The Casual Vacancy (5 page)

Pagford was as lovely as ever this morning, and Howard knew a sublime moment of exultation in the existence, both of himself, and of the town to which he belonged, as he saw it, like a pulsing heart. He was here to drink it all in — the glossy black benches, the red and purple flowers, the sunlight gilding the top of the stone cross — and Barry Fairbrother was gone. It was difficult not to sense a greater design in this sudden rearrangement of what Howard saw as the battlefield across which he and Barry had faced each other for so long.

“Howard,” said Maureen sharply.
“Howard.”

A woman was striding across the Square; a thin, black-haired, brown-skinned woman in a trench coat, who was scowling at her booted feet as she walked.

“D’you think she…? Has she heard?” whispered Maureen.

“I don’t know,” said Howard.

Maureen, who had still not found time to change into her Dr. Scholl’s, nearly turned an ankle as she backed away from the windows in haste, and hurried behind the counter. Howard walked slowly, majestically, to occupy the space behind the till, like a gunner moving to his post.

The bell tinkled, and Dr. Parminder Jawanda pushed open the door of the delicatessen, still frowning. She did not acknowledge Howard or Maureen, but made her way directly to the shelf of oils. Maureen’s eyes followed her with the rapt and unblinking attention of a hawk watching a field mouse.

“Morning,” said Howard, when Parminder approached the counter with a bottle in her hand.

“Morning.”

Dr. Jawanda rarely looked him in the eye, either at Parish Council meetings, or when they met outside the church hall. Howard was always amused by her inability to dissemble her dislike; it made him jovial, extravagantly gallant and courteous.

“Not at work today?”

“No,” said Parminder, rummaging in her purse.

Maureen could not contain herself.

“Dreadful news,” she said, in her hoarse, cracked voice. “About Barry Fairbrother.”

“Mm,” said Parminder, but then, “What?”

“About Barry Fairbrother,” repeated Maureen.

“What about him?”

Parminder’s Birmingham accent was still strong after sixteen years in Pagford. A deep vertical groove between her eyebrows gave her a perennially intense look, sometimes of crossness, sometimes of concentration.

“He died,” said Maureen, gazing hungrily into the scowling face. “Last night. Howard’s just been telling me.”

Parminder remained quite still, with her hand in her purse. Then her eyes slid sideways to Howard.

“Collapsed and died in the golf club car park,” Howard said. “Miles was there, saw it happen.”

More seconds passed.

“Is this a joke?” demanded Parminder, her voice hard and high-pitched.

“Of course it’s not a joke,” said Maureen, savoring her own outrage. “Who’d make a joke like that?”

Parminder set down the oil with a bang on the glass-topped counter and walked out of the shop.

“Well!” said Maureen, in an ecstasy of disapproval. “‘Is this a joke?’ Charming!”

“Shock,” said Howard wisely, watching Parminder hurrying back across the Square, her trench coat flapping behind her. “She’ll be as upset as the widow, that one. Mind you, it’ll be interesting,” he added, scratching idly at the overfold of his belly, which was often itchy, “To see what she…”

He left the sentence unfinished, but it did not matter: Maureen knew exactly what he meant. Both, as they watched Councillor Jawanda disappear around a corner, were contemplating the casual vacancy: and they saw it, not as an empty space but as a magician’s pocket, full of possibilities.

VIII

The Old Vicarage was the last and grandest of the Victorian houses in Church Row. It stood at the very bottom, in a big corner garden, facing St. Michael and All Saints across the road.

Parminder, who had run the last few yards down the street, fumbled with the stiff lock on the front door and let herself inside. She would not believe it until she heard it from somebody else, anybody else; but the telephone was already ringing ominously in the kitchen.

“Yes?”

“It’s Vikram.”

Parminder’s husband was a cardiac surgeon. He worked at the South West General Hospital in Yarvil and he never usually called from work. Parminder gripped the receiver so tightly that her fingers hurt.

“I only heard by accident. It sounds like an aneurysm. I’ve asked Huw Jeffries to move the PM up the list. Better for Mary to know what it was. They could be doing him now.”

“Right,” whispered Parminder.

