The Casual Vacancy (36 page)
“Don’t be so damn rude and disgusting!” shouted Colin. “Sit up properly! Wipe up that mess! How dare you speak to your mother like that? Apologize!”
Tessa withdrew the needle too fast; she had made herself bleed.
“I’m sorry that you shooting up at breakfast makes me want to puke, Tess,” said Fats from under the table, where he was wiping the floor with a bit of kitchen roll.
“Your mother isn’t ‘Shooting up,’ she’s got a medical condition!” shouted Colin. “And don’t call her ‘Tess’!”
“I know you don’t like needles, Stu,” said Tessa, but her eyes were stinging; she had hurt herself, and felt shaken and angry with both of them, feelings that were still with her this evening.)
Tessa wondered why Parminder did not appreciate Vikram’s concern. Colin never noticed when
she
was stressed.
Perhaps
, Tessa thought angrily,
there’s something in this arranged marriage business…my mother certainly wouldn’t have chosen Colin for me…
Parminder was shoving bowls of cut fruit across the table for pudding. Tessa wondered a little resentfully what she would have offered a guest who was not diabetic, and comforted herself with the thought of a bar of chocolate lying at home in the fridge.
Parminder, who had talked five times as much as anybody else all through supper, had started ranting about her daughter, Sukhvinder. She had already told Tessa on the telephone about the girl’s betrayal; she went through it all again at the table.
“Waitressing with Howard Mollison. I don’t, I really
don’t
know what she’s thinking. But Vikram —”
“They don’t think, Minda,” Colin proclaimed, breaking his long silence. “That’s teenagers. They don’t care. They’re all the same.”
“Colin, what rubbish,” snapped Tessa. “They aren’t all the same at all. We’d be delighted if Stu went and got himself a Saturday job — not that there’s the remotest chance of that.”
“— but Vikram doesn’t mind,” Parminder pressed on, ignoring the interruption. “He can’t see anything wrong with it, can you?”
Vikram answered easily: “It’s work experience. She probably won’t make university; there’s no shame in it. It’s not for everyone. I can see Jolly married early, quite happy.”
“
Waitressing…
”
“Well, they can’t all be academic, can they?”
“No, she certainly isn’t academic,” said Parminder, who was almost quivering with anger and tension. “Her marks are absolutely atrocious — no aspiration, no ambition —
waitressing
— ‘let’s face it, I’m not going to get into uni’ — no, you certainly
won’t
, with that attitude — with
Howard Mollison…
oh, he must have absolutely loved it — my daughter going cap in hand for a job. What was she thinking —
what
was she thinking?”
“You wouldn’t like it if Stu took a job with someone like Mollison,” Colin told Tessa.
“I wouldn’t care,” said Tessa. “I’d be thrilled he was showing any kind of work ethic. As far as I can tell, all he seems to care about is computer games and —”
But Colin did not know that Stuart smoked; she broke off, and Colin said, “Actually, this would be exactly the kind of thing Stuart would do. Insinuate himself with somebody he knew we didn’t like, to get at us. He’d love that.”
“For goodness sake, Colin, Sukhvinder isn’t trying to
get at
Minda,” said Tessa.
“So you think I’m being unreasonable?” Parminder shot at Tessa.
“No, no,” said Tessa, appalled at how quickly they had been sucked into the family row. “I’m just saying, there aren’t many places for kids to work in Pagford, are there?”
“And why does she need to work at all?” said Parminder, raising her hands in a gesture of furious exasperation. “Don’t we give her enough money?”
“Money you earn yourself is always different, you know that,” said Tessa.
Tessa’s chair faced a wall that was covered in photographs of the Jawanda children. She had sat here often, and had counted how many appearances each child made: Jaswant, eighteen; Rajpal, nineteen; and Sukhvinder, nine. There was only one photograph on the wall celebrating Sukhvinder’s individual achievements: the picture of the Winterdown rowing team on the day that they had beaten St. Anne’s. Barry had given all the parents an enlarged copy of this picture, in which Sukhvinder and Krystal Weedon were in the middle of the line of eight, with their arms around each other’s shoulders, beaming and jumping up and down so that they were both slightly blurred.
