The Casual Vacancy

that time in the playground at St Thomas’s, when Fats, in a spirit of disinterested investigation, had handed him a peanut hidden inside a marshmallow … he could still feel his burning throat closing inexorably. He remembered trying to yell, and his knees giving way, and the children all around him, watching with a strange, bloodless interest, and then Krystal Weedon’s raucous scream.
    ‘Andiprice iz ’avin’ a ’lurgycacshun!’
    She had run, on her stocky little legs, all the way to the staff room, and the headmaster had snatched Andrew up and sprinted with him to the nearby surgery, where Dr Crawford had administered adrenalin. She was the only one who had remembered the talk that their teacher had given the class, explaining Andrew’s life-threatening condition; the only one to recognize his symptoms.
    Krystal ought to have been given a gold merit star, and perhaps a certificate at assembly as Pupil of the Week, but the very next day (Andrew remembered it as clearly as his own collapse) she had hit Lexie Mollison so hard in the mouth that she had knocked out two of Lexie’s teeth.
    He wheeled Simon’s bike carefully into the Walls’ garage, then rang the doorbell with a reluctance that had never been there before. Tessa Wall answered, dressed in her best grey coat. Andrew was annoyed with her; it was down to her that he had a black eye.
    ‘Come in, Andy,’ said Tessa, and her expression was tense. ‘We’ll just be a minute.’
    He waited in the hallway, where the coloured glass over the door cast its paintboxy glow on the floorboards. Tessa marched into the kitchen, and Andrew glimpsed Fats in his black suit, crumpled up in a kitchen chair like a crushed spider, with one arm over his head, as if he were fending off blows.
    Andrew turned his back. The two boys had had no communication since Andrew had led Tessa to the Cubby Hole. Fats had not been to school for a fortnight. Andrew had sent a couple of texts, but Fats had not replied. His Facebook page remained frozen as it had been on the day of Howard Mollison’s party.
    A week ago, without warning, Tessa had telephoned the Prices, told them that Fats had admitted to having posted the messages under the name The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother, and offered her deepest apologies for the consequences they had suffered.
    ‘So how did he know I had that computer?’ Simon had roared, advancing on Andrew. ‘How did fucking Fats Wall know I did jobs after-hours at the printworks?’
    Andrew’s only consolation was that if his father had known the truth, he might have ignored Ruth’s protests and continued to pummel Andrew until he was unconscious.
    Why Fats had decided to pretend he had authored all the posts, Andrew did not know. Perhaps it was Fats’ ego at work, his determination to be the mastermind, the most destructive, the baddest of them all. Perhaps he had thought he was doing something noble, taking the fall for both of them. Either way, Fats had caused much more trouble than he knew; he had never realized, thought Andrew, waiting in the hall, what it was like to live with a father like Simon Price, safe in his attic room, with his reasonable, civilized parents.
    Andrew could hear the adult Walls talking in quiet voices; they had not closed the kitchen door.
    ‘We need to leave
now
,’ Tessa was saying. ‘He’s got a moral obligation and he’s going.’
    ‘He’s had enough punishment,’ said Cubby’s voice.
    ‘I’m not asking him to go as a—’
    ‘Aren’t you?’ said Cubby sharply. ‘For God’s sake, Tessa. D’you think they’ll want him there? You go. Stu can stay here with me.’
    A minute later Tessa emerged from the kitchen, closing the door firmly behind her.
    ‘Stu isn’t coming, Andy,’ she said, and he could tell that she was furious about it. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
    ‘No problem,’ he muttered. He was glad. He could not imagine what they had left to talk about. This way he could sit with Gaia.
    A little way down Church Row, Samantha Mollison was standing at her sitting-room window, holding a coffee and watching mourners pass her house on their way to St Michael and All Saints. When she saw Tessa Wall, and what she thought was Fats, she let out a little gasp.
    ‘Oh my God, he’s going,’ she said out loud, to nobody.
    Then she recognized Andrew, turned red, and backed hastily away from the glass.
    Samantha was supposed to be working from home. Her laptop lay open behind her on the sofa, but that