The Casual Vacancy

side; even her eye seemed to droop. There were tubes taped to her, a needle in her arm. Lying down, the deformity in her chest was much more obvious. The sheet rose and fell in odd places, as if the grotesque head on its scrawny neck protruded from a barrel.
    When Krystal sat down beside her, Nana Cath made no movement. She simply gazed. One little hand trembled slightly.
    ‘She ain’ talkin’, bu’ she said yer name, twice, las’ nigh’,’ Cheryl told her, staring gloomily over the rim of her can.
    There was a tightness in Krystal’s chest. She did not know whether it would hurt Nana Cath to hold her hand. She edged her own fingers to within a few inches of Nana Cath’s, but let them rest on the bedspread.
    ‘Rhiannon’s bin in,’ said Cheryl. ‘An’ John an’ Sue. Sue’s tryin’ ter get hold of Anne-Marie.’
    Krystal’s spirits leapt.
    ‘Where is she?’ she asked Cheryl.
    ‘Somewhere out Frenchay way. Y’know she’s got a baby now?’
    ‘Yeah, I ’eard,’ said Krystal. ‘Wha’ was it?’
    ‘Dunno,’ said Cheryl, swigging Coke.
    Someone at school had told her:
Hey, Krystal, your sister’s up the duff!
She had been excited by the news. She was going to be an auntie, even if she never saw the baby. All her life, she had been in love with the idea of Anne-Marie, who had been taken away before Krystal was born; spirited into another dimension, like a fairy-tale character, as beautiful and mysterious as the dead man in Terri’s bathroom.
    Nana Cath’s lips moved.
    ‘Wha’?’ said Krystal, bending low, half scared, half elated.
    ‘D’yeh wan’ somethin’, Nana Cath?’ asked Cheryl, so loudly that whispering guests at other beds stared over.
    Krystal could hear a wheezing, rattling noise, but Nana Cath seemed to be making a definite attempt to form a word. Cheryl was leaning over the other side, one hand gripping the metal bars at the head of the bed.
    ‘… Oh … mm,’ said Nana Cath.
    ‘Wha’?’ said Krystal and Cheryl together.
    The eyes had moved millimetres: rheumy, filmy eyes, looking at Krystal’s smooth young face, her open mouth, as she leaned over her great-grandmother, puzzled, eager and fearful.
    ‘…
owin …
’ said the cracked old voice.
    ‘She dunno wha’ she’s sayin’,’ Cheryl shouted over her shoulder at the timid couple visiting at the next bed. ‘Three days lef’ on the fuckin’ floor, ’s’not surprisin’, is it?’
    But tears had blurred Krystal’s eyes. The ward with its high windows dissolved into white light and shadow; she seemed to see a flash of bright sunlight on dark green water, fragmented into brilliant shards by the splashing rise and fall of oars.
    ‘Yeah,’ she whispered to Nana Cath. ‘Yeah, I goes rowin’, Nana.’
    But it was no longer true, because Mr Fairbrother was dead.

VI
    ‘The fuck have you done to your face? Come off the bike again?’ asked Fats.
    ‘No,’ said Andrew. ‘Si-Pie hit me. I was trying to tell the stupid cunt he’d got it wrong about Fairbrother.’
    He and his father had been in the woodshed, filling the baskets that sat on either side of the wood-burner in the sitting room. Simon had hit Andrew around the head with a log, knocking him into the pile of wood, grazing his acne-covered cheek.
    D’you think you know more about what goes on than I do, you spottylittle shit? If I hear you’ve breathed a word of what goes on in this house—
    I haven’t—
    I’ll fucking skin you alive, d’you hear me? How do you know Fairbrother wasn’t on the fiddle too, eh? And the other fucker was the only one dumb enough to get caught?
    And then, whether out of pride or defiance, or because his fantasies of easy money had taken too strong a hold on his imagination to become dislodged by facts, Simon had sent in his application forms. Humiliation, for which the whole family would surely pay, was a certainty.
    Sabotage
. Andrew brooded on the word. He wanted to bring his father crashing down from the heights to which his dreams of easy money had raised him, and he wanted to do it, if at all possible (for he preferred glory without death), in such a way that Simon would never know whose manoeuvrings had brought his ambitions to rubble.
    He confided in nobody, not even Fats. He told Fats nearly everything, but the few omissions were the vast topics, the ones that occupied nearly all his interior space. It was one thing to sit in Fats’ room with hard-ons and look up ‘girl-on-girl action’ on the