The One Plus One

12. Jess

Jess’s grandmother had often stated that the key to a happy life was a short memory. Admittedly that was before she got dementia and used to forget where she lived, but Jess took her point. She had to forget about that money. She was never going to survive being stuck in a car with Mr Nicholls if she let herself think too hard about what she had done. Marty used to tell her she had the world’s worst poker face: her feelings floated across them like reflections on a still pond. She would give herself away within hours and blurt out a confession like one of those North Koreans. Or she would go crazy with the tension and start plucking at bits of the upholstery with her fingernails.

She sat in the car and listened to Tanzie chatting, and she told herself she would find a way to pay it all back before he discovered what she had done. She would take it out of Tanzie’s winnings. She would work it out somehow. She told herself he was just a man who had offered them a lift and with whom she had to make polite conversation for a few hours a day.

And periodically she glanced behind her at the two kids and thought, What else could I have done?

It shouldn’t have been hard to sit back and enjoy the ride. The country lanes were banked with wild flowers, and when the rain cleared the clouds revealed skies the azure blue of 1950s postcards. Tanzie wasn’t sick again, and with every mile they travelled from home she found her shoulders starting to inch downwards from her ears. She saw now that it had been months since she had felt even remotely at ease. Her life these days held a constant underlying drumbeat of worry: what were the Fishers going to do next? What was going on in Nicky’s head? What was she to do about Tanzie? And the grim bass percussion underneath it all: Money. Money. Money.

‘You okay?’ said Mr Nicholls.

Hauled from her thoughts, Jess muttered, ‘Fine. Thanks.’ They nodded awkwardly at each other. He hadn’t relaxed. It was obvious in his intermittently tightened jaw, in the way he was deep in thought behind his sunglasses, at the way his knuckles showed white on the steering-wheel. Jess wasn’t sure what on earth had been behind his decision to offer to drive, but she was pretty sure he had regretted it from the moment Tanzie had first wailed that she needed a sick bag.

‘Um, is there any chance you could stop with the tapping?’

‘Tapping?’

‘Your feet. On the dashboard.’

She looked at her feet.

‘It’s really distracting.’

‘You want me to stop tapping my feet.’

He looked straight ahead through the windscreen. ‘Yes. Please.’

She let her feet slide down, but she was uncomfortable, so after a moment she lifted them and tucked them under her on the seat. She rested her head on the window.

‘Your hand.’

‘What?’

‘Your hand. You’re hitting your knee now.’

She had been tapping it absentmindedly. ‘You want me to stay completely still while you drive.’

‘I’m not saying that. But the tapping thing is making it hard for me to focus.’

‘You can’t drive if I’m moving any part of my body?’

‘That’s not it.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘It’s tapping. I just find … tapping … irritating.’

Jess took a deep breath. ‘Kids, nobody is to move. Okay? We don’t want to irritate Mr Nicholls.’

‘The kids aren’t doing it,’ he said mildly. ‘It’s just you.’

‘You do fidget a lot, Mum.’

‘Thanks, Tanze.’ Jess clasped her hands in front of her. She sat and clenched her teeth and concentrated on staying still, trying to focus on the good, which was that Mr Nicholls hadn’t changed his mind. It had been almost sixty miles now and he hadn’t changed his mind. And when you were basically responsible for an entire household, it was kind of nice not to be in charge for a while.

She let her head fall back against the headrest, closed her eyes and cleared her mind of money, of Marty’s stupid car, of her worries for the children, letting them float away with the miles, and she tried to let the quiet hum of an expensive engine pass through her; she let the breeze from the open window ripple over her face and the music fill her ears and just briefly she felt like a woman in a different sort of life altogether.

They stopped for lunch at a pub somewhere outside Oxford, unfurling themselves and letting out little sighs of relief as they cracked joints and stretched cramped limbs. Mr Nicholls disappeared into the pub and she sat on a picnic table and unpacked the sandwiches she had made hastily that morning when it turned out they were going to get a lift after all.

