The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling (7)

It rained on Barry Fairbrother’s grave. The ink blurred on the cards. Siobhan’s chunky sunflower head defied the pelting drops, but Mary’s lilies and freesias crumpled, then fell apart. The chrysanthemum oar darkened as it decayed. Rain swelled the river, made streams in the gutters and turned the steep roads into Pagford glossy and treacherous. The windows of the school bus were opaque with condensation; the hanging baskets in the Square became bedraggled, and Samantha Mollison, windscreen wipers on full tilt, suffered a minor collision in the car on the way home from work in the city.

A copy of the Yarvil and District Gazette stuck out of Mrs. Catherine Weedon’s door in Hope Street for three days, until it became sodden and illegible. Finally, social worker Kay Bawden tugged it out of the letterbox, peered in through the rusty flap and spotted the old lady spread-eagled at the foot of the stairs. A policeman helped break down the front door, and Mrs. Weedon was taken away in an ambulance to South West General.

Still the rain fell, forcing the sign painter who had been hired to rename the old shoe shop to postpone the job. It poured for days and into the nights, and the Square was full of hunchbacks in waterproofs, and umbrellas collided on the narrow pavements.

Howard Mollison found the gentle patter against the dark window soothing. He sat in the study that had once been his daughter Patricia’s bedroom, and contemplated the email that he had received from the local newspaper. They had decided to run Councillor Fairbrother’s article arguing that the Fields ought to remain with Pagford, but in the interests of balance, they hoped that another councillor might make the case for reassignment in the following issue.

Backfired on you, hasn’t it, Fairbrother? thought Howard happily. There you were, thinking you’d have it all your own way…

He closed the email and turned instead to the small pile of papers beside him. These were the letters that had come trickling in, requesting an election to fill Barry’s vacant seat. The constitution stated that it required nine applications to enforce a public vote, and he had received ten. He read them over, while his wife’s and his business partner’s voices rose and fell in the kitchen, stripping bare between them the meaty scandal of old Mrs. Weedon’s collapse and belated discovery.

“…don’t walk out on your doctor for nothing, do you? Screaming at the top of her voice, Karen said —”

“— saying she’d been given the wrong drugs, yes, I know,” said Shirley, who considered that she had a monopoly on medical speculation, given that she was a hospital volunteer. “They’ll run tests up at the General, I expect.”

“I’d be feeling very worried if I were Dr. Jawanda.”

“She’s probably hoping the Weedons are too ignorant to sue, but that won’t matter if the General finds out it was the wrong medication.”

“She’ll be struck off,” said Maureen with relish.

“That’s right,” said Shirley, “and I’m afraid a lot of people will feel good riddance. Good riddance.”

Methodically Howard sorted letters into piles. Miles’ completed application forms he set aside on their own. The remaining communications were from fellow Parish Councillors. There were no surprises here; as soon as Parminder had emailed him to tell him that she knew of somebody who was interested in standing for Barry’s seat, he had expected these six to rally round her, demanding an election. Together with Bends-Your-Ear herself, they were the ones he dubbed “The Obstreperous Faction,” whose leader had recently fallen. Onto this pile he placed the completed forms of Colin Wall, their chosen candidate.

Into a third pile he placed four more letters, which were, likewise, from expected sources: professional complainers of Pagford, known to Howard as perennially dissatisfied and suspicious, all prolific correspondents to the Yarvil and District Gazette. Each had their own obsessive interest in some esoteric local issue, and considered themselves “independent minded”; they would be the ones most likely to scream “nepotism” if Miles had been co-opted; but they were among the most anti-Fields people in town.

Howard took the last two letters in each hand, weighing them up. One of them was from a woman whom he had never met, who claimed (Howard took nothing for granted) to work at the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic (the fact that she styled herself “Ms.” inclined him to believe her). After some hesitation, he placed this on top of Cubby Wall’s application forms.

The last letter, unsigned and typed on a word processor, demanded an election in intemperate terms. It had an air of haste and carelessness and was littered with typos. The letter extolled the virtues of Barry Fairbrother and named Miles specifically as “unfit to fill his sheos.” Howard wondered whether Miles had a disgruntled client out there who might prove to be an embarrassment. It was good to be forewarned of such potential hazards. However, Howard doubted whether the letter, being anonymous, counted as a vote for an election. He therefore fed it into the little desktop shredder that Shirley had given him for Christmas.

Edward Collins & Co., the Pagford solicitors, occupied the upper floor of a terraced brick house, with an optician’s on the ground floor. Edward Collins was deceased and his firm comprised two men: Gavin Hughes who was the salaried partner, with one window in his office, and Miles Mollison, who was the equity partner, with two windows. They shared a secretary who was twenty-eight, single, plain but with a good figure. Shona laughed too long at all Miles’ jokes, and treated Gavin with a patronage that was almost offensive.

The Friday after Barry Fairbrother’s funeral, Miles knocked on Gavin’s door at one o’clock and entered without waiting for a summons. He found his partner looking up at the dark gray sky through the rain-speckled window.

“I’m going to nip up the road for lunch,” said Miles. “If Lucy Bevan’s early, will you tell her I’ll be back at two? Shona’s out.”

“Yeah, fine,” said Gavin.

“Everything all right?”

“Mary’s called. There’s a bit of a glitch with Barry’s life insurance. She wants me to help her sort it.”

“Right, well, you can handle that, can’t you? I’ll be back at two, anyway.”

Miles slipped on his overcoat, jogged down the steep stairs and walked briskly up the rain-swept little street that led to the Square. A momentary break in the clouds caused sunlight to flood the glistening war memorial and the hanging baskets. Miles experienced a rush of atavistic pride as he hurried across the Square towards Mollison and Lowe, that Pagford institution, that classiest of emporia; a pride that familiarity had never blighted, but rather deepened and ripened.

The bell tinkled at the door as Miles pushed it open. There was something of a lunchtime rush on: a queue of eight waited at the counter and Howard, in his mercantile regalia, fisherman’s flies glinting in his deerstalker, was in full tongue.

“…and a quarter of black olives, Rosemary, to you. Nothing else, now? Nothing else for Rosemary…that’ll be eight pounds, sixty-two pence; we’ll call it eight, my love, in light of our long and fruitful association…”

Giggles and gratitude; the rattle and crash of the till.

“And here’s my lawyer, come to check up on me,” boomed Howard, winking and chuckling over the heads of the queue at Miles. “If you’ll wait for me in the back, sir, I’ll try not to say anything incriminating to Mrs. Howson…”

Miles smiled at the middle-aged ladies, who beamed back. Tall, with thick, close-cropped graying hair, big round blue eyes, his paunch disguised by his dark overcoat, Miles was a reasonably attractive addition to the hand-baked biscuits and local cheeses. He navigated his way carefully between the little tables piled high with delicacies and paused at the big arch hewn between delicatessen and the old shoe shop, which was denuded of its protective plastic curtain for the first time. Maureen (Miles recognized the handwriting) had put up a sign on a sandwich board in the middle of the arch: No Entry. Coming Soon…The Copper Kettle. Miles peered through into the clean, spare space that would soon be Pagford’s newest and best café; it was plastered and painted, with freshly varnished black boards underfoot.

He sidled around the corner of the counter and edged past Maureen, who was operating the meat slicer, affording her the opportunity for a gruff and ribald laugh, then ducked through the door that led into the dingy little back room. Here was a Formica table, on which Maureen’s Daily Mail lay folded; Howard’s and Maureen’s coats hanging on hooks, and a door leading to the lavatory, which exuded a scent of artificial lavender. Miles hung up his overcoat and drew up an old chair to the table.

Howard appeared a minute or two later, bearing two heaped plates of delicatessen fare.

“Definitely decided on the ‘Copper Kettle’ then?” asked Miles.

“Well, Mo likes it,” said Howard, setting down a plate in front of his son.

He lumbered out, returned with two bottles of ale, and closed the door with his foot so that the room was enveloped in a windowless gloom relieved only by the dim pendant light. Howard sat down with a deep grunt. He had been conspiratorial on the telephone midmorning, and kept Miles waiting a few moments longer while he flipped off the lid of one bottle.

“Wall’s sent his forms in,” he said at last, handing over the beer.

“Ah,” said Miles.

“I’m going to set a deadline. Two weeks from today for everyone to declare.”

“Fair enough,” said Miles.

“Mum reckons this Price bloke is still interested. Have you asked Sam if she knows who he is yet?”

“No,” said Miles.

Howard scratched an underfold of the belly that rested close to his knees as he sat on the creaking chair.

“Everything all right with you and Sam?”

Miles admired, as always, his father’s almost psychic intuition.

“Not great.”

He would not have confessed it to his mother, because he tried not to fuel the constant cold war between Shirley and Samantha, in which he was both hostage and prize.

“She doesn’t like the idea of me standing,” Miles elaborated. Howard raised his fair eyebrows, his jowls wobbling as he chewed. “I don’t bloody know what’s got into her. She’s on one of her anti-Pagford kicks.”

Howard took his time swallowing. He dabbed at his mouth with a paper napkin and burped.

“She’ll come round quickly enough once you’re in,” he said. “The social side of it. Plenty for the wives. Functions at Sweetlove House. She’ll be in her element.” He took another swig of ale and scratched his belly again.

“I can’t picture this Price,” said Miles, returning to the essential point, “but I’ve got a feeling he had a kid in Lexie’s class at St. Thomas’s.”

“Fields-born, though, that’s the thing,” said Howard. “Fields-born, which could work to our advantage. Split the pro-Fields vote between him and Wall.”

“Yeah,” said Miles. “Makes sense.”

This had not occurred to him. He marveled at the way his father’s mind worked.

“Mum’s already rung his wife and got her to download the forms for him. I might get Mum to call him back tonight, tell her he’s got two weeks, try and force his hand.”

“Three candidates then?” said Miles. “With Colin Wall.”

“I haven’t heard of anyone else. It’s possible, once details hit the website, someone else’ll come forward. But I’m confident about our chances. I’m confident. Aubrey called,” Howard added. There was always a touch of additional portentousness in Howard’s tone when he used Aubrey Fawley’s Christian name. “Right behind you, goes without saying. He’s back this evening. He’s been in town.”

Usually, when a Pagfordian said “in town,” they meant “in Yarvil.” Howard and Shirley used the phrase, in imitation of Aubrey Fawley, to mean “in London.”

“He mentioned something about us all getting together for a chat. Maybe tomorrow. Might even invite us over to the house. Sam’d like that.”

Miles had just taken a large bite of soda bread and liver pâté, but he conveyed his agreement with an emphatic nod. He liked the idea that Aubrey Fawley was “right behind” him. Samantha might jeer at his parents’ thralldom to the Fawleys, but Miles noticed that on those rare occasions when Samantha came face-to-face with either Aubrey or Julia, her accent changed subtly and her demeanor became markedly more demure.

“Something else,” said Howard, scratching his belly again. “Got an email from the Yarvil and District Gazette this morning. Asking for my views on the Fields. As chair of the Parish Council.”

“You’re kidding? I thought Fairbrother had stitched that one up —”

“Backfired, didn’t it?” said Howard, with immense satisfaction. “They’re going to run his article, and they want someone to argue against the following week. Give them the other side of the story. I’d appreciate a hand. Lawyer’s turn of phrase, and all that.”

“No problem,” said Miles. “We could talk about that bloody addiction clinic. That’d make the point.”

“Yes — very good idea — excellent.”

In his enthusiasm, he had swallowed too much at once and Miles had to bang him on the back until his coughing had subsided. At last, dabbing his watering eyes with a napkin, Howard said breathlessly, “Aubrey’s recommending the District cuts funding from their end, and I’m going to put it to our lot that it’s time to terminate the lease on the building. It wouldn’t hurt to make the case in the press. How much time and money’s gone into that bloody place with nothing to show for it. I’ve got the figures.” Howard burped sonorously. “Bloody disgraceful. Pardon me.”

Gavin cooked for Kay at his house that evening, opening tins and crushing garlic with a sense of ill usage.

After a row, you had to say certain things to secure a truce: those were the rules, everyone knew that. Gavin had telephoned Kay from his car on the way back from Barry’s burial and told her that he wished she had been there, that the whole day had been horrible and that he hoped he could see her that night. He considered these humble admissions no more or less than the price he had to pay for an evening of undemanding companionship.

But Kay seemed to consider them more in the light of a down payment on a renegotiated contract. You missed me. You needed me when you were upset. You’re sorry we didn’t go as a couple. Well, let’s not make that mistake again. There had been a certain complacency about the way she had treated him since; a briskness, a sense of renewed expectation.

He was making spaghetti Bolognese tonight; he had deliberately omitted to buy a pudding or to lay the table in advance; he was at pains to show her that he had not made much of an effort. Kay seemed oblivious, even determined to take this casual attitude as a compliment. She sat at his small kitchen table, talking to him over the pitter-patter of rain on the skylight, her eyes wandering over the fixtures and fittings. She had not often been here.

“I suppose Lisa chose this yellow, did she?”

She was doing it again: breaking taboos, as though they had recently passed to a deeper level of intimacy. Gavin preferred not to talk about Lisa if he could avoid it; surely she knew that by now? He shook oregano onto the mince in his frying pan and said, “No, this was all the previous owner. I haven’t got round to changing it yet.”

“Oh,” she said, sipping wine. “Well, it’s quite nice. A bit bland.”

This rankled with Gavin, as, in his opinion, the interior of the Smithy was superior in every way to that of ten Hope Street. He watched the pasta bubbling, keeping his back to her.

“Guess what?” she said. “I met Samantha Mollison this afternoon.”

Gavin wheeled around; how did Kay even know what Samantha Mollison looked like?

“Just outside the deli in the Square; I was on my way in to get this,” said Kay, clinking the wine bottle beside her with a flick of her nail. “She asked me whether I was Gavin’s girlfriend.”

Kay said it archly, but actually she had been heartened by Samantha’s choice of words, relieved to think that this was how Gavin described her to his friends.

“And what did you say?”

“I said — I said yes.”

Her expression was crestfallen. Gavin had not meant to ask the question quite so aggressively. He would have given a lot to prevent Kay and Samantha ever meeting.

“Anyway,” Kay proceeded with a slight edge to her voice, “She’s asked us for dinner next Friday. Week today.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” said Gavin crossly.

A lot of Kay’s cheerfulness deserted her.

“What’s the problem?”

“Nothing. It’s — nothing,” he said, prodding the bubbling spaghetti. “It’s just that I see enough of Miles during work hours, to be honest.”

It was what he had dreaded all along: that she would worm her way in and they would become Gavin-and-Kay, with a shared social circle, so that it would become progressively more difficult to excise her from his life. How had he let this happen? Why had he allowed her to move down here? Fury at himself mutated easily into anger with her. Why couldn’t she realize how little he wanted her, and take herself off without forcing him to do the dirty? He drained the spaghetti in the sink, swearing under his breath as he speckled himself with boiling water.

“You’d better call Miles and Samantha and tell them ‘no,’ then,” said Kay.

Her voice had hardened. As was Gavin’s deeply ingrained habit, he sought to deflect an imminent conflict and hoped that the future would look after itself.

“No, no,” he said, dabbing at his wet shirt with a tea towel. “We’ll go. It’s fine. We’ll go.”

But in his undisguised lack of enthusiasm, he sought to put down a marker to which he could refer, retrospectively. You knew I didn’t want to go. No, I didn’t enjoy it. No, I don’t want it to happen again.

They ate for several minutes in silence. Gavin was afraid that there would be another row, and that Kay would force him to discuss underlying issues again. He cast around for something to say, and so started telling her about Mary Fairbrother and the life insurance company.

“They’re being real bastards,” he said. “He was heavily insured, but their lawyers are looking for a way not to pay out. They’re trying to make out he didn’t make a full disclosure.”

“In what way?”

“Well, an uncle died of an aneurysm, too. Mary swears Barry told the insurance agent that when he signed the policy, but it’s nowhere in the notes. Presumably the bloke didn’t realize it can be a genetic thing. I don’t know that Barry did, come to…”

Gavin’s voice broke. Horrified and embarrassed, he bowed his flushing face over his plate. There was a hard chunk of grief in his throat and he couldn’t shift it. Kay’s chair legs scraped on the floor; he hoped that she was off to the bathroom, but then felt her arms around his shoulders, drawing him to her. Without thinking, he put a single arm around her, too.

It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?

He had dribbled snot onto the back of her top.

“Sorry,” he said thickly, wiping it away with his napkin.

