, she fell asleep.

On the far side of the building, in a shabby blue room with plastic chairs and a fish tank in the corner, Miles and Samantha were sitting on either side of Shirley, waiting for news from theatre. Miles was still wearing his slippers.

‘I can’t believe Parminder Jawanda wouldn’t come,’ he said for the umpteenth time, his voice cracking. Samantha got up, moved past Shirley, and put her arms around Miles, kissing his thick hair, speckled with grey, breathing in his familiar smell.

Shirley said, in a high, strangled voice, ‘I’m not surprised she wouldn’t come. I’m not surprised. Absolutely appalling.’

All she had left of her old life and her old certainties was attacking familiar targets. Shock had taken almost everything from her: she no longer knew what to believe, or even what to hope. The man in theatre was not the man she had thought she had married. If she could have returned to that happy place of certainty, before she had read that awful post…

Perhaps she ought to shut down the whole website. Take away the message boards in their entirety. She was afraid that the Ghost might come back, that he might say the awful thing again…

She wanted to go home, right now and disable the website; and while there, she could destroy the EpiPen once and for all…

He saw it… I know he saw it…

But I’d never have done it, really. I wouldn’t have done it. I was upset. I’d never have done it…

What if Howard survived, and his first words were: ‘She ran out of the room when she saw me. She didn’t call an ambulance straight away. She was holding a big needle…’

Then I’ll say his brain’s been affected, Shirley thought defiantly.

And if he died…

Beside her, Samantha was hugging Miles. Shirley did not like it; she ought to be the centre of attention; it was her husband who was lying upstairs, fighting for his life. She had wanted to be like Mary Fairbrother, cosseted and admired, a tragic heroine. This was not how she had imagined it—

‘Shirley?’

Ruth Price, in her nurse’s uniform, had come hurrying into the room, her thin face forlorn with sympathy.

‘I just heard – I had to come – Shirley, how awful, I’m so sorry.’

‘Ruth, dear,’ said Shirley, getting up, and allowing herself to be embraced. ‘That’s so kind. So kind.’

Shirley liked introducing her medical friend to Miles and Samantha, and receiving her pity and her kindness in front of them. It was a tiny taste of how she had imagined widowhood…

But then Ruth had to go back to work, and Shirley returned to her plastic chair and her uncomfortable thoughts.

‘He’ll be OK,’ Samantha was murmuring to Miles, as he rested his head on her shoulder. ‘I know he’ll pull through. He did last time.’

Shirley watched little neon-bright fish darting hither and thither in their tank. It was the past that she wished she could change; the future was a blank.

‘Has anyone phoned Mo?’ Miles asked after a while, wiping his eyes on the back of one hand, while the other gripped Samantha’s leg. ‘Mum, d’you want me to—?’

‘No,’ said Shirley sharply. ‘We’ll wait… until we know.’

In the theatre upstairs, Howard Mollison’s body overflowed the edges of the operating table. His chest was wide open, revealing the ruins of Vikram Jawanda’s handiwork. Nineteen people laboured to repair the damage, while the machines to which Howard was connected made soft implacable noises, confirming that he continued to live.

And far below, in the bowels of the hospital, Robbie Weedon’s body lay frozen and white in the morgue. Nobody had accompanied him to the hospital, and nobody had visited him in his metal drawer.

III

Andrew had refused a lift back to Hilltop House, so it was only Tessa and Fats in the car together, and Fats said, ‘I don’t want to go home.’

‘All right,’ Tessa replied, and she drove, while talking to Colin on the telephone. ‘I’ve got him… Andy found him. We’ll be back in a bit… Yes… Yes, I will…’

Tears were spattering down Fats’ face; his body was betraying him; it was exactly like the time when hot urine had spilt down his leg into his sock, when Simon Price had made him piss himself. The hot saltiness leaked over his chin and onto his chest, pattering like drops of rain.

He kept imagining the funeral. A tiny little coffin.

He had not wanted to do it with the boy so near.

Would the weight of the dead child ever lift from him?

‘So you ran away,’ said Tessa coldly, over his tears.

She had prayed that she would find him alive, but her strongest emotion was disgust. His tears did not soften her. She was used to men’s tears. Part of her was ashamed that he had not, after all, thrown himself into the river.

