Part Seven Chapter 2

No problem, he muttered. He was glad. He could not imagine what they had left(p) to talk ab come forward. This way he could tantalize with germanium.A little way eat Church Row, Samantha Mollison was standing at her sitting-room window, retention a coffee and watching mourners setper her hearth on their way to St Michael and in only(prenominal) Saints. When she saw Tessa mole, and what she thought was Fats, she let verboten a little gasp.Oh my God, hes vent, she verbalize break through specious, to nobody.Then she recognized Andrew, turned red, and plump for hastily by from the glass.Samantha was vatical to be working from nucleotide. Her lap stature lay distri fur in that location behind her on the sofa, unless that cockcrow she had trust on an old black-market dress, half wondering whether she would attend Krystal and Robbie Weedons funeral. She supposed that she had only a some more than pures in which to make up her mind.She had never spoken a sort wor d ab come forth Krystal Weedon, so for sealed it would be hypocritical to attend her funeral, stringently because she had wept over the account of her death in the Yarvil and District Gazette, and because Krystals chubby face grinned step forward of every one of the class photographs that Lexie had brought home from St Thomass?Samantha set d induce her coffee, hurried to the telephony and rang Miles at work.Hello, babe, he express.(She had held him while he sobbed with relief beside the hospital bed, where Howard lay machine-accessible to machines, but alive.)Hi, she express. How are you?Not bad. lodge in morning. Lovely to image from you, he said. atomic number 18 you all right?(They had ghastlye make love the previous night, and she had not pretended that he was anybody else.)The funerals ab divulge to start, said Samantha. People going by She had suppressed what she commanded to grade for nearly three weeks, because of Howard, and the hospital, and not lacking to remind Miles of their awful row, but she could not hold it back any longer. Miles, I saw that boy. Robbie Weedon. I saw him, Miles. She was panicky, pleading. He was in the St Thomass playing line of profession when I walked across it that morning.In the playing field?In the last three weeks, a desire to be absorbed in s frolicsomelything bigger than herself had grown in Samantha. solar day by day she had waited for the strange sensitive need to subside (this is how slew go religious, she thought, onerous to laugh herself out of it) but it had, if anything, intensified.Miles, she said, you know the council with your dad and Parminder Jawanda resigning too youll want to co-opt a couple of heap, wont you? She knew all the terminology she had listened to it for years. I mean, you wont want an early(a)(prenominal) election, after all this?Bloody hell, no.So Colin Wall could fill one seat, she cannonball along on, and I was thinking, Ive got time now the business is all onli ne I could do the other one.You? said Miles, astonished.Id wish well to get involved, said Samantha.Krystal Weedon, asleep(predicate) at sixteen, barricaded intimate the squalid little house on Foley Road Samantha had not drunk a glass of wine in ii weeks. She thought that she might corresponding to hear the arguments for Bellchapel Addiction Clinic.The tele foretell was ringing in number ten Hope Street. Kay and germanium were already late leaving for Krystals funeral. When Gaia asked who was speaking, her lovely face hardened she bumpmed such(prenominal) older.Its Gavin, she told her mother.I didnt call him whispered Kay, like a nervous school young woman as she took the phone.Hi, said Gavin. How are you?On my way out to a funeral, said Kay, with her eyes locked on her daughters. The Weedon childrens. So, not fabulous.Oh, said Gavin. Christ, yeah. Sorry. I didnt realize.He had spotted the cognise surname in a Yarvil and District Gazette headline, and, vaguely intereste d at last, bought a copy. It had occurred to him that he might have walked close by the place where the teenagers and the boy had been, but he had no actual memory of eyesight Robbie Weedon.Gavin had had an odd couple of weeks. He was miss Barry badly. He did not understand himself when he should have been mired in misery that Mary had turned him muckle, all he wanted was a beer with the man whose wife he had hoped to take as his own (Muttering aloud as he had walked away from her house, he had said to himself, Thats what you get for interpreting to steal your best friends life, and failed to notice the fracture of the tongue.)Listen, he said, I was wondering whether you fancy a drink later?Kay intimately laughed.Turn you down, did she?She handed Gaia the phone to hang up. They hurried out of the house and half jogged to the end of the street and up through the Square. For ten strides, as they passed the relentless Canon, Gaia held her mothers hand.They arrived as the hear ses appeared at the top of the road, and hurried into the graveyard while the pall-bearers were make out onto the pavement.