He withdrew from her and blew his nose. She dragged her chair to sit beside him and put a hand on his arm. He liked her so much better when she was silent, and her face was soft and concerned, as it was now.

“I still can’t…he was a good bloke,” he said. “Barry. He was a good bloke.”

“Yes, everyone says that about him,” said Kay.

She had never been allowed to meet this famous Barry Fairbrother, but she was intrigued by the show of emotion from Gavin, and by the person who had caused it.

“Was he funny?” she asked, because she could imagine Gavin in thrall to a comedian, to a rowdy ringleader, propping up the bar.

“Yeah, I s’pose. Well, not particularly. Normal. He liked a laugh but he was just such a…such a nice bloke. He liked people, you know?”

She waited, but Gavin did not seem able to elucidate further on the niceness of Barry.

“And the kids…and Mary…poor Mary…God, you’ve got no idea.”

Kay continued to pat his arm gently, but her sympathy had chilled a little. No idea, she thought, what it was to be alone? No idea how hard it was to be left in sole charge of a family? Where was his pity for her, Kay?

“They were really happy,” said Gavin, in a cracked voice. “She’s in pieces.”

Wordlessly, Kay stroked his arm, reflecting that she had never been able to afford to go to pieces.

“I’m all right,” he said, wiping his nose on his napkin and picking up his fork. By the smallest of twitches, he indicated that she should remove her hand.

Samantha’s dinner invitation to Kay had been motivated by a mixture of vengefulness and boredom. She saw it as retaliation against Miles, who was always busy with schemes in which he gave her no say but with which he expected her to cooperate; she wanted to see how he liked it when she arranged things without consulting him. Then she would be stealing a march on Maureen and Shirley, those nosy old crones, who were so fascinated by Gavin’s private affairs but knew next to nothing about the relationship between him and his London girlfriend. Finally, it would afford her another opportunity to sharpen her claws on Gavin for being pusillanimous and indecisive about his love life: she might talk about weddings in front of Kay or say how nice it was to see Gavin making a commitment at last.

However, her plans for the discomfiture of others gave Samantha less pleasure than she had hoped. When on Saturday morning she told Miles what she had done, he reacted with suspicious enthusiasm.

“Great, yeah, we haven’t had Gavin round for ages. And nice for you to get to know Kay.”

“Why?”

“Well, you always got on with Lisa, didn’t you?”

“Miles, I hated Lisa.”

“Well, OK…maybe you’ll like Kay better!”

She glared at him, wondering where all this good humor was coming from. Lexie and Libby, home for the weekend and cooped up in the house because of the rain, were watching a music DVD in the sitting room; a guitar-laden ballad blared through to the kitchen where their parents stood talking.

“Listen,” said Miles, brandishing his mobile, “Aubrey wants to have a talk with me about the council. I’ve just called Dad, and the Fawleys have invited us all to dinner tonight at Sweetlove —”

“No thanks,” said Samantha, cutting him off. She was suddenly full of a fury she could barely explain, even to herself. She walked out of the room.

They argued in low voices all over the house through the day, trying not to spoil their daughters’ weekend. Samantha refused to change her mind or to discuss her reasons. Miles, afraid of getting angry at her, was alternately conciliatory and cold.

“How do you think it’s going to look if you don’t come?” he said at ten to eight that evening, standing in the doorway of the sitting room, ready to leave, wearing a suit and tie.

“It’s nothing to do with me, Miles,” Samantha said. “You’re the one running for office.”

She liked watching him dither. She knew that he was terrified of being late, yet wondering whether he could still persuade her to go with him.

“You know they’ll be expecting both of us.”

“Really? Nobody sent me an invitation.”

“Oh, come off it, Sam, you know they meant — they took it for granted —”

“More fool them, then. I’ve told you, I don’t fancy it. You’d better hurry. You don’t want to keep Mummy and Daddy waiting.”

He left. She listened to the car reversing out of the drive, then went into the kitchen, opened a bottle of wine and brought it back into the sitting room with a glass. She kept picturing Howard, Shirley and Miles all having dinner together at Sweetlove House. It would surely be the first orgasm Shirley had had in years.

Her thoughts swerved irresistibly to what her accountant had said to her during the week. Profits were way down, whatever she had pretended to Howard. The accountant had actually suggested closing the shop and concentrating on the online side of the business. This would be an admission of failure that Samantha was not prepared to make. For one thing, Shirley would love it if the shop closed; she had been a bitch about it from the start. I’m sorry, Sam, it’s not really my taste…just a teeny bit over the top…But Samantha loved her little red and black shop in Yarvil; loved getting away from Pagford every day, chatting to customers, gossiping with Carly, her assistant. Her world would be tiny without the shop she had nurtured for fourteen years; it would contract, in short, to Pagford.

(Pagford, bloody Pagford. Samantha had never meant to live here. She and Miles had planned a year out before starting work, a round-the-world trip. They had their itinerary mapped out, their visas ready. Samantha had dreamed about walking barefoot and hand in hand on long white Australian beaches. And then she had found out that she was pregnant.

She had come down to visit him at “Ambleside,” a day after she had taken the pregnancy test, one week after their graduation. They were supposed to be leaving for Singapore in eight days’ time.

Samantha had not wanted to tell Miles in his parents’ house; she was afraid that they would overhear. Shirley seemed to be behind every door Samantha opened in the bungalow.

So she waited until they were sitting at a dark corner table in the Black Canon. She remembered the rigid line of Miles’ jaw when she told him; he seemed, in some indefinable way, to become older as the news hit him.

He did not speak for several petrified seconds. Then he said, “Right. We’ll get married.”

He told her that he had already bought her a ring, that he had been planning to propose somewhere good, somewhere like the top of Ayers Rock. Sure enough, when they got back to the bungalow, he unearthed the little box from where he had already hidden it in his rucksack. It was a small solitaire diamond from a jeweler’s in Yarvil; he had bought it with some of the money his grandmother had left him. Samantha had sat on the edge of Miles’ bed and cried and cried. They had married three months later.)

Alone with her bottle of wine, Samantha turned on the television. It brought up the DVD Lexie and Libby had been watching: a frozen image of four young men singing to her in tight T-shirts; they looked barely out of their teens. She pressed play. After the boys finished their song, the DVD cut to an interview. Samantha slugged back her wine, watching the band joking with each other, then becoming earnest as they discussed how much they loved their fans. She thought that she would have known them as Americans even if the sound had been off. Their teeth were perfect.

It grew late; she paused the DVD, went upstairs and told the girls to leave the PlayStation and go to bed; then she returned to the sitting room, where she was three-quarters of the way down the bottle of wine. She had not turned on the lamps. She pressed play and kept drinking. When the DVD finished, she put it back to the beginning and watched the bit she had missed.

One of the boys appeared significantly more mature than the other three. He was broader across the shoulders; biceps bulged beneath the short sleeves of his T-shirt; he had a thick strong neck and a square jaw. Samantha watched him undulating, staring into the camera with a detached serious expression on his handsome face, which was all planes and angles and winged black eyebrows.

She thought of sex with Miles. It had last happened three weeks previously. His performance was as predictable as a Masonic handshake. One of his favorite sayings was “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”

Samantha emptied the last of the bottle into her glass and imagined making love to the boy on the screen. Her breasts looked better in a bra these days; they spilled everywhere when she lay down; it made her feel flabby and awful. She pictured herself, forced back against a wall, one leg propped up, a dress pushed up to her waist and that strong dark boy with his jeans round his knees, thrusting in and out of her…

With a lurch in the pit of her stomach that was almost like happiness, she heard the car turning back into the drive and the beams of the headlights swung around the dark sitting room.

She fumbled with the controls to turn over to the news, which took her much longer than it ought to have done; she shoved the empty wine bottle under the sofa and clutched her almost empty glass as a prop. The front door opened and closed. Miles entered the room behind her.

“Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

He turned on a lamp and she glanced up at him. He was as well groomed as he had been when he left, except for the raindrops on the shoulders of his jacket.

“How was dinner?”

“Fine,” he said. “You were missed. Aubrey and Julia were sorry you couldn’t make it.”

“Oh, I’m sure. And I’ll bet your mother cried with disappointment.”

He sat down in an armchair at right angles to her, staring at her. She pushed her hair out of her eyes.

“What’s this all about, Sam?”

“If you don’t know, Miles —”

But she was not sure herself; or at least, she did not know how to condense this sprawling sense of ill-usage into a coherent accusation.

“I can’t see how me standing for the Parish Council —”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Miles!” she shouted, and was then slightly taken aback by how loud her voice was.

“Explain to me, please,” he said, “what possible difference it can make to you?”

She glared at him, struggling to articulate it for his pedantic legal mind, which was like a fiddling pair of tweezers in the way that it seized on poor choices of word, yet so often failed to grasp the bigger picture. What could she say that he would understand? That she found Howard and Shirley’s endless talk about the council boring as hell? That he was quite tedious enough already, with his endlessly retold anecdotes about the good old days back at the rugby club and his self-congratulatory stories about work, without adding pontifications about the Fields?

“Well, I was under the impression,” said Samantha, in their dimly lit sitting room, “That we had other plans.”

“Like what?” said Miles. “What are you talking about?”

“We said,” Samantha articulated carefully over the rim of her trembling glass, “that once the girls were out of school, we’d go traveling. We promised each other that, remember?”

The formless rage and misery that had consumed her since Miles announced his intention to stand for the council had not once led her to mourn the year’s traveling she had missed, but at this moment it seemed to her that that was the real problem; or at least, that it came closest to expressing both the antagonism and the yearning inside her.

Miles seemed completely bewildered.

“What are you talking about?”

“When I got pregnant with Lexie,” Samantha said loudly, “and we couldn’t go traveling, and your bloody mother made us get married in double-quick time, and your father got you a job with Edward Collins, you said, we agreed, that we’d do it when the girls were grown up; we said we’d go away and do all the things we missed out on.”

He shook his head slowly.

“This is news to me,” he said. “Where the hell has this come from?”

“Miles, we were in the Black Canon. I told you I was pregnant, and you said — for Christ’s sake, Miles — I told you I was pregnant, and you promised me, you promised —”

“You want a holiday?” said Miles. “Is that it? You want a holiday?”

“No, Miles, I don’t want a bloody holiday, I want — don’t you remember? We said we’d take a year out and do it later, when the kids were grown up!”

“Fine, then.” He seemed unnerved, determined to brush her aside. “Fine. When Libby’s eighteen; in four years’ time, we’ll talk about it again. I don’t see how me becoming a councillor affects any of this.”

“Well, apart from the bloody boredom of listening to you and your parents whining about the Fields for the rest of our natural lives —”

“Our natural lives?” he smirked. “As opposed to —?”

“Piss off,” she spat. “Don’t be such a bloody smartarse, Miles, it might impress your mother —”

“Well, frankly, I still don’t see what the problem —”

“The problem,” she shouted, “is that this is about our future, Miles. Our future. And I don’t want to bloody talk about it in four years’ time, I want to talk about it now!”

“I think you’d better eat something,” said Miles. He got to his feet. “You’ve had enough to drink.”

“Screw you, Miles!”

“Sorry, if you’re going to be abusive…”

He turned and walked out of the room. She barely stopped herself throwing her wineglass after him.

The council: if he got on it, he would never get off; he would never renounce his seat, the chance to be a proper Pagford big shot, like Howard. He was committing himself anew to Pagford, retaking his vows to the town of his birth, to a future quite different from the one he had promised his distraught new fiancée as she sat sobbing on his bed.

When had they last talked about traveling the world? She was not sure. Years and years ago, perhaps, but tonight Samantha decided that she, at least, had never changed her mind. Yes, she had always expected that some day they would pack up and leave, in search of heat and freedom, half the globe away from Pagford, Shirley, Mollison and Lowe, the rain, the pettiness and the sameness. Perhaps she had not thought of the white sands of Australia and Singapore with longing for many years, but she would rather be there, even with her heavy thighs and her stretch marks, than here, trapped in Pagford, forced to watch as Miles turned slowly into Howard.

She slumped back down on the sofa, groped for the controls, and switched back to Libby’s DVD. The band, now in black and white, was walking slowly along a long empty beach, singing. The broad-shouldered boy’s shirt was flapping open in the breeze. A fine trail of hair led from his navel down into his jeans.

Alison Jenkins, the journalist from the Yarvil and District Gazette, had at last established which of the many Weedon households in Yarvil housed Krystal. It had been difficult: nobody was registered to vote at the address and no landline number was listed for the property. Alison visited Foley Road in person on Sunday, but Krystal was out, and Terri, suspicious and antagonistic, refused to say when she would be back or confirm that she lived there.

Krystal arrived home a mere twenty minutes after the journalist had departed in her car, and she and her mother had another row.

“Why din’t ya tell her to wait? She was gonna interview me abou’ the Fields an’ stuff!”

“Interview you? Fuck off. Wha’ the fuck for?”

The argument escalated and Krystal walked out again, off to Nikki’s, with Terri’s mobile in her tracksuit bottoms. She frequently made off with this phone; many rows were triggered by her mother demanding it back and Krystal pretending that she didn’t know where it was. Dimly, Krystal hoped that the journalist might know the number somehow and call her directly.

She was in a crowded, jangling café in the shopping center, telling Nikki and Leanne all about the journalist, when the mobile rang.

“’Oo? Are you the journalist, like?”

“…o’s ’at…’erri?”

“It’s Krystal. ’Oo’s this?”

“…’m your…’nt…other…’ister.”

“’Oo?” shouted Krystal. One finger in the ear not pressed against the phone, she wove her way between the densely packed tables to reach a quieter place.

“Danielle,” said the woman, loud and clear on the other end of the telephone. “I’m yer mum’s sister.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Krystal, disappointed.

Fuckin’ snobby bitch, Terri always said when Danielle’s name came up. Krystal was not sure that she had ever met Danielle.

“It’s abou’ your great gran.”

“’O’o?”

“Nana Cath,” said Danielle impatiently. Krystal reached the balcony overlooking the shopping center forecourt; reception was strong here; she stopped.

“Wha’s wrong with ’er?” said Krystal. It felt as though her stomach was flipping over, the way it had done as a little girl, turning somersaults on a railing like the one in front of her. Thirty feet below, the crowds surged, carrying plastic bags, pushing buggies and dragging toddlers.

“She’s in South West General. She’s been there a week. She’s had a stroke.”

“She’s bin there a week?” said Krystal, her stomach still swooping. “Nobody told us.”

“Yeah, well, she can’t speak prop’ly, but she’s said your name twice.”

“Mine?” asked Krystal, clutching the mobile tightly.

“Yeah. I think she’d like to see yeh. It’s serious. They’re sayin’ she migh’ not recover.”

“Wha’ ward is it?” asked Krystal, her mind buzzing.

“Twelve. High-dependency. Visiting hours are twelve till four, six till eight. All righ’?”

“Is it —?”

“I gotta go. I only wanted to let you know, in case you want to see her. “Bye.”

The line went dead. Krystal lowered the mobile from her ear, staring at the screen. She pressed a button repeatedly with her thumb, until she saw the word “blocked.” Her aunt had withheld her number.

Krystal walked back to Nikki and Leanne. They knew at once that something was wrong.

“Go an’ see ’er,” said Nikki, checking the time on her own mobile. “Yeh’ll ge’ there fer two. Ge’ the bus.”

“Yeah,” said Krystal blankly.

She thought of fetching her mother, of taking her and Robbie to go and see Nana Cath too, but there had been a huge row a year before, and her mother and Nana Cath had had no contact since. Krystal was sure that Terri would take an immense amount of persuading to go to the hospital, and was not sure that Nana Cath would be happy to see her.

It’s serious. They’re saying she might not recover.

“’Ave yeh gor enough cash?” said Leanne, rummaging in her pockets as the three of them walked up the road toward the bus stop.

“Yeah,” said Krystal, checking. “It’s on’y a quid up the hospital, innit?”

They had time to share a cigarette before the number twenty-seven arrived. Nikki and Leanne waved her off as though she were going somewhere nice. At the very last moment, Krystal felt scared and wanted to shout “Come with me!” But then the bus pulled away from the curb, and Nikki and Leanne were already turning away, gossiping.

The seat was prickly, covered in some old smelly fabric. The bus trundled onto the road that ran by the precinct and turned right into one of the main thoroughfares that led through all the big-name shops.