Barry,
she thought,
would have helped Parminder see things the right way
. He had been a bridge between mother and daughter, both of whom had adored him.
Not for the first time, Tessa wondered how much difference it made that she had not given birth to her son. Did she find it easier to accept him as a separate individual than if he had been made from her flesh and blood? Her glucose-heavy, tainted blood…
Fats had recently stopped calling her “Mum.” She had to pretend not to care, because it made Colin so angry; but every time Fats said “Tessa” it was like a needle jab to her heart.
The four of them finished their cold fruit in silence.
Up in the little white house that sat high above the town, Simon Price fretted and brooded. Days passed. The accusatory post had vanished from the message boards, but Simon remained paralyzed. To withdraw his candidacy might seem like an admission of guilt. The police had not come knocking about the computer; Simon half regretted throwing it off the old bridge now. On the other hand, he could not decide whether he had imagined a knowing grin from the man behind the till when he handed over his credit card in the garage at the foot of the hill. There was a lot of talk about redundancies at work, and Simon was still afraid of the contents of that post coming to the bosses’ ears, that they might save themselves redundancy pay by sacking himself, Jim and Tommy.
Andrew watched and waited, losing hope every day. He had tried to show the world what his father was, and the world, it seemed, had merely shrugged. Andrew had imagined that someone from the printworks or the council would rise up and tell Simon firmly, “no”; that he was not fit to set himself up in competition with other people, that he was unsuitable and substandard, and must not disgrace himself or his family. Yet nothing had happened, except that Simon stopped talking about the council or making telephone calls in the hope of garnering votes, and the leaflets that he had had printed out of hours at work sat untouched in a box in the porch.
Then, without warning or fanfare, came victory. Heading down the dark stairs in search of food on Friday evening, Andrew heard Simon talking stiffly on the telephone in the sitting room, and paused to listen.
“…withdraw my candidacy,” he was saying. “Yes. Well, my personal circumstances have changed. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that’s right. OK. Thank you.”
Andrew heard Simon replace the receiver.
“Well, that’s that,” his father said to his mother. “I’m well out of it, if that’s the kind of shit they’re throwing around.”
He heard his mother return some muffled, approving rejoinder, and before Andrew had time to move, Simon had emerged into the hall below, drawn breath into his lungs and yelled the first syllable of Andrew’s name, before realizing that his son was right in front of him.
“What are you doing?”
Simon’s face was half in shadow, lit only by the light escaping the sitting room.
“I wanted a drink,” Andrew lied; his father did not like the boys helping themselves to food.
“You start work with Mollison this weekend, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Right, well, you listen to me. I want anything you can get on that bastard, d’you hear me? All the dirt you can get. And on his son, if you hear anything.”
“All right,” said Andrew.
“And I’ll put it up on the fucking website for them,” said Simon, and he walked back into the sitting room. “
Barry Fairbrother’s fucking ghost
.”
As he scavenged an assortment of food that might not be missed, skimming off slices here, handfuls there, a jubilant jingle ran through Andrew’s mind:
I stopped you, you bastard. I stopped you.
He had done exactly what he had set out to do: Simon had no idea who had brought his ambitions to dust. The silly sod was even demanding Andrew’s help in getting his revenge; a complete about-turn, because when Andrew had first told his parents that he had a job at the delicatessen, Simon had been furious.
“You stupid little tit. What about your fucking allergy?”
“I thought I’d try not eating any of the nuts,” said Andrew.
“Don’t get smart with me, Pizza Face. What if you eat one accidentally, like at St. Thomas’s? D’you think we want to go through that crap again?”
But Ruth had supported Andrew, telling Simon that Andrew was old enough to take care, to know better. When Simon had left the room, she had tried to tell Andrew that Simon was only worried about him.
“The only thing he’s worried about is that he’d have to miss bloody
Match of the Day
to take me to hospital.”
Andrew returned to his bedroom, where he sat shoveling food into his mouth with one hand and texting Fats with the other.
He thought that it was all over, finished, done with. Andrew had never yet had reason to observe the first tiny bubble of fermenting yeast, in which was contained an inevitable, alchemical transformation.
