The Casual Vacancy

secretary, she was already putting together the agenda.
    ‘Howard – Miles – come and look at this!’
    Shirley’s voice had lost its usual soft, flutey quality; it rang out shrilly.
    Howard waddled out of the sitting room followed by Miles, who was still in the suit he had worn all day at work. Maureen’s droopy, bloodshot, heavily mascara-ed eyes were fixed on the empty doorway like a bloodhound’s; her hunger to know what Shirley had found or seen was almost palpable. Maureen’s fingers, a clutch of bulging knuckles covered in translucent leopard-spotted skin, slid the crucifixand wedding ring up and down the chain around her neck. The deep creases running from the corners of Maureen’s mouth to her chin always reminded Samantha of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
    Why are you always here?
Samantha asked the older woman loudly, inside her own head.
You couldn’t make me lonely enough to live in Howard and Shirley’s pocket.
    Disgust rose in Samantha like vomit. She wanted to seize the over-warm cluttered room and mash it between her hands, until the royal china, and the gas fire, and the gilt-framed pictures of Miles broke into jagged pieces; then, with wizened and painted Maureen trapped and squalling inside the wreckage, she wanted to heave it, like a celestial shot-putter, away into the sunset. The crushed lounge and the doomed crone inside it, soared in her imagination through the heavens, plunging into the limitless ocean, leaving Samantha alone in the endless stillness of the universe.
    She had had a terrible afternoon. There had been another frightening conversation with her accountant; she could not remember much of her drive home from Yarvil. She would have liked to offload on Miles, but after dumping his briefcase and pulling off his tie in the hall he had said, ‘You haven’t started dinner yet, have you?’
    He sniffed the air ostentatiously, then answered himself.
    ‘No, you haven’t. Well, good, because Mum and Dad have invited us over.’ And before she could protest, he had added sharply, ‘It’s nothing to do with the council. It’s to discuss arrangements for Dad’s sixty-fifth.’
    Anger was almost a relief; it eclipsed her anxiety, her fear. She had followed Miles out to the car, cradling her sense of ill-usage. When he asked, at last, on the corner of Evertree Crescent, ‘How was your day?’ she answered, ‘Absolutely bloody fantastic.’
    ‘Wonder what’s up?’ said Maureen, breaking the silence in the sitting room.
    Samantha shrugged. It was typical of Shirley to have summoned her menfolk and left the women in limbo; Samantha was not going to give her mother-in-law the satisfaction of showing interest.
    Howard’s elephantine footsteps made the floorboards under the hall carpet creak. Maureen’s mouth was slack with anticipation.
    ‘Well, well, well,’ boomed Howard, lumbering back into the room.
    ‘I was checking the council website for apologies,’ said Shirley, a little breathless in his wake. ‘For the next meeting—’
    ‘Someone’s posted accusations about Simon Price,’ Miles told Samantha, pressing past his parents, seizing the role of announcer.
    ‘What kind of accusations?’ asked Samantha.
    ‘Receiving stolen goods,’ said Howard, firmly reclaiming the spotlight, ‘and diddling his bosses at the printworks.’
    Samantha was pleased to find herself unmoved. She had only the haziest idea who Simon Price was.
    ‘They’ve posted under a pseudonym,’ Howard continued, ‘and it’s not a particularly tasteful pseudonym, either.’
    ‘Rude, you mean?’ Samantha asked. ‘Big-Fat-Cock or something?’
    Howard’s laughter boomed through the room, Maureen gave an affected shriek of horror, but Miles scowled and Shirley looked furious.
    ‘Not
quite
that, Sammy, no,’ said Howard. ‘No, they’ve called themselves “The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother”.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Samantha, her grin evaporating. She did not like that. After all, she had been in the ambulance while they had forced needles and tubes into Barry’s collapsed body; she had watched him dying beneath the plastic mask; seen Mary clinging to his hand, heard her groans and sobs.
    ‘Oh, no, that’s not nice,’ said Maureen, relish in her bullfrog’s voice. ‘No, that’s nasty. Putting words into the mouths of the dead. Taking names in vain. That’s not right.’
    ‘No,’ agreed Howard. Almost absent-mindedly, he strolled across the room, picked up the wine bottle and returned