The Casual Vacancy (58 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well…” said Kay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You little bitch, open the door! Letcha mother see ya!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nearly three weeks after the sirens had wailed through sleepy Pagford, on a sunny morning in April, Shirley Mollison stood alone in her bedroom, squinting at her reflection in the mirrored wardrobe. She was making final adjustments to her dress before her now-daily drive to South West General. The belt buckle slid up a hole tighter than it had done a fortnight ago, her silver hair was in need of a trim and her grimace against the sunshine blazing into the room could have been a simple expression of her mood.

Shirley had walked up and down the wards for a year, wheeling the library trolley, carrying clipboards and flowers, and never once had it occurred to her that she might become one of those poor crumpled women who sat beside beds, their lives derailed, their husbands defeated and weak. Howard had not made the speedy recovery of seven years previously. He was still connected to bleeping machines, withdrawn and feeble, a nasty color, querulously dependent. Sometimes she pretended to need the bathroom to escape his baleful gaze.

When Miles accompanied her to the hospital, she could let him do all the talking to Howard, which he did, keeping up a steady monologue of Pagford news. She felt so much better — both more visible and more protected — with tall Miles walking beside her down the chilly corridors. He chatted genially to the nurses, and handed her in and out of the car, and restored to her the sense of being a rare creature, worthy of care and protection. But Miles could not come every day, and to Shirley’s profound irritation he kept deputizing Samantha to accompany her. This was not the same thing at all, even though Samantha was one of the few who managed to bring a smile to Howard’s purple vacant face.

Nobody seemed to realize how dreadful the silence was at home either. When the doctors had told the family that recuperation would take months, Shirley had hoped that Miles would ask her to move into the spare room of the big house in Church Row, or that he might stay over, from time to time, in the bungalow. But no: she had been left alone, quite alone, except for a painful three-day period when she had played hostess to Pat and Melly.

I’d never have done it,
she reassured herself, automatically, in the silent night, when she could not sleep.
I never really meant to. I was just upset. I’d never have done it.

She had buried Andrew’s EpiPen in the soft earth beneath the bird table in the garden, like a tiny corpse. She did not like knowing it was there. Some dark evening soon, the night before refuse-collection day, she would dig it up again and slip it into a neighbor’s bin.

Howard had not mentioned the needle to her or to anyone. He had not asked her why she had run away when she saw him.

Shirley found relief in long rattling streams of invective, directed at the people who had, in her stated opinion, caused the catastrophe that had fallen on her family. Parminder Jawanda was the first of these, naturally, for her callous refusal to attend Howard. Then there were the two teenagers who, through their vile irresponsibility, had diverted the ambulance that might have reached Howard sooner.

The latter argument was perhaps a little weak, but it was the enjoyable fashion to denigrate Stuart Wall and Krystal Weedon, and Shirley found plenty of willing listeners in her immediate circle. What was more, it had transpired that the Wall boy had been the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother all along. He had confessed to his parents, and they had personally telephoned the victims of the boy’s spite to apologize. The Ghost’s identity had leaked swiftly into the wider community, and this, coupled with the knowledge that he had been jointly responsible for the drowning of a three-year-old child, made abuse of Stuart both a duty and a pleasure.

Shirley was more vehement in her comments than anybody. There was a savagery in her denunciations, each of them a little exorcism of the kinship and admiration she had felt for the Ghost, and a repudiation of that awful last post which nobody else, as yet, had admitted to seeing. The Walls had not telephoned Shirley to apologize, but she was constantly primed, in case the boy should mention it to his parents, or in case anybody should bring it up, to deliver a final crushing blow to Stuart’s reputation.

“Oh yes, Howard and I know all about it,” she planned to say, with icy dignity, “and it’s my belief that the shock caused his heart attack.”

She had actually practiced saying this aloud in the kitchen.

The question of whether Stuart Wall had really known something about her husband and Maureen was less urgent now, because Howard was patently incapable of shaming her in that way again, and perhaps never would be, and nobody seemed to be gossiping. And if the silence she offered Howard, when she was unavoidably alone with him, was tinged with a sense of grievance on both sides, she was able to face the prospect of his protracted incapacitation and absence from the house with more equanimity than she might have thought possible three weeks previously.

