The Casual Vacancy (24 page)

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.

VI

“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.