Fear fluttered inside Krystal’s belly like a fetus. She had known that Nana Cath was getting older and frailer, but somehow, vaguely, she had expected her to regenerate, to return to the heyday that had seemed to last so long; for her hair to turn black again, her spine to straighten and her memory to sharpen like her caustic tongue. She had never thought about Nana Cath dying, always associating her with toughness and invulnerability. If she had considered them at all, Krystal would have thought of the deformity to Nana Cath’s chest, and the innumerable wrinkles crisscrossing her face, as honorable scars sustained during her successful battle to survive. Nobody close to Krystal had ever died of old age.

(Death came to the young in her mother’s circle, sometimes even before their faces and bodies had become emaciated and ravaged. The body that Krystal had found in the bathroom when she was six had been of a handsome young man, as white and lovely as a statue, or that was how she remembered him. But sometimes she found that memory confusing and doubted it. It was hard to know what to believe. She had often heard things as a child that adults later contradicted and denied. She could have sworn that Terri had said, “It was yer dad.” But then, much later, she had said, “Don’ be so silly. Yer dad’s not dead, ’e’s in Bristol, innee?” So Krystal had had to try and reattach herself to the idea of Banger, which was what everybody called the man they said was her father.

But always, in the background, there had been Nana Cath. She had escaped foster care because of Nana Cath, ready and waiting in Pagford, a strong if uncomfortable safety net. Swearing and furious, she had swooped, equally aggressive to Terri and to the social workers, and taken her equally angry great-granddaughter home.

Krystal did not know whether she had loved or hated that little house in Hope Street. It was dingy and it smelled of bleach; it gave you a hemmed-in feeling. At the same time, it was safe, entirely safe. Nana Cath would only let approved individuals in through the door. There were old-fashioned bath cubes in a glass jar on the end of the bath.)

What if there were other people at Nana Cath’s bedside, when she got there? She would not recognize half her own family, and the idea that she might come across strangers tied to her by blood scared her. Terri had several half sisters, products of her father’s multiple liaisons, whom even Terri had never met; but Nana Cath tried to keep up with them all, doggedly maintaining contact with the large disconnected family her sons had produced. Occasionally, over the years, relatives Krystal did not recognize had turned up at Nana Cath’s while she was there. Krystal thought that they eyed her askance and said things about her under their voices to Nana Cath; she pretended not to notice and waited for them to leave, so that she could have Nana Cath to herself again. She especially disliked the idea that there were any other children in Nana Cath’s life.

(“’Oo are they?” Krystal had asked Nana Cath when she was nine, pointing jealously at a framed photograph of two boys in Paxton High uniforms on Nana Cath’s sideboard.

“Them’s two o’ my great-grandsons,” said Nana Cath. “Tha’s Dan and tha’s Ricky. They’re your cousins.”

Krystal did not want them as cousins, and she did not want them on Nana Cath’s sideboard.

“An’ who’s tha’?” she demanded, pointing at a little girl with curly golden hair.

“Tha’s my Michael’s little girl, Rhiannon, when she were five. Beau’iful, weren’t she? Bu’ she wen’ an’ married some wog,” said Nana Cath.

There had never been a photograph of Robbie on Nana Cath’s sideboard.

Yeh don’t even know who the father is, do yeh, yer whore? I’m washin’ my ’ands of yeh. I’ve ’ad enough, Terri, I’ve ’ad it: you can look after it yourself.)

The bus trundled on through town, past all the Sunday afternoon shoppers. When Krystal had been small, Terri had taken her into the center of Yarvil nearly every weekend, forcing her into a pushchair long past the age when Krystal needed it, because it was so much easier to hide nicked stuff with a pushchair, push it down under the kid’s legs, hide it under the bags in the basket under the seat. Sometimes Terri would go on tandem shoplifting trips with the sister she spoke to, Cheryl, who was married to Shane Tully. Cheryl and Terri lived four streets away from each other in the Fields, and petrified the air with their language when they argued, which was frequently. Krystal never knew whether she and her Tully cousins were supposed to be on speaking terms or not, and no longer bothered keeping track, but she spoke to Dane whenever she ran across him. They had shagged, once, after splitting a bottle of cider out on the rec when they were fourteen. Neither of them had ever mentioned it afterwards. Krystal was hazy on whether or not it was legal, doing your cousin. Something Nikki had said had made her think that maybe it wasn’t.

The bus rolled up the road that led to the main entrance of South West General, and stopped twenty yards from an enormous long rectangular gray and glass building. There were patches of neat grass, a few small trees and a forest of signposts.

Krystal followed two old ladies out of the bus and stood with her hands in her tracksuit pockets, looking around. She had already forgotten what kind of ward Danielle had told her Nana Cath was on; she recalled only the number twelve. She approached the nearest signpost with a casual air, squinting at it almost incidentally: it bore line upon line of impenetrable print, with words as long as Krystal’s arm and arrows pointing left, right, diagonally. Krystal did not read well; being confronted with large quantities of words made her feel intimidated and aggressive. After several surreptitious glances at the arrows, she decided that there were no numbers there at all, so she followed the two old ladies towards the double glass doors at the front of the main building.

The foyer was crowded and more confusing than the signposts. There was a bustling shop, which was separated from the main hall by floor to ceiling windows; there were rows of plastic chairs, which seemed to be full of people eating sandwiches; there was a packed café in the corner; and a kind of hexagonal counter in the middle of the floor, where women were answering inquiries as they checked their computers. Krystal headed there, her hands still in her pockets.

“Where’s ward twelve?” Krystal asked one of the women in a surly voice.

“Third floor,” said the woman, matching her tone.

Krystal did not want to ask anything else out of pride, so she turned and walked away, until she spotted lifts at the far end of the foyer and entered one going up.

It took her nearly fifteen minutes to find the ward. Why didn’t they put up numbers and arrows, not these stupid long words? But then, walking along a pale green corridor with her trainers squeaking on the linoleum floor, someone called her name.

“Krystal?”

It was her aunt Cheryl, big and broad in a denim skirt and tight white vest, with banana-yellow black-rooted hair. She was tattooed from her knuckles to the tops of her thick arms, and wore multiple gold hoops like curtain rings in each ear. There was a can of Coke in her hand.

“She ain’ bothered, then?” said Cheryl. Her bare legs were planted firmly apart, like a sentry guard.

“’Oo?”

“Terri. She din’ wanna come?”

“She don’ know ye’. I on’y jus’ ’eard. Danielle called an’ tole me.”

Cheryl ripped off the ring-pull and slurped Coke, her tiny eyes sunken in a wide, flat face that was mottled like corned beef, scrutinizing Krystal over the top of the can.

“I tole Danielle ter call yeh when it ’appened. Three days she were lyin’ in the ’ouse, and no one fuckin’ found ’er. The state of ’er. Fuckin’ ’ell.”

Krystal did not ask Cheryl why she herself had not walked the short distance to Foley Road to tell Terri the news. Evidently the sisters had fallen out again. It was impossible to keep up.

“Where is she?” asked Krystal.

Cheryl led the way, her flip-flops making a slapping noise on the floor.

“Hey,” she said, as they walked. “I ’ad a call fr’m a journalist about you.”

“Didja?”

“She give me a number.”

Krystal would have asked more questions, but they had entered a very quiet ward, and she was suddenly frightened. She did not like the smell.

Nana Cath was almost unrecognizable. One side of her face was terribly twisted, as though the muscles had been pulled with a wire. Her mouth dragged to one side; even her eye seemed to droop. There were tubes taped to her, a needle in her arm. Lying down, the deformity in her chest was much more obvious. The sheet rose and fell in odd places, as if the grotesque head on its scrawny neck protruded from a barrel.

When Krystal sat down beside her, Nana Cath made no movement. She simply gazed. One little hand trembled slightly.

“She ain’ talkin’, bu’ she said yer name, twice, las’ nigh’,” Cheryl told her, staring gloomily over the rim of her can.

There was a tightness in Krystal’s chest. She did not know whether it would hurt Nana Cath to hold her hand. She edged her own fingers to within a few inches of Nana Cath’s, but let them rest on the bedspread.

“Rhiannon’s bin in,” said Cheryl. “An’ John an’ Sue. Sue’s tryin’ ter get hold of Anne-Marie.”

Krystal’s spirits leaped.

“Where is she?” she asked Cheryl.

“Somewhere out Frenchay way. Y’know she’s got a baby now?”

“Yeah, I ’eard,” said Krystal. “Wha’ was it?”

“Dunno,” said Cheryl, swigging Coke.

Someone at school had told her: Hey, Krystal, your sister’s up the duff! She had been excited by the news. She was going to be an auntie, even if she never saw the baby. All her life, she had been in love with the idea of Anne-Marie, who had been taken away before Krystal was born; spirited into another dimension, like a fairy-tale character, as beautiful and mysterious as the dead man in Terri’s bathroom.

Nana Cath’s lips moved.

“Wha’?” said Krystal, bending low, half scared, half elated.

“D’yeh wan’ somethin’, Nana Cath?” asked Cheryl, so loudly that whispering guests at other beds stared over.

Krystal could hear a wheezing, rattling noise, but Nana Cath seemed to be making a definite attempt to form a word. Cheryl was leaning over the other side, one hand gripping the metal bars at the head of the bed.

“…Oh…mm,” said Nana Cath.

“Wha’?” said Krystal and Cheryl together.

The eyes had moved millimeters: rheumy, filmy eyes, looking at Krystal’s smooth young face, her open mouth, as she leaned over her great-grandmother, puzzled, eager and fearful.

“…owin…” said the cracked old voice.

“She dunno wha’ she’s sayin’,” Cheryl shouted over her shoulder at the timid couple visiting at the next bed. “Three days lef’ on the fuckin’ floor, ’s ’not surprisin’, is it?”

But tears had blurred Krystal’s eyes. The ward with its high windows dissolved into white light and shadow; she seemed to see a flash of bright sunlight on dark green water, fragmented into brilliant shards by the splashing rise and fall of oars.

“Yeah,” she whispered to Nana Cath. “Yeah, I goes rowin’, Nana.”

But it was no longer true, because Mr. Fairbrother was dead.

“The fuck have you done to your face? Come off the bike again?” asked Fats.

“No,” said Andrew. “Si-Pie hit me. I was trying to tell the stupid cunt he’d got it wrong about Fairbrother.”

He and his father had been in the woodshed, filling the baskets that sat on either side of the wood burner in the sitting room. Simon had hit Andrew around the head with a log, knocking him into the pile of wood, grazing his acne-covered cheek.

D’you think you know more about what goes on than I do, you spotty little shit? If I hear you’ve breathed a word of what goes on in this house —

I haven’t —

I’ll fucking skin you alive, d’you hear me? How do you know Fairbrother wasn’t on the fiddle too, eh? And the other fucker was the only one dumb enough to get caught?

And then, whether out of pride or defiance, or because his fantasies of easy money had taken too strong a hold on his imagination to become dislodged by facts, Simon had sent in his application forms. Humiliation, for which the whole family would surely pay, was a certainty.

Sabotage. Andrew brooded on the word. He wanted to bring his father crashing down from the heights to which his dreams of easy money had raised him, and he wanted to do it, if at all possible (for he preferred glory without death), in such a way that Simon would never know whose maneuverings had brought his ambitions to rubble.

He confided in nobody, not even Fats. He told Fats nearly everything, but the few omissions were the vast topics, the ones that occupied nearly all his interior space. It was one thing to sit in Fats’ room with hard-ons and look up “girl-on-girl action” on the Internet: quite another to confess how obsessively he pondered ways of engaging Gaia Bawden in conversation. Likewise, it was easy to sit in the Cubby Hole and call his father a cunt, but never would he have told how Simon’s rages turned his hands cold and his stomach queasy.

But then came the hour that changed everything. It started with nothing more than a yearning for nicotine and beauty. The rain had passed off at last, and the pale spring sun shone brightly on the fish-scale dirt on the school-bus windows as it jerked and lurched through the narrow streets of Pagford. Andrew was sitting near the back, unable to see Gaia, who was hemmed in at the front by Sukhvinder and the fatherless Fairbrother girls, newly returned to school. He had barely seen Gaia all day and faced a barren evening with only stale Facebook pictures to console him.

As the bus approached Hope Street, it struck Andrew that neither of his parents was at home to notice his absence. Three cigarettes that Fats had given him resided in his inside pocket; and Gaia was getting up, holding tightly to the bar on the back of the seat, readying herself to descend, still talking to Sukhvinder Jawanda.

Why not? Why not?

So he got up too, swung his bag over his shoulder, and when the bus stopped walked briskly up the aisle after the two girls as they got out.

“See you at home,” he threw out to a startled Paul as he passed.

He reached the sunny pavement and the bus rumbled away. Lighting up, he watched Gaia and Sukhvinder over the top of his cupped hands. They were not heading towards Gaia’s house in Hope Street, but ambling up towards the Square. Smoking and scowling slightly in unconscious imitation of the most unself-conscious person he knew — Fats — Andrew followed them, his eyes feasting on Gaia’s copper-brown hair as it bounced on her shoulder blades, the swing of her skirt as her hips swayed beneath it.

The two girls slowed down as they approached the Square, advancing towards Mollison and Lowe, which had the most impressive facade of them all: blue and gold lettering across the front and four hanging baskets. Andrew hung back. The girls paused to examine a small white sign pasted to the window of the new café, then disappeared into the delicatessen.

Andrew walked once around the Square, past the Black Canon and the George Hotel, and stopped at the sign. It was a hand-lettered advertisement for weekend staff.

Hyperconscious of his acne, which was particularly virulent at the moment, he knocked out the end of his cigarette, put the long stub back into his pocket and followed Gaia and Sukhvinder inside.

The girls were standing beside a little table piled high with boxed oatcakes and crackers, watching the enormous man in the deerstalker behind the counter talking to an elderly customer. Gaia looked around when the bell over the door tinkled.

“Hi,” Andrew said, his mouth dry.

“Hi,” she replied.

Blinded by his own daring, Andrew walked nearer, and the schoolbag over his shoulder bumped into the revolving stand of guides to Pagford and Traditional West Country Cooking. He seized the stand and steadied it, then hastily lowered his bag.

“You after a job?” Gaia asked him quietly, in her miraculous London accent.

“Yeah,” he said. “You?”

She nodded.

“Flag it up on the suggestion page, Eddie,” Howard was booming at the customer. “Post it on the website, and I’ll get it on the agenda for you. Pagford Parish Council — all one word — dot co, dot UK, slash, Suggestion Page. Or follow the link. Pagford…” He reiterated slowly, as the man pulled out paper and a pen with a quivering hand, “…Parish…”

Howard’s eyes flicked over the three teenagers waiting quietly beside the savory biscuits. They were wearing the halfhearted uniform of Winterdown, which permitted so much laxity and variation that it was barely a uniform at all (unlike that of St. Anne’s, which comprised a neat tartan skirt and a blazer). For all that, the white girl was stunning; a precision-cut diamond set off by the plain Jawanda daughter, whose name Howard did not know, and a mouse-haired boy with violently erupted skin.

The customer creaked out of the shop, the bell tinkled.

“Can I help you?” Howard asked, his eyes on Gaia.

“Yeah,” she said, moving forwards. “Um. About the jobs.” She pointed at the small sign in the window.

“Ah, yes,” said Howard, beaming. His new weekend waiter had let him down a few days previously; thrown over the café for Yarvil and a supermarket job. “Yes, yes. Fancy waitressing, do you? We’re offering minimum wage — nine to half past five, Saturdays — twelve to half past five, Sundays. Opening two weeks from today; training provided. How old are you, my love?”

She was perfect, perfect, exactly what he had been imagining: fresh-faced and curvy; he could just imagine her in a figure-hugging black dress with a lace-edged white apron. He would teach her to use the till, and show her around the stockroom; there would be a bit of banter, and perhaps a little bonus on days when the takings were up.

Howard sidled out from behind the counter and, ignoring Sukhvinder and Andrew, took Gaia by the upper arm, and led her through the arch in the dividing wall. There were no tables and chairs there yet, but the counter had been installed and so had a tiled black and cream mural on the wall behind it, which showed the Square in Yesteryear. Crinolined women and men in top hats swarmed everywhere; a brougham carriage had drawn up outside a clearly marked Mollison and Lowe, and beside it was the little café, The Copper Kettle. The artist had improvised an ornamental pump instead of the war memorial.

