The Casual Vacancy (7 page)
Howard carried the mental image of the Fields with him always, like a memory of a nightmare: boarded windows daubed with obscenities; smoking teenagers loitering in the perennially defaced bus shelters; satellite dishes everywhere, turned to the skies like the denuded ovules of grim metal flowers. He often asked rhetorically why they could not have organized and made the place over — what was stopping the residents from pooling their meager resources and buying a lawnmower between the lot of them? But it never happened: the Fields waited for the councils, District and Parish, to clean, to repair, to maintain; to give and give and give again.
Howard would then recall the Hope Street of his boyhood, with its tiny back gardens, each hardly more than tablecloth-sized squares of earth, but most, including his mother’s, bristling with runner beans and potatoes. There was nothing, as far as Howard could see, to stop the Fielders growing fresh vegetables; nothing to stop them disciplining their sinister, hooded, spray-painting offspring; nothing to stop them pulling themselves together as a community and tackling the dirt and the shabbiness; nothing to stop them cleaning themselves up and taking jobs; nothing at all. So Howard was forced to draw the conclusion that they were choosing, of their own free will, to live the way they lived, and that the estate’s air of slightly threatening degradation was nothing more than a physical manifestation of ignorance and indolence.
Pagford, by contrast, shone with a kind of moral radiance in Howard’s mind, as though the collective soul of the community was made manifest in its cobbled streets, its hills, its picturesque houses. To Howard, his birthplace was much more than a collection of old buildings, and a fast-flowing, tree-fringed river, the majestic silhouette of the abbey above or the hanging baskets in the Square. For him, the town was an ideal, a way of being; a micro-civilization that stood firmly against a national decline.
“I’m a Pagford man,” he would tell summertime tourists, “born and bred.” In so saying, he was giving himself a profound compliment disguised as a commonplace. He had been born in Pagford and he would die there, and he had never dreamed of leaving, nor itched for more change of scene than could be had from watching the seasons transform the surrounding woods and river; from watching the Square blossom in spring or sparkle at Christmas.
Barry Fairbrother had known all this; indeed, he had said it. He had laughed right across the table in the church hall, laughed right in Howard’s face. “You know, Howard, you
are
Pagford to me.” And Howard, not discomposed in the slightest (for he had always met Barry joke for joke), had said, “I’ll take that as a great compliment, Barry, however it was intended.”
He could afford to laugh. The one remaining ambition of Howard’s life was within touching distance: the return of the Fields to Yarvil seemed imminent and certain.
Then, two days before Barry Fairbrother had dropped dead in a car park, Howard had learned from an unimpeachable source that his opponent had broken all known rules of engagement, and had gone to the local paper with a story about the blessing it had been for Krystal Weedon to be educated at St. Thomas’s.
The idea of Krystal Weedon being paraded in front of the reading public as an example of the successful integration of the Fields and Pagford might (so Howard said) have been funny, had it not been so serious. Doubtless Fairbrother would have coached the girl, and the truth about her foul mouth, the endlessly interrupted classes, the other children in tears, the constant removals and reintegrations, would be lost in lies.
Howard trusted the good sense of his fellow townsfolk, but he feared journalistic spin and the interference of ignorant do-gooders. His objection was both principled and personal: he had not yet forgotten how his granddaughter had sobbed in his arms, with bloody sockets where her teeth had been, while he tried to soothe her with a promise of triple prizes from the tooth fairy.
Two mornings after her husband’s death, Mary Fairbrother woke at five o’clock. She had slept in the marital bed with her twelve-year-old, Declan, who had crawled in, sobbing, shortly after midnight. He was sound asleep now, so Mary crept out of the room and went down into the kitchen to cry more freely. Every hour that passed added to her grief, because it bore her further away from the living man, and because it was a tiny foretaste of the eternity she would have to spend without him. Again and again she found herself forgetting, for the space of a heartbeat, that he was gone forever and that she could not turn to him for comfort.
