The Casual Vacancy

but did not care. He knew that he had acquitted himself well.
    ‘Where’re we goin’?’ asked Krystal.
    ‘Dunno,’ said Fats. ‘Where d’you usually go?’
    She shrugged, walking and chewing. They left the shopping centre and walked on down the high street. They were some distance from the recreation ground, where they had previously gone to find privacy.
    ‘Didjer mum really drop yeh?’ Krystal asked.
    ‘Course she bloody didn’t. I got the bus in, didn’t I?’
    Krystal accepted the rebuke without rancour, glancing sideways into the shop windows at their paired reflections. Stringy and strange, Fats was a school celebrity. Even Dane thought he was funny.
    ‘He’s on’y usin’ yeh, yeh stupid bitch,’ Ashlee Mellor had spat at her, three days ago, on the corner of Foley Road, ‘because yer a fuckin’ whore, like yer mum.’
    Ashlee had been a member of Krystal’s gang until the two of them had clashed over another boy. Ashlee was notoriously not quite right in the head; she was prone to outbursts of rage and tears, and divided most of her time between learning support and guidance when at Winterdown. If further proof were needed of her inability to think through consequences, she had challenged Krystal on her home turf, where Krystal had back-up and she had none. Nikki, Jemma and Leanne had helped corner and hold Ashlee, and Krystal had pummelled and slapped her everywhere she could reach, until her knuckles came away bloody from the other girl’s mouth.
    Krystal was not worried about repercussions.
    ‘Soft as shite an’ twice as runny,’ she said of Ashlee and her family.
    But Ashlee’s words had stung a tender, infected place in Krystal’s psyche, so it had been balm to her when Fats had sought her out at school the next day and asked her, for the first time, to meet him over the weekend. She had told Nikki and Leanne immediately that she was going out with Fats Wall on Saturday, and had been gratified by their looks of surprise. And to cap it all, he had turned up when he had said he would (or within half an hour of it) right in front of all her mates, and walked away with her. It was like they were properly going out.
    ‘So what’ve you been up to?’ Fats asked, after they had walked fifty yards in silence, back past the internet café. He knew a conventional need to keep some form of communication going, even while he wondered whether they would find a private place before the rec, a half-hour’s walk away. He wanted to screw her while they were both stoned; he was curious to know what that was like.
    ‘I bin ter see my Nana in hospital this mornin’, she’s ’ad a stroke,’ said Krystal.
    Nana Cath had not tried to speak this time, but Krystal thought she had known that she was there. As Krystal had expected, Terri was refusing to visit, so Krystal had sat beside the bed on her own for an hour until it was time to leave for the precinct.
    Fats was curious about the minutiae of Krystal’s life; but only in so far as she was an entry point to the real life of the Fields. Particulars such as hospital visits were of no interest to him.
    ‘An’,’ Krystal added, with an irrepressible spurt of pride, ‘I’ve gave an interview to the paper.’
    ‘What?’ said Fats, startled. ‘Why?’
    ‘Jus’ about the Fields,’ said Krystal. ‘What it’s like growin’ up there.’
    (The journalist had found her at home at last, and when Terri had given her grudging permission, taken her to a café to talk. She had kept asking her whether being at St Thomas’s had helped Krystal, whether it had changed her life in any way. She had seemed a little impatient and frustrated by Krystal’s answers.
    ‘How are your marks at school?’ she had said, and Krystal had been evasive and defensive.
    ‘Mr Fairbrother said that he thought it broadened your horizons.’
    Krystal did not know what to say about horizons. When she thought of St Thomas’s, it was of her delight in the playing field with the big chestnut tree, which rained enormous glossy conkers on them every year; she had never seen conkers before she went to St Thomas’s. She had liked the uniform at first, liked looking the same as everybody else. She had been excited to see her great-grandfather’s name on the war memorial in the middle of the Square:
Pte Samuel Weedon.
Only one other boy had his surname on the war memorial,and that was a farmer’s son, who had been able to drive a tractor at nine, and who had once brought