The Casual Vacancy

girls with her, all of them strung along the pavement in a line, held back by the traffic.
    ‘Your fucking mum killed my Nan! She’s gonna get fucking done and so are you!’
    Sukhvinder’s stomach seemed to melt clean away. People were staring at her. A couple of third-year girls scuttled out of sight. Sukhvinder sensed the bystanders nearby transforming into a watchful, eager pack. Krystal and her gang were dancing on tiptoes, waiting for a break in the cars.
    ‘What’s she talking about?’ Gaia asked Sukhvinder, whose mouth was so dry that she could not reply. There was no point in running. She would never make it. Leanne Carter was the fastest girl in their year. All that seemed to move in the world were the passing cars, giving her a few final seconds of safety.
    And then Jaswant appeared, accompanied by several sixth-year boys.
    ‘All right, Jolly?’ she said. ‘What’s up?’
    Jaswant had not heard Krystal; it was mere luck that she haddrifted this way with her entourage. Over the road, Krystal and her friends had gone into a huddle.
    ‘Nothing much,’ said Sukhvinder, dizzy with relief at her temporary reprieve. She could not tell Jaz what was happening in front of the boys. Two of them were nearly six feet tall. All were staring at Gaia.
    Jaz and her friends moved towards the newsagent’s door, and Sukhvinder, with an urgent look at Gaia, followed them. She and Gaia watched through the window as Krystal and her gang moved on, glancing back every few steps.
    ‘What was that about?’ Gaia asked.
    ‘Her great-gran was my mum’s patient, and she died,’ said Sukhvinder. She wanted to cry so much that the muscles in her throat were painful.
    ‘Silly bitch,’ said Gaia.
    But Sukhvinder’s suppressed sobs were born not only from the shaky aftermath of fear. She had liked Krystal very much, and she knew that Krystal had liked her too. All those afternoons on the canal, all those journeys in the minibus; she knew the anatomy of Krystal’s back and shoulders better than she knew her own.
    They returned to school with Jaswant and her friends. The best-looking of the boys struck up a conversation with Gaia. By the time they had turned in at the gates, he was teasing her about her London accent. Sukhvinder could not see Krystal anywhere, but she spotted Fats Wall at a distance, loping along with Andrew Price. She would have known his shape and his walk anywhere, the way something primal inside you helped you recognize a spider moving across a shadowy floor.
    Wave upon wave of nausea rippled through her as she approached the school building. There would be two of them from now on: Fats and Krystal together. Everyone knew that they were seeing each other. And into Sukhvinder’s mind dropped a vividly coloured picture of herself bleeding on the floor, and Krystal and her gang kicking her, and Fats Wall watching, laughing.
    ‘Need the loo,’ she told Gaia. ‘Meet you up there.’
    She dived into the first girls’ bathroom they passed, locked herselfin a cubicle and sat down on the closed seat. If she could have died … if she could have disappeared for ever … but the solid surface of things refused to dissolve around her, and her body, her hateful hermaphrodite’s body, continued, in its stubborn, lumpen way, to live …
    She heard the bell for the start of afternoon lessons, jumped up and hurried out of the bathroom. Queues were forming along the corridor. She turned her back on all of them and marched out of the building.
    Other people truanted. Krystal did it and so did Fats Wall. If she could only get away and stay away this afternoon, she might be able to think of something to protect her before she had to go back in. Or she could walk in front of a car. She imagined it slamming into her body and her bones shattering. How quickly would she die, broken in the road? She still preferred the thought of drowning, of cool clean water putting her to sleep for ever: a sleep without dreams …
    ‘Sukhvinder?
Sukhvinder!
’
    Her stomach turned over. Tessa Wall was hurrying towards her across the car park. For one mad moment Sukhvinder considered running, but then the futility of it overwhelmed her, and she stood waiting for Tessa to reach her, hating her, with her stupid plain face and her evil son.
    ‘Sukhvinder, what are you doing? Where are you going?’
    She could not even think of a lie. With a hopeless gesture of her shoulders, she surrendered.
    Tessa had no appointments until three. She