"I said no!"

Lexie stomped away. Andrew, glad to see her go, smiled at Samantha, and was surprised when she beamed at him.

"Do you talk back to your parents?"

"Yeah," he said, and she laughed. Her breasts really were enormous.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" boomed a voice through the microphone, and everyone stopped talking to listen to Howard. "Wanted to say a few words...most of you probably know by now that my son Miles has just been elected to the Parish Council!"

There was a smattering of applause and Miles raised his drink high above his head to acknowledge it. Andrew was startled to hear Samantha say quite clearly under her breath, "Hoo-fucking-ray."

Nobody was coming for drinks now. Andrew slipped back into the kitchen. Gaia and Sukhvinder were alone in there, drinking and laughing, and when they saw Andrew they both shouted, "Andy!"

He laughed too.

"Are you both pissed?"

"Yes," said Gaia, and "No," said Sukhvinder. "She is, though."

"I don't care," said Gaia. "Mollison can sack me if he wants. No point saving up for a ticket to Hackney anymore."

"He won't sack you," said Andrew, helping himself to some of the vodka. "You're his favorite."

"Yeah," said Gaia. "Creepy old bastard."

And the three of them laughed again.

Through the glass doors, amplified by the microphone, came Maureen's croaky voice.

"Come on, then, Howard! Come on - a duet for your birthday! Go on - ladies and gentlemen - Howard's favorite song!"

The teenagers gazed at each other in tantalized horror. Gaia tripped forward, giggling, and pushed the door open.

The first few bars of "The Green, Green Grass of Home" blared out, and then, in Howard's bass and Maureen's gravelly alto: The old home town looks the same, As I step down from the train...

Gavin was the only one who heard the giggles and snorts, but when he turned around all he saw were the double doors to the kitchen, swinging a little on their hinges.

Miles had left to chat with Aubrey and Julia Fawley, who had arrived late, wreathed in polite smiles. Gavin was in the grip of a familiar mixture of dread and anxiety. His brief sunlit haze of freedom and happiness had been overcast by the twin threats of Gaia blabbing what he had said to her mother, and of Mary leaving Pagford forever. What was he going to do?

Down the lane I walk, with my sweet Mary, Hair of gold and lips like cherries...

"Kay not here?"

Samantha had arrived, leaning against the table beside him, smirking.

"You already asked me that," said Gavin. "No."

"Everything OK with you two?"

"Is that really any of your business?"

It slipped out of him before he could stop it; he was sick of her constant probing and jeering. For once, it was just the two of them; Miles was still busy with the Fawleys.

She overacted being taken aback. Her eyes were bloodshot and her speech was deliberate; for the first time, Gavin felt more dislike than intimidation.

"I'm sorry. I was only -"

"Asking. Yeah," he said, as Howard and Maureen swayed, arm in arm.

"I'd like to see you settled down. You and Kay seemed good together."

"Yeah, well, I like my freedom," said Gavin. "I don't know many happily married couples."

Samantha had drunk too much to feel the full force of the dig, but she had the impression that one had been made.

"Marriages are always a mystery to outsiders," she said carefully. "Nobody can ever really know except the two people involved. So you shouldn't judge, Gavin."

"Thanks for the insight," he said, and irritated past endurance he set down his empty beer can and headed toward the cloakroom.

Samantha watched him leave, sure that she had had the best of the encounter, and turned her attention to her mother-in-law, whom she could see through a gap in the crowd, watching Howard and Maureen sing. Samantha relished Shirley's anger, which was expressed in the tightest, coldest smile she had worn all evening. Howard and Maureen had performed together many a time over the years; Howard loved to sing, and Maureen had once performed backing vocals for a local skiffle band. When the song finished, Shirley clapped her hands together once; she might have been summoning a flunky, and Samantha laughed out loud and moved along to the bar end of the table, which she was disappointed to find unmanned by the boy in the bow tie.

