Fists pummeled the bathroom door. Gavin's hand slipped and blood dripped from his thin neck to speckle his clean white shirt.

"Your boyfriend," came a furious female scream, "is still in the bathroom and I am going to be late!"

"I've finished!" he shouted.

The gash stung, but what did that matter? Here was his excuse, ready-made: Look what your daughter made me do. I'll have to go home and change my shirt before work. With an almost light heart he grabbed the tie and jacket he had hung over the hook on the back of the door, and unlocked it.

Gaia pushed past, slammed the door behind her and rammed the lock home. Out on the tiny landing, which was thick with an unpleasant smell of burned rubber, Gavin remembered the headboard banging against the wall last night, the creaking of the cheap pine bed, Kay's groans and yelps. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that her daughter was in the house.

He jogged down the carpetless stairs. Kay had told him of her plans to sand and polish them, but he doubted that she would ever do it; her flat in London had been shabby and in poor repair. In any case, he was convinced that she was expecting to move in with him quite soon, but he would not allow it; that was the final bastion, and there, if forced, he would make his stand.

"What have you done to yourself?" Kay squealed, catching sight of the blood on his shirt. She was wearing the cheap scarlet kimono that he did not like, but which suited her so well.

"Gaia banged on the door and made me jump. I'm going to have to go home and change."

"Oh, but I've made you breakfast!" she said quickly.

He realized that the smell of burning rubber was actually scrambled eggs. They looked anemic and overcooked.

"I can't, Kay, I've got to change this shirt, I've got an early -"

She was already spooning the congealed mass onto plates.

"Five minutes, surely you can stay five -?"

The mobile phone in his jacket pocket buzzed loudly and he pulled it out, wondering whether he would have the nerve to pretend that it was an urgent summons.

"Jesus Christ," he said, in unfeigned horror.

"What's the matter?"

"Barry. Barry Fairbrother! He's...fuck, he's...he's dead! It's from Miles. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ!"

She laid down the wooden spoon.

"Who's Barry Fairbrother?"

"I play squash with him. He's only forty-four! Jesus Christ!"

He read the text message again. Kay watched him, confused. She knew that Miles was Gavin's partner at the solicitor's, but had never been introduced to him. Barry Fairbrother was no more than a name to her.

There came a thunderous banging from the stairs: Gaia was stamping as she ran.

"Eggs," she stated, at the kitchen door. "Like you make me every morning. Not. And thanks to him," with a venomous look at the back of Gavin's head, "I've probably missed the bloody bus."

"Well, if you hadn't spent so long doing your hair," Kay shouted at the figure of her retreating daughter, who did not respond, but stormed down the hall, her bag bouncing off the walls, and slammed the front door behind her.

"Kay, I've got to go," said Gavin.

"But look, I've got it all ready, you could have it before -"

"I've got to change my shirt. And, shit, I did Barry's will for him, I'll need to look it out. No, I'm sorry, I've got to go. I can't believe it," he added, rereading Miles' text. "I can't believe it. We only played squash on Thursday. I can't - Jesus."

A man had died; there was nothing she could say, not without putting herself in the wrong. He kissed her briefly on her unresponsive mouth, and then walked away, up the dark narrow hall.

"Will I see you -?"

"I'll call you later," he shouted over her, pretending not to hear.

Gavin hurried across the road to his car, gulping the crisp, cold air, holding the fact of Barry's death in his mind like a vial of volatile liquid that he dare not agitate. As he turned the key in the ignition, he imagined Barry's twin daughters crying, facedown in their bunk beds. He had seen them lying like that, one above the other, each playing on a Nintendo DS, when he passed the door of their bedroom the very last time he had gone round for dinner.

The Fairbrothers had been the most devoted couple he knew. He would never eat at their house again. He used to tell Barry how lucky he was. Not so lucky after all.

Someone was coming down the pavement towards him; in a panic that it was Gaia, coming to shout at him or to demand a lift, he reversed too hard and hit the car behind him: Kay's old Vauxhall Corsa. The passerby drew level with his window, and was revealed to be an emaciated, hobbling old woman in carpet slippers. Sweating, Gavin swung his steering wheel around and squeezed out of the space. As he accelerated, he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Gaia letting herself back into Kay's house.

He was having difficulty getting enough air into his lungs. There was a tight knot in his chest. Only now did he realize that Barry Fairbrother had been his best friend.

VI.

