The Casual Vacancy

Pagford’s delicatessen would not open until nine thirty, Howard Mollison had arrived early. He was an extravagantly obese man of sixty-four. A great apron of stomach fell so far down in front of his thighs that most people thought instantly of his penis when they first clapped eyes on him, wondering when he had last seen it, how he washed it, how he managed to perform any of the acts for which a penis is designed. Partly because his physique set off these trains of thought, and partly because of his fine line in banter, Howard managed to discomfort and disarm in almost equal measure,so that customers almost always bought more than they meant to on a first visit to the shop. He kept up the patter while he worked, one short-fingered hand sliding the meat-slicer smoothly backwards and forwards, silky-fine slices of ham rippling onto the cellophane held below, a wink ever ready in his round blue eyes, his chins wobbling with easy laughter.
    Howard had devised a costume to wear to work: white shirt-sleeves, a stiff dark-green canvas apron, corduroy trousers and a deerstalker into which he had inserted a number of fisherman’s flies. If the deerstalker had ever been a joke, it had long since ceased to be. Every workday morning he positioned it, with unsmiling exactitude, on his dense grey curls, aided by a small mirror in the staff lavatory.
    It was Howard’s constant pleasure to open up in the mornings. He loved moving around the shop while the only sound was that of the softly humming chill cabinets, relished bringing it all back to life – flicking on the lights, pulling up the blinds, lifting lids to uncover the treasures of the chilled counter: the pale grey-green artichokes, the onyx-black olives, the dried tomatoes curled like ruby seahorses in their herb-flecked oil.
    This morning, however, his enjoyment was laced with impatience. His business partner Maureen was already late, and, like Miles earlier, Howard was afraid that somebody might beat him to the telling of the sensational news, because she did not have a mobile phone.
    He paused beside the newly hewn archway in the wall between the delicatessen and the old shoe shop, soon to become Pagford’s newest café, and checked the industrial-strength clear plastic that prevented dust from settling in the delicatessen. They were planning to have the café open before Easter, in time to pull in the tourists to the West Country for whom Howard filled the windows annually with local cider, cheese and corn dollies.
    The bell tinkled behind him, and he turned, his patched and reinforced heart pumping fast from excitement.
    Maureen was a slight, round-shouldered woman of sixty-two, and the widow of Howard’s original partner.‘Heard the news?’
    She frowned at him interrogatively.
    ‘Barry Fairbrother’s dead.’
    Her mouth fell open.
    ‘
No!
How?’
    Howard tapped the side of his head.
    ‘Something went. Up here. Miles was there, saw it all happen. Golf club car park.’
    ‘
No!
’ she said again.
    ‘Stone dead,’ said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid.
    Maureen’s brightly lipsticked mouth hung slackly as she crossed herself. Her Catholicism always added a picturesque touch to such moments.
    ‘Miles was there?’ she croaked. He heard the yearning for every detail in her deep, ex-smoker’s voice.
    ‘D’you want to put on the kettle, Mo?’
    He could at least prolong her agony for a few minutes. She slopped boiling tea over her hand in her haste to return to him. They sat together behind the counter, on the high wooden stools Howard had placed there for slack periods, and Maureen cooled her burnt hand on a fistful of ice scraped from around the olives. Together they rattled through the conventional aspects of the tragedy: the widow (‘she’ll be lost, she lived for Barry’); the children (‘four teenagers; what a burden without a father’); the relative youth of the dead man (‘he wasn’t much older than Miles, was he?’); and then, at last, they reached the real point of departure, beside which all else was aimless meandering.
    ‘What’ll happen?’ Maureen asked Howard greedily.
    ‘Ah,’ said Howard. ‘Well, now. That’s the question, isn’t it? We’ve got ourselves a casual vacancy, Mo, and it could make all the difference.’
    ‘We’ve got a …?’ asked Maureen, frightened that she might have missed something crucial.
    ‘Casual