‘Marmite,’ said Nicky, arriving back and peeling apart two slices of bread.

‘I was in a rush.’

‘Have we got anything else?’

‘Jam.’

He sighed, and reached into the bag. Tanzie sat on the end of the bench, already lost in maths papers. She couldn’t read them in the car, as it made her nauseous, so she wanted to take every opportunity to work. Jess watched her scribbling algebraic equations on her exercise book, lost in concentration, and wondered for the hundredth time where she had come from.

‘Here,’ said Mr Nicholls, arriving with a tray. ‘I thought we could all do with some drinks.’ He pushed two bottles of cola towards the kids. ‘I didn’t know what you wanted so I got a selection.’ He had bought a bottle of Italian beer, what looked like a half of cider, a glass of white wine, another cola, a lemonade and a bottle of orange juice. He had a mineral water. A small mountain of different-flavoured crisps sat in the middle.

‘You bought all that?’

‘There was a queue. I couldn’t be bothered to come back out to ask.’

‘I – I haven’t got that much cash.’

He looked at her as if she was the weird one. ‘It’s a drink. I’m not buying you a house.’

And then his phone rang. He grabbed it and strode off across the car park, already talking as he went.

‘Shall I see if he wants one of our sandwiches?’ Tanzie said.

Jess watched him stride along the lane, one hand thrust deep in a pocket, until he was out of sight. ‘Not just now,’ she said.

Nicky said nothing. When she asked him which bit hurt the most, he just muttered that he was fine.

‘It’ll get easier,’ Jess said, reaching out a hand. ‘Really. We’ll have this break, get Tanze sorted and work out what to do. Sometimes you need time away to sort things out in your head. It makes everything clearer.’

‘I don’t think what’s in my head is the problem.’

She gave him his painkillers, and watched him wash them down with cola, then stretch out his gangly limbs tentatively. In the car, she had tried to move the dog so that Nicky wasn’t pressed up against the door, but it was tough. Norman was too wide to fit in the footwell. He could sit up in the middle of the back seat – they actually put a belt round him for a while – but then he would gradually slump until he was horizontal; a canine landslip, his head on Tanzie’s lap, his great backside shoving Nicky along the leather seat.

Nicky took the dog off for a walk, his shoulders hunched, and his feet dragging. She wondered if he had cigarettes. He was out of sorts because his Nintendo had run out of charge some twenty miles back. Jess wasn’t sure he knew what to do with himself when he wasn’t surgically attached to a gaming device.

They watched him go in silence.

Jess thought of the way his few smiles had steadily grown fewer, his watchfulness, the way he now seemed like a fish out of water, pale and vulnerable, in the rare hours he was out of his bedroom. She thought of his face, resigned, expressionless, in that hospital. Who was it who had said you were only as happy as your unhappiest child?

Tanzie bent over her papers. ‘I’m going to live somewhere else when I’m a teenager, I think.’

Jess looked at her. ‘What?’

‘I think I might live in a university. I don’t really want to grow up near the Fishers.’ She scribbled a figure in her workbook, then rubbed out one digit, replacing it with a four. ‘They scare me a bit,’ she said quietly.

‘The Fishers?’

‘I had a nightmare about them.’

Jess swallowed. ‘You don’t need to be scared of them,’ she said. ‘They’re just stupid boys. What they did is what cowards do. They’re nothing.’

‘They don’t feel like nothing.’

‘Tanze, I’m going to work out what to do about them, and we’re going to fix it. Okay? You don’t need to have nightmares. I’m going to fix this.’

They sat in silence. The lane was silent, apart from the sound of a distant tractor. Birds wheeled overhead in the infinite blue. Mr Nicholls was walking back slowly. He had straightened up, as if he had resolved something, and his phone was loose in his hand. Jess rubbed at her eyes.

