a smoke ring out of the Cubby Hole and loosened the dark grey tie around his neck. He appeared older and not, after all, so very foolish in the suit, which bore traces of earth on the knees and cuffs from the journey to the cave.
'You'd think they were bum chums,' Fats said, after he had taken another powerful drag on his cigarette.
'Cubby upset, was he?'
'Upset? He's having fucking hysterics. He's given himself hiccups. He's worse than the fucking widow.'
Andrew laughed. Fats blew another smoke ring and pulled at one of his overlarge ears.
'I bowed out early. They haven't even buried him yet.'
They smoked in silence for a minute, both looking out at the sludgy river. As he smoked, Andrew contemplated the words 'bowed out early', and the amount of autonomy Fats seemed to have, compared to himself. Simon and his fury stood between Andrew and too much freedom: in Hilltop House, you sometimes copped for punishment simply because you were present. Andrew's imagination had once been caught by a strange little module in their philosophy and religion class, in which primitive gods had been discussed in all their arbitrary wrath and violence, and the attempts of early civilizations to placate them. He had thought then of the nature of justice as he had come to know it: of his father as a pagan god, and of his mother as the high priestess of the cult, who attempted to interpret and intercede, usually failing, yet still insisting, in the face of all the evidence, that there was an underlying magnanimity and reasonableness to her deity.
Fats rested his head against the stone side 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