The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling Read Free Book Online Page A

shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.
    She had no control over her thoughts; they had broken apart too, and random fragments of memory surfaced and spun out of sight again: dancing with Barry at the Walls’ New Year’s party, and the silly conversation they had had walking back from the last meeting of the Parish Council.
    “You’ve got a cow-faced house,” she had told him.
    “ Cow -faced? What does that mean?”
    “It’s narrower at the front than at the back. It’s lucky. But you overlook a T-junction. That’s unlucky.”
    “So we’re luck neutral,” Barry had said.
    The artery in his head must have been bulging dangerously even then, and neither of them had known it.
    Parminder walked blindly from the kitchen into the gloomy sitting room, which was in perpetual shade, no matter the weather, because of the towering Scots pine in the front garden. She hated that tree, but it lived on because of the fuss she and Vikram knew the neighbors would make if they felled it.
    She couldn’t settle. Through the hall, then back into the kitchen, where she seized the telephone and called Tessa Wall, who did not pick up. She must be at work. Parminder returned, trembling, to the kitchen chair.
    Her grief was so big and wild it terrified her, like an evil beast that had erupted from under the floorboards. Barry, little, bearded Barry, her friend, her ally.
    It was exactly the way her father had died. She had been fifteen, and they had come back from town to find him lying facedown on the lawn with the mower beside him, the sun hot on the back of his head. Parminder hated sudden death. The long wasting away that so many people feared was a comforting prospect to her; time to arrange and organize, time to say good-bye…
    Her hands were still pressed tightly over her mouth. She stared at the grave, sweet visage of Guru Nanak pinned to the cork board.
    (Vikram did not like the picture.
    “What’s that doing there?”
    “I like it,” she had said defiantly.)
    Barry, dead.
    She tamped down the awful urge to cry with a fierceness that her mother had always deplored, especially in the wake of her father’s death, when her other daughters, and the aunts and cousins, were all wailing and beating their breasts. “And you were his favorite too!” But Parminder kept her unwept tears locked tightly inside where they seemed to undergo an alchemical transformation, returning to the outer world as lava slides of rage, disgorged periodically at her children and the receptionists at work.
    She could still see Howard and Maureen behind the counter, the one immense, the other scrawny, and in her mind’s eye they were looking down at her from a height as they told her that her friend was dead. With an almost welcome gush of fury and hatred she thought, They’re glad. They think they’ll win now .
    She jumped up again, strode back into the sitting room and took down, from the top shelf, one volume of the Sainchis, her brand-new holy book. Opening it at random, she read, with no surprise, but rather a sense of looking at her own devastated face in a mirror:
    O mind, the world is a deep, dark pit. On every side, Death casts forward his net.
    IX
    The room set aside for the guidance department at Winterdown Comprehensive opened off the school library. It had no windows and was lit by a single strip light.
    Tessa Wall, head of guidance and wife of the deputy headmaster, entered the room at half-past ten, numb with fatigue and carrying a cup of strong instant coffee that she had brought up from the staff room. She was a short stout woman with a plain wide face, who cut her own graying hair — the blunt fringe was often a little