‘I think I’ve finished the complex equations. Do you want to see?’

Tanzie held up a page of numbers. Jess looked at her daughter’s lovely open face. She reached forward and straightened her glasses on her nose. ‘Yes,’ she said, her smile bright. ‘I would totally love to look at some complex equations.’

It took two and a half hours to do the next leg of the journey. Mr Nicholls tapped the steering-wheel as if they were stuck in a jam (they weren’t), took two calls during the journey, one from the woman called Gemma, which he cut off (his ex-wife?) and one that was obviously to do with his business. He said he would ring them later. He was silent for a whole forty minutes after he’d taken the second. A woman with an Italian accent called just after they pulled into a petrol station, and at the words ‘Eduardo, baby’ Mr Nicholls ripped his phone from the hands-free holder and went and stood outside by the pump. ‘No, Lara,’ he said, turning away from them. ‘We’ve discussed this … Well, your solicitor is wrong … No, calling me a lobster really isn’t going to make any difference.’

Nicky slept for an hour, his blue-black hair flopping over his swollen cheekbone, his face briefly untroubled in sleep. Tanzie sang under her breath and stroked the dog. Norman slept, farted audibly several times, and slowly infused the car with his odour. Nobody complained. It actually masked the lingering smell of vomit.

‘Do the kids need to grab some food?’ Mr Nicholls said, as they finally drove into the suburbs of some large town. Jess had already stopped noting which. Huge, shining office blocks punctuated each half-mile, their frontages bearing management- or technology-based names she’d never heard of: ACCSYS, TECHNOLOGICA and MEDIAPLUS. The roads were lined with endless stretches of car parks. Nobody walked.

‘We could find a McDonald’s. There’s bound to be loads of them around here.’

‘We don’t eat McDonald’s,’ she said.

‘You don’t eat McDonald’s.’

‘No. I can say it again, if you like. We don’t eat McDonald’s.’

‘Vegetarian?’

‘No. Actually, could we just find a supermarket? I’ll make sandwiches.’

‘McDonald’s would probably be cheaper, if it’s about money.’

‘It’s not about the money.’

Jess couldn’t tell him: if you were a single parent, there were certain things you could not do. Which were basically the things that everyone expected you to do: claim benefits, smoke, live on an estate, feed your kids McDonald’s. Some things she couldn’t help, but others she could.

He let out a little sigh, his gaze fixed ahead. ‘Okay, well, we could find somewhere to stay and then see whether they have a restaurant attached.’

‘I had kind of planned we’d just sleep in the car.’

Mr Nicholls pulled over to the side of the road and turned to face her. ‘Sleep in the car?’

Embarrassment made her spiky. ‘We have Norman. No hotel’s going to take him. We’ll be fine in here.’

He pulled out his phone and began tapping into a screen. ‘I’ll find a dog-friendly place. There’s bound to be somewhere, even if we have to drive a bit further.’

Jess could feel the colour bleeding into her cheeks. ‘Actually, I’d rather you didn’t.’

He kept tapping on the screen.

‘Really. We – we don’t have the money for hotel rooms.’

Mr Nicholls’s finger stilled on the phone. ‘That’s crazy. You can’t sleep in my car.’

‘It’s only a couple of nights. We’ll be fine. We would have slept in the Rolls. It’s why I brought the duvets.’

Tanzie watched from the rear seat.

‘I have a daily budget. And I’d like to stick to it. If you don’t mind.’ Twelve pounds a day for food. Maximum.

He looked at her like she was mad.

‘I’m not stopping you getting a hotel,’ she added. She didn’t want to tell him she’d actually prefer it if he did.

‘This is nuts,’ he said finally.

It was only when he turned back to the wheel that it occurred to her he might not want to leave them alone in his car.