Andrew and Sukhvinder were left behind, awkward and vaguely antagonistic to each other.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

A stooping woman with a jet-black bouffant had emerged from out of a back room. Andrew and Sukhvinder muttered that they were waiting, and then Howard and Gaia reappeared in the archway. When he saw Maureen, Howard dropped Gaia’s arm, which he had been holding absentmindedly while he explained to her what a waitress’s duties would be.

“I might have found us some more help for the Kettle, Mo,” he said.

“Oh, yes?” said Maureen, switching her hungry gaze to Gaia. “Have you got experience?”

But Howard boomed over her, telling Gaia all about the delicatessen and how he liked to think it was a bit of a Pagford institution, a bit of a landmark.

“Thirty-five years, it’s been,” said Howard, with a majestic disdain of his own mural. “The young lady’s new to town, Mo,” he added.

“And you two are after jobs as well, are you?” Maureen asked Sukhvinder and Andrew.

Sukhvinder shook her head; Andrew made an equivocal movement with his shoulders; but Gaia said, with her eyes on the girl, “Go on. You said you might.”

Howard considered Sukhvinder, who would most certainly not appear to advantage in a tight black dress and frilly apron; but his fertile and flexible mind was firing in all directions. A compliment to her father — something of a hold over her mother — an unasked favor granted; there were matters beyond the purely aesthetic that ought, perhaps, to be considered here.

“Well, if we get the business we’re expecting, we could probably do with two,” he said, scratching his chins with his eyes on Sukhvinder, who had blushed unattractively.

“I don’t…” she said, but Gaia urged her.

“Go on. Together.”

Sukhvinder was flushed, and her eyes were watering.

“I…”

“Go on,” whispered Gaia.

“I…all right.”

“We’ll give you a trial, then, Miss Jawanda,” said Howard.

Doused in fear, Sukhvinder could hardly breathe. What would her mother say?

“And I suppose you’re wanting to be potboy, are you?” Howard boomed at Andrew.

Potboy?

“It’s heavy lifting we need, my friend,” said Howard, while Andrew blinked at him nonplussed: he had only read the large type at the top of the sign. “Pallets into the stockroom, crates of milk up from the cellar and rubbish bagged up at the back. Proper manual labor. Do you think you can handle that?”

“Yeah,” said Andrew. Would he be there when Gaia was there? That was all that mattered.

“We’ll need you early. Eight o’clock, probably. We’ll say eight till three, and see how it goes. Trial period of two weeks.”

“Yeah, fine,” said Andrew.

“What’s your name?”

When Howard heard it, he raised his eyebrows.

“Is your father Simon? Simon Price?”

“Yeah.”

Andrew was unnerved. Nobody knew who his father was, usually.

Howard told the two girls to come back on Sunday afternoon, when the till was to be delivered, and he would be at liberty to instruct them; then, though he showed an inclination to keep Gaia in conversation, a customer entered, and the teenagers took their chance to slip outside.

Andrew could think of nothing to say once they found themselves on the other side of the tinkling glass door; but before he could marshal his thoughts, Gaia threw him a careless “bye,” and walked away with Sukhvinder. Andrew lit up the second of Fats’ three fags (this was no time for a half-smoked stub), which gave him an excuse to remain stationary while he watched her walk away into the lengthening shadows.

“Why do they call him ‘Peanut,’ that boy?” Gaia asked Sukhvinder, once they were out of earshot of Andrew.

“He’s allergic,” said Sukhvinder. She was horrified at the prospect of telling Parminder what she had done. Her voice sounded like somebody else’s. “He nearly died at St. Thomas’s; somebody gave him one hidden in a marshmallow.”

“Oh,” said Gaia. “I thought it might be because he had a tiny dick.”

She laughed, and so did Sukhvinder, forcing herself, as though jokes about penises were all she heard, day in, day out.

Andrew saw them both glance back at him as they laughed, and knew that they were talking about him. The giggling might be a hopeful sign; he knew that much about girls, anyway. Grinning at nothing but the cooling air, he walked off, schoolbag over his shoulder, cigarette in his hand, across the Square towards Church Row, and thence to forty minutes of steep climbing up out of town to Hilltop House.

The hedgerows were ghostly pale with white blossom in the dusk, blackthorn blooming on either side of him, celandine fringing the lane with tiny, glossy heart-shaped leaves. The smell of the flowers, the deep pleasure of the cigarette and the promise of weekends with Gaia; everything blended together into a glorious symphony of elation and beauty as Andrew puffed up the hill. The next time Simon said “got a job, Pizza Face?” he would be able to say “yes.” He was going to be Gaia Bawden’s weekend workmate.

And, to cap it all, he knew at last exactly how he might plunge an anonymous dagger straight between his father’s shoulder blades.

Once the first impulse of spite had worn off, Samantha bitterly regretted inviting Gavin and Kay to dinner. She spent Friday morning joking with her assistant about the dreadful evening she was bound to have, but her mood plummeted once she had left Carly in charge of Over the Shoulder Boulder Holders (a name that had made Howard laugh so hard the first time he had heard it that it had brought on an asthma attack, and which made Shirley scowl whenever it was spoken in her presence). Driving back to Pagford ahead of the rush hour, so that she could shop for ingredients and start cooking, Samantha tried to cheer herself up by thinking of nasty questions to ask Gavin. Perhaps she might wonder aloud why Kay had not moved in with him: that would be a good one.

Walking home from the Square with bulging Mollison and Lowe carrier bags in each hand, she came across Mary Fairbrother beside the cash-point machine in the wall of Barry’s bank.

“Mary, hi…how are you?”

Mary was thin and pale, with gray patches around her eyes. Their conversation was stilted and strange. They had not spoken since the journey in the ambulance, barring brief, awkward condolences at the funeral.

“I’ve been meaning to drop in,” Mary said, “you were so kind — and I wanted to thank Miles —”

“No need,” Samantha said awkwardly.

“Oh, but I’d like —”

“Oh, but then, please do —”

After Mary had walked away, Samantha had the awful feeling that she might have given the impression that that evening would be a perfect time for Mary to come round.

Once home, she dropped the bags in the hall and telephoned Miles at work to tell him what she had done, but he displayed an infuriating equanimity about the prospect of adding a newly widowed woman to their foursome.

“I can’t see what the problem is, really,” he said. “Nice for Mary to get out.”

“But I didn’t say we were having Gavin and Kay over —”

“Mary likes Gav,” said Miles. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

He was, Samantha thought, being deliberately obtuse, no doubt in retaliation for her refusal to go to Sweetlove House. After she had hung up, she wondered whether to call Mary to tell her not to come that evening, but she was afraid of sounding rude, and settled for hoping that Mary would find herself unequal to calling in after all.

Stalking into the sitting room, she put on Libby’s boy band DVD at full volume so that she would be able to hear it in the kitchen, then carried the bags through and set to work preparing a casserole and her fall-back pudding, Mississippi mud pie. She would have liked to buy one of Mollison and Lowe’s large gateaux, to save herself some work, but it would have got straight back to Shirley, who frequently intimated that Samantha was overreliant on frozen food and ready meals.

Samantha knew the boy band DVD so well by now that she was able to visualize the images matching the music blaring through to the kitchen. Several times that week, while Miles was upstairs in his home study or on the telephone to Howard, she had watched it again. When she heard the opening bars of the track where the muscular boy walked, with his shirt flapping open, along the beach, she went through to watch in her apron, absentmindedly sucking her chocolatey fingers.

She had planned on having a long shower while Miles laid the table, forgetting that he would be late home, because he had to drive into Yarvil to pick up the girls from St. Anne’s. When Samantha realized why he had not returned, and that their daughters would be with him when he did, she had to fly around to organize the dining room herself, then find something to feed Lexie and Libby before the guests arrived. Miles found his wife in her work clothes at half past seven, sweaty, cross and inclined to blame him for what had been her own idea.

Fourteen-year-old Libby marched into the sitting room without greeting Samantha and removed the disc from the DVD player.

“Oh, good, I was wondering what I’d done with that,” she said. “Why’s the TV on? Have you been playing it?”

Sometimes, Samantha thought that her younger daughter had a look of Shirley about her.

“I was watching the news, Libby. I haven’t got time to watch DVDs. Come through, your pizza’s ready. We’ve got people coming round.”

“Frozen pizza again?”

“Miles! I need to change. Can you mash the potatoes for me? Miles?”

But he had disappeared upstairs, so Samantha pounded the potatoes herself, while her daughters ate at the island in the middle of the kitchen. Libby had propped the DVD cover against her glass of Diet Pepsi, and was ogling it.

“Mikey’s so lush,” she said, with a carnal groan that took Samantha aback; but the muscular boy was called Jake. Samantha was glad they did not like the same one.

Loud and confident Lexie was jabbering about school; a machine-gun torrent of information about girls whom Samantha did not know, with whose antics and feuds and regroupings she could not keep up.

“All right, you two, I’ve got to change. Clear away when you’re done, all right?”

She turned down the heat under the casserole and hurried upstairs. Miles was buttoning up his shirt in the bedroom, watching himself in the wardrobe mirror. The whole room smelled of soap and aftershave.

“Everything under control, hon?”

“Yes, thanks. So glad you’ve had time to shower,” spat Samantha, pulling out her favorite long skirt and top, slamming the wardrobe door.

“You could have one now.”

“They’ll be here in ten minutes; I won’t have time to dry my hair and put on makeup.” She kicked off her shoes; one of them hit the radiator with a loud clang. “When you’ve finished preening, could you please go downstairs and sort out drinks?”

After Miles had left the room, she tried to untangle her thick hair and repair her makeup. She looked awful. Only when she had changed did she realize that she was wearing the wrong bra for her clinging top. After a frantic search, she remembered that the right one was drying in the utility room; she hurried out onto the landing but the doorbell rang. Swearing, she scuttled back to the bedroom. The boy band’s music was blaring out of Libby’s room.

Gavin and Kay had arrived on the dot of eight because Gavin was afraid of what Samantha might say if they turned up late; he could imagine her suggesting that they had lost track of time because they were shagging or that they must have had a row. She seemed to think that one of the perks of marriage was that it gave you rights of comment and intrusion over single people’s love lives. She also thought that her crass, uninhibited way of talking, especially when drunk, constituted trenchant humor.

“Hello-ello-ello,” said Miles, moving back to let Gavin and Kay inside. “Come in, come in. Welcome to Casa Mollison.”

He kissed Kay on both cheeks and relieved her of the chocolates she was holding.

“For us? Thanks very much. Lovely to meet you properly at last. Gav’s been keeping you under wraps for far too long.”

Miles shook the wine out of Gavin’s hand, then clapped him on the back, which Gavin resented.

“Come on through, Sam’ll be down in a mo. What’ll you have to drink?”

Kay would ordinarily have found Miles rather smooth and over-familiar, but she was determined to suspend judgment. Couples had to mix with each other’s circles, and manage to get along in them. This evening represented significant progress in her quest to infiltrate the layers of his life to which Gavin had never admitted her, and she wanted to show him that she was at home in the Mollisons’ big, smug house, that there was no need to exclude her anymore. So she smiled at Miles, asked for a red wine, and admired the spacious room with its stripped pine floorboards, its over-cushioned sofa and its framed prints.

“Been here for, ooh, getting on for fourteen years,” said Miles, busy with the corkscrew. “You’re down in Hope Street, aren’t you? Nice little houses, some great fixer-upper opportunities down there.”

Samantha appeared, smiling without warmth. Kay, who had previously seen her only in an overcoat, noted the tightness of her orange top, beneath which every detail of her lacy bra was clearly visible. Her face was even darker than her leathery chest; her eye makeup was thick and unflattering and her jangling gold earrings and high-heeled golden mules were, in Kay’s opinion, tarty. Samantha struck her as the kind of woman who would have raucous girls’ nights out, and find stripograms hilarious, and flirt drunkenly with everyone else’s partner at parties.

“Hi there,” said Samantha. She kissed Gavin and smiled at Kay. “Great, you’ve got drinks. I’ll have the same as Kay, Miles.”

She turned away to sit down, having already taken stock of the other woman’s appearance: Kay was small-breasted and heavy-hipped, and had certainly chosen her black trousers to minimize the size of her bottom. She would have done better, in Samantha’s opinion, to wear heels, given the shortness of her legs. Her face was attractive enough, with even-toned olive skin, large dark eyes and a generous mouth; but the closely cropped boy’s hair and the resolutely flat shoes were undoubtedly pointers to certain sacrosanct Beliefs. Gavin had done it again: he had gone and picked another humorless, domineering woman who would make his life a misery.

“So!” said Samantha brightly, raising her glass. “Gavin-and-Kay!”

She saw, with satisfaction, Gavin’s hangdog wince of a smile; but before she could make him squirm more or weasel private information out of them both to dangle over Shirley’s and Maureen’s heads, the doorbell rang again.

Mary appeared fragile and angular, especially beside Miles, who ushered her into the room. Her T-shirt hung from protruding collarbones.

“Oh,” she said, coming to a startled halt on the threshold. “I didn’t realize you were having —”

“Gavin and Kay just dropped in,” said Samantha a little wildly. “Come in, Mary, please…have a drink…”

“Mary, this is Kay,” said Miles. “Kay, this is Mary Fairbrother.”

“Oh,” said Kay, thrown; she had thought that it would only be the four of them. “Yes, hello.”

Gavin, who could tell that Mary had not meant to drop in on a dinner party and was on the point of walking straight back out again, patted the sofa beside him; Mary sat down with a weak smile. He was overjoyed to see her. Here was his buffer; even Samantha must realize that her particular brand of prurience would be inappropriate in front of a bereaved woman; plus, the constrictive symmetry of a foursome had been broken up.

“How are you?” he said quietly. “I was going to give you a ring, actually…there’ve been developments with the insurance…”

“Haven’t we got any nibbles, Sam?” asked Miles.

Samantha walked from the room, seething at Miles. The smell of scorched meat met her as she opened the kitchen door.

“Oh shit, shit, shit…”

She had completely forgotten the casserole, which had dried out. Desiccated chunks of meat and vegetables sat, forlorn survivors of the catastrophe, on the singed bottom of the pot. Samantha sloshed in wine and stock, chiseling the adhering bits off the pan with her spoon, stirring vigorously, sweating in the heat. Miles’ high-pitched laugh rang out from the sitting room. Samantha put on long-stemmed broccoli to steam, drained her glass of wine, ripped open a bag of tortilla chips and a tub of hummus, and upended them into bowls.

Mary and Gavin were still conversing quietly on the sofa when she returned to the sitting room, while Miles was showing Kay a framed aerial photograph of Pagford, and giving her a lesson in the town’s history. Samantha set down the bowls on the coffee table, poured herself another drink and settled into the armchair, making no effort to join either conversation. It was awfully uncomfortable to have Mary there; with her grief hanging so heavily around her she might as well have walked in trailing a shroud. Surely, though, she would leave before dinner.

Gavin was determined that Mary should stay. As they discussed the latest developments in their ongoing battle with the insurance company, he felt much more relaxed and in control than he usually did in Miles and Samantha’s presence. Nobody was chipping away at him, or patronizing him, and Miles was absolving him temporarily of all responsibility for Kay.

“…and just here, just out of sight,” Miles was saying, pointing to a spot two inches past the frame of the picture, “you’ve got Sweetlove House, the Fawley place. Big Queen Anne manor house, dormers, stone quoins…stunning, you should visit, it’s open to the public on Sundays in the summer. Important family locally, the Fawleys.”

“Stone quoins?” “Important family, locally?” God, you are an arse, Miles.

Samantha hoisted herself out of her armchair and returned to the kitchen. Though the casserole was watery, the burned flavor dominated. The broccoli was flaccid and tasteless; the mashed potato cool and dry. Past caring, she decanted it all into dishes and slammed it down on the circular dining-room table.

“Dinner’s ready!” she called at the sitting-room door.

“Oh, I must go,” said Mary, jumping up. “I didn’t mean —”

“No, no, no!” said Gavin, in a tone that Kay had never heard before: kindly and cajoling. “It’ll do you good to eat — kids’ll be all right for an hour.”

Miles added his support and Mary looked uncertainly towards Samantha, who was forced to add her voice to theirs, then dashed back through into the dining room to lay another setting.

She invited Mary to sit between Gavin and Miles, because placing her next to a woman seemed to emphasize her husband’s absence. Kay and Miles had moved on to discussing social work.

“I don’t envy you,” he said, serving Kay a large ladle full of casserole; Samantha could see black, scorched flecks in the sauce spreading across the white plate. “Bloody difficult job.”

“Well, we’re perennially under-resourced,” said Kay, “but it can be satisfying, especially when you can feel you’re making a difference.”

