J. Rowling - The Casual Vacancy

Paul scuttled out of the room. Andrew pressed the hem of his T-shirt to his stinging mouth.

‘What about all the cash-in-hand jobs?’ Ruth sobbed, her cheek pink from his punch, tears dripping from her chin. Andrew hated to see her humiliated and pathetic like this; but he half hated her too for landing herself in it, when any idiot could have seen… ‘It says about the cash-in-hand jobs. Shirley doesn’t know about them, how could she? Someone at the printworks has put that on there. I told you, Si, I told you you shouldn’t do those jobs, they’ve always worried the living daylights out of—’

‘Fucking shut up, you whining cow, you didn’t mind spending the money!’ yelled Simon, his jaw jutting again; and Andrew wanted to roar at his mother to stay silent: she blabbed when any idiot could have told her she should keep quiet, and she kept quiet when she might have done good by speaking out; she never learned, she never saw any of it coming.

Nobody spoke for a minute. Ruth dabbed at her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffed intermittently. Simon clutched his toe, his jaw clenched, breathing loudly. Andrew licked the blood from his stinging lip, which he could feel swelling.

‘This’ll cost me my fucking job,’ said Simon, staring wild-eyed around the room, as if there might be somebody there he had forgotten to hit. ‘They’re already talking about fucking redundancies. This’ll be it. This’ll—’ He slapped the lamp off the end table, but it didn’t break, merely rolled on the floor. He picked it up, tugged the lead out of the wall socket, raised it over his head and threw it at Andrew, who dodged.

‘Who’s fucking talked?’ Simon yelled, as the lamp base broke apart on the wall. ‘Someone’s fucking talked!’

‘It’s some bastard at the printworks, isn’t it?’ Andrew shouted back; his lip was thick and throbbing; it felt like a tangerine segment. ‘D’you think we’d have – d’you think we don’t know how to keep our mouths shut by now?’

It was like trying to read a wild animal. He could see the muscles working in his father’s jaw, but he could tell that Simon was considering Andrew’s words.

‘When was that put on there?’ he roared at Ruth. ‘Look at it! What’s the date on it?’

Still sobbing, she peered at the screen, needing to approach the tip of her nose within two inches of it, now that her glasses were broken.

‘The fifteenth,’ she whispered.

‘Fifteenth… Sunday,’ said Simon. ‘Sunday, wasn’t it?’

Neither Andrew nor Ruth put him right. Andrew could not believe his luck; nor did he believe it would hold.

‘Sunday,’ said Simon, ‘so anyone could’ve – my fucking toe ,’ he yelled, as he pulled himself up and limped exaggeratedly towards Ruth. ‘Get out of my way!’

She hastened out of the chair and watched him read the paragraph through again. He kept snorting like an animal to clear his airways. Andrew thought that he might be able to garrotte his father as he sat there, if only there was a wire to hand.

‘Someone’s got all this from work,’ said Simon, as if he had just reached this conclusion, and had not heard his wife or son urging the hypothesis on him. He placed his hands on the keyboard and turned to Andrew. ‘How do I get rid of it?’

‘What?’

‘You do fucking computing! How do I get this off here?’

‘You can’t get – you can’t,’ said Andrew. ‘You’d need to be the administrator.’

‘Make yourself the administrator, then,’ said Simon, jumping up and pointing Andrew into the swivel chair.

‘I can’t make myself the administrator,’ said Andrew. He was afraid that Simon was working himself up into a second bout of violence. ‘You need to input the right user name and passwords.’

‘You’re a real fucking waste of space, aren’t you?’

Simon shoved Andrew in the middle of his sternum as he limped past, knocking him back into the mantelpiece.

‘Pass me the phone!’ Simon shouted at his wife, as he sat back down in the armchair.

Ruth took the telephone and carried it the few feet to Simon. He ripped it out of her hands and punched in a number.

Andrew and Ruth waited in silence as Simon called, first Jim, and then Tommy, the men with whom he had completed the after-hours jobs at the printworks. Simon’s fury, his suspicion of his own accomplices, was funnelled down the telephone in curt short sentences full of swearwords.

Paul had not returned. Perhaps he was still trying to staunch his bleeding nose, but more likely he was too scared. Andrew thought his brother unwise. It was safest to leave only after Simon had given you permission.

His calls completed, Simon held out the telephone to Ruth without speaking; she took it and hurried it back into its stand.

Simon sat thinking while his fractured toe pulsated, sweating in the heat of the wood-burner, awash with impotent fury. The beating to which he had subjected his wife and son was nothing, he did not give them a thought; a terrible thing had just happened to him, and naturally his rage had exploded on those nearest him; that was how life worked. In any case, Ruth, the silly bitch, had admitted to telling Shirley…

Simon was building his own chain of evidence, as he thought things must have happened. Some fucker (and he suspected that gum-chewing forklift driver, whose expression, as Simon had sped away from him in the Fields, had been outraged) talking about him to the Mollisons (somehow, illogically, Ruth’s admission that she had mentioned the computer to Shirley made this seem more likely), and they (the Mollisons, the establishment, the smooth and the snide, guarding their access to power) had put up this message on their website (Shirley, the old cow, managed the site, which set the seal on the theory).

‘It’s your fucking friend,’ Simon told his wet-faced, trembling-lipped wife. ‘It’s your fucking Shirley. She’s done this. She’s got some dirt on me to get me off her son’s case. That’s who it is.’

‘But Si—’

Shut up, shut up, you silly cow , thought Andrew.

‘Still on her side, are you?’ roared Simon, making to stand again.

‘No!’ squealed Ruth, and he sank back into the chair, glad to keep the weight off his pounding foot.

The Harcourt-Walsh management would not be happy about those after-hours jobs, Simon thought. He wouldn’t put it past the bloody police to come nosing around the computer. A desire for urgent action filled him.

‘You,’ he said, pointing at Andrew. ‘Unplug that computer. All of it, the leads and everything. You’re coming with me.’

Things denied, things untold, things hidden and disguised.

The muddy River Orr gushed over the wreckage of the stolen computer, thrown from the old stone bridge at midnight. Simon limped to work on his fractured toe and told everyone that he had slipped on the garden path. Ruth pressed ice to her bruises and concealed them inexpertly with an old tube of foundation; Andrew’s lip scabbed over, like Dane Tully’s, and Paul had another nosebleed on the bus and had to go straight to the nurse on arrival at school.

Shirley Mollison, who had been shopping in Yarvil, did not answer Ruth’s repeated telephone calls until late afternoon, by which time Ruth’s sons had arrived home from school. Andrew listened to the one-sided conversation from the stairs outside the sitting room. He knew that Ruth was trying to take care of the problem before Simon came home, because Simon was more than capable of seizing the receiver from her and shouting and swearing at her friend.

‘…just silly lies,’ she was saying brightly, ‘but we’d be very grateful if you could remove it, Shirley.’

He scowled and the cut on his fat lip threatened to burst open again. He hated hearing his mother asking the woman for a favour. In that moment he was irrationally annoyed that the post had not been taken down already; then he remembered that he had written it, that he had caused everything: his mother’s battered face, his own cut lip and the atmosphere of dread that pervaded the house at the prospect of Simon’s return.