They drove the next few miles in silence. Mr Nicholls had the air of a man who was quietly pissed off. In a weird way, Jess preferred it. Two, three days max, she told herself. In fact, she’d just let him drop them at the maths competition and tell him they would make their own way back. She wasn’t sure she could take more than another forty-eight hours of being stuck in a car with him. And if Tanzie did as well as everyone seemed to think she would, they could blow a little of her winnings on train tickets.

The thought of ditching Mr Nicholls made her feel so much better that she didn’t say anything when he pulled into the Travel Inn.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, and walked off across the car park. He took the keys with him, jangling them impatiently in his hand.

‘Are we staying here?’ Tanzie said, rubbing at her eyes and looking around.

‘Mr Nicholls is. We’re going to stay in the car. It will be an adventure!’ Jess said.

There was a brief silence.

‘Yay,’ said Nicky.

Jess knew he was uncomfortable. But what else could she do? ‘You can stretch out in the back. Tanze and I will sleep in the front. It will be fine.’

Mr Nicholls walked back out, shielding his eyes against the early-evening sun. She realized he was wearing the exact same outfit she had seen him wear in the pub that night.

‘They had one room left. A twin. You guys can take it. I’ll see if there’s somewhere else nearby.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I told you. I can’t accept any more from you.’

‘I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for your kids.’

‘No,’ she said, trying to sound a little more diplomatic. ‘It’s very kind of you, but we’ll be fine out here.’

He ran a hand through his hair. ‘You know what? I can’t sleep in a hotel room knowing that there’s a boy who just got out of hospital sleeping in the back seat of a car twenty feet away. Nicky can have the other bed.’

‘No,’ she said, reflexively.

‘Why?’

She couldn’t say.

His expression darkened. ‘I’m not a pervert.’

‘I didn’t say you were.’

‘So why won’t you let your son share a room with me? He’s as tall as I am, for Christ’s sake.’

Jess flushed. ‘He’s had a tough time lately. I just need to keep an eye on him.’

‘What’s a pervert?’ said Tanzie.

‘I could charge up my Nintendo,’ said Nicky, from the back seat.

‘You know what? This is a ridiculous discussion. I’m hungry. I need to get something to eat.’ Mr Nicholls poked his head in through the door. ‘Nicky. Do you want to sleep in the car or in the hotel room?’

Nicky looked sideways at Jess. ‘Hotel room. And I’m not a pervert either.’

‘Am I a pervert?’ said Tanzie.

‘Okay,’ said Mr Nicholls. ‘Here’s the deal. Nicky and Tanzie sleep in the hotel room. You can sleep on the floor with them.’

‘But I can’t let you pay for a hotel room for us, then make you sleep in the car. Besides, the dog will howl all night. He doesn’t know you.’

Mr Nicholls rolled his eyes. He was clearly losing patience. ‘Okay, then. The kids sleep in the hotel room. You and I sleep in the car with the dog. Everyone’s happy.’ He didn’t look happy.

‘I’ve never stayed in a hotel. Have I stayed in a hotel, Mum?’

There was a brief silence. Jess could feel the situation sliding away from her.

‘I’ll mind Tanze,’ said Nicky. He looked hopeful. His face, where it wasn’t bruised, was the colour of putty. ‘A bath would be good.’

‘Would you read me a story?’

‘Only if it has zombies in it.’ Jess watched as he half smiled at her. And that smile was what broke her.

‘Okay,’ she said. And tried to fight the wave of nausea at what she had just agreed to.

The mini-mart squatted, illuminated, in the shadow of a logistics company across the road, its windows bright with exclamation marks and offers on crispy fish bites and fizzy drinks. She bought rolls and cheese, crisps and overpriced apples, and made the kids a picnic supper, which they ate on the grassy slope around the car park. On the other side the traffic thundered past in a purple haze towards the south. She offered Mr Nicholls some, but he peered at the contents of her bag and said thanks but he’d eat in the restaurant. She suspected he wanted a break from them.