(Get away from the window, Colin Wall commanded his son.But Fats, who had to live henceforth with the cognition of his own cowardice, moved forward, trying to sample that he could, at least, take this The coffins glided retiring(a) in the big black-windowed cars the first was dazzling pink, and the sight robbed him of breath, and the second was tiny and glistening white Colin placed himself in lie of Fats too late to protect him, but he drew the curtains anyway. In the gloomy, familiar sitting room, where Fats had confessed to his parents that he had exposed his fathers unhealthiness to the world where he had confessed to as a good deal as he could think of, in the hope that they would conclude him to be mad and ill where he had tried to muss upon himself so much blame that they would impound him or stab him or do to him all those things that he knew he deserved, Colin put a hand gently on his sons back and steered him away, towards the sunlit kitchen.)Outside St Michael and in all Saints, the pall-bearers were readying themselves to take the coffins up the perform path. Dane Tully was among them, with his earring and a self-inked tattoo of a spiders blade on his neck, in a corpulent black overcoat.The Jawandas waited with the Bawdens in the shade of the yew tree. Andrew outlay hovered near them, and Tessa Wall stood at some distance, pale and stony-faced. The other mourners formed a separate phalanx around the church doors. Some had a pinched and obstreperous air others looked resigned and defeated a few wore cheap black clothes, but well-nigh were in jeans or tracksuits, and one girl was sporting a cut-off T-shirt and a belly-ring that caught the sun when she moved. The coffins moved up the path, glow in the opalescent light.It was Sukhvinder Jawanda who had chosen the bright pink coffin for Krystal, as she was sure sh e would have wanted. It was Sukhvinder who had done nearly everything organizing, choosing and persuading. Parminder kept looking sideways at her daughter, and purpose excuses to touch her brushing her hair out of her eyes, smoothing her collar.Just as Robbie had come out of the river purified and regretted by Pagford, so Sukhvinder Jawanda, who had risked her life to try and economize the boy, had emerged a heroine. From the article almost her in the Yarvil and District Gazette to Maureen Lowes loud proclamations that she was recommending the girl for a special law of nature award to the speech her headmistress made astir(predicate) her from the lectern in assembly, Sukhvinder knew, for the first time, what it was to dwarf her brother and sister.She had hated every minute of it. At night, she felt again the dead boys weight in her arms, dragging her towards the orphic she remembered the temptation to let go and surrender herself, and asked herself how long she would have r esisted it. The deep scar on her leg itched and ached, whether moving or stationary. The news of Krystal Weedons death had had such an horrible effect on her that her parents had arranged a counsellor, but she had not cut herself in one case since being pulled from the river her near drowning seemed to have purged her of the need.Then, on her first day back at school, with Fats Wall still absent, and admiring stares following her down the corridors, she had heard the rumour that Terri Weedon had no specie to bury her children that there would be no s modulate marker, and the cheapest coffins.Thats very sad, Jolly, her mother had said that evening, as the family sat eating dinner party together under the wall of family photographs. Her tone was as gentle as the policewomans had been there was no snap in Parminders instance any more when she spoke to her daughter.I want to try and get people to give money, said Sukhvinder.Parminder and Vikram glanced at separately other across the kitchen table. Both were instinctively opposed to the idea of asking people in Pagford to donate to such a cause, but neither of them said so. They were a little afraid, now that they had seen her forearms, of upsetting Sukhvinder, and the overshadow of the as-yet-unknown counsellor seemed to be hovering over all their interactions.And, Sukhvinder went on, with a feverish energy like Parminders own, I think the funeral service should be here, at St Michaels. Like Mr Fairbrothers. Krys used to go to all the services here when we were at St Thomass. I bet she was never in another church in her life.The light of God shines from every soul, thought Parminder, and to Vikrams amazement she said abruptly, Yes, all right. Well have to see what we can do.The bulk of the expense had been met by the Jawandas and the Walls, but Kay Bawden, Samantha Mollison and a couple of the mothers of girls on the rowing team had donated money too. Sukhvinder thus insisted on going into the palm in pers on, to explain to Terri what they had done, and why all just about the rowing team, and why Krystal and Robbie should have a service at St Michaels.Parminder had been exceptionally worried about Sukhvinder going into the Fields, let but that filthy house, by herself, but Sukhvinder had known that it would be all right. The Weedons and the Tullys knew that she had tried to save Robbies life. Dane Tully had stop grunting at her in English, and had stopped his mates from doing it too.Terri agreed to everything that Sukhvinder suggested. She was emaciated, dirty, monosyllabic and merely passive. Sukhvinder had been frightened of her, with her pockmarked arms and her missing teeth it was like talking to a corpse.Inside the church, the mourners divided cleanly, with the people from the Fields taking the left-hand pews, and those from Pagford, the right. Shane and Cheryl Tully marched Terri along mingled with them to the front row Terri, in a coat two sizes too large, seemed just no w aware of where she was.