The Casual Vacancy (31 page)

“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.

I

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

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

“Doct’ Jawan —”

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

The receptionist looked aghast.

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

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

“Oh — yeah,” said Karen, flustered. “He wanted to see Dr. Crawford, but —”

“You’d better get back to the front desk.”

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

“Mr. — Mr. Mollison.”

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

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

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

“What’s the problem?” she asked brusquely.

“Bit of an irritation,” he said. “Just here. Need a cream, or something.”

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

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

“It’s only here that’s itching.”

“I need to see the whole area.”

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

“No, I haven’t checked emails today.”

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

“Could you, please — I need to look under…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We should check, though. As you’re here.”

He sighed again, and laboriously rolled up his sleeve.

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

“Yes,” she said, against her own better judgment.

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

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

“No,” she said, her back to him. “I never saw it.”

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

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

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

She scanned the list of his medications onscreen.

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

“Because of my asthma,” said Howard, tweaking his sleeve straight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

“Wha’
d’you
wan’?”

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

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

“Wha’?”

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

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

“Are you blasted?” demanded Cheryl, glaring into the taut and empty face.

“Fuck off. No, I ain’t.”

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

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

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

“Funeral’s Tuesday at nine, up the crematorium.”

“Right,” said Terri.

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

“Yeah,” said Terri.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wish you was my mummy.

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

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

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

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

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

I wish you was my mummy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s got no knickers, Nana.”

And Nana Cath had giggled. Nana Cath never giggled.

I wish you was my mummy.

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

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

She was jogging along, trying to outrun the memories.

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

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

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

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