The Casual Vacancy

needle.
    Too late, now, to say to the old lady what she ought to have said. Too late, now, to become again her Terri-Baby.
Big girls don’t cry … big girls don’t cry …
It had been years before she had realized that the song Nana Cath had sung her, in her rasping smoker’s voice, was really ‘Sherry Baby’.
    Terri’s hands scuttled like vermin through the debris on the work tops, searching for fag packets, ripping them apart, finding them all empty. Krystal had probably had the last of them; she was a greedy little cow, just like Danielle, riffling through Nana Cath’s possessions, trying to keep her death quiet from the rest of them.
    There was a long stub lying on a greasy plate; Terri wiped it off on her T-shirt and lit it on the gas cooker. Inside her head, she heard her own eleven-year-old voice.
    I wish you was my mummy.
    She did not want to remember. She leaned up against the sink, smoking, trying to look forward, to imagine the clash that was coming between her two older sisters. Nobody messed with Cheryl and Shane: they were both handy with their fists, and Shane had put burning rags through some poor bastard’s letter box not so long ago; it was why he’d done his last stretch, and he would still be inside if the house had not been empty at the time. But Danielle had weapons Cheryl did not: money and her own home, and a landline. She knew official people and how to talk to them. She was the kind that had spare keys, and mysterious bits of paperwork.
    Yet Terri doubted that Danielle would get the house, even with her secret weapons. There were more than just the three of them; Nana Cath had had loads of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. After Terri had been taken into care, her father had had more kids. Nine in total, Cheryl reckoned, to five different mothers. Terri had never met her half-siblings, but Krystal had told her that Nana Cath saw them.
    ‘Yeah?’ she had retorted. ‘I hope they rob her blind, the stupid old bitch.’
    So she saw the rest of the family, but they weren’t exactly angels, from all that Terri had heard. It was only she, who had once been Terri-Baby, whom Nana Cath had cut adrift for ever.
    When you were straight, evil thoughts and memories came pouring up out of the darkness inside you; buzzing black flies clinging to the insides of your skull.
    I wish you was my mummy.
    In the vest top that Terri was wearing today, her scarred arm, neck and upper back were fully exposed, swirled into unnatural folds and creases like melted ice cream. She had spent six weeks in the burns unit of South West General when she was eleven.
    (‘How did it happen, love?’ asked the mother of the child in the next bed.
    Her father had thrown a pan of burning chip fat at her. Her Human League T-shirt had caught fire.
    ‘’Naccident,’ Terri muttered. It was what she had told everyone, including the social worker and the nurses. She would no sooner have shopped her father than chosen to burn alive.
    Her mother had walked out shortly after Terri’s eleventh birthday, leaving all three daughters behind. Danielle and Cheryl had moved in with their boyfriends’ families within days. Terri had been the only one left, trying to make chips for her father, clinging to the hope that her mother would come back. Even through the agony and the terror of those first days and nights in the hospital, she had been glad it had happened, because she was sure that her mum would hear about it and come and get her. Every time there was movement at the end of the ward, Terri’s heart would leap.
    But in six long weeks of pain and loneliness, the only visitor had been Nana Cath. Through quiet afternoons and evenings, Nana Cath had come to sit beside her granddaughter, reminding her to say thank you to the nurses, grim-faced and strict, yet leaking unexpected tenderness.
    She brought Terri a cheap plastic doll in a shiny black mac, but when Terri undressed her, she had nothing on underneath.
    ‘She’s got no knickers, Nana.’
    And Nana Cath had giggled. Nana Cath never giggled.
    I wish you was my mummy.
    She had wanted Nana Cath to take her home. She had asked her to, and Nana Cath had agreed. Sometimes Terri thought that those weeks in hospital had been the happiest of her life, even with the pain. It had been so safe, and people had been kind to her and looked after her. She had thought that she was going home with Nana Cath, to the house with the pretty net curtains, and not back to her father;