Andrew, Gaia and Sukhvinder were still convulsed in the kitchen. They laughed because of Howard and Maureen's duet, and because they had finished two-thirds of the vodka, but mostly they laughed because they laughed, feeding off each other until they could barely stand.

The little window over the sink, propped ajar so that the kitchen did not become too steamy, rattled and clattered, and Fats' head appeared through it.

"Evening," he said. Evidently he had climbed onto something outside, because, with a noise of scraping and a heavy object falling over, more and more of him emerged through the window until he landed heavily on the draining board, knocking several glasses to the ground, where they shattered.

Sukhvinder walked straight out of the kitchen. Andrew knew immediately that he did not want Fats there. Only Gaia seemed unperturbed. Still giggling, she said, "There's a door, you know."

"No shit?" said Fats. "Where's the drink?"

"This is ours," said Gaia, cradling the vodka in her arms. "Andy nicked it. You'll have to get your own."

"Not a problem," said Fats coolly, and he walked through the doors into the hall.

"Need the loo..." mumbled Gaia, and she stowed the vodka bottle back under the sink, and left the kitchen too.

Andrew followed. Sukhvinder had returned to the bar area, Gaia was disappearing into the bathroom, and Fats was leaning against the trestle table with a beer in one hand and a sandwich in the other.

"Didn't think you'd want to come to this," said Andrew.

"I was invited, mate," said Fats. "It was on the invitation. Whole Wall family."

"Does Cubby know you're here?"

"Dunno," said Fats. "He's in hiding. Didn't get ol' Barry's seat after all. The whole social fabric'll collapse now Cubby's not holding it together. Fucking hell, that's horrible," he added, spitting out a mouthful of sandwich. "Wanna fag?"

The hall was so noisy, and the guests so raucously drunk, that nobody seemed to care where Andrew went anymore. When they got outside, they found Patricia Mollison, alone beside her sports car, looking up at the clear starry sky, smoking.

"You can have one of these," she said, offering her packet, "if you want."

After she had lit their cigarettes, she stood at her ease with one hand balled deep in her pocket. There was something about her that Andrew found intimidating; he could not even bring himself to glance at Fats, to gauge his reaction.

"I'm Pat," she told them, after a little while. "Howard and Shirley's daughter."

"Hi," said Andrew. "'M Andrew."

"Stuart," said Fats.

She did not seem to need to prolong conversation. Andrew felt it as a kind of compliment and tried to emulate her indifference. The silence was broken by footsteps and the sound of muffled girls' voices.

Gaia was dragging Sukhvinder outside by the hand. She was laughing, and Andrew could tell that the full effect of the vodka was still intensifying inside her.

"You," said Gaia, to Fats, "are really horrible to Sukhvinder."

"Stop it," said Sukhvinder, tugging against Gaia's hand. "I'm serious - let me -"

"He is!" said Gaia breathlessly. "You are! Do you put stuff on her Facebook?"

"Stop it!" shouted Sukhvinder. She wrenched herself free and plunged back inside the party.

"You are horrible to her," said Gaia, grabbing on to the railings for support. "Calling her a lesbian and stuff..."

"Nothing wrong with being a lesbian," said Patricia, her eyes narrowed through the smoke she was inhaling. "But then, I would say that."

Andrew saw Fats look at Pat sideways.

"I never said there was anything wrong with it. It's only jokes," he said.

Gaia slid down the rails to sit on the chilly pavement, her head in her arms.

"You all right?" Andrew asked. If Fats had not been there, he would have sat down too.

"Pissed," she muttered.

"Might do better to stick your fingers down your throat," suggested Patricia, looking down at her dispassionately.

"Nice car," Fats said, eyeing the BMW.

"Yeah," said Patricia. "New. I make double what my brother makes," she said, "but Miles is the Christ Child. Miles the Messiah...Parish Councillor Mollison the Second...of Pagford. Do you like Pagford?" she asked Fats, while Andrew watched Gaia breathing deeply, her head between her knees.

