The Casual Vacancy (56 page)

(Long ago, in Yarvil, men had subjected Shirley to smutty jokes because of her mother’s reputation, even though she, Shirley, had been as pure as it was possible to be.)

“Grandad’s feeling ill,” Lexie was telling Andrew. “What’s in those cakes?”

He bent down behind the counter, hiding his red face.

I snogged your mum.

Andrew had almost skived off work. He had been afraid that Howard might sack him on the spot for kissing his daughter-in-law, and was downright terrified that Miles Mollison might storm in, looking for him. At the same time, he was not so naive that he did not know that Samantha, who must, he thought ruthlessly, be well over forty, would figure as the villain of the piece. His defense was simple. “She was pissed and she grabbed me.”

There was a tiny glimmer of pride in his embarrassment. He had been anxious to see Gaia; he wanted to tell her that a grown woman had pounced on him. He had hoped that they might laugh about it, the way that they laughed about Maureen, but that she might be secretly impressed; and also that in the course of laughing, he might find out exactly what she had done with Fats; how far she had let him go. He was prepared to forgive her. She had been pissed too. But she had not turned up.

He went to fetch a napkin for Lexie and almost collided with his boss’s wife, who was standing behind the counter, holding his EpiPen.

“Howard wanted me to check something,” Shirley told him. “And this needle shouldn’t be kept in here. I’ll put it in the back.”

XII

Halfway down his packet of Rolos, Robbie became extremely thirsty. Krystal had not bought him a drink. He climbed off the bench and crouched down in the warm grass, where he could still see her outline in the bushes with the stranger. After a while, he scrambled down the bank toward them.

“’M thirsty,” he whined.

“Robbie, get out of it!” screamed Krystal. “Go an’ sit on the bench!”

“Wanna drink!”

“Fuckin’ — go an’ wai’ by the bench, an’ I’ll gerra drink in a minute! Go ’way, Robbie!”

Crying, he climbed back up the slippery bank to the bench. He was accustomed to not being given what he wanted, and disobedient by habit, because grown-ups were arbitrary in their wrath and their rules, so he had learned to seize his tiny pleasures wherever and whenever he could.

Angry at Krystal, he wandered a little way from the bench along the road. A man in sunglasses was walking along the pavement toward him.

(Gavin had forgotten where he had parked the car. He had marched out of Mary’s and walked straight down Church Row, only realizing that he was heading in the wrong direction when he drew level with Miles and Samantha’s house. Not wanting to pass the Fairbrothers’ again, he had taken a circuitous route back to the bridge.

He saw the boy, chocolate-stained, ill-kempt and unappealing, and walked past, with his happiness in tatters, half wishing that he could have gone to Kay’s house and been silently cradled…she had always been nicest to him when he was miserable, it was what had attracted him to her in the first place.)

The rushing of the river increased Robbie’s thirst. He cried a bit more as he changed direction and headed away from the bridge, back past the place where Krystal was hidden. The bushes had started shaking. He walked on, wanting a drink, then noticed a hole in a long hedge on the left of the road. When he drew level, he spotted a playing field beyond.

Robbie wriggled through the hole and contemplated the wide green space with its spreading chestnut tree and goalposts. Robbie knew what they were, because his cousin Dane had showed him how to kick a football at the play park. He had never seen so much greenness.

A woman came striding across the field, with her arms folded and her head bowed.

(Samantha had been walking at random, walking and walking, anywhere as long as it was nowhere near Church Row. She had been asking herself many questions and coming up with few answers; and one of the questions she asked herself was whether she might not have gone too far in telling Miles about that stupid, drunken letter, which she had sent out of spite, and which seemed much less clever now…

She glanced up and her eyes met Robbie’s. Children often wriggled through the hole in the hedge to play in the field at weekends. Her own girls had done it when they were younger.

She climbed over the gate and turned away from the river toward the Square. Self-disgust clung to her, no matter how hard she tried to outrun it.)