And she thought of the Weedons. Terri’s urine sample had tested negative at the clinic yesterday and Robbie had had a full week in nursery. The recollection cheered her, counterbalancing her slight irritation that Gavin’s attention was still focused entirely on Mary; that he was doing nothing to help ease her conversation with his friends.

“You’ve got a daughter, haven’t you, Kay?”

“That’s right: Gaia. She’s sixteen.”

“Same age as Lexie; we should get them together,” said Miles.

“Divorced?” asked Samantha delicately.

“No,” said Kay. “We weren’t married. He was a university boyfriend and we split up not long after she was born.”

“Yeah, Miles and I had barely left university ourselves,” said Samantha.

Kay did not know whether Samantha meant to draw a distinction between herself, who had married the big smug father of her children, and Kay, who had been left…not that Samantha could know that Brendan had left her…

“Gaia’s taken a Saturday job with your father, actually,” Kay told Miles. “At the new café.”

Miles was delighted. He took enormous pleasure in the idea that he and Howard were so much part of the fabric of the place that everybody in Pagford was connected to them, whether as friend or client, customer or employee. Gavin, who was chewing and chewing on a bit of rubbery meat that was refusing to yield to his teeth, experienced a further lowering in the pit of his stomach. It was news to him that Gaia had taken a job with Miles’ father. Somehow he had forgotten that Kay possessed in Gaia another powerful device for anchoring herself to Pagford. When not in the immediate vicinity of her slamming doors, her vicious looks and caustic asides, Gavin tended to forget that Gaia had any independent existence at all; that she was not simply part of the uncomfortable backdrop of stale sheets, bad cooking and festering grudges against which his relationship with Kay staggered on.

“Does Gaia like Pagford?” Samantha asked.

“Well, it’s a bit quiet compared to Hackney,” said Kay, “but she’s settling in well.”

She took a large gulp of wine to wash out her mouth after disgorging the enormous lie. There had been yet another row before leaving tonight.

(“What’s the matter with you?” Kay had asked, while Gaia sat at the kitchen table, hunched over her laptop, wearing a dressing gown over her clothes. Four or five boxes of dialogue were open on the screen. Kay knew that Gaia was communicating online with the friends she had left behind in Hackney, friends she had had, in most cases, since she had been in primary school.

“Gaia?”

Refusal to answer was new and ominous. Kay was used to explosions of bile and rage against herself and, particularly, Gavin.

“Gaia, I’m talking to you.”

“I know, I can hear you.”

“Then kindly have the courtesy to answer me back.”

Black dialogue jerked upwards in the boxes on the screen, funny little icons, blinking and waggling.

“Gaia, please will you answer me?”

“What? What do you want?”

“I’m trying to ask about your day.”

“My day was shit. Yesterday was shit. Tomorrow will be shit as well.”

“When did you get home?”

“The same time I always get home.”

Sometimes, even after all these years, Gaia displayed resentment at having to let herself in, at Kay not being at home to meet her like a storybook mother.

“Do you want to tell me why your day was shit?”

“Because you dragged me to live in a shithole.”

Kay willed herself not to shout. Lately there had been screaming matches that she was sure the whole street had heard.

“You know that I’m going out with Gavin tonight?”

Gaia muttered something Kay did not catch.

“What?”

“I said, I didn’t think he liked taking you out.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

But Gaia did not answer; she simply typed a response into one of the scrolling conversations on the screen. Kay vacillated, both wanting to press her and afraid of what she might hear.

“We’ll be back around midnight, I expect.”

Gaia had not responded. Kay had gone to wait for Gavin in the hall.)

“Gaia’s made friends,” Kay told Miles, “with a girl who lives in this street; what’s her name — Narinder?”

“Sukhvinder,” said Miles and Samantha together.

“She’s a nice girl,” said Mary.

“Have you met her father?” Samantha asked Kay.

“No,” said Kay.

“He’s a heart surgeon,” said Samantha, who was on her fourth glass of wine. “Absolutely bloody gorgeous.”

“Oh,” said Kay.

“Like a Bollywood film star.”

None of them, Samantha reflected, had bothered to tell her that dinner was tasty, which would have been simple politeness, even though it was awful. If she wasn’t allowed to torment Gavin, she ought at least to be able to needle Miles.

“Vikram’s the only good thing about living in this godforsaken town, I can tell you,” said Samantha. “Sex on legs.”

“And his wife’s our local GP,” said Miles, “and a parish councillor. You’ll be employed by Yarvil District Council, Kay, are you?”

“That’s right,” said Kay. “But I spend most of my time in the Fields. They’re technically in Pagford Parish, aren’t they?”

Not the Fields, thought Samantha. Oh, don’t mention the bloody Fields.

“Ah,” said Miles, with a meaningful smile. “Yes, well, the Fields do belong to Pagford, technically. Technically, they do. Painful subject, Kay.”

“Really? Why?” asked Kay, hoping to make conversation general, because Gavin was still talking in an undertone to the widow.

“Well, you see — this is back in the fifties.” Miles seemed to be embarking on a well-rehearsed speech. “Yarvil wanted to expand the Cantermill Estate, and instead of building out to the west, where the bypass is now —”

“Gavin? Mary? More wine?” Samantha called over Miles.

“— they were a little bit duplicitous; land was bought without it being very clear what they wanted it for, and then they went and expanded the estate over the border into Pagford Parish.”

“Why aren’t you mentioning Old Aubrey Fawley, Miles?” asked Samantha. She had, at last, reached that delicious point of intoxication where her tongue became wicked and she became disengaged from fear of consequences, eager to provoke and to irritate, seeking nothing but her own amusement. “The truth is that Old Aubrey Fawley, who used to own all those lovely stone quoits, or whatever Miles was telling you about, did a deal behind everyone’s backs —”

“That’s not fair, Sam,” said Miles, but she talked over him again.

“— he flogged off the land where the Fields are built, pocketed, I don’t know, must have been a quarter of a mil or so —”

“Don’t talk rubbish, Sam, back in the fifties?”

“— but then, once he realized everyone was pissed off with him, he pretended he hadn’t known it would cause trouble. Upper-class twit. And a drunk,” added Samantha.

“Simply not true, I’m afraid,” Miles said firmly. “To fully understand the problem, Kay, you need to appreciate a bit of local history.”

Samantha, holding her chin in her hand, pretended to slide her elbow off the table in boredom. Though she could not like Samantha, Kay laughed, and Gavin and Mary broke off their quiet conversation.

“We’re talking about the Fields,” said Kay, in a tone intended to remind Gavin that she was there; that he ought to be giving her moral support.

Miles, Samantha and Gavin realized simultaneously that the Fields was a most tactless subject to raise in front of Mary, when they had been such a bone of contention between Barry and Howard.

“Apparently they’re a bit of a sore subject locally,” said Kay, wanting to force Gavin to express a view, to rope him in.

“Mmm,” he replied, and turning back to Mary, he said, “So how’s Declan’s football coming on?”

Kay experienced a powerful stab of fury: Mary might be recently bereaved, but Gavin’s solicitousness seemed unnecessarily pointed. She had imagined this evening quite differently: a foursome in which Gavin would have to acknowledge that they really were a couple; yet nobody looking on would imagine that they enjoyed a closer relationship than acquaintanceship. Also, the food was horrible. Kay put her knife and fork together with three-quarters of her helping untouched — an act that was not lost on Samantha — and addressed Miles again.

“Did you grow up in Pagford?”

“Afraid so,” said Miles, smiling complacently. “Born in the old Kelland Hospital along the road. They closed it in the eighties.”

“And you?” Kay asked Samantha, who cut across her.

“God, no. I’m here by accident.”

“Sorry, I don’t know what you do, Samantha?” asked Kay.

“I’ve got my own busi —”

“She sells outsize bras,” said Miles.

Samantha got up abruptly and went to fetch another bottle of wine. When she returned to the table, Miles was telling Kay the humorous anecdote, doubtless intended to illustrate how everyone knew everyone in Pagford, of how he had been pulled over in the car one night by a policeman who turned out to be a friend he had known since primary school. The blow-by-blow reenactment of the banter between himself and Steve Edwards was tediously familiar to Samantha. As she moved around the table replenishing all the glasses, she watched Kay’s austere expression; evidently, Kay did not find drink-driving a laughing matter.

“…so Steve’s holding out the Breathalyzer, and I’m about to blow in it, and out of nowhere we both start cracking up. His partner’s got no idea what the hell’s going on; he’s like this” — Miles mimed a man turning his head from side to side in astonishment — “and Steve’s bent double, pissing himself, because all we can think of is the last time he was holding something steady for me to blow into, which was nigh on twenty years ago, and —”

“It was a blow-up doll,” said Samantha, unsmiling, dropping back into her seat beside Miles. “Miles and Steve put it in their friend Ian’s parents’ beds, during Ian’s eighteenth-birthday party. Anyway, in the end Miles was fined a grand and got three points on his license, because it was the second time he’d been caught over the limit. So that was hysterically funny.”

Miles’ grin remained foolishly in place, like a limp balloon forgotten after a party. A stiff little chill seemed to blow through the temporarily silent room. Though Miles struck her as an almighty bore, Kay was on his side: he was the only one at the table who seemed remotely inclined to ease her passage into Pagford social life.

“I must say, the Fields are pretty rough,” she said, reverting to the subject with which Miles seemed most comfortable, and still ignorant that it was in any way inauspicious within Mary’s vicinity. “I’ve worked in the inner cities; I didn’t expect to see that kind of deprivation in a rural area, but it’s not all that different from London. Less of an ethnic mix, of course.”

“Oh, yes, we’ve got our share of addicts and wasters,” said Miles. “I think that’s about all I can manage, Sam,” he added, pushing his plate away from him with a sizeable amount of food still on it.

Samantha started to clear the table; Mary got up to help.

“No, no, it’s fine, Mary, you relax,” Samantha said. To Kay’s annoyance, Gavin jumped up too, chivalrously insisting on Mary’s sitting back down, but Mary insisted too.

“That was lovely, Sam,” said Mary, in the kitchen, as they scraped most of the food into the bin.

“No, it wasn’t, it was horrible,” said Samantha, who was only appreciating how drunk she was now that she was on her feet. “What do you think of Kay?”

“I don’t know. She’s not what I expected,” said Mary.

“She’s exactly what I expected,” said Samantha, taking out plates for pudding. “She’s another Lisa, if you ask me.”

“Oh, no, don’t say that,” said Mary. “He deserves someone nice this time.”

This was a most novel point of view to Samantha, who was of the opinion that Gavin’s wetness merited constant punishment.

They returned to the dining room to find an animated conversation in progress between Kay and Miles, while Gavin sat in silence.

“…offload responsibility for them, which seems to me to be a pretty self-centered and self-satisfied —”

“Well, I think it’s interesting that you use the word ‘responsibility,’” said Miles, “because I think that goes to the very heart of the problem, doesn’t it? The question is, where exactly do we draw the line?”

“Beyond the Fields, apparently.” Kay laughed, with condescension. “You want to draw a line neatly between the home-owning middle classes and the lower —”

“Pagford’s full of working-class people, Kay; the difference is, most of them work. D’you know what proportion of the Fields lives off benefits? Responsibility, you say: what happened to personal responsibility? We’ve had them through the local school for years: kids who haven’t got a single worker in the family; the concept of earning a living is completely foreign to them; generations of non-workers, and we’re expected to subsidize them —”

“So your solution is to shunt off the problem onto Yarvil,” said Kay, “not to engage with any of the underlying —”

“Mississippi mud pie?” called Samantha.

Gavin and Mary took slices with thanks; Kay, to Samantha’s fury, simply held out her plate as though Samantha were a waitress, her attention all on Miles.

“…the addiction clinic, which is absolutely crucial, and which certain people are apparently lobbying to close —”

“Oh, well, if you’re talking about Bellchapel,” said Miles, shaking his head and smirking, “I hope you’ve mugged up on what the success rates are, Kay. Pathetic, frankly, absolutely pathetic. I’ve seen the figures, I was going through them this morning, and I won’t lie to you, the sooner they close —”

“And the figures you’re talking about are…?”

“Success rates, Kay, exactly what I said: the number of people who have actually stopped using drugs, gone clean —”

“I’m sorry, but that’s a very naive point of view; if you’re going to judge success purely —”

“But how on earth else are we supposed to judge an addiction clinic’s success?” demanded Miles, incredulous. “As far as I can tell, all they do at Bellchapel is dole out methadone, which half of their clients use alongside heroin anyway.”

“The whole problem of addiction is immensely complicated,” said Kay, “and it’s naive and simplistic to put the problem purely in terms of users and non…”

But Miles was shaking his head, smiling; Kay, who had been enjoying her verbal duel with this self-satisfied lawyer, was suddenly angry.

“Well, I can give you a very concrete example of what Bellchapel’s doing: one family I’m working with — mother, teenage daughter and small son — if the mother wasn’t on methadone, she’d be on the streets trying to pay for her habit; the kids are immeasurably better off —”

“They’d be better off away from their mother, by the sound of it,” said Miles.

“And where exactly would you propose they go?”

“A decent foster home would be a good start,” said Miles.

“Do you know how many foster homes there are, against how many kids needing them?” asked Kay.

“The best solution would have been to have them adopted at birth —”

“Fabulous. I’ll hop in my time machine,” retorted Kay.

“Well, we know a couple who were desperate to adopt,” said Samantha, unexpectedly throwing her weight behind Miles. She would not forgive Kay for the rude outstretched plate; the woman was bolshy and patronizing, exactly like Lisa, who had monopolized every get-together with her political views and her job in family law, despising Samantha for owning a bra shop. “Adam and Janice,” she reminded Miles in parenthesis, who nodded; “and they couldn’t get a baby for love nor money, could they?”

“Yes, a baby,” said Kay, rolling her eyes, “everybody wants a baby. Robbie’s nearly four. He’s not potty-trained, he’s developmentally behind for his age and he’s almost certainly had inappropriate exposure to sexual behavior. Would your friends like to adopt him?”

“But the point is, if he’d been taken from his mother at birth —”

“She was off the drugs when he was born, and making good progress,” said Kay. “She loved him and wanted to keep him, and she was meeting his needs at the time. She’d already raised Krystal, with some family support —”

“Krystal!” shrieked Samantha. “Oh my God, are we talking about the Weedons?”

Kay was horrified that she had used names; it had never mattered in London, but everyone truly did know everyone in Pagford, it seemed.

“I shouldn’t have —”

But Miles and Samantha were laughing, and Mary looked tense. Kay, who had not touched her pie, and had managed very little of the first course, realized that she had drunk too much; she had been sipping wine steadily out of nerves, and now she had committed a prime indiscretion. Still, it was too late to undo that; anger overrode every other consideration.

“Krystal Weedon is no advert for that woman’s mothering skills,” said Miles.

“Krystal’s trying her damnedest to hold her family together,” said Kay. “She loves her little brother very much; she’s terrified he’ll be taken away —”

“I wouldn’t trust Krystal Weedon to look after a boiling egg,” said Miles, and Samantha laughed again. “Oh, look, it’s to her credit she loves her brother, but he isn’t a cuddly toy —”

“Yes, I know that,” snapped Kay, remembering Robbie’s shitty, crusted bottom, “but he’s still loved.”

“Krystal bullied our daughter Lexie,” said Samantha, “so we’ve seen a different side of her to the one I’m sure she shows you.”

“Look, we all know Krystal’s had a rough deal,” said Miles, “nobody’s denying that. It’s the drug-addled mother I’ve got an issue with.”

“As a matter of fact, she’s doing very well on the Bellchapel program at the moment.”

“But with her history,” said Miles, “it isn’t rocket science, is it, to guess that she’ll relapse?”

“If you apply that rule across the board, you ought not to have a driving license, because with your history you’re bound to drink and drive again.”

Miles was temporarily baffled, but Samantha said coldly, “I think that’s a rather different thing.”

“Do you?” said Kay. “It’s the same principle.”

“Yes, well, principles are sometimes the problem, if you ask me,” said Miles. “Often what’s needed is a bit of common sense.”

“Which is the name people usually give to their prejudices,” rejoined Kay.

“According to Nietzsche,” said a sharp new voice, making them all jump, “philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.”

A miniature Samantha stood at the door into the hall, a busty girl of around sixteen in tight jeans and a T-shirt; she was eating a handful of grapes and looking rather pleased with herself.