Once he was out of sight, Jess relaxed too. She set the kids up in their room, feeling faintly wistful that she wasn’t in with them. It was on the ground floor, facing the car park. She had asked Mr Nicholls to park as close to their window as possible, and Tanzie made her go outside three times, just so she could wave at her through the curtains and squash her nose sideways against the glass.

Nicky disappeared into the bathroom for an hour, the taps running. He came out, switched on the television and lay on the bed, looking simultaneously exhausted and relieved.

Jess laid out his pills, got Tanzie bathed and into her pyjamas, and warned them not to stay up too late. ‘And no smoking,’ she warned him. ‘Seriously.’

‘How can I?’ he said, grumpily. ‘You’ve got my stash.’

Tanzie lay on her side, working her way through her maths books, locked into a silent world of numbers. Jess fed and walked the dog, sat in the passenger seat with the door open, ate a cheese roll and waited for Mr Nicholls to finish his meal.

It was a quarter past nine, and she was struggling to read a newspaper in the fading light when he appeared. He was holding a phone in a way that suggested he had just come off another call, and he seemed about as pleased to see her as she was him. He opened the door, climbed in and shut it.

‘I’ve asked Reception to ring me if anyone cancels their booking.’ He stared ahead at the windscreen. ‘Obviously I didn’t tell them I’d be waiting in their car park.’

Norman was lying on the tarmac, looking like he’d been dropped from a great height. She wondered whether she should bring him in. Without the children in the back, and with the encroaching darkness, it felt even odder to be in the car beside Mr Nicholls.

‘Are the kids okay?’

‘They’re very happy. Thank you.’

‘Your boy looks pretty bashed up.’

‘He’ll be fine.’

There was a long silence. He looked at her. Then he put both hands on the wheel, and leant backwards in his seat. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and turned to face her. ‘Okay … so have I done something else to upset you?’

‘What?’

‘You’ve acted like I’m bugging you all day. I apologized for the thing in the pub the other night. I’ve done what I can to help you out here. And yet still I get the feeling I’ve done something wrong.’

‘You – you haven’t done anything wrong,’ she stammered.

He studied her for a minute. ‘Is this, like, a woman’s “There’s nothing wrong” when actually what you mean is that I’ve done something massive and I’m actually supposed to guess? And then you get really mad if I don’t?’

‘No.’

‘You see, now I don’t know. Because that “no” might be part of the woman’s “There’s nothing wrong.”’

‘I’m not speaking in code. There’s nothing wrong.’

‘Then can we just ease up around each other a bit? You’re making me really uncomfortable.’

‘I’m making you uncomfortable?’

His head swivelled slowly.

‘You’ve looked like you regretted offering us this lift since the moment we got into the car. In fact, since before we got in.’ Shut up, Jess, she warned herself. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. ‘I’m not even sure why you did it.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, turning away. ‘Forget it.’

He stared ahead of him out of the windscreen. He looked suddenly really, really tired.

‘In fact, you could just drop us at a station tomorrow morning. We won’t bother you any more.’

‘Is that what you want?’ he said.

She drew her knees up to her chest. ‘It might be the best thing.’

They sat there in the silence. The skies darkened to pitch around them. Twice Jess opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Mr Nicholls stared through the windscreen at the closed curtains of the hotel room, apparently deep in thought.

She thought of Nicky and Tanzie, sleeping peacefully on the other side, and wished she was with them. She felt sick. Why couldn’t she have just pretended? Why couldn’t she have been nicer? It would only have been for a couple of days. She was an idiot. She had blown it all again.

It had grown chill. Finally, she pulled Nicky’s duvet from the back seat and thrust it at him. ‘Here,’ she said.

‘Oh.’ He looked at the huge picture of Super Mario. ‘Thanks.’

