The Casual Vacancy

herself. They sat for a while without speaking, and Tessa was too tired to find words that might have changed the atmosphere between them. She felt shivery, exposed, skinned to the bone. She had been awake for over twenty-four hours.
    (Samantha Mollison had telephoned from the hospital at ten o’clock, just as Tessa was emerging from a long soak in the bath to watch the BBC news. She had scrambled back into her clothes while Colin made inarticulate noises and blundered into the furniture. They had called upstairs to tell their son where they were going, then run out to the car. Colin had driven far too fast into Yarvil, asthough he might bring Barry back if he could do the journey in record time; outstrip reality and trick it into rearranging itself.)
    ‘If you ain’ gonna talk to me, I’ll go,’ said Krystal.
    ‘Don’t be rude, please, Krystal,’ said Tessa. ‘I’m very tired this morning. Mr Wall and I were at the hospital last night with Mr Fairbrother’s wife. They’re good friends of ours.’
    (Mary had unravelled completely when she had seen Tessa, flinging her arms around her, burying her face in Tessa’s neck with a dreadful wailing shriek. Even as Tessa’s own tears began to splatter down Mary’s narrow back, she thought quite distinctly that the noise Mary was making was called keening. The body that Tessa had so often envied, slim and petite, had quaked in her arms, barely able to contain the grief it was being asked to bear.
    Tessa could not remember Miles and Samantha leaving. She did not know them very well. She supposed that they had been glad to go.)
    ‘I seen ’is wife,’ said Krystal. ‘Blonde woman, she come to see us race.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Tessa.
    Krystal was chewing on the tips of her fingers.
    ‘He were gonna get me talkin’ to the paper,’ she said abruptly.
    ‘What’s that?’ asked Tessa, confused.
    ‘Mr Fairbrother wuz. He wuz gonna get me interviewed. On me own.’
    There had once been a piece in the local paper about the Winterdown rowing eight coming first in the regional finals. Krystal, whose reading was poor, had brought a copy of the paper in to show Tessa, and Tessa had read the article aloud, inserting exclamations of delight and admiration. It had been the happiest guidance session she had ever known.
    ‘Were they going to interview you because of rowing?’ asked Tessa. ‘The crew again?’
    ‘No,’ said Krystal. ‘Other stuff.’ Then, ‘When’s his funeral?’
    ‘We don’t know yet,’ said Tessa.
    Krystal gnawed at her nails, and Tessa could not summon the energy to break the silence that solidified around them.

X
    The announcement of Barry’s death on the Parish Council website sank with barely a ripple, a tiny pebble into the teeming ocean. All the same, the telephone lines in Pagford were busier than usual this Monday, and little knots of pedestrians kept congregating on the narrow pavements to check, in shocked tones, the exactness of their information.
    As the news travelled, an odd transmutation took place. It happened to the signature dotting the files in Barry’s office and to the emails littering inboxes of his enormous acquaintance, which began to take on the pathos of the crumb trail of a lost boy in a forest. These rapid scribbles, the pixels arranged by fingers henceforth forever still, acquired the macabre aspect of husks. Gavin was already a little repelled by the sight of his dead friend’s texts on his phone, and one of the girls from the rowing eight, still crying as she walked back from assembly, found a form that Barry had signed in her school bag, and became almost hysterical.
    The twenty-three-year-old journalist at the
Yarvil and District Gazette
had no idea that Barry’s once busy brain was now a heavy handful of spongy tissue on a metal tray in South West General. She read through what he had emailed her an hour before his death, then called his mobile number, but nobody answered. Barry’s phone, which he had turned off at Mary’s request before they left for the golf club, was sitting silently beside the microwave in the kitchen, along with the rest of his personal effects that the hospital had given her to take home. Nobody had touched them. These familiar objects – his key fob, his phone, his worn old wallet – seemed like pieces of the dead man himself; they might have been his fingers, his lungs.
    Onwards and outwards the news of Barry’s death spread, radiating, halo-like, from those who had been at