“Everyone meet Lexie,” said Miles proudly. “Thank you for that, genius.”

“You’re welcome,” said Lexie pertly, and she swept off upstairs.

A heavy silence sank over the table. Without really knowing why, Samantha, Miles and Kay all glanced towards Mary, who looked as though she might be on the verge of tears.

“Coffee,” said Samantha, lurching to her feet. Mary disappeared into the bathroom.

“Let’s go and sit through,” said Miles, conscious that the atmosphere was somewhat charged, but confident that he could, with a few jokes and his habitual bonhomie, steer everyone back into charity with each other. “Bring your glasses.”

His inner certainties had been no more rearranged by Kay’s arguments than a breeze can move a boulder; yet his feeling towards her was not unkind, but rather pitying. He was the least intoxicated by the constant refilling of glasses, but on reaching the sitting room he realized how very full his bladder was.

“Whack on some music, Gav, and I’ll go and get those choccies.”

But Gavin made no move towards the vertical stacks of CDs in their sleek Perspex stands. He seemed to be waiting for Kay to start on him. Sure enough, as soon as Miles had vanished from sight, Kay said, “Well, thank you very much, Gav. Thanks for all the support.”

Gavin had drunk even more greedily than Kay throughout dinner, enjoying his own private celebration that he had not, after all, been offered up as a sacrifice to Samantha’s gladiatorial bullying. He faced Kay squarely, full of a courage born not only of wine but because he had been treated for an hour as somebody important, knowledgeable and supportive, by Mary.

“You seemed to be doing OK on your own,” he said.

Indeed, the little he had permitted himself to hear of Kay and Miles’ argument had given him a pronounced sense of déjà vu; if he had not had Mary to distract him, he might have fancied himself back on that famous evening, in the identical dining room, when Lisa had told Miles that he epitomized all that was wrong with society, and Miles had laughed in her face, and Lisa had lost her temper and refused to stay for coffee. It was not very long after, that Lisa had admitted that she was sleeping with an associate partner at her firm and advised Gavin to get tested for chlamydia.

“I don’t know any of these people,” said Kay, “and you haven’t done one damn thing to make it any easier for me, have you?”

“What did you want me to do?” asked Gavin. He was wonderfully calm, insulated by the imminent returns of the Mollisons and Mary, and by the copious amounts of Chianti he had consumed. “I didn’t want an argument about the Fields. I don’t give a monkey’s about the Fields. Plus,” he added, “it’s a touchy subject around Mary; Barry was fighting on the council to keep the Fields part of Pagford.”

“Well, then, why couldn’t you have told me — given me a hint?”

He laughed, exactly as Miles had laughed at her. Before she could retort, the others returned like the Magi bearing gifts: Samantha carrying a tray of cups, followed by Mary holding the cafetière, and Miles, with Kay’s chocolates. Kay saw the flamboyant gold ribbon on the box and remembered how optimistic she had been about tonight when she had bought them. She turned her face away, trying to hide her anger, frantic with the desire to shout at Gavin, and also with a sudden, shocking urge to cry.

“It’s been so nice,” she heard Mary say, in a thick voice that suggested she, too, might have been crying, “but I won’t stay for coffee, I don’t want to be late back; Declan’s a bit…a bit unsettled at the moment. Thanks so much, Sam, Miles, it’s been good to, you know…well, get out for a bit.”

“I’ll walk you up the —” Miles began, but Gavin was talking firmly over him.

“You stay here, Miles; I’ll see Mary back. I’ll walk you up the road, Mary. It’ll only take five minutes. It’s dark up the top there.”

Kay was barely breathing; all her being was concentrated in loathing of complacent Miles, tarty Samantha and fragile, drooping Mary, but most of all of Gavin himself.

“Oh, yes,” she heard herself saying, as everybody seemed to look towards her for permission, “yep, you see Mary home, Gav.”

She heard the front door close and Gavin had gone. Miles was pouring Kay’s coffee. She watched the stream of hot black liquid fall, and felt suddenly, painfully alive to what she had risked in overthrowing her life for the man walking away into the night with another woman.

Colin Wall saw Gavin and Mary pass under his study window. He recognized Mary’s silhouette at once, but had to squint to identify the stringy man at her side, before they moved out of the aureole cast by the streetlight. Crouching, half-raised out of his computer chair, Colin gaped after the figures as they disappeared into the darkness.

He was shocked to his core, having taken it for granted that Mary was in a kind of purdah; that she was receiving only women in the sanctuary of her own home, among them Tessa, who was still visiting every other day. Never had it occurred to him that Mary might be socializing after dark, least of all with a single man. He felt personally betrayed; as though Mary, on some spiritual level, was cuckolding him.

Had Mary permitted Gavin to see Barry’s body? Was Gavin spending evenings sitting in Barry’s favorite seat by the fire? Were Gavin and Mary…could they possibly be…? Such things happened, after all, every day. Perhaps…perhaps even before Barry’s death…?

Colin was perennially appalled by the threadbare state of other people’s morals. He tried to insulate himself against shocks by pushing himself to imagine the worst: by conjuring awful visions of depravity and betrayal, rather than waiting for the truth to rip like a shell through his innocent delusions. Life, for Colin, was one long brace against pain and disappointment, and everybody apart from his wife was an enemy until they had proven otherwise.

He was half inclined to rush downstairs to tell Tessa what he had just seen, because she might be able to give him an innocuous explanation of Mary’s nighttime stroll, and to reassure him that his best friend’s widow had been, and was still, faithful to her husband. Nonetheless, he resisted the urge, because he was angry with Tessa.

Why was she showing such a determined lack of interest in his forthcoming candidacy for the council? Did she not realize how tight a stranglehold his anxiety had gained over him ever since he had sent in his application form? Even though he had expected to feel this way, the pain was not diminished by anticipation, any more than being hit by a train would be less devastating for seeing it approaching down the track; Colin merely suffered twice: in the expectation and in its realization.

His nightmarish new fantasies swirled around the Mollisons and the ways in which they were likely to attack him. Counter-arguments, explanations and extenuations ran constantly through his mind. He saw himself already besieged, fighting for his reputation. The edge of paranoia always apparent in Colin’s dealings with the world was becoming more pronounced; and meanwhile, Tessa was pretending to be oblivious, doing absolutely nothing to help alleviate the dreadful, crushing strain.

He knew that she did not think he ought to be standing. Perhaps she too was terrified that Howard Mollison would slit open the bulging gut of their past, and spill its ghastly secrets for all the Pagford vultures to pick over.

Colin had already made a few telephone calls to those whom Barry had counted on for support. He had been surprised and heartened that not one of them had challenged his credentials or interrogated him on the issues. Without exception, they had expressed their profound sorrow at the loss of Barry and their intense dislike of Howard Mollison, or “tha’ great smug basturd,” as one of the blunter voters had called him. “Tryin’ ter crowbar in ’is son. ’E could ’ardly stop hisself grinnin’ when ’e ’eard Barry was dead.” Colin, who had compiled a list of pro-Fields talking points, had not needed to refer to the paper once. So far, his main appeal as a candidate seemed to be that he was Barry’s friend, and that he was not called Mollison.

His miniature black and white face was smiling at him out of the computer monitor. He had been sitting here all evening, trying to compose his election pamphlet, for which he had decided to use the same photograph as was featured on the Winterdown website: full face, with a slightly anodyne grin, his forehead steep and shiny. The image had in its favor the fact that it had already been submitted to the public gaze, and had not brought down ridicule or ruin upon him: a powerful recommendation. But beneath the photograph, where the personal information ought to have been, were only one or two tentative sentences. Colin had spent most of the last two hours composing and then deleting words; at one point he had managed to complete an entire paragraph, only to destroy it, backspace by backspace, with a nervous, jabbing forefinger.

Unable to bear the indecision and solitude, he jumped up and went downstairs. Tessa was lying on the sofa in the sitting room, apparently dozing, with the television on in the background.

“How’s it going?” she asked sleepily, opening her eyes.

“Mary’s just gone by. Walking up the street with Gavin Hughes.”

“Oh,” said Tessa. “She said something about going over to Miles and Samantha’s, earlier. Gavin must have been there. He’s probably walking her home.”

Colin was appalled. Mary visiting Miles, the man who sought to fill her husband’s shoes, who stood in opposition to all that Barry had fought for?

“What on earth was she doing at the Mollisons’?”

“They went with her to the hospital, you know that,” said Tessa, sitting up with a small groan and stretching her short legs. “She hasn’t spoken to them properly since. She wanted to thank them. Have you finished your pamphlet?”

“I’m nearly there. Listen, with the information — I mean, as far as the personal information goes — past posts, do you think? Or limit it to Winterdown?”

“I don’t think you need say more than where you work now. But why don’t you ask Minda? She…” Tessa yawned “…she’s done it herself.”

“Yes,” said Colin. He waited, standing over her, but she did not offer to help, or even to read what he had written so far. “Yes, that’s a good idea,” he said, more loudly. “I’ll get Minda to look over it.”

She grunted, massaging her ankles, and he left the room, full of wounded pride. His wife could not possibly realize what a state he was in, how little sleep he was getting, or how his stomach was gnawing itself from within.

Tessa had only pretended to be asleep. Mary and Gavin’s footsteps had woken her ten minutes previously.

Tessa barely knew Gavin; he was fifteen years younger than her and Colin, but the main barrier toward intimacy had always been Colin’s tendency to be jealous of Barry’s other friendships.

“He’s been amazing about the insurance,” Mary had told Tessa on the telephone earlier. “He’s on the phone to them every day, from what I can gather, and he keeps telling me not to worry about fees. Oh God, Tessa, if they don’t pay out…”

“Gavin will sort it out for you,” said Tessa. “I’m sure he will.”

It would have been nice, thought Tessa, stiff and thirsty on the sofa, if she and Colin could have had Mary round to the house, to give her a change of scene and make sure she was eating, but there was one insuperable barrier: Mary found Colin difficult, a strain. This uncomfortable and hitherto concealed fact had emerged slowly in the wake of Barry’s death, like flotsam revealed by the ebbing tide. It could not have been plainer that Mary wanted only Tessa; she shied away from suggestions that Colin might help with anything, and avoided talking to him too long on the telephone. They had met so often as a foursome for years, and Mary’s antipathy had never surfaced: Barry’s good humor must have cloaked it.

Tessa had to manage the new state of affairs with great delicacy. She had successfully persuaded Colin that Mary was happiest in the company of other women. The funeral had been her one failure, because Colin had ambushed Mary as they all left St. Michael’s and tried to explain, through racking sobs, that he was going to stand for Barry’s seat on the council, to carry on Barry’s work, to make sure Barry prevailed posthumously. Tessa had seen Mary’s shocked and offended expression, and pulled him away.

Once or twice since, Colin had stated his intention of going over to show Mary all his election materials, to ask whether Barry would have approved of them; even voiced an intention of seeking guidance from Mary as to how Barry would have handled the process of canvassing for votes. In the end Tessa had told him firmly that he must not badger Mary about the Parish Council. He became huffy at this, but it was better, Tessa thought, that he should be angry with her, rather than adding to Mary’s distress, or provoking her into a rebuff, as had happened over the viewing of Barry’s body.

“The Mollisons, though!” said Colin, reentering the room with a cup of tea. He had not offered Tessa one; he was often selfish in these little ways, too busy with his own worries to notice. “Of all the people for her to have dinner with! They were against everything Barry stood for!”

“That’s a bit melodramatic, Col,” said Tessa. “Anyway, Mary was never as interested in the Fields as Barry.”

But Colin’s only understanding of love was of limitless loyalty, boundless tolerance: Mary had fallen, irreparably, in his estimation.

“And where are you going?” asked Simon, planting himself squarely in the middle of the tiny hall.

The front door was open, and the glass porch behind him, full of shoes and coats, was blinding in the bright Saturday morning sun, turning Simon into a silhouette. His shadow rippled up the stairs, just touching the one on which Andrew stood.

“Into town with Fats.”

“Homework all finished, is it?”

“Yeah.”

It was a lie; but Simon would not bother to check.

“Ruth? Ruth!”

She appeared at the kitchen door, wearing an apron, flushed, with her hands covered in flour.

“What?”

“Do we need anything from town?”

“What? No, I don’t think so.”

“Taking my bike, are you?” demanded Simon of Andrew.

“Yeah, I was going to —”

“Leaving it at Fats’ house?”

“Yeah.”

“What time do we want him back?” Simon asked, turning to Ruth again.

“Oh, I don’t know, Si,” said Ruth impatiently. The furthest she ever went in irritation with her husband was on occasions when Simon, though basically in a good mood, started laying down the law for the fun of it. Andrew and Fats often went into town together, on the vague understanding that Andrew would return before it became dark.

“Five o’clock, then,” said Simon arbitrarily. “Any later and you’re grounded.”

“Fine,” Andrew replied.

He kept his right hand in his jacket pocket, clenched over a tightly folded wad of paper, intensely aware of it, like a ticking grenade. The fear of losing this piece of paper, on which was inscribed a line of meticulously written code, and a number of crossed-out, reworked and heavily edited sentences, had been plaguing him for a week. He had been keeping it on him at all times, and sleeping with it inside his pillowcase.

Simon barely moved aside, so that Andrew had to edge past him into the porch, his fingers clamped over the paper. He was terrified that Simon would demand that he turn out his pockets, ostensibly looking for cigarettes.

“Bye, then.”

Simon did not answer. Andrew proceeded into the garage, where he took out the note, unfolded it and read it. He knew that he was being irrational, that mere proximity to Simon could not have magically switched the papers, but still he made sure. Satisfied that all was safe, he refolded it, tucked it deeper into his pocket, which fastened with a stud, then wheeled the racing bike out of the garage and down through the gate into the lane. He could tell that his father was watching him through the glass door of the porch, hoping, Andrew was sure, to see him fall off or mistreat the bicycle in some way.

Pagford lay below Andrew, slightly hazy in the cool spring sun, the air fresh and tangy. Andrew sensed the point at which Simon’s eyes could no longer follow him; it felt as though pressure had been removed from his back.

Down the hill into Pagford he streaked, not touching the brakes; then he turned into Church Row. Approximately halfway along the street he slowed down and cycled decorously into the drive of the Walls’ house, taking care to avoid Cubby’s car.

“Hello, Andy,” said Tessa, opening the front door to him.

“Hi, Mrs. Wall.”

Andrew accepted the convention that Fats’ parents were laughable. Tessa was plump and plain, her hairstyle was odd and her dress sense embarrassing, while Cubby was comically uptight; yet Andrew could not help but suspect that if the Walls had been his parents, he might have been tempted to like them. They were so civilized, so courteous. You never had the feeling, in their house, that the floor might suddenly give way and plunge you into chaos.

Fats was sitting on the bottom stair, putting on his trainers. A packet of loose tobacco was clearly visible, peeking out of the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Arf.”

“Fats.”

“D’you want to leave your father’s bicycle in the garage, Andy?”

“Yeah, thanks, Mrs. Wall.”

(She always, he reflected, said “your father,” never “your dad.” Andrew knew that Tessa detested Simon; it was one of the things that made him pleased to overlook the horrible shapeless clothes she wore, and the unflattering blunt-cut fringe.

Her antipathy dated from that horrific epoch-making occasion, years and years before, when a six-year-old Fats had come to spend Saturday afternoon at Hilltop House for the first time. Balancing precariously on top of a box in the garage, trying to retrieve a couple of old badminton racquets, the two boys had accidentally knocked down the contents of a rickety shelf.

Andrew remembered the tin of creosote falling, smashing onto the roof of the car and bursting open, and the terror that had engulfed him, and his inability to communicate to his giggling friend what they had brought upon themselves.

Simon had heard the crash. He ran out to the garage and advanced on them with his jaw jutting, making his low, moaning animal noise, before starting to roar threats of dire physical punishment, his fists clenched inches from their small, upturned faces.

Fats had wet himself. A stream of urine had spattered down the inside of his shorts onto the garage floor. Ruth, who had heard the yelling from the kitchen, had run from the house to intervene: “No, Si — Si, no — it was an accident.” Fats was white and shaking; he wanted to go home straightaway; he wanted his mum.

