The Casual Vacancy

a frumpy, overweight guidance teacher as a mother. He was pre-eminently and uniquely himself: Fats, school notable and landmark, and even the Fielders laughed at his jokes, and rarely bothered – so coolly and cruelly did he return jibes – to laugh at his unfortunate connections.
    Fats’ self-possession remained total this morning when, in full view of the parent-free hordes streaming past, he had to struggle out of the Nissan alongside not only his mother but his father too, who usually travelled to school separately. Andrew thought again of Krystal Weedon and her exposed thong, as Fats loped towards him.
    ‘All right, Arf?’ said Fats.
    ‘Fats.’
    They moved together into the crowd, their school bags slung over their shoulders, buffeting the shorter kids in the face, creating a small space in their slipstream.
    ‘Cubby’s been crying,’ said Fats, as they walked up the teeming stairs.
    ‘Say what?’
    ‘Barry Fairbrother dropped dead last night.’
    ‘Oh yeah, I heard,’ said Andrew.
    Fats gave Andrew the sly, quizzical look he used when others over-reached themselves, pretended to know more than they did, pretended to be more than they were.
    ‘My mum was at the hospital when they brought him in,’ said Andrew, nettled. ‘She works there, remember?’
    ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Fats, and the slyness was gone. ‘Well, you know how him and Cubby were bum chums. And Cubby’s going to announce it. Not good, Arf.’
    They parted at the top of the stairs for their respective registration rooms. Most of Andrew’s class was already in their room, sitting on desks, swinging their legs, leaning up against the cupboards at the sides. Bags lay under chairs. Talk was always louder and freer than usual on Monday mornings, because assembly meant an open-air walk to the sports hall. Their registration teacher sat at her desk, marking people present as they came in. She never bothered to call the register formally; it was one of the many small ways in which she attempted to ingratiate herself with them, and the class despised her for it.
    Krystal arrived as the bell rang for assembly. She shouted, ‘I’m here, miss!’ from the doorway, and swung herself back out again. Everyone else followed her, still talking. Andrew and Fats were reunited at the top of the stairs and were borne by the general flow out of the back doors and across the wide grey tarmacked yard.
    The sports hall smelt of sweat and trainers; the din of twelve hundred voraciously talking teenagers echoed off its bleak, whitewashed walls. A hard industrial-grey and much-stained carpet covered the floor, inset with different coloured lines marking out badminton and tennis courts, hockey and football pitches; the stuff gave vicious burns if you fell on it bare-legged, but was easier on the backside than bare wood for those who had to sit on it for the duration of whole-school assembly. Andrew and Fats had attained the dignity of tubular-legged, plastic-backed chairs, ranged at the rear of the hall for the fifth and sixth years.
    An old wooden lectern stood at the front, facing the pupils, and beside it sat the headmistress, Mrs Shawcross. Fats’ father, Colin ‘Cubby’ Wall, walked over to take his place beside her. Very tall, he had a high, balding forehead, and an immensely imitable walk, his arms held rigid by his side, bobbing up and down more than was necessary for forward locomotion. Everyone called him Cubby, because of his infamous obsession with keeping the cubbyholes on the wall outside his school office in good order. The registers went into some of them after they had been marked, while others were assigned to specific departments. ‘Be sure and put it in the right cubbyhole, Ailsa!’ ‘Don’t leave it hanging out like that, it’ll fall outof the cubbyhole, Kevin!’ ‘Don’t walk over it, girl! Pick it up, give it here, it’s meant to be in a cubbyhole!’
    All the other teachers called them pigeonholes. It was widely assumed that they did this to set themselves apart from Cubby.
    ‘Move along, move along,’ said Mr Meacher, the woodwork teacher, to Andrew and Fats, who had left an empty seat between themselves and Kevin Cooper.
    Cubby took his place behind the lectern. The pupils did not settle as quickly as they would have done for the headmistress. At the precise moment that the last voice died away, one of the double doors in the middle of the right-hand wall opened and Gaia walked in.
    She glanced around the hall (Andrew