Robbie went back through the hole in the hedge and walked a little way along the road after the striding lady, but she was soon out of sight. The half packet of remaining Rolos were melting in his hand, and he did not want to put them down, but he was so thirsty. Maybe Krystal had finished. He wandered back in the opposite direction.

When he reached the first patch of bushes on the bank, he saw that they were not moving, so he thought it was all right to approach.

“Krystal,” he said.

But the bushes were empty. Krystal was gone.

Robbie started to wail and shout for Krystal. He clambered back up the bank and looked wildly up and down the road, but there was no sign of her.

“Krystal!” he yelled.

A woman with short silver hair glanced at him, frowning, as she trotted briskly along the opposite pavement.

Shirley had left Lexie at the Copper Kettle, where she seemed happy, but a short way across the Square she had caught a glimpse of Samantha, who was the very last person she wanted to meet, so she had taken off in the opposite direction.

The boy’s wails and squawks echoed behind her as she hurried along. Shirley’s fist was clutched tightly around the EpiPen in her pocket. She would not be a dirty joke. She wanted to be pure and pitied, like Mary Fairbrother. Her rage was so enormous, so dangerous, that she could not think coherently: she wanted to act, to punish, to finish.

Just before the old stone bridge, a patch of bushes shivered to Shirley’s left. She glanced down and caught a disgusting glimpse of something sordid and vile, and it drove her on.

XIII

Sukhvinder had been walking around Pagford longer than Samantha. She had left the Old Vicarage shortly after her mother had told her she must go to work, and since then had been wandering the streets, observing invisible exclusion zones around Church Row, Hope Street and the Square.

She had nearly fifty pounds in her pocket, which represented her wages from the café and the party, and the razor blade. She had wanted to take her building society passbook, which resided in a little filing cabinet in her father’s study, but Vikram had been at his desk. She had waited for a while at the bus stop where you could catch a bus into Yarvil, but then she had spotted Shirley and Lexie Mollison coming down the road, and dived out of sight.

Gaia’s betrayal had been brutal and unexpected. Pulling Fats Wall…he would drop Krystal now that he had Gaia. Any boy would drop any girl for Gaia, she knew that. But she could not bear to go to work and hear her one ally trying to tell her that Fats was all right, really.

Her mobile buzzed. Gaia had already texted her twice.

How pissed was I last nite?

R u going 2 work?

Nothing about Fats Wall. Nothing about snogging Sukhvinder’s torturer. The new message said,
R u OK?

Sukhvinder put the mobile back into her pocket. She might walk toward Yarvil and catch a bus outside town, where nobody would see her. Her parents would not miss her until five thirty, when they expected her home from the café.

A desperate plan formed as she walked, hot and tired: if she could find a place to stay that cost less than fifty pounds…all she wanted was to be alone and ply her razor blade.

She was on the river road with the Orr flowing beside her. If she crossed the bridge, she would be able to take a backstreet all the way round to the start of the bypass.

“Robbie!
Robbie!
Where are you?”

It was Krystal Weedon, running up and down the riverbank. Fats Wall was smoking, with one hand in his pocket, watching Krystal run.

Sukhvinder took a sharp right onto the bridge, terrified that one of them might notice her. Krystal’s yells were echoing off the rushing water.

Sukhvinder caught sight of something in the river below.

Her hands were already on the hot stone ledge before she had thought about what she was doing, and then she had hoisted herself onto the edge of the bridge; she yelled,
“He’s in the river, Krys!”
and dropped, feetfirst, into the water. Her leg was sliced open by a broken computer monitor as she was pulled under by the current.

XIV

When Shirley opened the bedroom door, she saw nothing but two empty beds. Justice required a sleeping Howard; she would have to advise him to return to bed.

But there was no sound from either the kitchen or the bathroom. Shirley was worried that, by taking the river road home, she had missed him. He must have got dressed and set off for work; he might already be with Maureen in the back room, discussing Shirley; planning, perhaps, to divorce her and marry Maureen instead, now that the game was up, and pretense was ended.

