Part Seven Chapter 2

No problem, he muttered. He was glad. He could not imagine what they had left to let loose or so. This way he could sit with atomic number 32.A niggling way floor Church Row, Samantha Mollison was standing at her sitting-room window, holding a coffee and watching mourners hold her house on their way to St Michael and All Saints. When she see Tessa W either, and what she thought was Fats, she let emerge a slight gasp.Oh my idol, hes departure, she said break through loud, to nobody.Then she recognized Andrew, moody red, and impaleed hastily onward from the glass.Samantha was supposed to be working from home. Her laptop lay open asshole her on the sofa, but that morning she had disgorge on an old black dress, half wondering whether she would realise Krystal and Robbie Weedons funeral. She supposed that she had only a few oft minutes in which to make up her mind.She had neer spoken a kind word about Krystal Weedon, so surely it would be hypocritical to go through h er funeral, purely because she had wept over the account of her death in the Yarvil and District print, and because Krystals chubby face grinned out of only one of the class photographs that Lexie had brought home from St Thomass?Samantha set down her coffee, hurried to the telephone and rang Miles at work.Hello, babe, he said.(She had held him maculation he sobbed with relief beside the hospital bed, w present Howard lay committed to machines, but alive.)Hi, she said. How are you?Not bad. Busy morning. endearing to hear from you, he said. Are you every(prenominal) just?(They had made love the previous night, and she had not false that he was whateverbody else.)The funerals about to start, said Samantha. People going by She had suppressed what she wanted to say for almost three weeks, because of Howard, and the hospital, and not wanting to remind Miles of their awfully row, but she could not hold it back either desireer. Miles, I saw that boy. Robbie Weedon. I saw him, Miles. She was panicky, pleading. He was in the St Thomass playing field when I walked crossways it that morning.In the playing field?In the lead three weeks, a desire to be absorb in something full-grownger than herself had grown in Samantha. daylight by day she had waited for the strange new engross away to subside (this is how people go religious, she thought, movementing to put-on herself out of it) but it had, if anything, in ecstasysified.Miles, she said, you k instantly the council with your dad and Parminder Jawanda resigning overly youll want to co-opt a couple of people, wont you? She knew either the terminology she had listened to it for years. I mean, you wont want an different election, afterward all this?Bloody hell, no.So Colin Wall could select one seat, she rushed on, and I was thinking, Ive got time now the business is all online I could do the some other one.You? said Miles, astonished.Id like to compensite involved, said Samantha.Krystal Weedo n, beat(p) at sixteen, barricaded inside the squalid pocket-size house on Foley Road Samantha had not wino a glass of wine in dickens weeks. She thought that she might like to hear the arguments for Bellchapel colony Clinic.The telephone was ringing in number ten Hope Street. Kay and Gaia were already late sledding for Krystals funeral. When Gaia asked who was speaking, her lovely face hardened she seemed some(prenominal) older.Its Gavin, she told her mother.I didnt call him whispered Kay, like a nervous schoolgirl as she took the phone.Hi, said Gavin. How are you?On my way out to a funeral, said Kay, with her eye locked on her daughters. The Weedon childrens. So, not fabulous.Oh, said Gavin. Christ, yeah. Sorry. I didnt realize.He had spotted the familiar surname in a Yarvil and District Gazette headline, and, vaguely interested at last, bought a copy. It had occurred to him that he might buzz off walked cockeyed by the place where the teenagers and the boy had been, but he had no actual memory of seeing Robbie Weedon.Gavin had had an scratchy couple of weeks. He was missing Barry badly. He did not understand himself when he should have been mired in misery that Mary had turned him down, 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 trying to steal your best friends life, and failed to notice the funnies of the tongue.)Listen, he said, I was wondering whether you fancied a drink later?Kay almost laughed.Turn you down, did she?She pass on 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 Black Canon, Gaia held her mothers hand.They arrived as the hearses appeared at the top of the road, and hurried into the necropolis while the pall-bearers were shuffling out onto the pavement.(Get away from the window, Colin Wall commanded his son.But Fats, who had to live henceforth with the companionship of his own cowardice, moved forward, trying to prove that he could, at least, take this The coffins glided past in the big black-windowed cars the first was bright knap, and the sight robbed him of breath, and the second was particular and shiny white Colin placed himself in front end 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 ricketyness to the world where he had confessed to as much as he could think of, in the hope that they would conclude him to be mad and ill where he had tried to heap upon himself so much blame that they would beat 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 All Saints, the pall-bearers were readyi ng themselves to take the coffins up the church path. Dane Tully was among them, with his earring and a self-inked tattoo of a spiders web on his neck, in a dumb black overcoat.The Jawandas waited with the Bawdens in the shade of the yew tree. Andrew Price hovered rise them, and Tessa Wall stood at some distance, pale and stony-faced. The other mourners formed a separate phalanx roughly the church doors. Some had a pinched and defiant air others looked resigned and defeated a few wore bargain-priced black clothes, but most were in jeans or tracksuits, and one girl was sporting a cut-off jersey and a belly-ring that caught the sun when she moved. The coffins moved up the path, shimmer in the bright light.It was Sukhvinder Jawanda who had chosen the bright pink coffin for Krystal, as she was sure she would have wanted. It was Sukhvinder who had through nearly everything organizing, choosing and persuading. Parminder kept looking sideways at her daughter, and finding excuses to to uch 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 save the boy, had emerged a heroine. From the article about her in the Yarvil and District Gazette to Maureen Lowes loud proclamations that she was recommending the girl for a special police award to the speech her headmistress made about her from the reading desk in assembly, Sukhvinder knew, for the first time, what it was to eclipse her brother and sister.She had detested every minute of it. At night, she felt once more the dead boys weight in her arms, dragging her towards the hidden she remembered the temptation to let go and save herself, and asked herself how long she would have resisted it. The deep scar on her tholepin itched and ached, whether moving or stationary. The news of Krystal Weedons death had had such(prenominal) an alarming effect on her that her parents had arran ged a counsellor, but she had not cut herself once since macrocosm 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 future(a) her down the corridors, she had heard the rumour that Terri Weedon had no capital to bury her children that thither would be no quarry marker, and the cheapest coffins.Thats very sad, Jolly, her mother had said that evening, as the family sat eating dinner together under the circumvent of family photographs. Her tone was as gentle as the policewomans had been there was no snap in Parminders voice 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 each other across the kitchen table. Both were instinctively opposed to the idea of asking people in Pagford to donate to such a cause, but uncomplete of them said so. They were a little afraid, now that they had see n her forearms, of disturb Sukhvinder, and the shadow 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 surprise she said abruptly, Yes, all right. Well have to see what we can do.The bulk of the depreciate 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 then insisted on going into the Fields in person, to explain to Terri what they had done, and why all about the rowing team, and why Krystal and Robbie should have a service at St Michaels.Parminder had been exceptionally upset(a) about Suk hvinder going into the Fields, let alone that disgusting 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 stopped 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 only passive. Sukhvinder had been frightened of her, with her pockmarked arms and her missing dentition it was like talking to a corpse.Inside the church, the mourners divided up 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 between them to the front row Terri, in a coat two sizes too large, seemed scarcely sure of where she was.