The school bus had reached the Fields, the sprawling estate that lay on the outskirts of the city of Yarvil. Dirty gray houses, some of them spray-painted with initials and obscenities; the occasional boarded window; satellite dishes and overgrown grass - none of it was any more worthy of Andrew's sustained attention than the ruined abbey of Pagford, glittering with frost. Andrew had once been intrigued and intimidated by the Fields, but familiarity had long since rendered it all commonplace.

The pavements swarmed with children and teenagers walking towards school, many of them in T-shirts, despite the cold. Andrew spotted Krystal Weedon, byword and dirty joke. She was bouncing along, laughing uproariously, in the middle of a mixed group of teenagers. Multiple earrings swung from each ear, and the string of her thong was clearly visible above her low-slung tracksuit bottoms. Andrew had known her since primary school, and she featured in many of the most highly colored memories of his extreme youth. They had jeered at her name, but instead of crying, as most of the little girls would have done, five-year-old Krystal had caught on, cackled and shrieked, "Weed-on! Krystal weed-on!" And she had pulled down her pants in the middle of class and pretended to do it. He retained a vivid memory of her bare pink vulva; it was as though Father Christmas had popped up in their midst; and he remembered Miss Oates, bright red in the face, marching Krystal from the room.

By the age of twelve, transposed to the comprehensive, Krystal had become the most well-developed girl in their year and had lingered at the back of the class, where they were supposed to take their maths worksheets when they had finished and swap them for the next in the series. How it had been initiated, Andrew (among the last to finish his maths, as ever) had no idea, but he had reached the plastic boxes of worksheets, neatly lined up on top of the cupboards at the back, to find Rob Calder and Mark Richards taking it in turns to cup and squeeze Krystal's breasts. Most of the other boys were looking on, electrified, their faces hidden from the teacher by their upstanding textbooks, while the girls, many of them flushed scarlet, were pretending not to have seen. Andrew had realized that half the boys had already had their turn, and that he was expected to take his. He had both wanted and not wanted to. It was not her breasts he feared, but the bold challenging look on her face; he had been frightened of doing it wrong. When the oblivious and ineffectual Mr. Simmonds had looked up at last and said, "You've been up there forever, Krystal, get a worksheet and sit down," Andrew had been almost entirely relieved.

Though they had long since been separated into different sets, they were still in the same registration class, so Andrew knew that Krystal was sometimes present, often not, and that she was in almost constant trouble. She knew no fear, like the boys who came to school with tattoos they had inked themselves, with split lips and cigarettes, and stories of clashes with the police, of drug taking and easy sex.

Winterdown Comprehensive lay just inside Yarvil, a large, ugly triple-storied building whose outer shell consisted of windows interspersed with turquoise-painted panels. When the bus doors creaked open, Andrew joined the swelling masses, black-blazered and sweatered, that were milling across the car park towards the school's two front entrances. As he was about to join the bottleneck cramming itself through the double doors, he noticed a Nissan Micra pulling up, and detached himself to wait for his best friend.

Tubby, Tubs, Tubster, Flubber, Wally, Wallah, Fatboy, Fats: Stuart Wall was the most nicknamed boy in school. His loping walk, his skinniness, his thin sallow face, overlarge ears and permanently pained expression were distinctive enough, but it was his trenchant humor, his detachment and poise that set him apart. Somehow he managed to disassociate himself from everything that might have defined a less resilient character, shrugging off the embarrassment of being the son of a ridiculed and unpopular deputy head; of having a frumpy, overweight guidance teacher as a mother. He was preeminently and uniquely himself: Fats, school notable and landmark, and even the Fielders laughed at his jokes, and rarely bothered - so coolly and cruelly did he return jibes - to laugh at his unfortunate connections.

Fats' self-possession remained total this morning when, in full view of the parent-free hordes streaming past, he had to struggle out of the Nissan alongside not only his mother but his father too, who usually traveled to school separately. Andrew thought again of Krystal Weedon and her exposed thong, as Fats loped toward him.

"All right, Arf?" said Fats.

"Fats."

They moved together into the crowd, their schoolbags slung over their shoulders, buffeting the shorter kids in the face, creating a small space in their slipstream.

"Cubby's been crying," said Fats, as they walked up the teeming stairs.

"Say what?"

"Barry Fairbrother dropped dead last night."

"Oh yeah, I heard," said Andrew.

Fats gave Andrew the sly, quizzical look he used when others overreached themselves, pretended to know more than they did, pretended to be more than they were.

"My mum was at the hospital when they brought him in," said Andrew, nettled. "She works there, remember?"

"Oh, yeah," said Fats, and the slyness was gone. "Well, you know how him and Cubby were bum chums. And Cubby's going to announce it. Not good, Arf."