She half ran into the sitting room, intending to telephone the Copper Kettle. Howard was lying on the carpet in his pajamas.

His face was purple and his eyes were popping. A faint wheezing noise came from his lips. One hand was clutching feebly at his chest. His pajama top had ridden up. Shirley could see the very patch of scabbed raw skin where she had planned to plunge the needle.

Howard’s eyes met hers in mute appeal.

Shirley stared at him, terrified, then darted out of the room. At first she hid the EpiPen in the biscuit barrel; then she retrieved it and shoved it down the back of the cookery books.

She ran back into the sitting room, seized the telephone receiver and dialed 999.

“Pagford? This is for Orrbank Cottage, is it? There’s one on the way.”

“Oh, thank you, thank God,” said Shirley, and she had almost hung up when she realized what she had said and screamed, “no, no, not Orrbank Cottage…”

But the operator had gone and she had to dial again. She was panicking so much that she dropped the receiver. On the carpet beside her, Howard’s wheezing was becoming fainter and fainter.

“Not Orrbank Cottage,” she shouted. “Thirty-six Evertree Crescent, Pagford — my husband’s having a heart attack…”

XV

In Church Row, Miles Mollison came tearing out of his house in bedroom slippers and sprinted down the steep sloping pavement to the Old Vicarage on the corner. He banged on the thick oak door with his left hand, while trying to dial his wife’s number with his right.

“Yes?” said Parminder, opening the door.

“My dad,” gasped Miles “…another heart attack…Mum’s called an ambulance…will you come? Please, will you come?”

Parminder made a swift move back into the house, mentally seizing her doctor’s bag, but checked.

“I can’t. I’m suspended from work, Miles. I can’t.”

“You’re joking…please…the ambulance won’t be here for —”

“I can’t, Miles,” she said.

He turned and ran away from her through the open gate. Ahead, he saw Samantha, walking up their garden path. He called to her, his voice breaking, and she turned in surprise. At first, she thought that his panic was on her account.

“Dad…collapsed…there’s an ambulance coming…bloody Parminder Jawanda won’t come…”

“My God,” said Samantha. “Oh my God.”

They dashed to the car and drove up the road, Miles in his slippers, Samantha in the clogs that had blistered her feet.

“Miles, listen, there’s a siren — it’s here already…”

But when they turned into Evertree Crescent, there was nothing there, and the siren was already gone.

On a lawn a mile away, Sukhvinder Jawanda was vomiting river water beneath a willow tree, while an old lady pressed blankets around her that were already as sodden as Sukhvinder’s clothes. A short distance away, the dog-walker who had dragged Sukhvinder from the river by her hair and her sweatshirt was bent over a small, limp body.

Sukhvinder had thought she felt Robbie struggling in her arms, but had that been the cruel tug of the river, trying to rip him from her? She was a strong swimmer, but the Orr had dragged her under, pulled her helplessly wherever it chose. She had been swept around the bend, and it had thrown her in towards land, and she had managed a scream, and seen the man with his dog, running towards her along the bank…

“No good,” said the man, who had worked on Robbie’s little body for twenty minutes. “He’s gone.”

Sukhvinder wailed, and slumped to the cold wet ground, shaking furiously as the sound of the siren reached them, too late.

Back in Evertree Crescent, the paramedics were having enormous difficulty getting Howard onto the stretcher; Miles and Samantha had to help.

“We’ll follow in the car, you go with Dad,” Miles shouted at Shirley, who seemed bewildered, and unwilling to get into the ambulance.

Maureen, who had just shown her last customer out of the Copper Kettle, stood on the doorstep, listening.

“Lots of sirens,” she said over her shoulder to an exhausted Andrew, who was mopping tables. “Something must have happened.”

And she took a deep breath, as though she hoped to taste the tang of disaster on the warm afternoon air.