of the Cubby Hole and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. He was thinking about what he wanted to tell Andrew. He had been mentally rehearsing the way he would start, all through the funeral service, while his father gulped and sobbed into his handkerchief. Fats was so excited by the prospect of telling, that he was having difficulty containing himself; but he was determined not to blurt it out. The telling of it was, to Fats, of almost equal importance to the doing of it. He did not want Andrew to think that he had hurried here to say it.
‘You know how Fairbrother was on the Parish Council?’ said Andrew.
‘Yeah,’ said Fats, glad that Andrew had initiated a space-filler conversation.
‘Si-Pie’s saying he’s going to stand for his seat.’
‘Si-Pie is?’
Fats frowned at Andrew.
‘What the fuck’s got into him?’
‘He reckons Fairbrother was getting backhanders from some contractor.’ Andrew had heard Simon discussing it with Ruth in the kitchen that morning. It had explained everything. ‘He wants a bit of the action.’
‘That wasn’t Barry Fairbrother,’ said Fats, laughing as he flicked ash onto the cave floor. ‘And that wasn’t the Parish Council. That was What’s-his-name Frierly, up in Yarvil. He was on the school board at Winterdown. Cubby had a fucking fit. Local press calling him for a comment and all that. Frierly got done for it. Doesn’t Si-Pie read the Yarvil and District Gazette?’
Andrew stared at Fats.
‘Fucking typical.’
He ground out his cigarette on the earthy floor, embarrassed by his father’s idiocy. Simon had got the wrong end of the stick yet again. He spurned the local community, sneered at their concerns, was proud of his isolation in his poxy little house on the hill; then he got a bit of misinformation and decided to expose his family to humiliation on the basis of it.
‘Crooked as fuck, Si-Pie, isn’t he?’ said Fats.
They called him Si-Pie because that was Ruth’s nickname for her husband. Fats had heard her use it once, when he had been over for his tea, and had never called Simon anything else since.
‘Yeah, he is,’ said Andrew, wondering whether he would be able to dissuade his father from standing by telling him he had the wrong man and the wrong council.
‘Bit of a coincidence,’ said Fats, ‘because Cubby’s standing as well.’
Fats exhaled through his nostrils, staring at the crevice wall over Andrew’s head.
‘So will voters go for the cunt,’ he said, ‘or the twat?’
Andrew laughed. There was little he enjoyed more than hearing his father called a cunt by Fats.
‘Now have a shifty at this,’ said Fats, jamming his cigarette between his lips and patting his hips, even though he knew that the envelope was in the inside breast pocket. ‘Here you go,’ he said, pulling it out and opening it to show Andrew the contents: brown peppercorn-sized pods in a powdery mix of shrivelled stalks and leaves.
‘Sensimilla, that is.’
‘What is it?’
‘Tips and shoots of your basic unfertilized marijuana plant,’ said Fats, ‘specially prepared for your smoking pleasure.’
‘What’s the difference between that and the normal stuff?’ asked Andrew, with whom Fats had split several lumps of waxy black cannabis resin in the Cubby Hole.
‘Just a different smoke, isn’t it?’ said Fats, stubbing out his own cigarette. He took a packet of Rizlas from his pocket, drew out three of the fragile papers and gummed them together.
‘Did you get it off Kirby?’ asked Andrew, poking at and sniffing the contents of the envelope.
Everyone knew Skye Kirby was the go-to man for drugs. He was a year above them, in the lower sixth. His grandfather was an old hippy, who had been up in court several times for growing his own.
‘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