‘Krystal told the police that you and she were in the bushes. You just left him to his own devices, did you?’

Fats was speechless. He could not believe her cruelty. Did she not understand the desolation roaring inside him, the horror, the sense of contagion?

‘Well, I hope you have got her pregnant,’ said Tessa. ‘It’ll give her something to live for.’

Every time they turned a corner, he thought that she was taking him home. He had feared Cubby most, but now there was nothing to choose between his parents. He wanted to get out of the car, but she had locked all the doors.

Without warning, she swerved and braked. Fats, clutching the sides of his seat, saw that they were in a lay-by on the Yarvil bypass. Frightened that she would order him out of the car, he turned his swollen face to her.

‘Your birth mother,’ she said, looking at him as she had never done before, without pity or kindness, ‘was fourteen years old. We had the impression, from what we were told, that she was middle class, quite a bright girl. She absolutely refused to say who your father was. Nobody knew whether she was trying to protect an under-age boyfriend or something worse. We were told all of this, in case you had any mental or physical difficulties. In case,’ she said clearly, like a teacher trying to emphasize a point sure to come up in a test, ‘you had been the result of incest.’

He cowered away from her. He would have preferred to be shot.

‘I was desperate to adopt you,’ she said. ‘Desperate. But Dad was very ill. He said to me, “I can’t do it. I’m scared I’ll hurt a baby. I need to get better before we do this, and I can’t do that and cope with a new baby as well.”

‘But I was so determined to have you,’ said Tessa, ‘that I pressured him into lying, and telling the social workers that he was fine, and pretending to be happy and normal. We brought you home, and you were tiny and premature, and on the fifth night we had you, Dad slipped out of bed and went to the garage, put a hosepipe on the exhaust of the car and tried to kill himself, because he was convinced he’d smothered you. And he almost died.

‘So you can blame me,’ said Tessa, ‘for your and Dad’s bad start, and maybe you can blame me for everything that’s come since. But I’ll tell you this, Stuart. Your father’s spent his life facing up to things he never did. I don’t expect you to understand his kind of courage. But,’ her voice broke at last, and he heard the mother he knew, ‘he loves you, Stuart.’

She added the lie because she could not help herself. Tonight, for the first time, Tessa was convinced that it was a lie, and also that everything she had done in her life, telling herself that it was for the best, had been no more than blind selfishness, generating confusion and mess all around. But who could bear to know which stars were already dead, she thought, blinking up at the night sky; could anybody stand to know that they all were?

She turned the key in the ignition, crashed the gears and they pulled out again onto the bypass.

‘I don’t want to go to the Fields,’ said Fats in terror.

‘We’re not going to the Fields,’ she said. ‘I’m taking you home.’

IV

The police had picked up Krystal Weedon at last as she ran hopelessly along the river bank on the very edge of Pagford, still calling her brother in a cracked voice. The policewoman who approached her addressed her by name, and tried to break the news to her gently, but she still tried to beat the woman away from her, and in the end the policewoman had almost to wrestle her into the car. Krystal had not noticed Fats melting away into the trees; he did not exist to her any more.

The police drove Krystal home, but when they knocked on the front door Terri refused to answer. She had glimpsed them through an upstairs window, and thought that Krystal had done the one unthinkable and unforgivable thing, and told the pigs about the hold-alls full of Obbo’s hash. She dragged the heavy bags upstairs while the police hammered at the door, and only opened up when she considered that it had become unavoidable.

‘Whatcha wan’?’ she shouted, through an inch-wide gap in the door.

The policewoman asked to come in three times and Terri refused, still demanding to know what they wanted. A few neighbours had begun to peer through windows. Even when the policewoman said, ‘It’s about your son, Robbie,’ Terri did not realize.

‘’E’s fine. There’s nuthin’ wrong with ’im. Krystal’s got ’im.’

But then she saw Krystal, who had refused to stay in the car, and had walked halfway up the garden path. Terri’s gaze trickled down her daughter’s body to the place where Robbie should have been clinging to her, frightened by the strange men.

Terri flew from her house like a fury, with her hands outstretched like claws, and the policewoman had to catch her round the middle and swing her away from Krystal, whose face she was trying to lacerate.

‘Yeh little bitch, yeh little bitch, what’ve yeh done ter Robbie?’

