The Casual Vacancy

morning she had put on an old black dress, half wondering whether she would attend Krystal and Robbie Weedon’s funeral. She supposed that she had only a few more minutes in which to make up her mind.
    She had never spoken a kind word about Krystal Weedon, so surely it would be hypocritical to attend her funeral, purely because she had wept over the account of her death in the
Yarvil and District Gazette
, and because Krystal’s chubby face grinned out of every one of the class photographs that Lexie had brought home from St Thomas’s?
    Samantha set down her coffee, hurried to the telephone and rang Miles at work.
    ‘Hello, babe,’ he said.
    (She had held him while he sobbed with relief beside the hospital bed, where Howard lay connected to machines, but alive.)
    ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
    ‘Not bad. Busy morning. Lovely to hear from you,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’
    (They had made love the previous night, and she had not pretended that he was anybody else.)
    ‘The funeral’s about to start,’ said Samantha. ‘People going by …’
    She had suppressed what she wanted to say for nearly three weeks, because of Howard, and the hospital, and not wanting to remind Miles of their awful row, but she could not hold it back any longer.
    ‘… Miles,
I saw that boy.
Robbie Weedon.
I saw him, Miles
.’ She was panicky, pleading. ‘He was in the St Thomas’s playing field when I walked across it that morning.’
    ‘In the playing field?’
    In the last three weeks, a desire to be absorbed in something bigger than herself had grown in Samantha. Day by day she had waited for the strange new need to subside (
this is how people go religious
, she thought, trying to laugh herself out of it) but it had, if anything, intensified.
    ‘Miles,’ she said, ‘you know the council … with your dad – and Parminder Jawanda resigning too – you’ll want to co-opt a couple of people, won’t you?’ She knew all the terminology; she had listened to it for years. ‘I mean, you won’t want another election, after all this?’
    ‘Bloody hell, no.’
    ‘So Colin Wall could fill one seat,’ she rushed on, ‘and I was thinking, I’ve got time – now the business is all online – I could do the other one.’
    ‘You?’ said Miles, astonished.
    ‘I’d like to get involved,’ said Samantha.
    Krystal Weedon, dead at sixteen, barricaded inside the squalid little house on Foley Road … Samantha had not drunk a glass of wine in two weeks. She thought that she might like to hear the arguments for Bellchapel Addiction Clinic.
    The telephone was ringing in number ten Hope Street. Kay and Gaia were already late leaving for Krystal’s funeral. When Gaia asked who was speaking, her lovely face hardened: she seemed much older.
    ‘It’s Gavin,’ she told her mother.
    ‘I didn’t call him!’ whispered Kay, like a nervous schoolgirl as she took the phone.
    ‘Hi,’ said Gavin. ‘How are you?’
    ‘On my way out to a funeral,’ said Kay, with her eyes locked on her daughter’s. ‘The Weedon children’s. So, not fabulous.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Gavin. ‘Christ, yeah. Sorry. I didn’t realize.’
    He had spotted the familiar surname in a
Yarvil and District Gazette
headline, and, vaguely interested at last, bought a copy. It had occurred to him that he might have walked close by the place where the teenagers and the boy had been, but he had no actual memory of seeing Robbie Weedon.
    Gavin had had an odd couple of weeks. He was missing Barry badly. He did not understand himself: when he should have been mired in misery that Mary had turned him down, all he wanted was a beer with the man whose wife he had hoped to take as his own …
    (Muttering aloud as he had walked away from her house, he had said to himself, ‘That’s what you get for trying to steal your best friend’s life,’ and failed to notice the slip of the tongue.)
    ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I was wondering whether you fancied a drink later?’
    Kay almost laughed.
    ‘Turn you down, did she?’
    She handed Gaia the phone to hang up. They hurried out of the house and half jogged to the end of the street and up through the Square. For ten strides, as they passed the Black Canon, Gaia held her mother’s hand.
    They arrived as the hearses appeared at the top of the road, and hurried into the graveyard while the pall-bearers were shuffling out onto the pavement.
    (‘Get away from the window,’ Colin Wall commanded his son.
    But Fats, who