When her sister and brother-in-law came through to make breakfast, Mary took Barry’s phone and withdrew into the study, where she started looking for the numbers of some of Barry’s huge acquaintance. She had only been at it a matter of minutes when the mobile in her hands rang.
“Yes?” she murmured.
“Oh, hello! I’m looking for Barry Fairbrother. Alison Jenkins from the
Yarvil and District Gazette
.”
The young woman’s jaunty voice was as loud and horrible in Mary’s ear as a triumphal fanfare; the blast of it obliterated the sense of the words.
“Sorry?”
“Alison Jenkins from the
Yarvil and District Gazette
. I want to speak to Barry Fairbrother? It’s about his article on the Fields.”
“Oh?” said Mary.
“Yes, he hasn’t attached details of this girl he talks about. We’re supposed to interview her. Krystal Weedon?”
Each word felt to Mary like a slap. Perversely, she sat still and silent in Barry’s old swivel chair and let the blows rain upon her.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” said Mary, her voice cracking. “I can hear you.”
“I know Mr. Fairbrother was very keen to be present when we interview Krystal, but time’s running —”
“He won’t be able to be present,” said Mary, her voice eliding into a screech. “He won’t be able to talk about the
bloody
Fields any more, or about anything, ever again!”
“What?” said the girl on the end of the line.
“My husband is
dead,
all right. He’s
dead,
so
the Fields
will have to get on without him, won’t they?”
Mary’s hands were shaking so much that the mobile slipped through her fingers, and for the few moments before she managed to cut the call, she knew that the journalist heard her ragged sobs. Then she remembered that most of Barry’s last day on earth and their wedding anniversary had been given over to his obsession with the Fields and Krystal Weedon; fury erupted, and she threw the mobile so hard across the room that it hit a framed picture of their four children, knocking it to the floor. She began to scream and cry at once, and her sister and brother-in-law both came running upstairs and burst into the room.
All they could get out of her at first was, “The Fields, the bloody,
bloody
Fields…”
“It’s where me and Barry grew up,” her brother-in-law muttered, but he explained no further, for fear of inflaming Mary’s hysteria.
Social worker Kay Bawden and her daughter Gaia had moved from London only four weeks previously, and were Pagford’s very newest inhabitants. Kay was unfamiliar with the contentious history of the Fields; it was simply the estate where many of her clients lived. All she knew about Barry Fairbrother was that his death had precipitated the miserable scene in her kitchen, when her lover Gavin had fled from her and her scrambled eggs, and so dashed all the hopes his lovemaking had roused in her.
Kay spent Tuesday lunchtime in a layby between Pagford and Yarvil, eating a sandwich in her car, and reading a large stack of notes. One of her colleagues had been signed off work due to stress, with the immediate result that Kay had been lumbered with a third of her cases. Shortly before one o’clock, she set off for the Fields.
She had already visited the estate several times, but she was not yet familiar with the warrenlike streets. At last she found Foley Road, and identified from a distance the house that she thought must belong to the Weedons. The file had made it clear what she was likely to meet, and her first glimpse of the house met her expectations.
A pile of refuse was heaped against the front wall: carrier bags bulging with filth, jumbled together with old clothes and unbagged, soiled nappies. Bits of the rubbish had tumbled or been scattered over the scrubby patch of lawn, but the bulk of it remained piled beneath one of the two downstairs windows. A bald old tire sat in the middle of the lawn; it had been shifted sometime recently, because a foot away there was a flattened yellowish-brown circle of dead grass. After ringing the doorbell, Kay noticed a used condom glistening in the grass beside her feet, like the gossamer cocoon of some huge grub.
She was experiencing that slight apprehension that she had never quite overcome, although it was nothing compared to the nerves with which she had faced unknown doors in the early days. Then, in spite of all her training, in spite of the fact that a colleague usually accompanied her, she had, on occasion, been truly afraid. Dangerous dogs; men brandishing knives; children with grotesque injuries; she had found them all, and worse, in her years of entering strangers’ houses.