Krystal dodged the struggling pair, darted into the house and slammed the front door behind her.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ muttered the policeman under his breath.

Miles away in Hope Street, Kay and Gaia Bawden faced each other in the dark hallway. Neither of them was tall enough to replace the light bulb that had been dead for days, and they had no ladder. All day long, they had argued and almost made up, then argued again. Finally, at the moment when reconciliation seemed within touching distance, when Kay had agreed that she too hated Pagford, that it had all been a mistake, and that she would try and get them both back to London, her mobile had rung.

‘Krystal Weedon’s brother’s drowned,’ whispered Kay, as she cut Tessa’s call.

‘Oh,’ said Gaia. Knowing that she ought to express pity, but frightened to let discussion of London drop before she had her mother’s firm commitment, she added, in a tight little voice, ‘That’s sad.’

‘It happened here in Pagford,’ said Kay. ‘Along the road. Krystal was with Tessa Wall’s son.’

Gaia felt even more ashamed of letting Fats Wall kiss her. He had tasted horrible, of lager and cigarettes, and he had tried to feel her up. She was worth much more than Fats Wall, she knew that. If it had even been Andy Price, she would have felt better about it. Sukhvinder had not returned one of her calls, all day long.

‘She’ll be absolutely broken up,’ said Kay, her eyes unfocused.

‘But there’s nothing you can do,’ said Gaia. ‘Is there?’

‘Well…’ said Kay.

‘Not again!’ cried Gaia. ‘It’s always, always the same! You’re not her social worker any more! What,’ she shouted, stamping her foot as she had done when she was a little girl, ‘about me?’

The police officer in Foley Road had already called a duty social worker. Terri was writhing and screaming and trying to beat at the front door, while from behind it came the sounds of furniture being dragged to form a barricade. Neighbours were coming out onto their doorsteps, a fascinated audience to Terri’s meltdown. Somehow the cause of it was transmitted through the watchers, from Terri’s incoherent shouts and the attitudes of the ominous police.

‘The boy’s dead,’ they told each other. Nobody stepped forward to comfort or calm. Terri Weedon had no friends.

‘Come with me,’ Kay begged her mutinous daughter. ‘I’ll go to the house and see if I can do anything. I got on with Krystal. She’s got nobody.’

‘I bet she was shagging Fats Wall when it happened!’ shouted Gaia; but it was her final protest, and a few minutes later she was buckling herself into Kay’s old Vauxhall, glad, in spite of everything, that Kay had asked her along.

But by the time they had reached the bypass, Krystal had found what she was looking for: a bag of heroin concealed in the airing cupboard; the second of two that Obbo had given Terri in payment for Tessa Wall’s watch. She took it, with Terri’s works, into the bathroom, the only room that had a lock on the door.

Her aunt Cheryl must have heard what had happened, because Krystal could hear her distinctive raucous yell, added to Terri’s screams, even through the two doors.

‘You little bitch, open the door! Letcha mother see ya!’

And the police shouting, trying to shut the two women up.

Krystal had never shot up before, but she had watched it happen many times. She knew about longboats, and how to make a model volcano, and she knew how to heat the spoon, and about the tiny little ball of cotton wool you used to soak up the dissolved smack, and act as a filter when you were filling the syringe. She knew that the crook of the arm was the best place to find a vein, and she knew to lay the needle as flat as possible against the skin. She knew, because she had heard it said, many times, that first-timers could not take what addicts could manage, and that was good, because she did not want to take it.

Robbie was dead, and it was her fault. In trying to save him, she had killed him. Flickering images filled her mind as her fingers worked to achieve what must be done. Mr Fairbrother, running alongside the canal bank in his tracksuit as the crew rowed. Nana Cath’s face, fierce with pain and love. Robbie, waiting for her at the window of his foster home, unnaturally clean, jumping up and down with excitement as she approached the front door…

She could hear the policeman calling to her through the letter box not to be a silly girl, and the policewoman trying to quieten Terri and Cheryl.

The needle slid easily into Krystal’s vein. She pressed the plunger down hard, in hope and without regret.

By the time Kay and Gaia arrived, and the police decided to force their way in, Krystal Weedon had achieved her only ambition: she had joined her brother where nobody could part them.