The Casual Vacancy (52 page)

The hall was so noisy, and the guests so raucously drunk, that nobody seemed to care where Andrew went anymore. When they got outside, they found Patricia Mollison, alone beside her sports car, looking up at the clear starry sky, smoking.

“You can have one of these,” she said, offering her packet, “if you want.”

After she had lit their cigarettes, she stood at her ease with one hand balled deep in her pocket. There was something about her that Andrew found intimidating; he could not even bring himself to glance at Fats, to gauge his reaction.

“I’m Pat,” she told them, after a little while. “Howard and Shirley’s daughter.”

“Hi,” said Andrew. “’M Andrew.”

“Stuart,” said Fats.

She did not seem to need to prolong conversation. Andrew felt it as a kind of compliment and tried to emulate her indifference. The silence was broken by footsteps and the sound of muffled girls’ voices.

Gaia was dragging Sukhvinder outside by the hand. She was laughing, and Andrew could tell that the full effect of the vodka was still intensifying inside her.

“You,” said Gaia, to Fats, “are really horrible to Sukhvinder.”

“Stop it,” said Sukhvinder, tugging against Gaia’s hand. “I’m serious — let me —”

“He is!” said Gaia breathlessly. “You are! Do you put stuff on her Facebook?”

“Stop it!”
shouted Sukhvinder. She wrenched herself free and plunged back inside the party.

“You
are
horrible to her,” said Gaia, grabbing on to the railings for support. “Calling her a lesbian and stuff…”

“Nothing wrong with being a lesbian,” said Patricia, her eyes narrowed through the smoke she was inhaling. “But then, I would say that.”

Andrew saw Fats look at Pat sideways.

“I never said there was anything wrong with it. It’s only jokes,” he said.

Gaia slid down the rails to sit on the chilly pavement, her head in her arms.

“You all right?” Andrew asked. If Fats had not been there, he would have sat down too.

“Pissed,” she muttered.

“Might do better to stick your fingers down your throat,” suggested Patricia, looking down at her dispassionately.

“Nice car,” Fats said, eyeing the BMW.

“Yeah,” said Patricia. “New. I make double what my brother makes,” she said, “but Miles is the Christ Child. Miles the Messiah…Parish Councillor Mollison the Second…of Pagford. Do you like Pagford?” she asked Fats, while Andrew watched Gaia breathing deeply, her head between her knees.

“No,” said Fats. “It’s a shithole.”

“Yeah, well…I couldn’t wait to leave, personally. Did you know Barry Fairbrother?”

“A bit,” said Fats.

Something in his voice made Andrew worried.

“He was my reading mentor at St. Thomas’s,” said Patricia, with her eyes still on the end of the street. “Lovely bloke. I would have come back for the funeral, but Melly and I were in Zermatt. What’s all this stuff my mother’s been gloating about…this Barry’s Ghost stuff?”

“Someone putting stuff on the Parish Council website,” said Andrew hastily, afraid of what Fats might say, if he let him. “Rumors and stuff.”

“Yeah, my mother would love that,” said Patricia.

“Wonder what the Ghost’ll say next?” Fats asked, with a sidelong glance at Andrew.

“Probably stop now the election’s over,” muttered Andrew.

“Oh, I dunno,” said Fats. “If there’s stuff old Barry’s Ghost is still pissed off about…”

He knew that he was making Andrew anxious and he was glad of it. Andrew was spending all his time at his poxy job these days, and he would soon be moving. Fats did not owe Andrew anything. True authenticity could not exist alongside guilt and obligation.

“You all right down there?” Patricia asked Gaia, who nodded, with her face still hidden. “What was it, the drink or the duet that made you feel sick?”

Andrew laughed a little bit, out of politeness and because he wanted to keep the subject away from the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother.

“Turned my stomach too,” said Patricia. “Old Maureen and my father singing along together. Arm in arm.” Patricia took a final fierce drag on her cigarette and threw the end down, grinding it beneath her heel. “I walked in on her blowing him when I was twelve,” she said. “And he gave me a fiver not to tell my mother.”

Andrew and Fats stood transfixed, scared even to look at each other. Patricia wiped her face on the back of her hand: she was crying.

“Shouldn’t have bloody come,” she said. “Knew I shouldn’t.”