Tessa had arrived, and Fats had run to her in his soaking shorts, sobbing. It was the only time in his life that Andrew had seen his father at a loss, backing down. Somehow Tessa had conveyed white-hot fury without raising her voice, without threatening, without hitting. She had written out a check and forced it into Simon’s hand, while Ruth said, “No, no, there’s no need, there’s no need.” Simon had followed her to her car, trying to laugh it all off; but Tessa had given him a look of contempt while loading the still-sobbing Fats into the passenger seat, and slammed the driver’s door in Simon’s smiling face. Andrew had seen his parents’ expressions: Tessa was taking away with her, down the hill into the town, something that usually remained hidden in the house on top of the hill.)

Fats courted Simon these days. Whenever he came up to Hilltop House, he went out of his way to make Simon laugh; and in return, Simon welcomed Fats’ visits, enjoyed his crudest jokes, liked hearing about his antics. Still, when alone with Andrew, Fats concurred wholeheartedly that Simon was a Grade A, 24-karat cunt.

“I reckon she’s a lezzer,” said Fats, as they walked past the Old Vicarage, dark in the shadow of the Scots pine, with ivy covering its front.

“Your mum?” asked Andrew, barely listening, lost in his own thoughts.

“What?” yelped Fats, and Andrew saw that he was genuinely outraged. “Fuck off! Sukhvinder Jawanda.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

Andrew laughed, and so, a beat later, did Fats.

The bus into Yarvil was crowded; Andrew and Fats had to sit next to each other, rather than in two double seats, as they preferred. As they passed the end of Hope Street, Andrew glanced along it, but it was deserted. He had not run into Gaia outside school since the afternoon when they had both secured Saturday jobs at the Copper Kettle. The café would open the following weekend; he experienced waves of euphoria every time he thought of it.

“Si-Pie’s election campaign on track, is it?” asked Fats, busy making roll-ups. One long leg was stuck out at an angle into the aisle of the bus; people were stepping over it rather than asking him to move. “Cubby’s cacking it already, and he’s only making his pamphlet.”

“Yeah, he’s busy,” said Andrew, and he bore without flinching a silent eruption of panic in the pit of his stomach.

He thought of his parents at the kitchen table, as they had been, nightly, for the past week; of a box of stupid pamphlets Simon had had printed at work; of the list of talking points Ruth had helped Simon compile, which he used as he made telephone calls, every evening, to every person he knew within the electoral boundary. Simon did all of it with an air of immense effort. He was tightly wound at home, displaying heightened aggression towards his sons; he might have been shouldering a burden that they had shirked. The only topic of conversation at meals was the election, with Simon and Ruth speculating about the forces ranged against Simon. They took it very personally that other candidates were standing for Barry Fairbrother’s old seat, and seemed to assume that Colin Wall and Miles Mollison spent most of their time plotting together, staring up at Hilltop House, focused entirely on defeating the man who lived there.

Andrew checked his pocket again for the folded paper. He had not told Fats what he intended to do. He was afraid that Fats might broadcast it; Andrew was not sure how to impress upon his friend the necessity for absolute secrecy, how to remind Fats that the maniac who had made little boys piss themselves was still alive and well, and living in Andrew’s house.

“Cubby’s not too worried about Si-Pie,” said Fats. “He thinks the big competition is Miles Mollison.”

“Yeah,” said Andrew. He had heard his parents discussing it. Both of them seemed to think that Shirley had betrayed them; that she ought to have forbidden her son from challenging Simon.

“This is a holy fucking crusade for Cubby, y’know,” said Fats, rolling a cigarette between forefinger and thumb. “He’s picking up the regimental flag for his fallen comrade. Ole Barry Fairbrother.”

He poked strands of tobacco into the end of the roll-up with a match.

“Miles Mollison’s wife’s got gigantic tits,” said Fats.

An elderly woman sitting in front of them turned her head to glare at Fats. Andrew began to laugh again.

“Humongous bouncing jubblies,” Fats said loudly, into the scowling, crumpled face. “Great big juicy double-F mams.”

She turned her red face slowly to face the front of the bus again. Andrew could barely breathe.

They got off the bus in the middle of Yarvil, near the precinct and main pedestrian-only shopping street, and wove their way through the shoppers, smoking Fats’ roll-ups. Andrew had virtually no money left: Howard Mollison’s wages would be very welcome.

The bright-orange sign of the Internet café seemed to blaze at Andrew from a distance, beckoning him on. He could not concentrate on what Fats was saying. Are you going to? he kept asking himself. Are you going to?

He did not know. His feet kept moving, and the sign was growing larger and larger, luring him, leering at him.

If I find out you’ve breathed a word about what’s said in this house, I’ll skin you alive.

But the alternative…the humiliation of having Simon show what he was to the world; the toll it would take on the family when, after weeks of anticipation and idiocy, he was defeated, as he must be. Then would come rage and spite, and a determination to make everybody else pay for his own lunatic decisions. Only the previous evening Ruth had said brightly, “The boys will go through Pagford and post your pamphlets for you.” Andrew had seen, in his peripheral vision, Paul’s look of horror and his attempt to make eye contact with his brother.

“I wanna go in here,” mumbled Andrew, turning right.

They bought tickets with codes on them, and sat down at different computers, two occupied seats apart. The middle-aged man on Andrew’s right stank of body odor and old fags, and kept sniffing.

Andrew logged onto the Internet, and typed in the name of the website: Pagford…Parish…Council…dot…co…dot…uk…

The home page bore the council arms in blue and white, and a picture of Pagford that had been taken from a point close to Hilltop House, with Pargetter Abbey silhouetted against the sky. The site, as Andrew already knew, from looking at it on a school computer, looked dated and amateurish. He had not dared go near it on his own laptop; his father might be immensely ignorant about the Internet, but Andrew did not rule out the possibility that Simon might find somebody at work who could help him investigate, once the thing was done…

Even in this bustling anonymous place, there was no avoiding the fact that today’s date would be on the posting, or of pretending that he had not been in Yarvil when it happened; but Simon had never visited an Internet café in his life, and might not be aware that they existed.

The rapid contraction of Andrew’s heart was painful. Swiftly, he scrolled down the message board, which did not seem to enjoy a lot of traffic. There were threads entitled: refuse collection — a Query and school catchment areas in Crampton and Little manning? Every tenth entry or so was a posting from the Administrator, attaching Minutes of the Last Council Meeting. Right at the bottom of the page was a thread entitled: Death of Cllr Barry Fairbrother. This had received 152 views and forty-three responses. Then, on the second page of the message board, he found what he hoped to find: a post from the dead man.

A couple of months previously, Andrew’s computing set had been supervised by a young supply teacher. He had been trying to look cool, trying to get the class onside. He shouldn’t have mentioned SQL injections at all, and Andrew was quite sure that he had not been the only one who went straight home and looked them up. He pulled out the piece of paper on which he had written the code he had researched in odd moments at school, and brought up the log-in page on the council website. Everything hinged on the premise that the site had been set up by an amateur a long time ago; that it had never been protected from the simplest of classical hacks.

Carefully, using only his index finger, he input the magic line of characters.

He read them through twice, making sure that every apostrophe was where it should be, hesitated for a second on the brink, his breathing shallow, then pressed return.

He gasped, as gleeful as a small child, and had to fight the urge to shout out or punch the air. He had penetrated the tin-pot site at his first attempt. There, on the screen in front of him, were Barry Fairbrother’s user details: his name, his password, his entire profile.

Andrew smoothed out the magic paper he had kept under his pillow all week, and set to work. Typing up his next paragraph, with its many crossings out and reworkings, was a much more laborious process.

He had been trying for a style that was as impersonal and impenetrable as possible; for the dispassionate tone of a broadsheet journalist.

 

Aspiring Parish Councillor Simon Price hopes to stand on a platform of cutting wasteful council spending. Mr. Price is certainly no stranger to keeping down costs, and should be able to give the council the benefit of his many useful contacts. He saves money at home by furnishing it with stolen goods — most recently a PC — and he is the go-to man for any cut-price printing jobs that may need doing for cash, once senior management has gone home, at the Harcourt-Walsh Printworks.

 

Andrew read the message through twice. He had been over it time and again in his mind. There were many accusations he could have leveled at Simon, but the court did not exist in which Andrew could have laid the real charges against his father, in which he would have presented as evidence memories of physical terror and ritual humiliation. All he had were the many petty infractions of the law of which he had heard Simon boast, and he had selected these two specific examples — the stolen computer and the out-of-hours printing jobs done on the sly — because both were firmly connected to Simon’s workplace. People at the printer’s knew that Simon did these things, and they could have talked to anybody: their friends, their families.

His guts were juddering, the way they did when Simon truly lost control and laid about anyone within reach. Seeing his betrayal in black and white on the screen was terrifying.

“What the fuck are you doing?” asked Fats’ quiet voice in his ear.

The stinking, middle-aged man had gone; Fats had moved up; he was reading what Andrew had written.

“Fucking hell,” said Fats.

Andrew’s mouth was dry. His hand lay quiescent on the mouse.

“How’d you get in?” Fats whispered.

“SQL injection,” said Andrew. “It’s all on the Net. Their security’s shit.”

Fats looked exhilarated; wildly impressed. Andrew was half pleased, half scared, by the reaction.

“You’ve gotta keep this to —”

“Lemme do one about Cubby!”

“No!”

Andrew’s hand on the mouse skidded away from Fats’ reaching fingers. This ugly act of filial disloyalty had sprung from the primordial soup of anger, frustration and fear that had slopped inside him all his rational life, but he knew no better way to convey this to Fats than by saying, “I’m not just having a laugh.”

He read the message through a third time, then added a title to the message. He could feel Fats’ excitement beside him, as if they were having another porn session. Andrew was seized by a desire to impress further.

“Look,” he said, and he changed Barry’s username to The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother.

Fats laughed loudly. Andrew’s fingers twitched on the mouse. He rolled it sideways. Whether he would have gone through with it if Fats had not been watching, he would never know. With a single click, a new thread appeared at the top of the Pagford Parish Council message board: Simon Price Unfit to Stand for Council.

Outside on the pavement, they faced each other, breathless with laughter, slightly overawed by what had happened. Then Andrew borrowed Fats’ matches, set fire to the piece of paper on which he had drafted the message, and watched it disintegrate into fragile black flakes, which drifted onto the dirty pavement and vanished under passing feet.

Andrew left Yarvil at half past three, to be sure of getting back to Hilltop House before five. Fats accompanied him to the bus stop and then, apparently on a whim, told Andrew that he thought he would stay in town for a bit, after all.

Fats had made a loose arrangement to meet Krystal in the shopping center. He strolled back towards the shops, thinking about what Andrew had done in the Internet café, and trying to disentangle his own reactions.

He had to admit that he was impressed; in fact, he felt somewhat upstaged. Andrew had thought the business through, and kept it to himself, and executed it efficiently: all of this was admirable. Fats experienced a twinge of pique that Andrew had formulated the plan without saying a word to him, and this led Fats to wonder whether, perhaps, he ought not to deplore the undercover nature of Andrew’s attack on his father. Was there not something slippery and over-sophisticated about it; would it not have been more authentic to threaten Simon to his face or to take a swing at him?

Yes, Simon was a shit, but he was undoubtedly an authentic shit; he did what he wanted, when he wanted, without submitting to societal constraints or conventional morality. Fats asked himself whether his sympathies ought not to lie with Simon, whom he liked entertaining with crude, crass humor focused mainly on people making tits of themselves or suffering slapstick injuries. Fats often told himself that he would rather have Simon, with his volatility, his unpredictable picking of fights — a worthy opponent, an engaged adversary — than Cubby.

On the other hand, Fats had not forgotten the falling tin of creosote, Simon’s brutish face and fists, the terrifying noise he had made, the sensation of hot wet piss running down his own legs, and (perhaps most shameful of all) his wholehearted, desperate yearning for Tessa to come and take him away to safety. Fats was not yet so invulnerable that he was unsympathetic to Andrew’s desire for retribution.

So Fats came full circle: Andrew had done something daring, ingenious and potentially explosive in its consequences. Again Fats experienced a small pang of chagrin that it had not been he who had thought of it. He was trying to rid himself of his own acquired middle-class reliance on words, but it was difficult to forgo a sport at which he excelled, and as he trod the polished tiles of the shopping center forecourt, he found himself turning phrases that would blow Cubby’s self-important pretensions apart and strip him naked before a jeering public…

He spotted Krystal among a small crowd of Fields kids, grouped around the benches in the middle of the thoroughfare between shops. Nikki, Leanne and Dane Tully were among them. Fats did not hesitate, nor appear to gather himself in the slightest, but continued to walk at the same speed, his hands in his pockets, into the battery of curious critical eyes, raking him from the top of his head to his trainers.

“All righ’, Fatboy?” called Leanne.

“All right?” responded Fats. Leanne muttered something to Nikki, who cackled. Krystal was chewing gum energetically, color high in her cheeks, throwing back her hair so that her earrings danced, tugging up her tracksuit bottoms.

“All right?” Fats said to her, individually.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Duz yer mum know yer out, Fats?” asked Nikki.

“Yeah, she brought me,” said Fats calmly, into the greedy silence. “She’s waiting outside in the car; she says I can have a quick shag before we go home for tea.”

They all burst out laughing except Krystal, who squealed, “Fuck off, you cheeky bastard!” but looked gratified.

“You smokin’ rollies?” grunted Dane Tully, his eyes on Fats’ breast pocket. He had a large black scab on his lip.

“Yeah,” said Fats.

“Me uncle smokes them,” said Dane. “Knackered his fuckin’ lungs.”

He picked idly at the scab.

“Where’re you two goin’?” asked Leanne, squinting from Fats to Krystal.

“Dunno,” said Krystal, chewing her gum, glancing sideways at Fats.

He did not enlighten either of them, but indicated the exit of the shopping center with a jerk of his thumb.

“Laters,” Krystal said loudly to the rest.

Fats gave them a careless half-raised hand in farewell and walked away, Krystal striding along beside him. He heard more laughter in their wake, but did not care. He knew that he had acquitted himself well.

“Where’re we goin’?” asked Krystal.

“Dunno,” said Fats. “Where d’you usually go?”

She shrugged, walking and chewing. They left the shopping center and walked on down the high street. They were some distance from the recreation ground, where they had previously gone to find privacy.

“Didjer mum really drop yeh?” Krystal asked.

“Course she bloody didn’t. I got the bus in, didn’t I?”

Krystal accepted the rebuke without rancor, glancing sideways into the shop windows at their paired reflections. Stringy and strange, Fats was a school celebrity. Even Dane thought he was funny.

“He’s on’y usin’ yeh, yeh stupid bitch,” Ashlee Mellor had spat at her, three days ago, on the corner of Foley Road, “because yer a fuckin’ whore, like yer mum.”

Ashlee had been a member of Krystal’s gang until the two of them had clashed over another boy. Ashlee was notoriously not quite right in the head; she was prone to outbursts of rage and tears, and divided most of her time between learning support and guidance when at Winterdown. If further proof were needed of her inability to think through consequences, she had challenged Krystal on her home turf, where Krystal had backup and she had none. Nikki, Jemma and Leanne had helped corner and hold Ashlee, and Krystal had pummeled and slapped her everywhere she could reach, until her knuckles came away bloody from the other girl’s mouth.

Krystal was not worried about repercussions.

“Soft as shite an’ twice as runny,” she said of Ashlee and her family.

But Ashlee’s words had stung a tender, infected place in Krystal’s psyche, so it had been balm to her when Fats had sought her out at school the next day and asked her, for the first time, to meet him over the weekend. She had told Nikki and Leanne immediately that she was going out with Fats Wall on Saturday, and had been gratified by their looks of surprise. And to cap it all, he had turned up when he had said he would (or within half an hour of it) right in front of all her mates, and walked away with her. It was like they were properly going out.

“So what’ve you been up to?” Fats asked, after they had walked fifty yards in silence, back past the Internet café. He knew a conventional need to keep some form of communication going, even while he wondered whether they would find a private place before the rec, a half-hour’s walk away. He wanted to screw her while they were both stoned; he was curious to know what that was like.

“I bin ter see my Nana in hospital this mornin’, she’s ’ad a stroke,” said Krystal.

Nana Cath had not tried to speak this time, but Krystal thought she had known that she was there. As Krystal had expected, Terri was refusing to visit, so Krystal had sat beside the bed on her own for an hour until it was time to leave for the precinct.

Fats was curious about the minutiae of Krystal’s life; but only insofar as she was an entry point to the real life of the Fields. Particulars such as hospital visits were of no interest to him.

“An’,” Krystal added, with an irrepressible spurt of pride, “I’ve gave an interview to the paper.”

“What?” said Fats, startled. “Why?”