The move to Pagford had been the worst thing that had ever happened to Gaia Bawden. Excepting occasional visits to her father in Reading, London was all that she had ever known. So incredulous had Gaia been, when Kay had first said that she wanted to move to a tiny West Country town, that it had been weeks before she took the threat seriously. She had thought it one of Kay’s mad ideas, like the two chickens she had bought for their tiny back garden in Hackney (killed by a fox a week after purchase), or deciding to ruin half their saucepans and permanently scar her own hand by making marmalade, when she hardly ever cooked.
Wrenched from friends she had had since primary school, from the house she had known since she was eight, from weekends that were, increasingly, about every kind of urban fun, Gaia had been plunged, over her pleas, threats and protests, into a life she had never dreamed existed. Cobbled streets and no shops open past six o’clock, a communal life that seemed to revolve around the church, and where you could often hear birdsong and nothing else: Gaia felt as though she had fallen through a portal into a land lost in time.
She and Kay had clung tightly to each other all Gaia’s life (for her father had never lived with them, and Kay’s two successive relationships had never been formalized), bickering, condoling and growing steadily more like flatmates with the passing years. Now, though, Gaia saw nothing but an enemy when she looked across the kitchen table. Her only ambition was to return to London, by any means possible, and to make Kay as unhappy as she could, in revenge. She could not decide whether it would punish Kay more to fail all her GCSEs, or to pass them, and try and get her father to agree to house her, while she attended a sixth-form college in London. In the meantime, she had to exist in alien territory, where her looks and her accent, once instant passports to the most select social circles, had become foreign currency.
Gaia had no desire to become one of the popular students at Winterdown: she thought they were embarrassing, with their West Country accents and their pathetic ideas of what constituted entertainment. Her determined pursuit of Sukhvinder Jawanda was, in part, a way of showing the in-crowd that she found them laughable, and partly because she was in a mood to feel kinship with anybody who seemed to have outsider status.
The fact that Sukhvinder had agreed to join Gaia as a waitress had moved their friendship to a different level. In their next period of double biology, Gaia unbent as she had never done before, and Sukhvinder glimpsed, at last, part of the mysterious reason why this beautiful, cool newcomer had selected her as a friend. Adjusting the focus on their shared microscope, Gaia muttered, “It’s so frigging
white
here, isn’t it?”
Sukhvinder heard herself saying “yeah” before she had fully considered the question. Gaia was still talking, but Sukhvinder was only half listening. “So frigging white.” She supposed that it was.
At St. Thomas’s, she had been made to get up, the only brown person in the class, and talk about the Sikh religion. She had stood obediently at the front of the class and told the story of the Sikh religion’s founder Guru Nanak, who disappeared into a river, and was believed drowned, but reemerged after three days underwater to announce: “There is no Hindu, there is no Moslem.”
The other children had sniggered at the idea of anyone surviving underwater for three days. Sukhvinder had not had the courage to point out that Jesus had died and then come back to life. She had cut the story of Guru Nanak short, desperate to get back to her seat. She had only ever visited a gurdwara a handful of times in her life; there was none in Pagford, and the one in Yarvil was tiny and dominated, according to her parents, by Chamars, a different caste from their own. Sukhvinder did not even know why that mattered, because she knew that Guru Nanak explicitly forbade caste distinctions. It was all very confusing, and she continued to enjoy Easter eggs and decorating the Christmas tree, and found the books that Parminder pressed upon her children, explaining the lives of the gurus and the tenets of Khalsa, extremely difficult to read.
Visits to her mother’s family in Birmingham, to the streets where nearly everyone was brown, and the shops full of saris and Indian spices, made Sukhvinder feel dislocated and inadequate. Her cousins spoke Punjabi as well as English; they lived a cool city life; her female cousins were good-looking and trendy. They laughed at her West Country burr and her lack of fashion sense, and Sukhvinder hated being laughed at. Before Fats Wall had begun his regime of daily torture, before their year had been streamed into sets and she had found herself in daily contact with Dane Tully, she had always liked returning to Pagford. It had felt, then, like a haven.