They parted at the top of the stairs for their respective registration rooms. Most of Andrew's class was already in their room, sitting on desks, swinging their legs, leaning up against the cupboards at the sides. Bags lay under chairs. Talk was always louder and freer than usual on Monday mornings, because assembly meant an open-air walk to the sports hall. Their registration teacher sat at her desk, marking people present as they came in. She never bothered to call the register formally; it was one of the many small ways in which she attempted to ingratiate herself with them, and the class despised her for it.

Krystal arrived as the bell rang for assembly. She shouted, "I'm here, miss!" from the doorway, and swung herself back out again. Everyone else followed her, still talking. Andrew and Fats were reunited at the top of the stairs and were borne by the general flow out of the back doors and across the wide gray tarmacked yard.

The sports hall smelled of sweat and trainers; the din of twelve hundred voraciously talking teenagers echoed off its bleak, whitewashed walls. A hard industrial-gray and much-stained carpet covered the floor, inset with different colored lines marking out badminton and tennis courts, hockey and football pitches; the stuff gave vicious burns if you fell on it bare-legged, but was easier on the backside than bare wood for those who had to sit on it for the duration of whole-school assembly. Andrew and Fats had attained the dignity of tubular-legged, plastic-backed chairs, ranged at the rear of the hall for the fifth and sixth years.

An old wooden lectern stood at the front, facing the pupils, and beside it sat the headmistress, Mrs. Shawcross. Fats' father, Colin "Cubby" Wall, walked over to take his place beside her. Very tall, he had a high, balding forehead, and an immensely imitable walk, his arms held rigid by his side, bobbing up and down more than was necessary for forward locomotion. Everyone called him Cubby, because of his infamous obsession with keeping the cubbyholes on the wall outside his school office in good order. The registers went into some of them after they had been marked, while others were assigned to specific departments. "Be sure and put it in the right cubbyhole, Ailsa!" "Don't leave it hanging out like that, it'll fall out of the cubbyhole, Kevin!" "Don't walk over it, girl! Pick it up, give it here, it's meant to be in a cubbyhole!"

All the other teachers called them pigeonholes. It was widely assumed that they did this to set themselves apart from Cubby.

"Move along, move along," said Mr. Meacher, the woodwork teacher, to Andrew and Fats, who had left an empty seat between themselves and Kevin Cooper.

Cubby took his place behind the lectern. The pupils did not settle as quickly as they would have done for the headmistress. At the precise moment that the last voice died away, one of the double doors in the middle of the right-hand wall opened and Gaia walked in.

She glanced around the hall (Andrew permitted himself to watch, because half the hall was watching her; she was late, and unfamiliar, and beautiful, and it was only Cubby talking) and walked quickly, but not unduly so (because she had Fats' gift of self-possession) around the back of the students. Andrew's head could not revolve to keep watching her, but it struck him with a force that made his ears ring, that in moving along with Fats he had left an empty seat beside him.

He heard light, rapid footsteps coming closer, and then she was there; she had sat down right next to him. She nudged his chair, her body moving his. His nostrils caught a whisper of perfume. The whole of the left side of his body was burning with awareness of her, and he was grateful that the cheek nearest her was much less acne-ridden than the right. He had never been this close to her and wondered whether he dared look at her, make some sign of recognition; but immediately decided he had been paralyzed too long, and that it was too late to do so naturally.

Scratching his left temple to screen his face, he swiveled his eyeballs to glance down at her hands, clasped loosely on her lap. The nails were short, clean and unvarnished. There was a plain silver ring on one little finger.

Fats moved his elbow discreetly to put pressure on Andrew's side.

"Lastly," Cubby said, and Andrew realized that he had already heard Cubby say the word twice, and that the quietness in the hall had solidified into silence, as all fidgeting ceased and the air became stiff with curiosity, glee and unease.

"Lastly," said Cubby again, and his voice wobbled out of control, "I have a very...I have a very sad announcement to make. Mr. Barry Fairbrother, who has coached our extremely socksess...success...successful girls' rowing team for the past two years, has..."

He choked and passed a hand in front of his eyes.

"...died..."

Cubby Wall was crying in front of everybody; his knobbly bald head drooped onto his chest. A simultaneous gasp and giggle rolled across the watching crowd, and many faces turned toward Fats, who sat looking sublimely unconcerned; a little quizzical, but otherwise unmoved.

"...died..." sobbed Cubby, and the headmistress stood up, looking cross.

"...died...last night."

A loud squawk rose from somewhere in the middle of the lines of chairs at the back of the hall.

