The Casual Vacancy (4 page)

They parted at the top of the stairs for their respective registration rooms. Most of Andrew’s class was already in their room, sitting on desks, swinging their legs, leaning up against the cupboards at the sides. Bags lay under chairs. Talk was always louder and freer than usual on Monday mornings, because assembly meant an open-air walk to the sports hall. Their registration teacher sat at her desk, marking people present as they came in. She never bothered to call the register formally; it was one of the many small ways in which she attempted to ingratiate herself with them, and the class despised her for it.

Krystal arrived as the bell rang for assembly. She shouted, “I’m here, miss!” from the doorway, and swung herself back out again. Everyone else followed her, still talking. Andrew and Fats were reunited at the top of the stairs and were borne by the general flow out of the back doors and across the wide gray tarmacked yard.

The sports hall smelled of sweat and trainers; the din of twelve hundred voraciously talking teenagers echoed off its bleak, whitewashed walls. A hard industrial-gray and much-stained carpet covered the floor, inset with different colored lines marking out badminton and tennis courts, hockey and football pitches; the stuff gave vicious burns if you fell on it bare-legged, but was easier on the backside than bare wood for those who had to sit on it for the duration of whole-school assembly. Andrew and Fats had attained the dignity of tubular-legged, plastic-backed chairs, ranged at the rear of the hall for the fifth and sixth years.

An old wooden lectern stood at the front, facing the pupils, and beside it sat the headmistress, Mrs. Shawcross. Fats’ father, Colin “Cubby” Wall, walked over to take his place beside her. Very tall, he had a high, balding forehead, and an immensely imitable walk, his arms held rigid by his side, bobbing up and down more than was necessary for forward locomotion. Everyone called him Cubby, because of his infamous obsession with keeping the cubbyholes on the wall outside his school office in good order. The registers went into some of them after they had been marked, while others were assigned to specific departments. “Be sure and put it in the right cubbyhole, Ailsa!” “Don’t leave it hanging out like that, it’ll fall out of the cubbyhole, Kevin!” “Don’t walk over it, girl! Pick it up, give it here, it’s meant to be in a cubbyhole!”

All the other teachers called them pigeonholes. It was widely assumed that they did this to set themselves apart from Cubby.

“Move along, move along,” said Mr. Meacher, the woodwork teacher, to Andrew and Fats, who had left an empty seat between themselves and Kevin Cooper.

Cubby took his place behind the lectern. The pupils did not settle as quickly as they would have done for the headmistress. At the precise moment that the last voice died away, one of the double doors in the middle of the right-hand wall opened and Gaia walked in.

She glanced around the hall (Andrew permitted himself to watch, because half the hall was watching her; she was late, and unfamiliar, and beautiful, and it was only Cubby talking) and walked quickly, but not unduly so (because she had Fats’ gift of self-possession) around the back of the students. Andrew’s head could not revolve to keep watching her, but it struck him with a force that made his ears ring, that in moving along with Fats he had left an empty seat beside him.

He heard light, rapid footsteps coming closer, and then she was there; she had sat down right next to him. She nudged his chair, her body moving his. His nostrils caught a whisper of perfume. The whole of the left side of his body was burning with awareness of her, and he was grateful that the cheek nearest her was much less acne-ridden than the right. He had never been this close to her and wondered whether he dared look at her, make some sign of recognition; but immediately decided he had been paralyzed too long, and that it was too late to do so naturally.

Scratching his left temple to screen his face, he swiveled his eyeballs to glance down at her hands, clasped loosely on her lap. The nails were short, clean and unvarnished. There was a plain silver ring on one little finger.

Fats moved his elbow discreetly to put pressure on Andrew’s side.

“Lastly,” Cubby said, and Andrew realized that he had already heard Cubby say the word twice, and that the quietness in the hall had solidified into silence, as all fidgeting ceased and the air became stiff with curiosity, glee and unease.

“Lastly,” said Cubby again, and his voice wobbled out of control, “I have a very…I have a very sad announcement to make. Mr. Barry Fairbrother, who has coached our extremely socksess…success…successful girls’ rowing team for the past two years, has…”

He choked and passed a hand in front of his eyes.