Nobody came in answer to the bell, but she could hear a small child grizzling through the ground-floor window on her left, which was ajar. She tried rapping on the door instead and a tiny flake of peeling cream paint fell off and landed on the toe of her shoe. It reminded her of the state of her own new home. It would have been nice if Gavin had offered to help with some of her redecorating, but he had said not a word. Sometimes Kay counted over the things that he had not said or done, like a miser looking through IOUs, and felt bitter and angry, and determined to extract repayment.
She knocked again, sooner than she would have done if she had not wanted to distract herself from her own thoughts, and this time, a distant voice said, “I’m fuckin’
comin’.
”
The door swung open to reveal a woman who appeared simultaneously childlike and ancient, dressed in a dirty pale-blue T-shirt and a pair of men’s pajama bottoms. She was the same height as Kay, but shrunken; the bones of her face and sternum showed sharply through the thin white skin. Her hair, which was home-dyed, coarse and very red, looked like a wig on top of a skull, her pupils were minuscule and her chest virtually breastless.
“Hello, are you Terri? I’m Kay Bawden, from Social Services. I’m covering for Mattie Knox.”
There were silvery pockmarks all over the woman’s fragile gray-white arms, and an angry red, open sore on the inside of one forearm. A wide area of scar tissue on her right arm and lower neck gave the skin a shiny plastic appearance. Kay had known an addict in London who had accidentally set fire to her house, and realized too late what was happening.
“Yeah, righ’,” said Terri, after an overlong pause. When she spoke, she seemed much older; several of her teeth were missing. She turned her back on Kay and took a few unsteady steps down the dark hallway. Kay followed. The house smelled of stale food, of sweat, of unshifted filth. Terri led Kay through the first door on the left, into a tiny sitting room.
There were no books, no pictures, no photographs, no television; nothing except a pair of filthy old armchairs and a broken set of shelves. Debris littered the floor. A pile of brand-new cardboard boxes piled against the wall struck an incongruous note.
A bare-legged little boy was standing in the middle of the floor, dressed in a T-shirt and a bulging pull-up nappy. Kay knew from the file that he was three and a half. His whining seemed unconscious and unmotivated, a sort of engine noise to signal that he was there. He was clutching a miniature cereal packet.
“So this must be Robbie?” said Kay.
The boy looked at her when she said his name, but kept grizzling.
Terri shoved aside a scratched old biscuit tin, which had been sitting on one of the dirty frayed armchairs, and curled herself into the seat, watching Kay from beneath drooping eyelids. Kay took the other chair, on the arm of which was perched an overflowing ashtray. Cigarette ends had fallen into the seat of Kay’s chair; she could feel them beneath her thighs.
“Hello, Robbie,” said Kay, opening Terri’s file.
The little boy continued to whine, shaking the cereal packet; something inside it rattled.
“What have you got in there?” Kay asked.
He did not answer, but shook the packet more vigorously. A small plastic figure flew out of it, soared in an arc and fell down behind the cardboard boxes. Robbie began to wail. Kay watched Terri, who was staring at her son, blank-faced. Eventually, Terri murmured, “S’up, Robbie?”
“Shall we see if we can get it out?” said Kay, quite glad of a reason to stand up and brush down the back of her legs. “Let’s have a look.”
She put her head close to the wall to look into the gap behind the boxes. The little figure was wedged near the top. She forced her hand into the gap. The boxes were heavy and difficult to move. Kay managed to grasp the model, which, once she had it in her hand, she saw to be a squat, fat Buddha-like man, bright purple all over.
“Here you are,” she said.
Robbie’s wailing ceased; he took the figure and put it back inside the cereal packet, which he started to shake again.
Kay glanced around. Two small toy cars lay upside down under the broken shelves.
“Do you like cars?” Kay asked Robbie, pointing at them.
He did not follow the direction of her finger, but squinted at her with a mixture of calculation and curiosity. Then he trotted off and picked up a car and held it up for her to see.
“Broom,” he said. “Ca.”
“That’s right,” said Kay. “Very good. Car. Broom broom.”