“Tessa Wall was there,” he told her. “Call Tessa.”

“Yes,” said Parminder. “All right.”

But when she had hung up, she sank down into one of the kitchen chairs and stared out of the window into the back garden without seeing it, her fingers pressed to her mouth.

Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.

She had no control over her thoughts; they had broken apart too, and random fragments of memory surfaced and spun out of sight again: dancing with Barry at the Walls’ New Year’s party, and the silly conversation they had had walking back from the last meeting of the Parish Council.

“You’ve got a cow-faced house,” she had told him.

“
Cow
-faced? What does that mean?”

“It’s narrower at the front than at the back. It’s lucky. But you overlook a T-junction. That’s unlucky.”

“So we’re luck neutral,” Barry had said.

The artery in his head must have been bulging dangerously even then, and neither of them had known it.

Parminder walked blindly from the kitchen into the gloomy sitting room, which was in perpetual shade, no matter the weather, because of the towering Scots pine in the front garden. She hated that tree, but it lived on because of the fuss she and Vikram knew the neighbors would make if they felled it.

She couldn’t settle. Through the hall, then back into the kitchen, where she seized the telephone and called Tessa Wall, who did not pick up. She must be at work. Parminder returned, trembling, to the kitchen chair.

Her grief was so big and wild it terrified her, like an evil beast that had erupted from under the floorboards. Barry, little, bearded Barry, her friend, her ally.

It was exactly the way her father had died. She had been fifteen, and they had come back from town to find him lying facedown on the lawn with the mower beside him, the sun hot on the back of his head. Parminder hated sudden death. The long wasting away that so many people feared was a comforting prospect to her; time to arrange and organize, time to say good-bye…

Her hands were still pressed tightly over her mouth. She stared at the grave, sweet visage of Guru Nanak pinned to the cork board.

(Vikram did not like the picture.

“What’s that doing there?”

“I like it,” she had said defiantly.)

Barry, dead.

She tamped down the awful urge to cry with a fierceness that her mother had always deplored, especially in the wake of her father’s death, when her other daughters, and the aunts and cousins, were all wailing and beating their breasts. “And you were his favorite too!” But Parminder kept her unwept tears locked tightly inside where they seemed to undergo an alchemical transformation, returning to the outer world as lava slides of rage, disgorged periodically at her children and the receptionists at work.

She could still see Howard and Maureen behind the counter, the one immense, the other scrawny, and in her mind’s eye they were looking down at her from a height as they told her that her friend was dead. With an almost welcome gush of fury and hatred she thought,
They’re glad. They think they’ll win now
.

She jumped up again, strode back into the sitting room and took down, from the top shelf, one volume of the
Sainchis,
her brand-new holy book. Opening it at random, she read, with no surprise, but rather a sense of looking at her own devastated face in a mirror:

O mind, the world is a deep, dark pit. On every side, Death casts forward his net.

IX

The room set aside for the guidance department at Winterdown Comprehensive opened off the school library. It had no windows and was lit by a single strip light.

Tessa Wall, head of guidance and wife of the deputy headmaster, entered the room at half-past ten, numb with fatigue and carrying a cup of strong instant coffee that she had brought up from the staff room. She was a short stout woman with a plain wide face, who cut her own graying hair — the blunt fringe was often a little lopsided — wore clothes of a homespun, crafty variety, and liked jewelry of beads and wood. Today’s long skirt might have been made of hessian, and she had teamed it with a thick lumpy cardigan in pea green. Tessa hardly ever looked at herself in full-length mirrors, and boycotted shops where this was unavoidable.

She had attempted to soften the guidance room’s resemblance to a cell by pinning up a Nepalese hanging she had owned since her student days: a rainbow sheet with a bright yellow sun and moon that emitted stylized, wavy rays. The rest of the bare painted surfaces were covered with a variety of posters that either gave helpful tips on boosting self-esteem or telephone numbers to call for anonymous help on a variety of health and emotional issues. The headmistress had made a slightly sarcastic remark about these the last time she had visited the guidance room.

“And if all else fails, they call ChildLine, I see,” she had said, pointing to the most prominent poster.

