The Casual Vacancy

around her as she wriggled into the nightdress. ‘About the shop. It was a great little place. And you’ve had it, what – ten years?’
    ‘Fourteen,’ said Samantha.
    She knew what he wanted. She considered telling him to go and screw himself, and decamping to the spare room, but the trouble was that there would then be a row and an atmosphere, and what she wanted more than anything in the world was to be able to head off to London with Libby in two days’ time, wearing the T-shirts that she had bought them both, and to be within close proximity of Jake and his band mates for a whole evening. This excursion constituted the entire sum of Samantha’s current happiness. What was more, sex might assuage Miles’ continuing annoyance that she was missing Howard’s birthday party.
    So she let him embrace and then kiss her. She closed her eyes, climbed on top of him, and imagined herself riding Jake on a deserted white beach, nineteen years old to his twenty-one. She came while imagining Miles watching them, furiously, through binoculars, from a distant pedalo.

X
    At nine o’clock on the morning of the election for Barry’s seat, Parminder left the Old Vicarage and walked up Church Row to the Walls’ house. She rapped on the door and waited until, at last, Colin appeared.
    There were shadows around his bloodshot eyes and beneath his cheekbones; his skin seemed to have thinned and his clothes grown too big. He had not yet returned to work. The news that Parminder had screamed confidential medical information about Howard in public had set back his tentative recovery; the more robust Colin ofa few nights ago, who had sat on the leather pouffe and pretended to be confident of victory, might never have been.
    ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked, closing the door behind her, looking wary.
    ‘Yes, fine,’ she said. ‘I thought you might like to walk down the church hall with me, to vote.’
    ‘I – no,’ he said weakly. ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘I know how you feel, Colin,’ said Parminder, in a small tight voice. ‘But if you don’t vote, it means they’ve won. I’m not going to let them win. I’m going to go down there and vote for you, and I want you to come with me.’
    Parminder was effectively suspended from work. The Mollisons had complained to every professional body for which they could find an address, and Dr Crawford had advised Parminder to take time off. To her great surprise, she felt strangely liberated.
    But Colin was shaking his head. She thought she saw tears in his eyes.
    ‘I can’t, Minda.’
    ‘You can!’ she said. ‘You
can
, Colin! You’ve got to stand up to them! Think of Barry!’
    ‘I can’t – I’m sorry – I …’
    He made a choking noise and burst into tears. Colin had cried in her surgery before now; sobbed in desperation at the burden of fear he carried with him every day of his life.
    ‘Come on,’ she said, unembarrassed, and she took his arm and steered him through to the kitchen, where she handed him kitchen roll and let him sob himself into hiccups again. ‘Where’s Tessa?’
    ‘At work,’ he gasped, mopping his eyes.
    There was an invitation to Howard Mollison’s sixty-fifth birthday party lying on the kitchen table; somebody had torn it neatly in two.
    ‘I got one of those, as well,’ said Parminder. ‘Before I shouted at him. Listen, Colin. Voting—’
    ‘I can’t,’ whispered Colin.
    ‘—shows them they haven’t beaten us.’
    ‘But they have,’ said Colin.
    Parminder burst out laughing. After contemplating her with hismouth open for a moment, Colin started to laugh too: a big, booming guffaw, like the bark of a mastiff.
    ‘All right, they’ve run us out of our jobs,’ said Parminder, ‘and neither of us wants to leave the house but, other than that, I think we’re in very good shape indeed.’
    Colin took off his glasses and dabbed his wet eyes, grinning.
    ‘Come
on
, Colin. I want to vote for you. It isn’t over yet. After I blew my top, and told Howard Mollison he was no better than a junkie in front of the whole council and the local press—’
    He burst out laughing again and she was delighted; she had not heard him laugh so much since New Year, and then it had been Barry making him do it.
    ‘—they forgot to vote on forcing the addiction clinic out of Bellchapel. So, please. Get your coat. We’ll walk down there together.’
    Colin’s snorts and giggles died away. He stared down at the big hands fumbled over each