“…died…”

Cubby Wall was crying in front of everybody; his knobbly bald head drooped onto his chest. A simultaneous gasp and giggle rolled across the watching crowd, and many faces turned toward Fats, who sat looking sublimely unconcerned; a little quizzical, but otherwise unmoved.

“…died…” sobbed Cubby, and the headmistress stood up, looking cross.

“…died…last night.”

A loud squawk rose from somewhere in the middle of the lines of chairs at the back of the hall.

“Who laughed?” roared Cubby, and the air crackled with delicious tension. “HOW DARE YOU! What girl laughed, who was it?”

Mr. Meacher was already on his feet, gesticulating furiously at somebody in the middle of the row just behind Andrew and Fats; Andrew’s chair was buffeted again, because Gaia had twisted in her seat to watch, like everyone else. Andrew’s entire body seemed to have become super-sensory; he could feel the way Gaia’s body was arched towards his. If he turned in the opposite direction, they would be breast to chest.

“Who laughed?”
repeated Cubby, raising himself absurdly on tiptoe, as if he might be able to make out the culprit from where he was standing. Meacher was mouthing and beckoning feverishly at the person he had singled out for blame.

“Who is it, Mr. Meacher?” shouted Cubby.

Meacher appeared unwilling to say; he was still having difficulty in persuading the guilty party to leave her seat, but as Cubby began to show alarming signs of leaving the lectern to investigate personally, Krystal Weedon shot to her feet, scarlet in the face, and started pushing her way along the row.

“You will see me in my office immediately after assembly!” shouted Cubby. “Absolutely disgraceful — total lack of respect! Get out of my sight!”

But Krystal stopped at the end of the row, stuck up her middle finger at Cubby and screamed, “I DI’N’ DO NOTHIN’, YOU PRICK!”

There was an eruption of excited chatter and laughter; the teachers made ineffectual attempts to quell the noise, and one or two left their chairs to try and intimidate their own registration classes back into order.

The double doors swung shut behind Krystal and Mr. Meacher.

“Settle down!” shouted the headmistress, and a precarious quiet, rife with fidgeting and whispers, spread over the hall again. Fats was staring straight ahead, and there was for once a forced air to his indifference and a darker tinge to his skin.

Andrew felt Gaia fall back into her chair. He screwed up his courage, glanced left and grinned. She smiled right back.

VII

Though Pagford’s delicatessen would not open until nine thirty, Howard Mollison had arrived early. He was an extravagantly obese man of sixty-four. A great apron of stomach fell so far down in front of his thighs that most people thought instantly of his penis when they first clapped eyes on him, wondering when he had last seen it, how he washed it, how he managed to perform any of the acts for which a penis is designed. Partly because his physique set off these trains of thought, and partly because of his fine line in banter, Howard managed to discomfort and disarm in almost equal measure, so that customers almost always bought more than they meant to on a first visit to the shop. He kept up the patter while he worked, one short-fingered hand sliding the meat slicer smoothly backwards and forwards, silky-fine slices of ham rippling onto the cellophane held below, a wink ever ready in his round blue eyes, his chins wobbling with easy laughter.

Howard had devised a costume to wear to work: white shirt-sleeves, a stiff dark-green canvas apron, corduroy trousers and a deerstalker into which he had inserted a number of fisherman’s flies. If the deerstalker had ever been a joke, it had long since ceased to be. Every workday morning he positioned it, with unsmiling exactitude, on his dense gray curls, aided by a small mirror in the staff lavatory.

It was Howard’s constant pleasure to open up in the mornings. He loved moving around the shop while the only sound was that of the softly humming chill cabinets, relished bringing it all back to life — flicking on the lights, pulling up the blinds, lifting lids to uncover the treasures of the chilled counter: the pale gray-green artichokes, the onyx-black olives, the dried tomatoes curled like ruby seahorses in their herb-flecked oil.

This morning, however, his enjoyment was laced with impatience. His business partner Maureen was already late, and, like Miles earlier, Howard was afraid that somebody might beat him to the telling of the sensational news, because she did not have a mobile phone.

He paused beside the newly hewn archway in the wall between the delicatessen and the old shoe shop, soon to become Pagford’s newest café, and checked the industrial-strength clear plastic that prevented dust from settling in the delicatessen. They were planning to have the café open before Easter, in time to pull in the tourists to the West Country for whom Howard filled the windows annually with local cider, cheese and corn dollies.

