The Casual Vacancy

Krystal Weedon, but Barry had liked her, so he assumed thatthere was more worth in her than he could see. Tessa knew her husband to be a strange mixture of arrogance and humility, of unshakeable conviction and insecurity.
    They’re completely deluded
, Tessa thought, looking at the other three, who were poring over some graph that Parminder had extracted from Kay’s notes.
They think they’ll reverse sixty years of anger and resentment with a few sheets of statistics.
None of them was Barry. He had been a living example of what they proposed in theory: the advancement, through education from poverty to affluence, from powerlessness and dependency to valuable contributor to society. Did they not see what hopeless advocates they were, compared to the man who had died?
    ‘People are definitely getting irritable with the Mollisons trying to run everything,’ Colin was saying.
    ‘I do think,’ said Kay, ‘that they’ll be hard-pushed, if they read this stuff, to pretend that the clinic isn’t doing crucial work.’
    ‘Not everybody’s forgotten Barry, on the council,’ said Parminder, in a slightly shaky voice.
    Tessa realized that her greasy fingers were groping vainly in space. While the others had talked, she had single-handedly finished the entire bowl of crisps.

VII
    It was a bright, balmy morning, and the computing lab at Winterdown Comprehensive became stuffy as lunchtime approached, the dirty windows speckling the dusty monitors with distracting spots of light. Even though there was no Fats or Gaia here to distract him, Andrew Price could not concentrate. He could think of nothing but what he had overheard his parents discussing the previous evening.
    They had been talking, quite seriously, about moving to Reading, where Ruth’s sister and brother-in-law lived. With his ear turned towards the open kitchen door, Andrew had hovered in the tiny dark hall and listened: Simon, it appeared, had been offered a job, or the possibility of a job, by the uncle whom Andrew and Paul barely knew, because Simon disliked him so much.
    ‘It’s less money,’ Simon had said.
    ‘You don’t know that. He hasn’t said—’
    ‘Bound to be. And it’ll be more expensive all round, living there.’
    Ruth made a noncommital noise. Scarcely daring to breathe in the hall, Andrew could tell, by the mere fact that his mother was not rushing to agree with Simon, that she wanted to go.
    Andrew found it impossible to imagine his parents in any house but Hilltop House, or against any backdrop but Pagford. He had taken it for granted that they would remain there for ever. He, Andrew, would leave one day for London, but Simon and Ruth would remain rooted to the hillside like trees, until they died.
    He had crept back upstairs to his bedroom and stared out of the window at the twinkling lights of Pagford, cupped in the deep black hollow between the hills. He felt as though he had never seen the view before. Somewhere down there, Fats was smoking in his attic room, probably looking at porn on his computer. Gaia was there too, absorbed in the mysterious rites of her gender. It occurred to Andrew that she had been through this; she had been torn away from the place she knew and transplanted. They had something profoundly in common at last; there was almost melancholy pleasure in the idea that, in leaving, he would share something with her.
    But she had not caused her own displacement. With a squirming unease in his guts, he had picked up his mobile and texted Fats: Si-Pie offered job in Reading. Might take it .
    Fats had still not responded, and Andrew had not seen him all morning, because they shared none of their classes. He had not seen Fats for the previous two weekends either, because he had been working at the Copper Kettle. Their longest conversation, recently, had concerned Fats’ posting about Cubby on the council website.
    ‘I think Tessa suspects,’ Fats had told Andrew casually. ‘She keeps looking at me like she knows.’
    ‘What’re you gonna say?’ Andrew had muttered, scared.
    He knew Fats’ desire for glory and credit, and he knew Fats’ passion for wielding the truth as a weapon, but he was not sure that his friend understood that his own pivotal role in the activities of the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother must never be revealed. It had never been easy to explain to Fats the reality of having Simon as a father, and, somehow, Fats was becoming more difficult to explain things to.
    When his IT teacher had