The Casual Vacancy

aisle apologizing. Then a powerful, sexy female voice started to sing:
    You had my heart 
    And we’ll never be worlds apart
    Maybe in magazines
    But you’ll still be my star …
    The pall-bearers were carrying the wicker coffin back down the aisle, and Mary and the children were following.
    … Now that it’s raining more than ever 
    Know that we’ll still have each other
    You can stand under my umbuh-rella
    You can stand under my umbuh-rella
    The congregation filed slowly out of the church, trying not to walk in time to the beat of the song.

II
    Andrew Price took the handlebars of his father’s racing bicycle and walked it carefully out of the garage, making sure that he did not scrape the car. Down the stone steps and through the metal gate he carried it; then, in the lane, he put his foot on one pedal, scooted a few yards and swung his other leg over the saddle. He soared left onto the vertiginously sloping hillside road and sped, without touching his brakes, down towards Pagford.
    The hedgerows and sky blurred; he imagined himself in a velodrome as the wind whipped his clean hair and his stinging face, which he had just scrubbed clean. Level with the Fairbrothers’wedge-shaped garden he applied the brakes, because some months previously he had taken this sharp turn too fast and fallen off, and had had to return home immediately with his jeans ripped open and grazes all down one side of his face …
    He freewheeled, with only one hand on the bars, into Church Row, and enjoyed a second, though lesser, downhill burst of speed, slightly checked when he saw that they were loading a coffin onto a hearse outside the church, and that a dark-clothed crowd was spilling out between the heavy wooden doors. Andrew pedalled furiously around the corner and out of sight. He did not want to see Fats emerging from church with a distraught Cubby, wearing the cheap suit and tie that he had described with comical disgust during yesterday’s English lesson. It would have been like interrupting his friend having a crap.
    As Andrew cycled slowly around the Square, he slicked his hair back off his face with one hand, wondering what the cold air had done to his purple-red acne and whether the anti-bacterial face wash had done anything to soothe the angry look of it. And he told himself the cover story: he had come from Fats’ house (which he might have done, there was no reason why not), which meant that Hope Street was as obvious a route down to the river as cutting through the first side street. Therefore there was no need for Gaia Bawden (if she happened to be looking out of the window of her house, and happened to see him, and happened to recognize him) to think that he had come this way because of her. Andrew did not anticipate having to explain to her his reason for cycling up her street, but he still held the fake story in his mind, because he believed it gave him an air of cool detachment.
    He simply wanted to know which was her house. Twice already, at weekends, he had cycled along the short terraced street, every nerve in his body tingling, but he had been unable, as yet, to discover which house harboured the Grail. All he knew, from his furtive glimpses through the dirty school-bus windows, was that she lived on the right hand even-numbered side.
    As he turned the corner, he tried to compose his features, acting the part of a man cycling slowly towards the river by the most directroute, lost in his own serious thoughts, but ready to acknowledge a classmate, should they show themselves …
    She was there. On the pavement. Andrew’s legs continued to pump, though he could not feel the pedals, and he was suddenly aware how thin the tyres were on which he balanced. She was rummaging in her leather handbag, her copper-brown hair hanging around her face. Number ten on the door ajar behind her, and a black T-shirt falling short of her waist; a band of bare skin, and a heavy belt and tight jeans … when he was almost past her, she closed the door and turned; her hair fell back from her beautiful face, and she said, quite clearly, in her London voice, ‘Oh, hi.’
    ‘Hi,’ he said. His legs kept pedalling. Six feet away, twelve feet away; why hadn’t he stopped? Shock kept him moving, he dared not look back; he was at the end of her street already;
for fuck’s sake don’t fall off
; he turned the corner, too stunned to gauge whether he was more relieved or disappointed that he had left her behind.
    Holy shit.
    He