The doorbell rang and Shirley hurried to open it. Maureen was there, hobbling on ill-advised high heels, garish in bright aquamarine.

“Hello, dear, come in,” said Shirley. “I’ll get my bag.”

It was better to take even Maureen to the hospital than to go alone. Maureen was not fazed by Howard’s dumbness; her croaky voice ground on and on, and Shirley could sit in peace, smile a pussycat smile and relax. In any case, as Shirley had taken temporary control of Howard’s share in the business, she was finding plenty of ways to work off her lingering suspicions by administering sharp little slaps in the form of disagreement with Maureen’s every decision.

“You know what’s happening down the road?” Maureen asked. “At St. Michael’s?
The Weedon kids’ funerals
.”

“Here?”
said Shirley, horrified.

“They’re saying people got up a collection,” said Maureen, brimful of gossip that Shirley had somehow missed, in her endless back and forward trips to the hospital. “Don’t ask me who. Anyway, I wouldn’t have thought the family would want it right by the river, would you?”

(The dirty and foul-mouthed little boy, of whose existence few had been aware, and of whom nobody but his mother and sister had been especially fond, had undergone such a transformation in Pagford’s collective mind by his drowning, that he was spoken of everywhere as a water baby, a cherub, a pure and gentle angel whom all would have embraced with love and compassion, if only they could have saved him.

But the needle and the flame had had no transformative effect upon Krystal’s reputation; on the contrary, they had fixed her permanently in the mind of Old Pagford as a soulless creature whose pursuit of what the elderly liked to call kicks had led to the death of an innocent child.)

Shirley was pulling on her coat.

“You realize, I actually saw them that day?” she said, her cheeks turning pink. “The boy bawling by one clump of bushes, and Krystal Weedon and Stuart Wall in another —”

“
Did you?
And were they really…?” asked Maureen avidly.

“Oh yes,” said Shirley. “Broad daylight. Open air. And the boy was right by the river when I saw him. A couple of steps and he’d have been in.”

Something in Maureen’s expression stung her.

“I was hurrying,” said Shirley with asperity, “because Howard had said he was feeling poorly and I was worried sick. I didn’t want to go out at all, but Miles and Samantha had sent Lexie over — I think, if you want my honest opinion, they’d had a row — and then Lexie wanted to visit the café — I was absolutely distracted, and all I could think was,
I must get back to Howard…
I didn’t actually
realize
what I’d seen until much later…and the dreadful thing,” said Shirley, her color higher than ever, and returning again to her favorite refrain, “is that if Krystal Weedon hadn’t let that child wander off while she was having her fun in the bushes, the ambulance would have reached Howard so much more quickly. Because, you know, with two of them coming…things got confu —”

“That’s right,” said Maureen, interrupting as they moved out towards the car, because she had heard all this before. “You know, I can’t
think
why they’re having the service here in Pagford…”

She longed to suggest that they drive past the church on the way to the hospital — she had a craving to see what the Weedon family looked like en masse, and to glimpse, perhaps, that degenerate junkie mother — but could think of no way to frame the request.

“You know, there’s one comfort, Shirley,” she said, as they set off for the bypass. “The Fields are as good as gone. That must be a comfort to Howard. Even if he can’t attend council for a while, he got that done.”

Andrew Price was speeding down the steep hill from Hilltop House, with the sun hot on his back and the wind in his hair. His week-old shiner had turned yellow and green, and looked, if possible, even worse than it had when he had turned up at school with his eye almost closed. Andrew had told the teachers who inquired that he had fallen off his bike.

It was now the Easter holidays, and Gaia had texted Andrew the previous evening to ask whether he would be going to Krystal’s funeral the next day. He had sent an immediate “
yes
,” and was now dressed, after much deliberation, in his cleanest jeans and a dark gray shirt, because he did not own a suit.

He was not very clear why Gaia was going to the funeral, unless it was to be with Sukhvinder Jawanda, to whom she seemed to cling more fondly than ever, now that she was moving back to London with her mother.