She called the dog in, reclined her seat just far enough for it not to be touching him, and then she pulled Tanzie’s duvet over herself. ‘Goodnight.’ She stared at the plush interior a matter of inches from her nose, breathing in the new-car smell, her mind a jumble. How far away was the station? How much would the fare cost? They would have to pay for an extra day’s bed and breakfast somewhere, at least. And what was she going to do with the dog? She could hear Norman’s faint snore from behind her and thought grimly that she was damned if she would vacuum that rear seat now.

‘It’s half past nine.’ Mr Nicholls’s voice broke into the silence.

Jess lay very still.

‘Half. Past. Nine.’ He let out a deep sigh. ‘I never thought I’d say it, but this is actually worse than being married.’

‘What – am I breathing too loud?’

He opened his door abruptly. ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ he said, and set off across the car park.

Jess pushed herself upright and watched him jogging across the road to the mini-mart, disappearing into its fluorescent-lit interior. He reappeared a few minutes later with a bottle of wine and a packet of plastic cups.

‘It’s probably awful,’ he said, climbing back into the driver’s seat. ‘But right now I couldn’t give a toss.’

She gazed at the bottle.

‘Truce, Jessica Thomas? It’s been a long day. And a shitty week. And, spacious as it is, this car isn’t big enough for two people who aren’t talking to each other.’

He looked at her. His eyes were exhausted and stubble was starting to show through on his chin. It made him seem curiously vulnerable.

She took a cup from him. ‘Sorry. I’m not used to people helping us out. It makes me …’

‘Suspicious? Crabby?’

‘I was going to say, it makes me think I should get out more.’

He let out a breath. ‘Right.’ He glanced down at the bottle. ‘Then let’s … Oh, for crying out loud.’

‘What?’

‘I thought it was a screw top.’ He stared at it as if it was just one more thing designed to annoy him. ‘Great. I don’t suppose you have a bottle opener?’

‘No.’

‘You think they’ll exchange it?’

‘Did you take the receipt?’

He let out a deep sigh, which she interrupted. ‘No need,’ she said, taking it from him. She opened her door and climbed out. Norman’s head shot up.

‘You’re not going to smash it into my windscreen?’

‘Nope.’ She peeled off the foil. ‘Take off your shoe.’

‘What?’

‘Take off your shoe. It won’t work with flip-flops.’

‘Please don’t use it as a glass. My ex did that once with a stiletto and it was really, really hard pretending that champagne smelling of feet was an erotic experience.’

She held out her hand. He finally took his shoe off and handed it to her. As he looked on, Jess placed the base of the wine bottle inside it and, holding the two together carefully, she stood alongside the hotel and thumped them hard against the wall.

‘I suppose there’s no point me asking you what you’re doing.’

‘Just give me a minute,’ she said, through gritted teeth, and thumped again.

Mr Nicholls shook his head slowly.

She straightened up and glared at him. ‘You’re more than welcome to suck the cork out, if you’d rather.’

He held up his hand. ‘No, no. You go ahead. Broken glass in my socks is exactly how I hoped to end tonight.’

Jess checked the cork and thumped again. And there – a centimetre of it protruded from the neck of the bottle. Thump. Another centimetre. She held it carefully, gave it one more thump, and there it was: she pulled the rest of the cork gently from the neck and handed it to him.

He stared at it, and then at her. She handed him back his shoe.

‘Wow. You’re a useful woman to know.’

‘I can also put up shelves, replace rotting floorboards and make a fan belt out of a tied stocking.’

‘Really?’

‘Not the fan belt.’ She climbed into the car and accepted the plastic cup of wine. ‘I tried it once. It shredded before we’d got thirty yards down the road. Total waste of M&S opaques.’ She took a sip. ‘And the car stank of burnt tights for weeks.’

Behind them, Norman whimpered in his sleep.

‘Truce,’ Mr Nicholls said, and held up his cup.

‘Truce. You’re not going to drive afterwards, are you?’ she said, holding up her own.

‘I won’t if you won’t.’

‘Oh, very funny.’

And suddenly the evening became a little easier.