The bell tinkled behind him, and he turned, his patched and reinforced heart pumping fast from excitement.

Maureen was a slight, round-shouldered woman of sixty-two, and the widow of Howard’s original partner. Her stooping posture made her look much older than she was, though she strove, in so many ways, to keep a claw-grip on youth: dying her hair jet black, dressing in bright colors and wobbling on injudiciously high heels, which she changed for Dr. Scholl’s sandals in the shop.

“Morning, Mo,” said Howard.

He had been determined not to waste the announcement by rushing it, but customers would soon be upon them and he had a lot to say.

“Heard the news?”

She frowned at him interrogatively.

“Barry Fairbrother’s dead.”

Her mouth fell open.

“
No!
How?”

Howard tapped the side of his head.

“Something went. Up here. Miles was there, saw it all happen. Golf club car park.”

“No!”
she said again.

“Stone dead,” said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid.

Maureen’s brightly lipsticked mouth hung slackly as she crossed herself. Her Catholicism always added a picturesque touch to such moments.

“Miles was there?” she croaked. He heard the yearning for every detail in her deep, ex-smoker’s voice.

“D’you want to put on the kettle, Mo?”

He could at least prolong her agony for a few minutes. She slopped boiling tea over her hand in her haste to return to him. They sat together behind the counter, on the high wooden stools Howard had placed there for slack periods, and Maureen cooled her burned hand on a fistful of ice scraped from around the olives. Together they rattled through the conventional aspects of the tragedy: the widow (“she’ll be lost, she lived for Barry”); the children (“four teenagers; what a burden without a father”); the relative youth of the dead man (“he wasn’t much older than Miles, was he?”); and then, at last, they reached the real point of departure, beside which all else was aimless meandering.

“What’ll happen?” Maureen asked Howard greedily.

“Ah,” said Howard. “Well, now. That’s the question, isn’t it? We’ve got ourselves a casual vacancy, Mo, and it could make all the difference.”

“We’ve got a…?” asked Maureen, frightened that she might have missed something crucial.

“Casual vacancy,” repeated Howard. “What you call it when a council seat becomes vacant through a death. Proper term,” he said pedagogically.

Howard was the Chair of the Parish Council, and First Citizen of Pagford. The position came with a gilt and enamel chain of office, now reposing in the tiny safe that he and Shirley had had installed at the bottom of their fitted wardrobes. If only Pagford District had been granted borough status, he would have been able to call himself Mayor; but even so, to all intents and purposes, that was what he was. Shirley had made this perfectly clear on the homepage of the council website, where, beneath a beaming and florid photograph of Howard in his First Citizen’s chain, it was stated that he welcomed invitations to attend local civic and business functions. Just a few weeks previously, he had handed out the cycling proficiency certificates at the local primary school.

Howard sipped his tea and said with a smile to take off the sting, “Fairbrother was a bugger, mind, Mo. He could be a real bugger.”

“Oh, I know,” she said. “I know.”

“I’d have had to have it out with him, if he’d lived. Ask Shirley. He could be an underhand bugger.”

“Oh, I know.”

“Well, we’ll see. We’ll see. This should be the end of it. Mind, I certainly didn’t want to win like this,” he added, with a deep sigh, “but speaking for the sake of Pagford…for the community…it’s not all bad…”

Howard checked his watch.

“That’s nearly half-past, Mo.”

They were never late opening up, never early closing; the business was run with the ritual and regularity of a temple.

Maureen teetered over to unlock the door and pull up the blinds. The Square was revealed in jerky increments as the blinds went up: picturesque and well kept, due in large part to the co-ordinated efforts of those proprietors whose properties faced onto it. Window boxes, hanging baskets and flower tubs were dotted about, planted in mutually agreed colors each year. The Black Canon (one of the oldest pubs in England) faced Mollison and Lowe across the Square.

Howard strode in and out of the back room, fetching long rectangular dishes containing fresh pâtés, and laying them, with their jewel-bright adornments of glistening citrus segments and berries, neatly beneath the glass counter. Puffing a little from exertion coming on top of so much early morning conversation, Howard set the last of the pâtés down and stood for a little while, looking out at the war memorial in the middle of the Square.