She got into the BMW, and the two boys watched, stunned, as she turned on the engine, reversed out of her parking space and drove away into the night.

“Fuck me,” said Fats.

“I think I might be sick,” whispered Gaia.

“Mr. Mollison wants you back inside — for the drinks.”

Her message delivered, Sukhvinder darted away again.

“I can’t,” whispered Gaia.

Andrew left her there. The din in the hall hit him as he opened the inner doors. The disco was in full swing. He had to move aside to allow Aubrey and Julia Fawley room to leave. Both, with their backs to the party, looked grimly pleased to be going.

Samantha Mollison was not dancing, but was leaning up against the trestle table where, so recently, there had been rows and rows of drinks. While Sukhvinder rushed around collecting glasses, Andrew unpacked the last box of clean ones, set them out and filled them.

“Your bow tie’s crooked,” Samantha told him, and she leaned across the table and straightened it for him. Embarrassed, he ducked into the kitchen as soon as she let go. Between each load of glasses he put in the dishwasher, Andrew took another swig of the vodka he had stolen. He wanted to be drunk like Gaia; he wanted to return to that moment when they had been laughing uncontrollably together, before Fats had appeared.

After ten minutes, he checked the drinks table again; Samantha was still propped up against it, glassy-eyed, and there were plenty of fresh-poured drinks left for her to enjoy. Howard was bobbing in the middle of the dance floor, sweat pouring down his face, roaring with laughter at something Maureen had said to him. Andrew wound his way through the crowd and back outside.

He could not see where she was at first: then he spotted them. Gaia and Fats were locked together ten yards away from the door, leaning up against the railings, bodies pressed tight against each other, tongues working in each other’s mouths.

“Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t do it all,” said Sukhvinder desperately from behind him. Then she spotted Fats and Gaia and let out something between a yelp and a sob. Andrew walked back into the hall with her, completely numb. In the kitchen, he poured the remainder of the vodka into a glass and downed it in one. Mechanically he filled the sink and set to washing out the glasses that could not fit in the dishwasher.

The alcohol was not like dope. It made him feel empty, but also keen to hit someone: Fats, for instance.

After a while, he realized that the plastic clock on the kitchen wall had leaped from midnight to one and that people were leaving.

He was supposed to find coats. He tried for a while, but then lurched off to the kitchen again, leaving Sukhvinder in charge.

Samantha was leaning up against the fridge, on her own, with a glass in her hand. Andrew’s vision was strangely jerky, like a series of stills. Gaia had not come back. She was doubtless long gone with Fats. Samantha was talking to him. She was drunk too. He was not embarrassed by her anymore. He suspected that he might be sick quite soon.

“…hate bloody Pagford…” said Samantha, and, “but you’re young enough to get out.”

“Yeah,” he said, unable to feel his lips. “An’ I will. ’Nigh will.”

She pushed his hair off his forehead and called him sweet. The image of Gaia with her tongue in Fats’ mouth threatened to obliterate everything. He could smell Samantha’s perfume, coming in waves from her hot skin.

“That band’s shit,” he said, pointing at her chest, but he did not think she heard him.

Her mouth was chapped and warm, and her breasts were huge, pressed against his chest; her back was as broad as his —

“What the fuck?”

Andrew was slumped against the draining board and Samantha was being dragged out of the kitchen by a big man with short graying hair. Andrew had a dim idea that something bad had happened, but the strange flickering quality of reality was becoming more and more pronounced, until the only thing to do was to stagger across the room to the bin and throw up again and again and again…

“Sorry, you can’t come in!” he heard Sukhvinder tell someone. “Stuff piled up against the door!”

He tied the bin bag tightly on his own vomit. Sukhvinder helped him clear the kitchen. He needed to throw up twice more, but both times managed to get to the bathroom.

It was nearly two o’clock by the time Howard, sweaty but smiling, thanked them and said good night.

“Very good work,” he said. “See you tomorrow, then. Very good…where’s Miss Bawden, by the way?”

Andrew left Sukhvinder to come up with a lie. Out in the street, he unchained Simon’s bicycle and wheeled it away into the darkness.

The long cold walk back to Hilltop House cleared his head, but assuaged neither his bitterness nor his misery.

