The Casual Vacancy

long gone with Fats. Samantha was talking to him. She was drunk too. He was not embarrassed by her any more. He suspected that he might be sick quite soon.
    ‘ … hate bloody Pagford …’ said Samantha, and, ‘but you’re young enough to get out.’
    ‘Yeah,’ he said, unable to feel his lips. ‘An’ I will. ’Nigh will.’
    She pushed his hair off his forehead and called him sweet. The image of Gaia with her tongue in Fats’ mouth threatened to obliterate everything. He could smell Samantha’s perfume, coming in waves from her hot skin.
    ‘That band’s shit,’ he said, pointing at her chest, but he did not think she heard him.
    Her mouth was chapped and warm, and her breasts were huge, pressed against his chest; her back was as broad as his—
    ‘What the fuck?’
    Andrew was slumped against the draining board and Samantha was being dragged out of the kitchen by a big man with short greying hair. Andrew had a dim idea that something bad had happened, but the strange flickering quality of reality was becoming more and more pronounced, until the only thing to do was to stagger across the room to the bin and throw up again and again and again …
    ‘Sorry, you can’t come in!’ he heard Sukhvinder tell someone. ‘Stuff piled up against the door!’
    He tied the bin bag tightly on his own vomit. Sukhvinder helped him clear the kitchen. He needed to throw up twice more, but both times managed to get to the bathroom.
    It was nearly two o’clock by the time Howard, sweaty but smiling, thanked them and said goodnight.
    ‘Very good work,’ he said. ‘See you tomorrow, then. Very good … where’s Miss Bawden, by the way?’
    Andrew left Sukhvinder to come up with a lie. Out in the street, he unchained Simon’s bicycle and wheeled it away into the darkness.
    The long cold walk back to Hilltop House cleared his head, but assuaged neither his bitterness nor his misery.
    Had he ever told Fats that he fancied Gaia? Maybe not, but Fatsknew. He
knew
that Fats knew … were they, perhaps, shagging right now?
    I’m moving, anyway
, Andrew thought, bent over and shivering as he pushed the bicycle up the hill.
So fuck them …
    Then he thought:
I’d better be moving …
Had he just snogged Lexie Mollison’s mother? Had her husband walked in on them? Had that really happened?
    He was scared of Miles, but he also wanted to tell Fats about it, to see his face …
    When he let himself into the house, exhausted, Simon’s voice came out of the darkness from the kitchen.
    ‘Have you put my bike in the garage?’
    He was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal. It was nearly half-past two in the morning.
    ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ said Simon.
    For once, he was not angry. Ruth was not there, so he did not have to prove himself bigger or smarter than his sons. He seemed weary and small.
    ‘Think we’re gonna have to move to Reading, Pizza Face,’ said Simon. It was almost a term of endearment.
    Shivering slightly, feeling old and shell-shocked, and immensely guilty, Andrew wanted to give his father something to make up for what he had done. It was time to redress balances and claim Simon as an ally. They were a family. They had to move together. Perhaps it could be better, somewhere else.
    ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. ‘Come through here. Found out how to do it at school …’
    And he led the way to the computer.

IV
    A misty blue sky stretched like a dome over Pagford and the Fields. Dawn light shone upon the old stone war memorial in the Square, on the cracked concrete façades of Foley Road, and turned the white walls of Hilltop House pale gold. As Ruth Price climbed into her car ready for another long shift at the hospital, she looked down at the River Orr, shining like a silver ribbon in the distance, and felt how completely unjust it was that somebody else would soon have her house and her view.
    A mile below, in Church Row, Samantha Mollison was still sound asleep in the spare bedroom. There was no lock on the door, but she had barricaded it with an armchair before collapsing, semi-dressed, onto the bed. The beginnings of a vicious headache disturbed her slumber, and the sliver of sunshine that had penetrated the gap in the curtains fell like a laser beam across the corner of one eye. She twitched a little, in the depths of her dry-mouthed, anxious half-sleep, and her dreams were guilty and strange.
    Downstairs, among the clean, bright surfaces of the kitchen, Miles sat bolt