J. Rowling - The Casual Vacancy

Her mobile buzzed. Gaia had already texted her twice.

How pissed was I last nite?

R u going 2 work?

Nothing about Fats Wall. Nothing about snogging Sukhvinder’s torturer. The new message said, R u OK?

Sukhvinder put the mobile back into her pocket. She might walk towards Yarvil and catch a bus outside town, where nobody would see her. Her parents would not miss her until five thirty, when they expected her home from the café.

A desperate plan formed as she walked, hot and tired: if she could find a place to stay that cost less than fifty pounds… all she wanted was to be alone and ply her razor blade.

She was on the river road with the Orr flowing beside her. If she crossed the bridge, she would be able to take a back street all the way round to the start of the bypass.

‘Robbie! Robbie! Where are you?’

It was Krystal Weedon, running up and down the river bank. Fats Wall was smoking, with one hand in his pocket, watching Krystal run.

Sukhvinder took a sharp right onto the bridge, terrified that one of them might notice her. Krystal’s yells were echoing off the rushing water.

Sukhvinder caught sight of something in the river below.

Her hands were already on the hot stone ledge before she had thought about what she was doing, and then she had hoisted herself onto the edge of the bridge; she yelled, ‘ He’s in the river, Krys! ’ and dropped, feet first, into the water. Her leg was sliced open by a broken computer monitor as she was pulled under by the current.

When Shirley opened the bedroom door, she saw nothing but two empty beds. Justice required a sleeping Howard; she would have to advise him to return to bed.

But there was no sound from either the kitchen or the bathroom. Shirley was worried that, by taking the river road home, she had missed him. He must have got dressed and set off for work; he might already be with Maureen in the back room, discussing Shirley; planning, perhaps, to divorce her and marry Maureen instead, now that the game was up, and pretence was ended.

She half ran into the sitting room, intending to telephone the Copper Kettle. Howard was lying on the carpet in his pyjamas.

His face was purple and his eyes were popping. A faint wheezing noise came from his lips. One hand was clutching feebly at his chest. His pyjama top had ridden up. Shirley could see the very patch of scabbed raw skin where she had planned to plunge the needle.

Howard’s eyes met hers in mute appeal.

Shirley stared at him, terrified, then darted out of the room. At first she hid the EpiPen in the biscuit barrel; then she retrieved it and shoved it down the back of the cookery books.

She ran back into the sitting room, seized the telephone receiver and dialled 999.

‘Pagford? This is for Orrbank Cottage, is it? There’s one on the way.’

‘Oh, thank you, thank God,’ said Shirley, and she had almost hung up when she realized what she had said and screamed, ‘no, no, not Orrbank Cottage…’

But the operator had gone and she had to dial again. She was panicking so much that she dropped the receiver. On the carpet beside her, Howard’s wheezing was becoming fainter and fainter.

‘Not Orrbank Cottage,’ she shouted. ‘Thirty-six Evertree Crescent, Pagford – my husband’s having a heart attack…’

In Church Row, Miles Mollison came tearing out of his house in bedroom slippers and sprinted down the steep sloping pavement to the Old Vicarage on the corner. He banged on the thick oak door with his left hand, while trying to dial his wife’s number with his right.

‘Yes?’ said Parminder, opening the door.

‘My dad,’ gasped Miles ‘… another heart attack… Mum’s called an ambulance… will you come? Please, will you come?’

Parminder made a swift move back into the house, mentally seizing her doctor’s bag, but checked.

‘I can’t. I’m suspended from work, Miles. I can’t.’

‘You’re joking… please… the ambulance won’t be here for—’

‘I can’t, Miles,’ she said.

He turned and ran away from her through the open gate. Ahead, he saw Samantha, walking up their garden path. He called to her, his voice breaking, and she turned in surprise. At first, she thought that his panic was on her account.

‘Dad… collapsed… there’s an ambulance coming… bloody Parminder Jawanda won’t come…’

‘My God,’ said Samantha. ‘Oh my God.’

They dashed to the car and drove up the road, Miles in his slippers, Samantha in the clogs that had blistered her feet.

‘Miles, listen, there’s a siren – it’s here already…’

But when they turned into Evertree Crescent, there was nothing there, and the siren was already gone.

On a lawn a mile away, Sukhvinder Jawanda was vomiting river water beneath a willow tree, while an old lady pressed blankets around her that were already as sodden as Sukhvinder’s clothes. A short distance away, the dog-walker who had dragged Sukhvinder from the river by her hair and her sweatshirt was bent over a small, limp body.

Sukhvinder had thought she felt Robbie struggling in her arms, but had that been the cruel tug of the river, trying to rip him from her? She was a strong swimmer, but the Orr had dragged her under, pulled her helplessly wherever it chose. She had been swept around the bend, and it had thrown her in towards land, and she had managed a scream, and seen the man with his dog, running towards her along the bank…

‘No good,’ said the man, who had worked on Robbie’s little body for twenty minutes. ‘He’s gone.’

Sukhvinder wailed, and slumped to the cold wet ground, shaking furiously as the sound of the siren reached them, too late.

Back in Evertree Crescent, the paramedics were having enormous difficulty getting Howard onto the stretcher; Miles and Samantha had to help.

‘We’ll follow in the car, you go with Dad,’ Miles shouted at Shirley, who seemed bewildered, and unwilling to get into the ambulance.

Maureen, who had just shown her last customer out of the Copper Kettle, stood on the doorstep, listening.

‘Lots of sirens,’ she said over her shoulder to an exhausted Andrew, who was mopping tables. ‘Something must have happened.’

And she took a deep breath, as though she hoped to taste the tang of disaster on the warm afternoon air.

Many, many times had Colin Wall imagined the police coming to his door. They arrived, at last, at dusk on Sunday evening: a woman and a man, not to arrest Colin, but to look for his son.

A fatal accident and ‘Stuart, is it?’ was a witness. ‘Is he at home?’

‘No,’ said Tessa, ‘oh, dear God… Robbie Weedon… but he lives in the Fields… why was he here?’

The policewoman explained, kindly, what they believed to have happened. ‘The teenagers took their eye off him’ was the phrase she used.

Tessa thought she might faint.

‘You don’t know where Stuart is?’ asked the policeman.

‘No,’ said Colin, gaunt and shadow-eyed. ‘Where was he last seen?’

‘When our colleague pulled up, Stuart seems to have, ah, run away.’

‘Oh, dear God,’ said Tessa again.