Had he ever told Fats that he fancied Gaia? Maybe not, but Fats knew. He
knew
that Fats knew…were they, perhaps, shagging right now?

I’m moving, anyway,
Andrew thought, bent over and shivering as he pushed the bicycle up the hill.
So fuck them…

Then he thought:
I’d better be moving…
Had he just snogged Lexie Mollison’s mother? Had her husband walked in on them? Had that really happened?

He was scared of Miles, but he also wanted to tell Fats about it, to see his face…

When he let himself into the house, exhausted, Simon’s voice came out of the darkness from the kitchen.

“Have you put my bike in the garage?”

He was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal. It was nearly half past two in the morning.

“Couldn’t sleep,” said Simon.

For once, he was not angry. Ruth was not there, so he did not have to prove himself bigger or smarter than his sons. He seemed weary and small.

“Think we’re gonna have to move to Reading, Pizza Face,” said Simon. It was almost a term of endearment.

Shivering slightly, feeling old and shell-shocked, and immensely guilty, Andrew wanted to give his father something to make up for what he had done. It was time to redress balances and claim Simon as an ally. They were a family. They had to move together. Perhaps it could be better, somewhere else.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said. “Come through here. Found out how to do it at school…”

And he led the way to the computer.

IV

A misty blue sky stretched like a dome over Pagford and the Fields. Dawn light shone upon the old stone war memorial in the Square, on the cracked concrete facades of Foley Road, and turned the white walls of Hilltop House pale gold. As Ruth Price climbed into her car ready for another long shift at the hospital, she looked down at the River Orr, shining like a silver ribbon in the distance, and felt how completely unjust it was that somebody else would soon have her house and her view.

A mile below, in Church Row, Samantha Mollison was still sound asleep in the spare bedroom. There was no lock on the door, but she had barricaded it with an armchair before collapsing, semidressed, onto the bed. The beginnings of a vicious headache disturbed her slumber, and the sliver of sunshine that had penetrated the gap in the curtains fell like a laser beam across the corner of one eye. She twitched a little, in the depths of her dry-mouthed, anxious half sleep, and her dreams were guilty and strange.

Downstairs, among the clean, bright surfaces of the kitchen, Miles sat bolt upright and alone with an untouched mug of tea in front of him, staring at the fridge, and stumbling again, in his mind’s eye, upon his drunken wife locked in the embrace of a sixteen-year-old schoolboy.

Three houses away, Fats Wall lay smoking in his bedroom in the clothes he had worn to Howard Mollison’s birthday party. He had wanted to stay awake all night, and he had done it. His mouth was slightly numb and tingly from all the cigarettes he had smoked, but his tiredness had had the reverse effect of the one he had hoped: he was unable to think very clearly, but his unhappiness and unease were as acute as ever.

Colin Wall woke, drenched in sweat, from another of the nightmares that had tormented him for years. He had always done terrible things in the dreams, the kinds of things that he spent his waking life dreading, and this time he had killed Barry Fairbrother, and the authorities had only just found out, and had come to tell him that they knew, that they had dug up Barry and found the poison that Colin had administered.

Staring up at the lampshade’s familiar shadow on the ceiling, Colin wondered why he had never considered the possibility that he had killed Barry; and at once, the question presented itself to him:
How do you know you didn’t?

Downstairs, Tessa was injecting insulin into her stomach. She knew that Fats had come home the previous evening, because she could smell the cigarette smoke at the bottom of the stairs to his attic bedroom. Where he had been and what time he had come in, she did not know, and it frightened her. How had things come to this?

Howard Mollison was sleeping soundly and happily in his double bed. The patterned curtains dappled him with pink petals and protected him from a rude awakening, but his rattling wheezing snores had roused his wife. Shirley was eating toast and drinking coffee in the kitchen, wearing her glasses and her candlewick dressing gown. She visualized Maureen swaying arm in arm with her husband in the village hall and experienced a concentrated loathing that took the taste from every mouthful.

In the Smithy, a few miles outside Pagford, Gavin Hughes soaped himself under a hot shower and wondered why he had never had the courage of other men, and how they managed to make the right choices among almost infinite alternatives. There was a yearning inside him for a life he had glimpsed but never tasted, yet he was afraid. Choice was dangerous: you had to forgo all other possibilities when you chose.