She sat back down and took her notepad out of her bag.
“So, Terri. How have things been going?”
There was a pause before Terri said, “All righ’.”
“Just to explain: Mattie has been signed off sick, so I’m covering for her. I’ll need to go over some of the information she’s left me, to check that nothing’s changed since she saw you last week, all right?
“So, let’s see: Robbie is in nursery now, isn’t he? Four mornings a week and two afternoons?”
Kay’s voice seemed to reach Terri only distantly. It was like talking to somebody sitting at the bottom of a well.
“Yeah,” she said, after a pause.
“How’s that going? Is he enjoying it?”
Robbie crammed the matchbox car into the cereal box. He picked up one of the cigarette butts that had fallen off Kay’s trousers, and squashed it on top of the car and the purple Buddha.
“Yeah,” said Terri drowsily.
But Kay was poring over the last of the untidy notes Mattie had left before she had been signed off.
“Shouldn’t he be there today, Terri? Isn’t Tuesday one of the days he goes?”
Terri seemed to be fighting a desire to sleep. Once or twice her head rocked a little on her shoulders. Finally she said, “Krystal was s’posed to drop him and she never.”
“Krystal is your daughter, isn’t she? How old is she?”
“Fourteen,” said Terri dreamily, “’n’a half.”
Kay could see from her notes that Krystal was sixteen. There was a long pause.
Two chipped mugs stood at the foot of Terri’s armchair. The dirty liquid in one of them had a bloody look. Terri’s arms were folded across her flat breast.
“I had him dressed,” said Terri, dragging the words from deep in her consciousness.
“Sorry, Terri, but I’ve got to ask,” said Kay. “Have you used this morning?”
Terri passed a bird’s-claw hand over her mouth.
“Nah.”
“Wantashit,” said Robbie, and he scurried toward the door.
“Does he need help?” Kay asked, as Robbie vanished from sight, and they heard him scampering upstairs.
“Nah, ’e can doot alone,” slurred Terri. She propped her drooping head on her fist, her elbow on the armchair. Robbie let out a shout from the landing.
“Door! Door!”
They heard him thumping wood. Terri did not move.
“Shall I help him?” Kay suggested.
“Yeah,” said Terri.
Kay climbed the stairs and operated the stiff handle on the door for Robbie. The room smelled rank. The bath was gray, with successive brown tidemarks around it, and the toilet had not been flushed. Kay did this before allowing Robbie to scramble onto the seat. He screwed up his face and strained loudly, indifferent to her presence. There was a loud splash, and a noisome new note was added to the already putrid air. He got down and pulled up his bulging nappy without wiping; Kay made him come back, and tried to persuade him to do it for himself, but the action seemed quite foreign to him. In the end she did it for him. His bottom was sore: crusty, red and irritated. The nappy stank of ammonia. She tried to remove it, but he yelped, lashed out at her, then pulled away, scampering back down to the sitting room with his nappy sagging. Kay wanted to wash her hands, but there was no soap. Trying not to inhale, she closed the bathroom door behind her.
She glanced into the bedrooms before returning downstairs. The contents of all three spilled out onto the cluttered landing. They were all sleeping on mattresses. Robbie seemed to be sharing a room with his mother. A couple of toys lay among the dirty clothes strewn all over the floor: cheap, plastic and too young for him. To Kay’s surprise, the duvet and pillows both had covers on them.
Back in the sitting room, Robbie was whining again, banging his fist against the stack of cardboard boxes. Terri was watching from beneath half-closed eyelids. Kay brushed off the seat of her chair before sitting back down.
“Terri, you’re on the methadone program at the Bellchapel Clinic, isn’t that right?”
“Mm,” said Terri drowsily.
“And how’s that going, Terri?”
Pen poised, Kay waited, pretending that the answer was not sitting in front of her.
“Are you still going to the clinic, Terri?”
“Las’ week. Friday, I goes.”
Robbie pounded the boxes with his fists.
“Can you tell me how much methadone you’re on?”
“Hundred and fifteen mils,” said Terri.