After a while, he realized that the plastic clock on the kitchen wall had leaped from midnight to one and that people were leaving.

He was supposed to find coats. He tried for a while, but then lurched off to the kitchen again, leaving Sukhvinder in charge.

Samantha was leaning up against the fridge, on her own, with a glass in her hand. Andrew's vision was strangely jerky, like a series of stills. Gaia had not come back. She was doubtless long gone with Fats. Samantha was talking to him. She was drunk too. He was not embarrassed by her anymore. He suspected that he might be sick quite soon.

"...hate bloody Pagford..." said Samantha, and, "but you're young enough to get out."

"Yeah," he said, unable to feel his lips. "An' I will. 'Nigh will."

She pushed his hair off his forehead and called him sweet. The image of Gaia with her tongue in Fats' mouth threatened to obliterate everything. He could smell Samantha's perfume, coming in waves from her hot skin.

"That band's shit," he said, pointing at her chest, but he did not think she heard him.

Her mouth was chapped and warm, and her breasts were huge, pressed against his chest; her back was as broad as his - "What the fuck?"

Andrew was slumped against the draining board and Samantha was being dragged out of the kitchen by a big man with short graying hair. Andrew had a dim idea that something bad had happened, but the strange flickering quality of reality was becoming more and more pronounced, until the only thing to do was to stagger across the room to the bin and throw up again and again and again...

"Sorry, you can't come in!" he heard Sukhvinder tell someone. "Stuff piled up against the door!"

He tied the bin bag tightly on his own vomit. Sukhvinder helped him clear the kitchen. He needed to throw up twice more, but both times managed to get to the bathroom.

It was nearly two o'clock by the time Howard, sweaty but smiling, thanked them and said good night.

"Very good work," he said. "See you tomorrow, then. Very good...where's Miss Bawden, by the way?"

Andrew left Sukhvinder to come up with a lie. Out in the street, he unchained Simon's bicycle and wheeled it away into the darkness.

The long cold walk back to Hilltop House cleared his head, but assuaged neither his bitterness nor his misery.

Had he ever told Fats that he fancied Gaia? Maybe not, but Fats knew. He knew that Fats knew...were they, perhaps, shagging right now?

I'm moving, anyway, Andrew thought, bent over and shivering as he pushed the bicycle up the hill. So fuck them...

Then he thought: I'd better be moving...Had he just snogged Lexie Mollison's mother? Had her husband walked in on them? Had that really happened?

He was scared of Miles, but he also wanted to tell Fats about it, to see his face...

When he let himself into the house, exhausted, Simon's voice came out of the darkness from the kitchen.

"Have you put my bike in the garage?"

He was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal. It was nearly half past two in the morning.

"Couldn't sleep," said Simon.

For once, he was not angry. Ruth was not there, so he did not have to prove himself bigger or smarter than his sons. He seemed weary and small.

"Think we're gonna have to move to Reading, Pizza Face," said Simon. It was almost a term of endearment.

Shivering slightly, feeling old and shell-shocked, and immensely guilty, Andrew wanted to give his father something to make up for what he had done. It was time to redress balances and claim Simon as an ally. They were a family. They had to move together. Perhaps it could be better, somewhere else.

"I've got something for you," he said. "Come through here. Found out how to do it at school..."

And he led the way to the computer.

IV.

A misty blue sky stretched like a dome over Pagford and the Fields. Dawn light shone upon the old stone war memorial in the Square, on the cracked concrete facades of Foley Road, and turned the white walls of Hilltop House pale gold. As Ruth Price climbed into her car ready for another long shift at the hospital, she looked down at the River Orr, shining like a silver ribbon in the distance, and felt how completely unjust it was that somebody else would soon have her house and her view.

A mile below, in Church Row, Samantha Mollison was still sound asleep in the spare bedroom. There was no lock on the door, but she had barricaded it with an armchair before collapsing, semidressed, onto the bed. The beginnings of a vicious headache disturbed her slumber, and the sliver of sunshine that had penetrated the gap in the curtains fell like a laser beam across the corner of one eye. She twitched a little, in the depths of her dry-mouthed, anxious half sleep, and her dreams were guilty and strange.

Downstairs, among the clean, bright surfaces of the kitchen, Miles sat bolt upright and alone with an untouched mug of tea in front of him, staring at the fridge, and stumbling again, in his mind's eye, upon his drunken wife locked in the embrace of a sixteen-year-old schoolboy.

Three houses away, Fats Wall lay smoking in his bedroom in the clothes he had worn to Howard Mollison's birthday party. He had wanted to stay awake all night, and he had done it. His mouth was slightly numb and tingly from all the cigarettes he had smoked, but his tiredness had had the reverse effect of the one he had hoped: he was unable to think very clearly, but his unhappiness and unease were as acute as ever.