“Jus’ about the Fields,” said Krystal. “What it’s like growin’ up there.”

(The journalist had found her at home at last, and when Terri had given her grudging permission, taken her to a café to talk. She had kept asking her whether being at St. Thomas’s had helped Krystal, whether it had changed her life in any way. She had seemed a little impatient and frustrated by Krystal’s answers.

“How are your marks at school?” she had said, and Krystal had been evasive and defensive.

“Mr. Fairbrother said that he thought it broadened your horizons.”

Krystal did not know what to say about horizons. When she thought of St. Thomas’s, it was of her delight in the playing field with the big chestnut tree, which rained enormous glossy conkers on them every year; she had never seen conkers before she went to St. Thomas’s. She had liked the uniform at first, liked looking the same as everybody else. She had been excited to see her great-grandfather’s name on the war memorial in the middle of the Square: Pte. Samuel Weedon. Only one other boy had his surname on the war memorial, and that was a farmer’s son, who had been able to drive a tractor at nine, and who had once brought a lamb into class for show and tell. Krystal had never forgotten the sensation of the lamb’s fleece under her hand. When she told Nana Cath about it, Nana Cath had said that their family had been farm laborers once.

Krystal had loved the river, green and lush, where they had gone for nature walks. Best of all had been rounders and athletics. She was always first to be picked for any kind of sporting team, and she had delighted in the groan that went up from the other team whenever she was chosen. And she thought sometimes of the special teachers she had been given, especially Miss Jameson, who had been young and trendy, with long blond hair. Krystal had always imagined Anne-Marie to be a little bit like Miss Jameson.

Then there were snippets of information that Krystal had retained in vivid, accurate detail. Volcanoes: they were made by plates shifting in the ground; they had made model ones and filled them with bicarbonate of soda and washing-up liquid, and they had erupted onto plastic trays. Krystal had loved that. She knew about Vikings too: they had longships and horned helmets, though she had forgotten when they arrived in Britain, or why.

But other memories of St. Thomas’s included the muttered comments made about her by little girls in her class, one or two of whom she had slapped. When Social Services had allowed her to go back to her mother, her uniform became so tight, short and grubby that letters were sent from school, and Nana Cath and Terri had a big row. The other girls at school had not wanted her in their groups, except for their rounders teams. She could still remember Lexie Mollison handing everyone in the class a little pink envelope containing a party invitation, and walking past Krystal with — as Krystal remembered it — her nose in the air.

Only a couple of people had asked her to parties. She wondered whether Fats or his mother remembered that she had once attended a birthday party at their house. The whole class had been invited, and Nana Cath had bought Krystal a party dress. So she knew that Fats’ huge back garden had a pond and a swing and an apple tree. They had eaten jelly and had sack races. Tessa had told Krystal off because, trying desperately hard to win a plastic medal, she had pushed other children out of the way. One of them had had a nosebleed.

“You enjoyed St. Thomas’s, though, did you?” the journalist had asked.

“Yeah,” said Krystal, but she knew that she had not conveyed what Mr. Fairbrother had wanted her to convey, and wished he could have been there with her to help. “Yeah, I enjoyed it.”)

“How come they wanted to talk to you about the Fields?” asked Fats.

“It were Mr. Fairbrother’s idea,” said Krystal.

After another few minutes, Fats asked, “D’you smoke?”

“Wha’, like spliffs? Yeah, I dunnit with Dane.”

“I’ve got some on me,” said Fats.

“Get it off Skye Kirby, didja?” asked Krystal. He wondered whether he imagined a trace of amusement in her voice; because Skye was the soft, safe option, the place the middle-class kids went. If so, Fats liked her authentic derision.

“Where d’you get yours, then?” he asked, interested now.

“I dunno, it were Dane’s,” she said.

“From Obbo?” suggested Fats.

“Tha’ fuckin’ tosser.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

But Krystal had no words for what was wrong with Obbo; and even if she had, she would not have wanted to talk about him. Obbo made her flesh crawl; sometimes he came round and shot up with Terri; at other times he fucked her, and Krystal would meet him on the stairs, tugging up his filthy fly, smiling at her through his bottle-bottom glasses. Often Obbo had little jobs to offer Terri, like hiding the computers, or giving strangers a place to stay for a night, or agreeing to perform services of which Krystal did not know the nature, but which took her mother out of the house for hours.

Krystal had had a nightmare, not long ago, in which her mother had become stretched, spread and tied on a kind of frame; she was mostly a vast, gaping hole, like a giant, raw, plucked chicken; and in the dream, Obbo was walking in and out of this cavernous interior, and fiddling with things in there, while Terri’s tiny head was frightened and grim. Krystal had woken up feeling sick and angry and disgusted.

“’E’s a fucker,” said Krystal.

“Is he a tall bloke with a shaved head and tattoos all up the back of his neck?” asked Fats, who had truanted for a second time that week, and sat on a wall for an hour in the Fields, watching. The bald man had interested him, fiddling around in the back of an old white van.

“Nah, tha’s Pikey Pritchard,” said Krystal, “if yeh saw him down Tarpen Road.”

“What does he do?”

“I dunno,” said Krystal. “Ask Dane, ’e’s mates with Pikey’s brother.”

But she liked his genuine interest; he had never shown this much inclination to talk to her before.

“Pikey’s on probation.”

“What for?”

“He glassed a bloke down the Cross Keys.”

“Why?”

“’Ow the fuck do I know? I weren’t there,” said Krystal.

She was happy, which always made her cocky. Setting aside her worry about Nana Cath (who was, after all, still alive, so might yet recover), it had been a good couple of weeks. Terri was adhering to the Bellchapel regime again, and Krystal was making sure that Robbie went to nursery. His bottom had mostly healed over. The social worker seemed as pleased as her sort ever did. Krystal had been to school every day too, though she had not attended either her Monday or her Wednesday morning guidance sessions with Tessa. She did not know why. Sometimes you got out of the habit.

She glanced sideways at Fats again. She had never once thought of fancying him; not until he had targeted her at the disco in the drama hall. Everyone knew Fats; some of his jokes were passed around like funny stuff that happened on the telly. (Krystal pretended to everyone that they had a television at home. She watched enough at friends’ houses, and at Nana Cath’s, to be able to bluff her way through. “Yeah, it were shit, weren’t it?” “I know, I nearly pissed meself,” she would say, when the others talked about programs they had seen.)

Fats was imagining how it would feel to be glassed, how the jagged shard would slice through the tender flesh on his face; he could feel the searing nerves and the sting of the air against his ripped skin; the warm wetness as blood gushed. He felt a tickly oversensitivity in the skin around his mouth, as if it was already scarred.

“Is he still carrying a blade, Dane?” he asked.

“’Ow d’you know ’e’s gotta blade?” demanded Krystal.

“He threatened Kevin Cooper with it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Krystal conceded. “Cooper’s a twat, innee?”

“Yeah, he is,” said Fats.

“Dane’s on’y carryin’ ’cos o’ the Riordon brothers,” said Krystal.

Fats liked the matter-of-factness of Krystal’s tone; her acceptance of the need for a knife, because there was a grudge and a likelihood of violence. This was the raw reality of life; these were things that actually mattered…before Arf had arrived at the house that day, Cubby had been importuning Tessa to give him an opinion on whether his campaign leaflet should be printed on yellow or white paper…

“What about in there?” suggested Fats, after a while.

To their right was a long stone wall, its gates open to reveal a glimpse of green and stone.

“Yeah, all righ’,” said Krystal. She had been in the cemetery once before, with Nikki and Leanne; they had sat on a grave and split a couple of cans, a little self-conscious about what they were doing, until a woman had shouted at them and called them names. Leanne had lobbed an empty can back at the woman as they left.

But it was too exposed, Fats thought, as he and Krystal walked up the broad concreted walkway between the graves: green and flat, the headstones offering virtually no cover. Then he saw barberry hedges along the wall on the far side. He cut a path right across the cemetery, and Krystal followed, hands in her pockets, as they picked their way between rectangular gravel beds, headstones cracked and illegible. It was a large cemetery, wide and well tended. Gradually they reached the newer graves of highly polished black marble with gold lettering, places where fresh flowers had been laid for the recently dead.

To Lyndsey Kyle, September 15 1960–March 26 2008,
Sleep Tight Mum.

“Yeah, we’ll be all right in there,” said Fats, eyeing the dark gap between the prickly, yellow-flowered bushes and the cemetery wall.

They crawled into the damp shadows, onto the earth, their backs against the cold wall. The headstones marched away from them between the bushes’ trunks, but there were no human forms among them. Fats skinned up expertly, hoping that Krystal was watching, and was impressed.

But she was gazing out under the canopy of glossy dark leaves, thinking about Anne-Marie, who (Aunt Cheryl had told her) had come to visit Nana Cath on Thursday. If only she had skipped school and gone at the same time, they could have met at last. She had fantasized, many times, about how she would meet Anne-Marie, and say to her, “I’m yer sister.” Anne-Marie, in these fantasies, was always delighted, and they saw each other all the time after that, and eventually Anne-Marie suggested that Krystal move in. The imaginary Anne-Marie had a house like Nana Cath’s, neat and clean, except that it was much more modern. Lately, in her fantasies, Krystal had added a sweet little pink baby in a frilly crib.

“There you go,” said Fats, handing Krystal the joint. She inhaled, held the smoke in her lungs for a few seconds, and her expression softened into dreaminess as the cannabis worked its magic.

“You ain’ got brothers an’ sisters,” she asked, “’ave yeh?”

“No,” said Fats, checking his pocket for the condoms he had brought.

Krystal handed back the joint, her head swimming pleasantly. Fats took an enormous drag and blew smoke rings.

“I’m adopted,” he said, after a while.

Krystal goggled at Fats.

“Are yeh adopted, are yeh?”

With the senses a little muffled and cushioned, confidences peeled easily away, everything became easy.

“My sister wuz adopted,” said Krystal, marveling at the coincidence, delighted to talk about Anne-Marie.

“Yeah, I probably come from a family like yours,” said Fats.

But Krystal was not listening; she wanted to talk.

“I gottan older sister an’ an older brother, Liam, but they wuz taken away before I wuz born.”

“Why?” asked Fats.

He was suddenly paying close attention.

“Me mum was with Ritchie Adams then,” said Krystal. She took a deep drag on the joint and blew out the smoke in a long thin jet. “He’s a proper psycho. He’s doin’ life. He killed a bloke. Proper violent to Mum an’ the kids, an’ then John an’ Sue came an’ took ’em, and the social got involved an’ it ended up John an’ Sue kept ’em.”

She drew on the joint again, considering this period of her pre-life, which was doused in blood, fury and darkness. She had heard things about Ritchie Adams, mainly from her aunt Cheryl. He had stubbed out cigarettes on one-year-old Anne-Marie’s arms, and kicked her until her ribs cracked. He had broken Terri’s face; her left cheekbone was still receded, compared to the right. Terri’s addiction had spiraled catastrophically. Aunt Cheryl was matter-of-fact about the decision to remove the two brutalized, neglected children from their parents.

“It ’ad to ’appen,” said Cheryl.

John and Sue were distant, childless relatives. Krystal had never known where or how they fitted in her complex family tree, or how they had effected what, to hear Terri tell it, sounded like kidnap. After much wrangling with the authorities, they had been allowed to adopt the children. Terri, who had remained with Ritchie until his arrest, never saw Anne-Marie or Liam, for reasons Krystal did not entirely understand; the whole story was clotted and festering with hatred and unforgivable things said and threatened, restraining orders, lots more social workers.

“Who’s your dad, then?” asked Fats.

“Banger,” said Krystal. She struggled to recall his real name. “Barry,” she muttered, though she had a suspicion that was not right. “Barry Coates. O’ny I uses me mum’s name, Weedon.”

The memory of the dead young man who had overdosed in Terri’s bathroom floated back to her through the sweet, heavy smoke. She passed the joint back to Fats and leaned her head against the stone wall, looking up at the sliver of sky, mottled with dark leaves.

Fats was thinking about Ritchie Adams, who had killed a man, and considering the possibility that his own biological father was in prison somewhere too; tattooed, like Pikey, spare and muscled. He mentally compared Cubby with this strong, hard authentic man. Fats knew that he had been parted from his biological mother as a very small baby, because there were pictures of Tessa holding him, frail and birdlike, with a woolly white cap on his head. He had been premature. Tessa had told him a few things, though he had never asked. His real mother had been very young when she had him, he knew that. Perhaps she had been like Krystal; the school bike…

He was properly stoned now. He put his hand behind Krystal’s neck and pulled her towards him, kissing her, sticking his tongue into her mouth. With his other hand, he groped for her breast. His brain was fuzzy and his limbs were heavy; even his sense of touch seemed affected. He fumbled a little to get his hand inside her T-shirt, to force it under her bra. Her mouth was hot and tasted of tobacco and dope; her lips were dry and chapped. His excitement was slightly blunted; he seemed to be receiving all sensory information through an invisible blanket. It took longer than the last time to pry her clothes loose from her body, and the condom was difficult, because his fingers had become stiff and slow; then he accidentally placed his elbow, with all his weight behind it, on her soft fleshy underarm and she shrieked in pain.

She was drier than before; he forced his way inside her, determined to accomplish what he had come for. Time was gluelike and slow, but he could hear his own rapid breathing, and it made him edgy, because he imagined someone else, crouching in the dark space with them, watching, panting in his ear. Krystal moaned a little. With her head thrown back, her nose became broad and snoutlike. He pushed up her T-shirt to look at the smooth white breasts, jiggling a little, beneath the loose constraint of the undone bra. He came without expecting it, and his own grunt of satisfaction seemed to belong to the crouching eavesdropper.

He rolled off her, peeled off the condom and threw it aside, then zipped himself up, feeling jittery, looking around to check that they were definitely alone. Krystal was dragging her pants up with one hand, pulling down her T-shirt with the other, reaching behind herself to do up her bra.

It had become cloudy and darker while they had sat behind the bushes. There was a distant buzzing in Fats’ ears; he was very hungry; his brain was working slowly, while his ears were hypersensitive. The fear that they had been watched, perhaps over the top of the wall behind them, would not leave him. He wanted to go.

“Let’s…” he muttered, and without waiting for her, he crawled out between the bushes and got to his feet, brushing himself down. There was an elderly couple a hundred yards away, crouching at a graveside. He wanted to get right away from phantom eyes that might, or might not, have watched him screw Krystal Weedon; but at the same time, the process of finding the right bus stop and getting on the bus to Pagford seemed almost unbearably onerous. He wished he could simply be transported, this instant, to his attic bedroom.

Krystal had staggered out behind him. She was pulling down the bottom of her T-shirt and staring down at the grassy ground at her feet.

“Fuck,” she mumbled.

“What?” said Fats. “C’mon, let’s go.”

“’S Mr. Fairbrother,” she said, without moving.

“What?”

She pointed at the mound in front of them. There was no headstone yet; but fresh flowers lay all along it.

“See?” she said, crouching over and indicating cards stapled to the cellophane. “Tha’ sez Fairbrother.” She recognized the name easily from all those letters that had gone home from school, asking her mother to give permission for her to go away on the minibus. “ ‘Ter Barry,’” she read carefully, “an’ this sez, ‘Ter Dad,’” she sounded out the words slowly, “‘from…’”

But Niamh and Siobhan’s names defeated her.

“So?” demanded Fats; but in truth, the news gave him the creeps. That wickerwork coffin lay feet below them, and inside it the short body and cheery face of Cubby’s dearest friend, so often seen in their house, rotting away in the earth. The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother…he was unnerved. It seemed like some kind of retribution.

“C’mon,” he said, but Krystal did not move. “What’s the matter?”

“I rowed for ’im, di’n I?” snapped Krystal.

“Oh, yeah.”

Fats was fidgeting like a restive horse, edging backwards.

Krystal stared down at the mound, hugging herself. She felt empty, sad and dirty. She wished they had not done it there, so close to Mr. Fairbrother. She was cold. Unlike Fats, she had no jacket.

“C’mon,” said Fats again.

She followed him out of the cemetery, and they did not speak to each other once. Krystal was thinking about Mr. Fairbrother. He had always called her “Krys,” which nobody else had ever done. She had liked being Krys. He had been a good laugh. She wanted to cry.

Fats was thinking about how he would be able to work this into a funny story for Andrew, about being stoned and fucking Krystal and getting paranoid and thinking they were being watched and crawling out almost onto old Barry Fairbrother’s grave. But it did not feel funny yet; not yet.