The Casual Vacancy

not back to the bedroom door flying open in the night, banging off the David Essex poster Cheryl had left behind, and her father with his hand on his fly, approaching the bed where she begged him not to … )
    The adult Terri threw the smoking filter of the cigarette stub down onto the kitchen floor and strode to her front door. Sheneeded more than nicotine. Down the path and along the street she marched, walking in the same direction as Cheryl. Out of the corner of her eye she saw them, two of her neighbours chatting on the pavement, watching her go by.
Like a fucking picture? It’ll last longer.
Terri knew that she was a perennial subject of gossip; she knew what they said about her; they shouted it after her sometimes. The stuck-up bitch next door was forever whining to the council about the state of Terri’s garden.
Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them …
    She was jogging along, trying to outrun the memories.
    You don’t even know who the father is, do yeh, yer whore? I’m washin’ my ’ands of yeh, Terri, I’ve ’ad enough.
    That had been the last time they had ever spoken, and Nana Cath had called her what everyone else called her, and Terri had responded in kind.
    Fuck you, then, you miserable old cow, fuck you.
    She had never said, ‘You let me down, Nana Cath.’ She had never said, ‘Why didn’t you keep me?’ She had never said, ‘I loved you more than anyone, Nana Cath.’
    She hoped to God Obbo was back. He was supposed to be back today; today or tomorrow. She had to have some. She had to.
    ‘All righ’, Terri?’
    ‘Seen Obbo?’ she asked the boy who was smoking and drinking on the wall outside the off licence. The scars on her back felt as though they were burning again.
    He shook his head, chewing, leering at her. She hurried on. Nagging thoughts of the social worker, of Krystal, of Robbie: more buzzing flies, but they were like the staring neighbours, judges all; they did not understand the terrible urgency of her need.
    (Nana Cath had collected her from the hospital and taken her home to the spare room. It had been the cleanest, prettiest room Terri had ever slept in. On each of the three evenings she had spent there, she had sat up in bed after Nana Cath had kissed her goodnight, and rearranged the ornaments beside her on the windowsill. There had been a tinkling bunch of glass flowers in a glass vase, a plastic pink paperweight with a shell in it and Terri’s favourite, a rearing pottery horse with a silly smile on its face.
    ‘I like horses,’ she had told Nana Cath.
    There had been a school trip to the agricultural show, in the days before Terri’s mother had left. The class had met a gigantic black Shire covered in horse brasses. She was the only one brave enough to stroke it. The smell had intoxicated her. She had hugged its column of a leg, ending in the massive feathered white hoof, and felt the living flesh beneath the hair, while her teacher said, ‘Careful, Terri, careful!’ and the old man with the horse had smiled at her and told her it was quite safe, Samson wouldn’t hurt a nice little girl like her.
    The pottery horse was a different colour: yellow with a black mane and tail.
    ‘You can ’ave it,’ Nana Cath told her, and Terri had known true ecstasy.
    But on the fourth morning her father had arrived.
    ‘You’re comin’ home,’ he had said, and the look on his face had terrified her. ‘You’re not stayin’ with that fuckin’ grassin’ old cow. No, you ain’t. No, you ain’t, you little bitch.’
    Nana Cath was as frightened as Terri.
    ‘Mikey, no,’ she kept bleating. Some of the neighbours were peering through the windows. Nana Cath had Terri by one arm, and her father had the other.
    ‘You’re coming home with me!’
    He blacked Nana Cath’s eye. He dragged Terri into his car. When he got her back to the house, he beat and kicked every bit of her he could reach.)
    ‘Seen Obbo?’ Terri shouted at Obbo’s neighbour, from fifty yards away. ‘Is ’e back?’
    ‘I dunno,’ said the woman, turning away.
    (When Michael was not beating Terri, he was doing the other things to her, the things she could not talk about. Nana Cath did not come any more. Terri ran away at thirteen, but not to Nana Cath’s; she did not want her father to find her. They caught her anyway, and put her into care.)
    Terri thumped on Obbo’s door and waited. She tried again, but nobody came. She sank onto the doorstep, shaking and began to cry.
    Two truanting Winterdown