Colin Wall woke, drenched in sweat, from another of the nightmares that had tormented him for years. He had always done terrible things in the dreams, the kinds of things that he spent his waking life dreading, and this time he had killed Barry Fairbrother, and the authorities had only just found out, and had come to tell him that they knew, that they had dug up Barry and found the poison that Colin had administered.

Staring up at the lampshade's familiar shadow on the ceiling, Colin wondered why he had never considered the possibility that he had killed Barry; and at once, the question presented itself to him: How do you know you didn't?

Downstairs, Tessa was injecting insulin into her stomach. She knew that Fats had come home the previous evening, because she could smell the cigarette smoke at the bottom of the stairs to his attic bedroom. Where he had been and what time he had come in, she did not know, and it frightened her. How had things come to this?

Howard Mollison was sleeping soundly and happily in his double bed. The patterned curtains dappled him with pink petals and protected him from a rude awakening, but his rattling wheezing snores had roused his wife. Shirley was eating toast and drinking coffee in the kitchen, wearing her glasses and her candlewick dressing gown. She visualized Maureen swaying arm in arm with her husband in the village hall and experienced a concentrated loathing that took the taste from every mouthful.

In the Smithy, a few miles outside Pagford, Gavin Hughes soaped himself under a hot shower and wondered why he had never had the courage of other men, and how they managed to make the right choices among almost infinite alternatives. There was a yearning inside him for a life he had glimpsed but never tasted, yet he was afraid. Choice was dangerous: you had to forgo all other possibilities when you chose.

Kay Bawden was lying awake and exhausted in bed in Hope Street, listening to the early morning quiet of Pagford and watching Gaia, who was asleep beside her in the double bed, pale and drained in the early daylight. There was a bucket next to Gaia on the floor, placed there by Kay, who had half carried her daughter from bathroom to bedroom in the early hours, after holding her hair out of the toilet for an hour.

"Why did you make us come here?" Gaia had wailed, as she choked and retched over the bowl. "Get off me. Get off. I fuck - I hate you."

Kay watched the sleeping face and recalled the beautiful little baby who had slept beside her, sixteen years ago. She remembered the tears that Gaia had shed when Kay had split up with Steve, her live-in partner of eight years. Steve had attended Gaia's parents' evenings and taught her to ride a bicycle. Kay remembered the fantasy she had nurtured (with hindsight, as silly as four-year-old Gaia's wish for a unicorn) that she would settle down with Gavin and give Gaia, at last, a permanent stepfather, and a beautiful house in the country. How desperate she had been for a storybook ending, and a life to which Gaia would always want to return; because her daughter's departure was hurtling toward Kay like a meteorite, and she foresaw the loss of Gaia as a calamity that would shatter her world.

Kay reached out a hand beneath the duvet and held Gaia's. The feel of the warm flesh that she had accidentally brought into the world made Kay start to weep, quietly, but so violently that the mattress shook.

And at the bottom of Church Row, Parminder Jawanda slipped a coat on over her nightdress and took her coffee into the back garden. Sitting in the chilly sunlight on a wooden bench, she saw that it was promising to be a beautiful day, but there seemed to be a blockage between her eyes and her heart. The heavy weight on her chest deadened everything.

The news that Miles Mollison had won Barry's seat on the Parish Council had not been a surprise, but on seeing Shirley's neat little announcement on the website, she had known another flicker of that madness that had overtaken her at the last meeting: a desire to attack, superseded almost at once by stifling hopelessness.

"I'm going to resign from the council," she told Vikram. "What's the point?"

"But you like it," he had said.

She had liked it when Barry had been there too. It was easy to conjure him up this morning, when everything was quiet and still. A little, ginger-bearded man; she had been taller than him by half a head. She had never felt the slightest physical attraction towards him. What was love, after all? thought Parminder, as a gentle breeze ruffled the tall hedge of Leyland cypresses that enclosed the Jawandas' big back lawn. Was it love when somebody filled a space in your life that yawned inside you, once they had gone?

I did love laughing, thought Parminder. I really miss laughing.

And it was the memory of laughter that, at last, made the tears flow from her eyes. They trickled down her nose and into her coffee, where they made little bullet holes, swiftly erased. She was crying because she never seemed to laugh anymore, and also because the previous evening, while they had been listening to the jubilant distant thump of the disco in the church hall, Vikram had said, "Why don't we visit Amritsar this summer?"

The Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the religion to which he was indifferent. She had known at once what Vikram was doing. Time lay slack and empty on her hands as never before in her life. Neither of them knew what the GMC would decide to do with her, once it had considered her ethical breach toward Howard Mollison.

"Mandeep says it's a big tourist trap," she had replied, dismissing Amritsar at a stroke.