“Mum says she should never have come to Pagford,” Gaia had told Andrew and Sukhvinder happily, as the three of them sat on the low wall beside the newsagent’s at lunchtime. “She knows Gavin’s a total twat.”

She had given Andrew her mobile number and told him that they would go out together when she came to Reading to see her father, and even mentioned, casually, taking him to see some of her favorite places in London, if he visited. She was showering benefits around her in the manner of a demob-happy soldier, and these promises, made so lightly, gilded the prospect of Andrew’s own move. He had greeted the news that his parents had had an offer on Hilltop House with at least as much excitement as pain.

The sweeping turn into Church Row, usually made with an uplift of spirits, dampened them. He could see people moving around in the graveyard, and he wondered what this funeral was going to be like, and for the first time that morning thought of Krystal Weedon in more than the abstract.

A memory, long buried in the deepest recesses of his mind, came back to him, of that time in the playground at St. Thomas’s, when Fats, in a spirit of disinterested investigation, had handed him a peanut hidden inside a marshmallow…he could still feel his burning throat closing inexorably. He remembered trying to yell, and his knees giving way, and the children all around him, watching with a strange, bloodless interest, and then Krystal Weedon’s raucous scream.

“Andiprice iz ’avin’ a ’lurgycacshun!”

She had run, on her stocky little legs, all the way to the staff room, and the headmaster had snatched Andrew up and sprinted with him to the nearby surgery, where Dr. Crawford had administered Adrenalin. She was the only one who had remembered the talk that their teacher had given the class, explaining Andrew’s life-threatening condition; the only one to recognize his symptoms.

Krystal ought to have been given a gold merit star, and perhaps a certificate at assembly as Pupil of the Week, but the very next day (Andrew remembered it as clearly as his own collapse) she had hit Lexie Mollison so hard in the mouth that she had knocked out two of Lexie’s teeth.

He wheeled Simon’s bike carefully into the Walls’ garage, then rang the doorbell with a reluctance that had never been there before. Tessa Wall answered, dressed in her best gray coat. Andrew was annoyed with her; it was down to her that he had a black eye.

“Come in, Andy,” said Tessa, and her expression was tense. “We’ll just be a minute.”

He waited in the hallway, where the colored glass over the door cast its paintboxy glow on the floorboards. Tessa marched into the kitchen, and Andrew glimpsed Fats in his black suit, crumpled up in a kitchen chair like a crushed spider, with one arm over his head, as if he were fending off blows.

Andrew turned his back. The two boys had had no communication since Andrew had led Tessa to the Cubby Hole. Fats had not been to school for a fortnight. Andrew had sent a couple of texts, but Fats had not replied. His Facebook page remained frozen as it had been on the day of Howard Mollison’s party.

A week ago, without warning, Tessa had telephoned the Prices, told them that Fats had admitted to having posted the messages under the name The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother, and offered her deepest apologies for the consequences they had suffered.

“So how did he know I had that computer?” Simon had roared, advancing on Andrew. “How did fucking Fats Wall know I did jobs after hours at the printworks?”

Andrew’s only consolation was that if his father had known the truth, he might have ignored Ruth’s protests and continued to pummel Andrew until he was unconscious.

Why Fats had decided to pretend he had authored all the posts, Andrew did not know. Perhaps it was Fats’ ego at work, his determination to be the mastermind, the most destructive, the baddest of them all. Perhaps he had thought he was doing something noble, taking the fall for both of them. Either way, Fats had caused much more trouble than he knew; he had never realized, thought Andrew, waiting in the hall, what it was like to live with a father like Simon Price, safe in his attic room, with his reasonable, civilized parents.

Andrew could hear the adult Walls talking in quiet voices; they had not closed the kitchen door.

“We need to leave
now,
” Tessa was saying. “He’s got a moral obligation and he’s going.”

“He’s had enough punishment,” said Cubby’s voice.

“I’m not asking him to go as a —”

“Aren’t you?” said Cubby sharply. “For God’s sake, Tessa. D’you think they’ll want him there? You go. Stu can stay here with me.”

A minute later Tessa emerged from the kitchen, closing the door firmly behind her.