Heading down the dark stairs in search of food on Friday evening, Andrew heard Simon talking stiffly on the telephone in the sitting room, and paused to listen.
‘…withdraw my candidacy,’ he was saying. ‘Yes. Well, my personal circumstances have changed. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that’s right. OK. Thank you.’
Andrew heard Simon replace the receiver.
‘Well, that’s that,’ his father said to his mother. ‘I’m well out of it, if that’s the kind of shit they’re throwing around.’
He heard his mother return some muffled, approving rejoinder, and before Andrew had time to move, Simon had emerged into the hall below, drawn breath into his lungs and yelled the first syllable of Andrew’s name, before realizing that his son was right in front of him.
‘What are you doing?’
Simon’s face was half in shadow, lit only by the light escaping the sitting room.
‘I wanted a drink,’ Andrew lied; his father did not like the boys helping themselves to food.
‘You start work with Mollison this weekend, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Right, well, you listen to me. I want anything you can get on that bastard, d’you hear me? All the dirt you can get. And on his son, if you hear anything.’
‘All right,’ said Andrew.
‘And I’ll put it up on the fucking website for them,’ said Simon, and he walked back into the sitting room. ‘Barry Fairbrother’s fucking ghost.’
As he scavenged an assortment of food that might not be missed, skimming off slices here, handfuls there, a jubilant jingle ran through Andrew’s mind: I stopped you, you bastard. I stopped you.
He had done exactly what he had set out to do: Simon had no idea who had brought his ambitions to dust. The silly sod was even demanding Andrew’s help in getting his revenge; a complete about-turn, because when Andrew had first told his parents that he had a job at the delicatessen, Simon had been furious.
‘You stupid little tit. What about your fucking allergy?’
‘I thought I’d try not eating any of the nuts,’ said Andrew.
‘Don’t get smart with me, Pizza Face. What if you eat one accidentally, like at St Thomas’s? D’you think we want to go through that crap again?’
But Ruth had supported Andrew, telling Simon that Andrew was old enough to take care, to know better. When Simon had left the room, she had tried to tell Andrew that Simon was only worried about him.
‘The only thing he’s worried about is that he’d have to miss bloody Match of the Day to take me to hospital.’
Andrew returned to his bedroom, where he sat shovelling food into his mouth with one hand and texting Fats with the other.
He thought that it was all over, finished, done with. Andrew had never yet had reason to observe the first tiny bubble of fermenting yeast, in which was contained an inevitable, alchemical transformation.
VIII
The move to Pagford had been the worst thing that had ever happened to Gaia Bawden. Excepting occasional visits to her father in Reading, London was all that she had ever known. So incredulous had Gaia been, when Kay had first said that she wanted to move to a tiny West Country town, that it had been weeks before she took the threat seriously. She had thought it one of Kay’s mad ideas, like the two chickens she had bought for their tiny back garden in Hackney (killed by a fox a week after purchase), or deciding to ruin half their saucepans and permanently scar her own hand by making marmalade, when she hardly ever cooked.
Wrenched from friends she had had since primary school, from the house she had known since she was eight, from weekends that were, increasingly, about every kind of urban fun, Gaia had been plunged, over her pleas, threats and protests, into a life she had never dreamed existed. Cobbled streets and no shops open past six o’clock, a communal life that seemed to revolve around the church, and where you could often hear birdsong and nothing else: Gaia felt as though she had fallen through a portal into a land lost in time.
She and Kay had clung tightly to each other all Gaia’s life (for her father had never lived with them, and Kay’s two successive relationships had never been formalized), bickering, condoling and growing steadily more like flat-mates with the passing years. Now, though, Gaia saw nothing but an enemy when she looked across the kitchen table. Her only ambition was to return to London, by any means possible, and to make Kay as unhappy as she could, in revenge. She could