The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling Page A

eight, still crying as she walked back from assembly, found a form that Barry had signed in her school bag, and became almost hysterical.
    The twenty-three-year-old journalist at the
Yarvil and District Gazette
had no idea that Barry’s once busy brain was now a heavy handful of spongy tissue on a metal tray in South West General. She read through what he had emailed her an hour before his death, then called his mobile number, but nobody answered. Barry’s phone, which he had turned off at Mary’s request before they left for the golf club, was sitting silently beside the microwave in the kitchen, along with the rest of his personal effects that the hospital had given her to take home. Nobody had touched them. These familiar objects – his key fob, his phone, his worn old wallet – seemed like pieces of the dead man himself; they might have been his fingers, his lungs.
    Onwards and outwards the news of Barry’s death spread, radiating, halo-like, from those who had been at the hospital. Onwards and outwards as far as Yarvil, reaching those who knew Barry only by sight or reputation or by name. Gradually the facts lost form and focus; in some cases they became distorted. In places, Barry himselfwas lost behind the nature of his ending, and he became no more than an eruption of vomit and piss, a twitching pile of catastrophe, and it seemed incongruous, even grotesquely comical, that a man should have died so messily at the smug little golf club.
    So it was that Simon Price, who had been one of the first to hear about Barry’s death, in his house on top of the hill overlooking Pagford, met a rebounding version at the Harcourt-Walsh printworks in Yarvil where he had worked ever since leaving school. It was borne to him on the lips of a young, gum-chewing forklift driver, whom Simon found skulking beside his office door, after a late-afternoon return from the bathroom.
    The boy had not come, in the first place, to discuss Barry at all.
    ‘That thing you said you migh’ be int’rested in,’ he mumbled, when he had followed Simon into the office, and Simon had closed the door, ‘I cud do it for yeh Wednesday, if yeh still fancied it.’
    ‘Yeah?’ said Simon, sitting himself down at his desk. ‘I thought you said it was all ready to go?’
    ‘’Tis, but I can’t fix up collection till Wednesday.’
    ‘How much did you say again?’
    ‘Eighty notes, fer cash.’
    The boy chewed vigorously; Simon could hear his saliva working. Gum-chewing was one of Simon’s many pet hates.
    ‘It’s the proper thing, though, is it?’ Simon demanded. ‘Not some knock-off piece of crap?’
    ‘Come straight from the warehouse,’ said the boy, shifting his feet and his shoulders. ‘Real thing, still boxed up.’
    ‘All right, then,’ said Simon. ‘Bring it in Wednesday.’
    ‘What, here?’ The boy rolled his eyes. ‘Nah, not to work, mate … Where d’you live?’
    ‘Pagford,’ said Simon.
    ‘Where’bouts in Pagford?’
    Simon’s aversion to naming his home bordered on the superstitious. He not only disliked visitors – invaders of his privacy and possible despoilers of his property – but he saw Hilltop House as inviolate, immaculate, a world apart from Yarvil and the crashing, grinding printworks.
    ‘I’ll come and pick it up after work,’ said Simon, ignoring the question. ‘Where are you keeping it?’
    The boy did not look happy. Simon glared at him.
    ‘Well, I’d need the cash upfront,’ the forklift driver temporized.
    ‘You get the money when I’ve got the goods.’
    ‘Dun’ work like that, mate.’
    Simon thought he might be developing a headache. He could not dislodge the horrible idea, implanted by his careless wife that morning, that a tiny bomb might tick undetected for ages inside a man’s brain. The steady clatter and rumble of the printing press beyond the door was surely not good for him; its relentless battery might have been thinning his artery walls for years.
    ‘All right,’ he