"No," said Fats. "It's a shithole."

"Yeah, well...I couldn't wait to leave, personally. Did you know Barry Fairbrother?"

"A bit," said Fats.

Something in his voice made Andrew worried.

"He was my reading mentor at St. Thomas's," said Patricia, with her eyes still on the end of the street. "Lovely bloke. I would have come back for the funeral, but Melly and I were in Zermatt. What's all this stuff my mother's been gloating about...this Barry's Ghost stuff?"

"Someone putting stuff on the Parish Council website," said Andrew hastily, afraid of what Fats might say, if he let him. "Rumors and stuff."

"Yeah, my mother would love that," said Patricia.

"Wonder what the Ghost'll say next?" Fats asked, with a sidelong glance at Andrew.

"Probably stop now the election's over," muttered Andrew.

"Oh, I dunno," said Fats. "If there's stuff old Barry's Ghost is still pissed off about..."

He knew that he was making Andrew anxious and he was glad of it. Andrew was spending all his time at his poxy job these days, and he would soon be moving. Fats did not owe Andrew anything. True authenticity could not exist alongside guilt and obligation.

"You all right down there?" Patricia asked Gaia, who nodded, with her face still hidden. "What was it, the drink or the duet that made you feel sick?"

Andrew laughed a little bit, out of politeness and because he wanted to keep the subject away from the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother.

"Turned my stomach too," said Patricia. "Old Maureen and my father singing along together. Arm in arm." Patricia took a final fierce drag on her cigarette and threw the end down, grinding it beneath her heel. "I walked in on her blowing him when I was twelve," she said. "And he gave me a fiver not to tell my mother."

Andrew and Fats stood transfixed, scared even to look at each other. Patricia wiped her face on the back of her hand: she was crying.

"Shouldn't have bloody come," she said. "Knew I shouldn't."

She got into the BMW, and the two boys watched, stunned, as she turned on the engine, reversed out of her parking space and drove away into the night.

"Fuck me," said Fats.

"I think I might be sick," whispered Gaia.

"Mr. Mollison wants you back inside - for the drinks."

Her message delivered, Sukhvinder darted away again.

"I can't," whispered Gaia.

Andrew left her there. The din in the hall hit him as he opened the inner doors. The disco was in full swing. He had to move aside to allow Aubrey and Julia Fawley room to leave. Both, with their backs to the party, looked grimly pleased to be going.

Samantha Mollison was not dancing, but was leaning up against the trestle table where, so recently, there had been rows and rows of drinks. While Sukhvinder rushed around collecting glasses, Andrew unpacked the last box of clean ones, set them out and filled them.

"Your bow tie's crooked," Samantha told him, and she leaned across the table and straightened it for him. Embarrassed, he ducked into the kitchen as soon as she let go. Between each load of glasses he put in the dishwasher, Andrew took another swig of the vodka he had stolen. He wanted to be drunk like Gaia; he wanted to return to that moment when they had been laughing uncontrollably together, before Fats had appeared.

After ten minutes, he checked the drinks table again; Samantha was still propped up against it, glassy-eyed, and there were plenty of fresh-poured drinks left for her to enjoy. Howard was bobbing in the middle of the dance floor, sweat pouring down his face, roaring with laughter at something Maureen had said to him. Andrew wound his way through the crowd and back outside.

He could not see where she was at first: then he spotted them. Gaia and Fats were locked together ten yards away from the door, leaning up against the railings, bodies pressed tight against each other, tongues working in each other's mouths.

"Look, I'm sorry, but I can't do it all," said Sukhvinder desperately from behind him. Then she spotted Fats and Gaia and let out something between a yelp and a sob. Andrew walked back into the hall with her, completely numb. In the kitchen, he poured the remainder of the vodka into a glass and downed it in one. Mechanically he filled the sink and set to washing out the glasses that could not fit in the dishwasher.

The alcohol was not like dope. It made him feel empty, but also keen to hit someone: Fats, for instance.