Why did I say that? Parminder wondered, crying harder than ever in the garden, with her coffee cooling in her hand. It'd be good to show the children Amritsar. He was trying to be kind. Why didn't I say yes?

She felt dimly that she had betrayed something, in refusing the Golden Temple. A vision of it swam through her tears, its lotus-flower dome reflected in a sheet of water, honey-bright against a backdrop of white marble.

"Mum."

Sukhvinder had crossed the lawn without Parminder noticing. She was dressed in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. Parminder hastily wiped her face and squinted at Sukhvinder, who had her back to the sun.

"I don't want to go to work today."

Parminder responded at once, in the same spirit of automatic contradiction that had made her turn down Amritsar. "You've made a commitment, Sukhvinder."

"I don't feel well."

"You mean you're tired. You're the one who wanted this job. Now you fulfill your obligations."

"But -"

"You're going to work," snapped Parminder, and she might have been pronouncing sentence. "You're not giving the Mollisons another reason to complain."

After Sukhvinder walked back to the house Parminder felt guilty. She almost called her daughter back, but instead she made a mental note that she must try and find time to sit down with her and talk to her without arguing.

V.

Krystal was walking along Foley Road in the early morning sunlight, eating a banana. It was an unfamiliar taste and texture, and she could not make up her mind whether she liked it or not. Terri and Krystal never bought fruit.

Nikki's mother had just turfed her unceremoniously out of the house.

"We got things to do, Krystal," she had said. "We're going to Nikki's gran's for dinner."

As an afterthought, she had handed Krystal the banana to eat for breakfast. Krystal had left without protest. There was barely enough room for Nikki's family around the kitchen table.

The Fields were not improved by sunshine, which merely showed up the dirt and the damage, the cracks in the concrete walls, the boarded windows and the litter.

The Square in Pagford looked freshly painted whenever the sun shone. Twice a year, the primary school children had walked through the middle of town, crocodile fashion, on their way to church for Christmas and Easter services. (Nobody had ever wanted to hold Krystal's hand. Fats had told them all that she had fleas. She wondered whether he remembered.) There had been hanging baskets full of flowers; splashes of purple, pink and green, and every time Krystal had passed one of the planted troughs outside the Black Canon, she had pulled off a petal. Each one had been cool and slippery in her fingers, swiftly becoming slimy and brown as she clutched it, and she usually wiped it off on the underside of a warm wooden pew in St. Michael's.

She let herself into her house and saw at once, through the open door to her left, that Terri had not gone to bed. She was sitting in her armchair with her eyes closed and her mouth open. Krystal closed the door with a snap, but Terri did not stir.

Krystal was at Terri's side in four strides, shaking her thin arm. Terri's head fell forwards onto her shrunken chest. She snored.

Krystal let go of her. The vision of a dead man in the bathroom swam back into her subconscious.

"Silly bitch," she said.

Then it occurred to her that Robbie was not there. She pounded up the stairs, shouting for him.

"'M'ere," she heard him say, from behind her own closed bedroom door.

When she shouldered it open, she saw Robbie standing there, naked. Behind him, scratching his bare chest, lying on her own mattress, was Obbo.

"All righ', Krys?" he said, grinning.

She seized Robbie and pulled him into his own room. Her hands trembled so badly that it took her ages to dress him.

"Did 'e do somethin' to yer?" she whispered to Robbie.

"'M'ungry," said Robbie.

When he was dressed, she picked him up and ran downstairs. She could hear Obbo moving around in her bedroom.

"Why's 'e 'ere?" she shouted at Terri, who was drowsily awake in her chair. "Why's 'e with Robbie?"

Robbie fought to get out of her arms; he hated shouting.

"An' wha' the fuck's that?" screamed Krystal, spotting, for the first time, two black holdalls lying beside Terri's armchair.

"S'nuthin'," said Terri vaguely.

But Krystal had already forced one of the zips open.

"S'nuthin'!" shouted Terri.

Big, bricklike blocks of hashish wrapped neatly in sheets of polythene: Krystal, who could barely read, who could not have identified half the vegetables in a supermarket, who could not have named the Prime Minister, knew that the contents of the bag, if discovered on the premises, meant prison for her mother. Then she saw the tin, with the coachman and horses on the lid, half protruding from the chair on which Terri was sitting.

"Yeh've used," said Krystal breathlessly, as disaster rained invisibly around her and everything collapsed. "Yeh've fuckin' -"

She heard Obbo on the stairs and she snatched up Robbie again. He wailed and struggled in her arms, frightened by her anger, but Krystal's grip was unbreakable.

"Fuckin' lerrim go," called Terri fruitlessly. Krystal had opened the front door and was running as fast as she could, encumbered by Robbie who was resisting and moaning, back along the road.