"Who laughed?" roared Cubby, and the air crackled with delicious tension. "HOW DARE YOU! What girl laughed, who was it?"

Mr. Meacher was already on his feet, gesticulating furiously at somebody in the middle of the row just behind Andrew and Fats; Andrew's chair was buffeted again, because Gaia had twisted in her seat to watch, like everyone else. Andrew's entire body seemed to have become super-sensory; he could feel the way Gaia's body was arched towards his. If he turned in the opposite direction, they would be breast to chest.

"Who laughed?" repeated Cubby, raising himself absurdly on tiptoe, as if he might be able to make out the culprit from where he was standing. Meacher was mouthing and beckoning feverishly at the person he had singled out for blame.

"Who is it, Mr. Meacher?" shouted Cubby.

Meacher appeared unwilling to say; he was still having difficulty in persuading the guilty party to leave her seat, but as Cubby began to show alarming signs of leaving the lectern to investigate personally, Krystal Weedon shot to her feet, scarlet in the face, and started pushing her way along the row.

"You will see me in my office immediately after assembly!" shouted Cubby. "Absolutely disgraceful - total lack of respect! Get out of my sight!"

But Krystal stopped at the end of the row, stuck up her middle finger at Cubby and screamed, "I DI'N' DO NOTHIN', YOU PRICK!"

There was an eruption of excited chatter and laughter; the teachers made ineffectual attempts to quell the noise, and one or two left their chairs to try and intimidate their own registration classes back into order.

The double doors swung shut behind Krystal and Mr. Meacher.

"Settle down!" shouted the headmistress, and a precarious quiet, rife with fidgeting and whispers, spread over the hall again. Fats was staring straight ahead, and there was for once a forced air to his indifference and a darker tinge to his skin.

Andrew felt Gaia fall back into her chair. He screwed up his courage, glanced left and grinned. She smiled right back.

VII.

Though Pagford's delicatessen would not open until nine thirty, Howard Mollison had arrived early. He was an extravagantly obese man of sixty-four. A great apron of stomach fell so far down in front of his thighs that most people thought instantly of his penis when they first clapped eyes on him, wondering when he had last seen it, how he washed it, how he managed to perform any of the acts for which a penis is designed. Partly because his physique set off these trains of thought, and partly because of his fine line in banter, Howard managed to discomfort and disarm in almost equal measure, so that customers almost always bought more than they meant to on a first visit to the shop. He kept up the patter while he worked, one short-fingered hand sliding the meat slicer smoothly backwards and forwards, silky-fine slices of ham rippling onto the cellophane held below, a wink ever ready in his round blue eyes, his chins wobbling with easy laughter.

Howard had devised a costume to wear to work: white shirt-sleeves, a stiff dark-green canvas apron, corduroy trousers and a deerstalker into which he had inserted a number of fisherman's flies. If the deerstalker had ever been a joke, it had long since ceased to be. Every workday morning he positioned it, with unsmiling exactitude, on his dense gray curls, aided by a small mirror in the staff lavatory.

It was Howard's constant pleasure to open up in the mornings. He loved moving around the shop while the only sound was that of the softly humming chill cabinets, relished bringing it all back to life - flicking on the lights, pulling up the blinds, lifting lids to uncover the treasures of the chilled counter: the pale gray-green artichokes, the onyx-black olives, the dried tomatoes curled like ruby seahorses in their herb-flecked oil.

This morning, however, his enjoyment was laced with impatience. His business partner Maureen was already late, and, like Miles earlier, Howard was afraid that somebody might beat him to the telling of the sensational news, because she did not have a mobile phone.

He paused beside the newly hewn archway in the wall between the delicatessen and the old shoe shop, soon to become Pagford's newest cafe, and checked the industrial-strength clear plastic that prevented dust from settling in the delicatessen. They were planning to have the cafe open before Easter, in time to pull in the tourists to the West Country for whom Howard filled the windows annually with local cider, cheese and corn dollies.

The bell tinkled behind him, and he turned, his patched and reinforced heart pumping fast from excitement.

Maureen was a slight, round-shouldered woman of sixty-two, and the widow of Howard's original partner. Her stooping posture made her look much older than she was, though she strove, in so many ways, to keep a claw-grip on youth: dying her hair jet black, dressing in bright colors and wobbling on injudiciously high heels, which she changed for Dr. Scholl's sandals in the shop.

"Morning, Mo," said Howard.

He had been determined not to waste the announcement by rushing it, but customers would soon be upon them and he had a lot to say.