J. Rowling - The Casual Vacancy

‘Yeah. Mind, there’s a bloke called Obbo,’ said Fats, slitting cigarettes and emptying the tobacco onto the papers, ‘in the Fields, who’ll get you anything. Fucking smack, if you want it.’

‘You don’t want smack, though,’ said Andrew, watching Fats’ face.

‘Nah,’ said Fats, taking the envelope back, and sprinkling the sensimilla onto the tobacco. He rolled the joint together, licking the end of the papers to seal it, poking the roach in more neatly, twisting the end into a point.

‘Nice,’ he said happily.

He had planned to tell Andrew his news after introducing the sensimilla as a kind of warm-up act. He held out his hand for Andrew’s lighter, inserted the cardboarded end between his own lips and lit up, taking a deep, contemplative drag, blowing out the smoke in a long blue jet, then repeating the process.

‘Mmm,’ he said, holding the smoke in his lungs, and imitating Cubby, whom Tessa had given a wine course one Christmas. ‘Herby. A strong aftertaste. Overtones of… fuck…’

He experienced a massive headrush, even though he was sitting, and exhaled, laughing.

‘… try that.’

Andrew leaned across and took the joint, giggling in anticipation, and at the beatific smile on Fats’ face, which was quite at odds with his usual constipated scowl.

Andrew inhaled and felt the power of the drug radiate out from his lungs, unwinding and loosening him. Another drag, and he thought that it was like having your mind shaken out like a duvet, so that it resettled without creases, so that everything became smooth and simple and easy and good.

‘Nice,’ he echoed Fats, smiling at the sound of his own voice. He passed the joint back into Fat’s waiting fingers and savoured this sense of well-being.

‘So, you wanna hear something interesting?’ said Fats, grinning uncontrollably.

‘Go on.’

‘I fucked her last night.’

Andrew nearly said ‘who?’, before his befuddled brain remembered: Krystal Weedon, of course; Krystal Weedon, who else?

‘Where?’ he asked, stupidly. It was not what he wanted to know.

Fats stretched out on his back in his funeral suit, his feet towards the river. Wordlessly, Andrew stretched out beside him, in the opposite direction. They had slept like this, ‘top and tail’, when they had stayed overnight at each other’s houses as children. Andrew gazed up at the rocky ceiling, where the blue smoke hung, slowly furling, and waited to hear everything.

‘I told Cubby and Tess I was at yours, so you know,’ said Fats. He passed the joint into Andrew’s reaching fingers, then linked his long hands on his chest, and listened to himself telling. ‘Then I got the bus to the Fields. Met her outside Oddbins.’

‘By Tesco’s?’ asked Andrew. He did not know why he kept asking dumb questions.

‘Yeah,’ said Fats. ‘We went to the rec. There’s trees in the corner behind the public bogs. Nice and private. It was getting dark.’

Fats shifted position and Andrew handed back the joint.

‘Getting in’s harder than I thought it would be,’ said Fats, and Andrew was mesmerized, half inclined to laugh, afraid of missing every unvarnished detail Fats could give him. ‘She was wetter when I was fingering her.’

A giggle rose like trapped gas in Andrew’s chest, but was stifled there.

‘Lot of pushing to get in properly. It’s tighter than I thought.’

Andrew saw a jet of smoke rise from the place where Fats’ head must be.

‘I came in about ten seconds. It feels fucking great once you’re in.’

Andrew fought back laughter, in case there was more.

‘I wore a johnny. It’d be better without.’

He pushed the joint back into Andrew’s hand. Andrew pulled on it, thinking. Harder to get in than you thought; over in ten seconds. It didn’t sound much; yet what wouldn’t he give? He imagined Gaia Bawden flat on her back for him and, without meaning to, let out a small groan, which Fats did not seem to hear. Lost in a fug of erotic images, pulling on the joint, Andrew lay with his erection on the patch of earth his body was warming and listened to the soft rush of the water a few feet from his head.

‘What matters, Arf?’ asked Fats, after a long, dreamy pause.

His head swimming pleasantly, Andrew answered, ‘Sex.’

‘Yeah,’ said Fats, delighted. ‘Fucking. That’s what matters. Propogun… propogating the species. Throw away the johnnies. Multiply.’

‘Yeah,’ said Andrew, laughing.

‘And death,’ said Fats. He had been taken aback by the reality of that coffin, and how little material lay between all the watching vultures and an actual corpse. He was not sorry that he had left before it disappeared into the ground. ‘Gotta be, hasn’t it? Death.’

‘Yeah,’ said Andrew, thinking of war and car crashes, and dying in blazes of speed and glory.

‘Yeah,’ said Fats. ‘Fucking and dying. That’s it, innit? Fucking and dying. That’s life.’

‘Trying to get a fuck and trying not to die.’

‘Or trying to die,’ said Fats. ‘Some people. Risking it.’

‘Yeah. Risking it.’

There was more silence, and their hiding place was cool and hazy.

‘And music,’ said Andrew quietly, watching the blue smoke hanging beneath the dark rock.

‘Yeah,’ said Fats, in the distance. ‘And music.’

The river rushed on past the Cubby Hole.

It rained on Barry Fairbrother’s grave. The ink blurred on the cards. Siobhan’s chunky sunflower head defied the pelting drops, but Mary’s lilies and freesias crumpled, then fell apart. The chrysanthemum oar darkened as it decayed. Rain swelled the river, made streams in the gutters and turned the steep roads into Pagford glossy and treacherous. The windows of the school bus were opaque with condensation; the hanging baskets in the Square became bedraggled, and Samantha Mollison, windscreen wipers on full tilt, suffered a minor collision in the car on the way home from work in the city.

A copy of the Yarvil and District Gazette stuck out of Mrs Catherine Weedon’s door in Hope Street for three days, until it became sodden and illegible. Finally, social worker Kay Bawden tugged it out of the letterbox, peered in through the rusty flap and spotted the old lady spread-eagled at the foot of the stairs. A policeman helped break down the front door, and Mrs Weedon was taken away in an ambulance to South West General.

Still the rain fell, forcing the sign-painter who had been hired to rename the old shoe shop to postpone the job. It poured for days and into the nights, and the Square was full of hunchbacks in waterproofs, and umbrellas collided on the narrow pavements.

Howard Mollison found the gentle patter against the dark window soothing. He sat in the study that had once been his daughter Patricia’s bedroom, and contemplated the email that he had received from the local newspaper. They had decided to run Councillor Fairbrother’s article arguing that the Fields ought to remain with Pagford, but in the interests of balance, they hoped that another councillor might make the case for reassignment in the following issue.

Backfired on you, hasn’t it, Fairbrother? thought Howard happily. There you were, thinking you’d have it all your own way…

He closed the email and turned instead to the small pile of papers beside him. These were the letters that had come trickling in, requesting an election to fill Barry’s vacant seat. The constitution stated that it required nine applications to enforce a public vote, and he had received ten. He read them over, while his wife’s and his business partner’s voices rose and fell in the kitchen, stripping bare between them the meaty scandal of old Mrs Weedon’s collapse and belated discovery.