Tessa sank into her chair with a low groan, took off her wristwatch, which pinched, and placed it on the desk beside various printed sheets and notes. She doubted that progress along the prearranged lines would be possible today; she doubted even whether Krystal Weedon would turn up. Krystal frequently walked out of school when upset, angry or bored. She was sometimes apprehended before she reached the gates and frog-marched back inside, swearing and shouting; at other times, she successfully evaded capture and escaped into days of truancy. Ten forty arrived, the bell sounded, and Tessa waited.

Krystal burst in through the door at ten fifty-one and slammed it behind her. She slumped down in front of Tessa with her arms folded across her ample bosom, her cheap earrings swinging.

“You can tell your ’usband,” she said, her voice trembling, “that I never fuckin’ laughed, all right?”

“Don’t swear at me, please, Krystal,” said Tessa.

“I never laughed — all right?”
screamed Krystal.

A group of sixth-formers carrying folders had arrived in the library. They glanced through the glass pane in the door; one of them grinned at the sight of the back of Krystal’s head. Tessa got up and let down the roller-blind over the window, then returned to her seat in front of the moon and sun.

“All right, Krystal. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“Your ’
usband
said sumthin’ abou’ Mister Fairbrother, right, an’ I couldn’t hear what he was saying, right, so Nikki tole me, and I couldn’t fucking —”

“Krystal! —”

“— couldn’t believe it, right, an’ I shouted but I never laughed! I never fuck —”

“— Krystal —”

“I never laughed, all right?”
shouted Krystal, arms tight across her chest, legs twisted together.

“All right, Krystal.”

Tessa was used to the anger of students she saw most often in guidance. Many of them were devoid of workaday morals; they lied, misbehaved and cheated routinely, and yet their fury when wrongly accused was limitless and genuine. Tessa thought she recognized this as authentic outrage, as opposed to the synthetic kind that Krystal was adept at producing. In any case, the squawk Tessa had heard during assembly had struck her at the time as one of shock and dismay rather than amusement; Tessa had been filled with dread when Colin had publicly identified it as laughter.

“I seen Cubby —”

“Krystal! —”

“I tole your fuckin’ ’usband —”

“Krystal, for the last time, please do not swear at me —”

“I told ’im I never laughed, I told ’im! An’ he’s still gave me fucking detention!”

Tears of fury gleamed in the girl’s heavily penciled eyes. Blood had flowed into her face; peony pink, she glared at Tessa, poised to run, to swear, to give Tessa the finger too. Nearly two years of gossamer-fine trust, laboriously spun between them, was stretching, on the point of tearing.

“I believe you, Krystal. I believe you didn’t laugh, but please do not swear at me.”

Suddenly, stubby fingers were rubbing the smeary eyes. Tessa pulled a wad of tissues from out of her desk drawer and handed them across to Krystal, who grabbed them without thanks, pressed them to each eye and blew her nose. Krystal’s hands were the most touching part of her: the fingernails were short and broad, untidily painted, and all her hand movements were as naive and direct as a small child’s.

Tessa waited until Krystal’s snorting breaths had slowed down. Then she said, “I can tell you’re upset that Mr. Fairbrother has died —”

“Yer, I am,” said Krystal, with considerable aggression. “So?”

Tessa had a sudden mental image of Barry listening in to this conversation. She could see his rueful smile; she heard him, quite clearly, saying “bless her heart.” Tessa closed her stinging eyes, unable to speak. She heard Krystal fidget, counted slowly to ten, and opened her eyes again. Krystal was staring at her, arms still folded, flushed and defiant-looking.

“I’m very sorry about Mr. Fairbrother too,” said Tessa. “He was an old friend of ours, actually. That’s the reason Mr. Wall is a bit —”

“I told ’im I never —”

“Krystal, please let me finish. Mr. Wall is very upset today, and that’s probably why he…why he misinterpreted what you did. I’ll speak to him.”

“He won’t change his fuck —”

“Krystal!”

“Well, he won’.”

Krystal banged the leg of Tessa’s desk with her foot, beating out a rapid rhythm. Tessa removed her elbows from the desk, so as not to feel the vibration, and said, “I’ll speak to Mr. Wall.”