The Casual Vacancy

stairs.
    ‘… you can put that – that thing that Mum suggested out of your head completely,’ Colin was saying gruffly. ‘You’ve got no physical or mental abnormalities, have you? Well then … don’t worry about it any more. But your counsellor will help you with all of this …’)
    Tessa gurgled and snorted into her sodden tissue, and thought how little she had done for Krystal, dead on the bathroom floor … it would have been a relief if St Michael had stepped down from his glowing window and enacted judgement on them all, decreeing exactly how much fault was hers, for the deaths, for the broken lives, for the mess … A fidgeting young Tully boy on the other side of the aisle hopped out of his pew, and a tattooed woman reached out a powerful arm, grabbed him and pulled him back. Tessa’s sobs were punctuated by a little gasp of surprise. She was sure that she had recognized her own lost watch on the thick wrist.
    Sukhvinder, who was listening to Tessa’s sobs, felt sorry for her, but did not dare turn around. Parminder was furious with Tessa. There had been no way for Sukhvinder to explain the scars on her arms without mentioning Fats Wall. She had begged her mother not to call the Walls, but then Tessa had telephoned Parminder to tell them that Fats had taken full responsibility for The_Ghost_of_ Barry_Fairbrother’s posts on the council website, and Parminder had been so vitriolic on the telephone that they had not spoken since.
    It had been such a strange thing for Fats to do, to take the blame for her post too; Sukhvinder thought of it almost as an apology. He had always seemed to read her mind: did he know that she had attacked her own mother? Sukhvinder wondered whether she wouldbe able to confess the truth to this new counsellor in whom her parents seemed to place so much faith, and whether she would ever be able to tell the newly kind and contrite Parminder …
    She was trying to follow the service, but it was not helping her in the way that she had hoped. She was glad about the chrysanthemum oar and the teddy bear, which Lauren’s mum had made; she was glad that Gaia and Andy had come, and the girls from the rowing team, but she wished that the Fairbrother twins had not refused.
    (‘It’d upset Mum,’ Siobhan had told Sukhvinder. ‘See, she thinks Dad spent too much time on Krystal.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Sukhvinder, taken aback.
    ‘And,’ said Niamh, ‘Mum doesn’t like the idea that she’ll have to see Krystal’s grave every time we visit Dad’s. They’ll probably be really near each other.’
    Sukhvinder thought these objections small and mean, but it seemed sacrilegious to apply such terms to Mrs Fairbrother. The twins walked away, wrapped up in each other as they always were these days, and treating Sukhvinder with coolness for her defection to the outsider, Gaia Bawden.)
    Sukhvinder kept waiting for somebody to stand up and talk about who Krystal really was, and what she had done in her life, the way that Niamh and Siobhan’s uncle had done for Mr Fairbrother, but apart from the vicar’s brief reference to ‘tragically short lives’ and ‘local family with deep roots in Pagford’, he seemed determined to skirt the facts.
    So Sukhvinder focused her thoughts on the day that their crew had competed in the regional finals. Mr Fairbrother had driven them in the minibus to face the girls from St Anne’s. The canal ran right through the private school’s grounds, and it had been decided that they were to change in the St Anne’s sports hall, and start the race there.
    ‘Unsporting, course it is,’ Mr Fairbrother had told them on the way. ‘Home-ground advantage. I tried to get it changed, but they wouldn’t. Just don’t be intimidated, all right?’
    ‘I ain’ fuck—’
    ‘Krys—’
    ‘I ain’ scared.’
    But when they turned into the grounds, Sukhvinder was scared. Long stretches of soft green lawn, and a big symmetrical golden-stoned building with spires and a hundred windows: she had never seen anything like it, except on picture postcards.
    ‘It’s like Buckingham Palace!’ Lauren shrieked from the back, and Krystal’s mouth had formed a round O; she had been as unaffected as a child sometimes.
    All of their parents, and Krystal’s great-grandmother, were waiting at the finishing line, wherever that was. Sukhvinder was sure that she was not the only one who felt small, scared and inferior as they approached the entrance of the beautiful building.
    A