The Casual Vacancy

passed by out of sight, Andrew looked up Reading on the internet. It was huge compared with Pagford. It had an annual music festival. It was only forty miles from London. He contemplated the train service. Perhaps he would go up to the capital at weekends, the way he currently took the bus to Yarvil. But the whole thing seemed unreal: Pagford was all he had ever known; he still could not imagine his family existing anywhere else.
    At lunchtime Andrew headed straight out of school, looking for Fats. He lit up a cigarette just out of sight of the grounds, and was delighted to hear, as he was slipping his lighter casually back into his pocket, a female voice that said, ‘Hey’. Gaia and Sukhvinder caught up with him.
    ‘All right,’ he said, blowing smoke away from Gaia’s beautiful face.
    The three of them had something these days that nobody else had. Two weekends’ work at the café had created a fragile bond between them. They knew Howard’s stock phrases, and had endured Maureen’s prurient interest in all of their home lives; they had smirked together at her wrinkled knees in the too-short waitress’s dress and had exchanged, like traders in a foreign land, small nuggets of personal information. Thus the girls knew that Andrew’s father had been sacked; Andrew and Sukhvinder knew that Gaia was working to save for a train ticket back to Hackney; and he and Gaia knew that Sukhvinder’s mother hated her working for Howard Mollison.
    ‘Where’s your Fat friend?’ she asked, as the three of them fell into step together.
    ‘Dunno,’ said Andrew. ‘Haven’t seen him.’
    ‘No loss,’ said Gaia. ‘How many of those do you smoke a day?’
    ‘Don’t count,’ said Andrew, elated by her interest. ‘D’you want one?’
    ‘No,’ said Gaia. ‘I don’t like smoking.’
    He wondered instantly whether the dislike extended to kissing people who smoked. Niamh Fairbrother had not complained when he had stuck his tongue into her mouth at the school disco.
    ‘Doesn’t Marco smoke?’ asked Sukhvinder.
    ‘No, he’s always in training,’ said Gaia.
    Andrew had become almost inured to the thought of Marco de Luca by now. There were advantages to Gaia being safeguarded, as it were, by an allegiance beyond Pagford. The power of the photographs of them together on her Facebook page had been blunted by his familiarity with them. He did not think it was his own wishful thinking that the messages she and Marco left for each other were becoming less frequent and less friendly. He could not know what was happening by telephone or email, but he was sure that Gaia’s air, when he was mentioned, was dispirited.
    ‘Oh, there he is,’ said Gaia.
    It was not the handsome Marco who had come into view, but Fats Wall, who was talking to Dane Tully outside the newsagent’s.
    Sukhvinder braked, but Gaia grabbed her upper arm.
    ‘You can walk where you like,’ she said, tugging her gently onwards, her flecked green eyes narrowing as they approached the place where Fats and Dane were smoking.
    ‘All right, Arf,’ called Fats, as the three of them came close.
    ‘Fats,’ said Andrew.
    Trying to head off trouble, especially Fats bullying Sukhvinder in front of Gaia, he asked, ‘Did you get my text?’
    ‘What text?’ said Fats. ‘Oh yeah – that thing about Si? You leaving, then, are you?’
    It was said with a cavalier indifference that Andrew could only attribute to the presence of Dane Tully.
    ‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Andrew.
    ‘Where are you going?’ asked Gaia.
    ‘My old man’s been offered a job in Reading,’ said Andrew.
    ‘Oh, that’s where my dad lives!’ said Gaia in surprise. ‘We could hang out when I go and stay. The festival’s awesome. D’you wanna get a sandwich, then, Sooks?’
    Andrew was so stupefied by her voluntary offer to spend time with him, that she had disappeared into the newsagent’s before he could gather his wits and agree. For a moment, the dirty bus stop, the newsagent’s, even Dane Tully, tattooed and shabby in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, seemed to glow with an almost celestial light.
    ‘Well, I got things to do,’ said Fats.
    Dane sniggered. Before Andrew could say anything or offer to accompany him, he had loped away.
    Fats was sure that Andrew would be nonplussed and hurt by his cool attitude, and he was glad of it. Fats did not ask himself why he was glad, or why a general desire to cause pain had become his overriding emotion in the last few days. He had