One Plus One: A Novel (11 page)

He raised an eyebrow at her. He was laying a plastic bin bag over the seat so that the kids wouldn’t get damp when they sat down again.

“Well, okay, I’ll do it. It will smell better, whatever.”

Sometime later they climbed back into the car. Nobody remarked on the smell. He ensured his window was as low as it could go, and began reprogramming the GPS.

“So,” he said. “Scotland it is. Via B roads.” He pressed the “destination” button. “Glasgow or Edinburgh?”

“Aberdeen.”

He looked at Jess.

“Aberdeen. Of course.” He looked behind him, trying not to let the despair seep into his voice. “Everyone happy? Water? Plastic bag on seat? Sick bags in place? Good. Let’s go.”

Ed heard his sister’s voice as he pulled back onto the road.
Ha ha ha, Ed. Served.

—

It began to rain shortly after Portsmouth. Ed drove along the back roads, keeping at a steady thirty-eight all the way, feeling the fine spit of raindrops from the half inch of window he had not felt able to close. He found he had to focus on not putting his foot too far down on the accelerator the whole time. It was a constant frustration, going at this sedate speed, like having an itch you couldn’t quite scratch. In the end he switched on cruise control.

Given their pace, he had time to study Jess surreptitiously. She remained silent, her head mostly turned away from him, as if he had done something to annoy her. He remembered her in his hallway now, demanding money, her chin tilted up—she was quite short.
She still seemed to think he was an arsehole. Come on, he told himself. Two, three days maximum. And then you never have to see them again. Let’s play nice.

“So . . . do you clean many houses?”

She frowned a little. “Yes.”

“You have a lot of regulars?”

“It’s a holiday park.”

“Did you . . . Was it something you wanted to do?”

“Did I grow up wanting to clean houses?” She raised an eyebrow, as if checking that he had seriously asked that question. “Um, no. I wanted to be a professional scuba diver. But I had Tanze and I couldn’t work out how to get the pram to float.”

“Okay, it was a dumb question.”

She rubbed her nose. “It’s not my dream job, no. But it’s fine. I can work around the kids and I like most of the people I clean for.”

Most of.

“Can you make a living out of it?”

Her head shot round. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Can you make a living? Is it lucrative?”

She looked away from him. “We get by.”

“No, we don’t,” said Tanzie, from the back.

“Tanze.”

“You’re always saying we haven’t got enough money.”

“It’s just a figure of speech.” Jess blushed.

“So what do you do, Mr. Nicholls?” said Tanzie.

“I work for a company that creates software. Do you know what that is?”

“Of course.”

Nicky looked up. In the rearview mirror Ed watched him remove his earbuds. When the boy saw him looking, he glanced away.

“Do you design games?”

“Not games, no.”

“What, then?”

“Well, for the last few years we’ve been working on a piece of software that we hope will move us closer to a cashless society.”

“How would that work?”

“Well, when you buy something or pay a bill, you wave your phone, which has a thing a bit like a bar code, and for every transaction you pay a tiny, tiny amount, like nought point nought one of a pound.”

“We would pay to pay?” said Jess. “No one will want that.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. The banks love it. Retailers like it because it gives them one uniform system instead of cards, cash, checks . . . and you’ll pay less per transaction than you do on a credit card. So it works for both sides.”

“Some of us don’t use credit cards unless we’re desperate.”

“Then it would just be linked to your bank account. You wouldn’t, like, have to do anything.”

“So if every bank and retailer picks this up, we won’t get a choice.”

“That’s a long way off.”

There was a brief silence. Jess pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them. “So basically the rich get richer—the banks and the retailers—and the poor get poorer.”

“Well, in theory, perhaps. But that’s the joy of it. It’s such a tiny amount you won’t notice it. And it will be very convenient.”

Jess muttered something he didn’t catch.

“How much is it again?” said Tanzie.

“Point nought one per transaction. So it works out as a little less than a penny.”

“How many transactions a day?”

“Twenty? Fifty? Depends how much you do.”

“So that’s fifty pence a day.”

“Exactly. Nothing.”

“Three pounds fifty a week,” said Jess.

“One hundred and eighty-two pounds a year,” said Tanzie. “Depending on how close the fee actually is to a penny. And whether it’s a leap year.”

Ed lifted one hand from the wheel. “At the outside. Even you can’t say that’s very much.”

Jess turned in her seat. “What does one hundred and eighty-two pounds buy us, Tanze?”

“Two supermarket pairs of school trousers, four school blouses, a pair of shoes. A gym kit and a five-pack of white socks. If you buy them from the supermarket. That comes to eighty-five pounds ninety-seven. The one hundred is exactly nine point two days of groceries, depending on whether anyone comes round and whether Mum buys a bottle of wine. That would be the supermarket’s brand.” Tanzie paused. “Or one month’s council tax for a Band D property. We’re Band D, right, Mum?”

“Yes, we are. Unless we get rebanded.”

“Or an out-of-season three-day holiday at the holiday village in Kent. One hundred and seventy-five pounds, inclusive of VAT.” She leaned forward. “That’s where we went last year. We got an extra night free because Mum mended the man’s curtains. And they had a waterslide.”

There was another brief silence.

Ed was about to speak when Tanzie’s head appeared between the two front seats. “Or a whole month’s cleaning of a four-bedroom house from Mum, laundering of sheets and towels included, at her current rates. That would be three hours’ cleaning, one point three hours laundering.” She leaned back in her seat, apparently satisfied.

They drove three miles, turned right at a T-junction, left onto a narrow lane. Ed wanted to say something but his voice had temporarily disappeared. Behind him, Nicky put his earbuds back in and turned away. The sun hid briefly behind a cloud.

“Still,” said Jess, putting her bare feet up on the dashboard, and leaning forward to turn up the music, “let’s hope you do really well with it, eh?”

J
ess’s grandmother had often said 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 her features like reflections on a still pond. She would blurt out a confession within hours. 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 wildflowers, 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 traveled from home she found her shoulders starting to inch downward 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, 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 ever since.

“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. She 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 as the breeze from the open window rippled over her face and the music filled her ears, 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 because it made her nauseated, 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 toward 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-flavored 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.”

“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, a palm pressed to the back of his neck, already talking as he went.

“Shall I see if he wants one of our sandwiches?” Tanzie said.

Jess watched him, 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 figure 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.

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, of his watchfulness, the way he 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 it.”

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 the glasses on Tanzie’s 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 took two calls during the journey, one from the woman called Gemma, which he cut off (his ex-wife?) and one that had obviously to do with his business. 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 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 odor. 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. Huge, shining office blocks punctuated each half mile, their frontages bearing management- or technology-based names she’d never heard of: Accsys, Technologica, and Avanta. 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: as a single parent, there were certain things she could not do. Which were basically the things that everyone expected a single parent to do: claim benefits, smoke, live in council housing, 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 one somewhere, even if we have to drive a bit farther.”

Jess could feel the color 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 as if she were mad.

“I’m not stopping you from 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.

—

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. And if Tanzie did as well as everyone seemed to think she would at the Olympiad, 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 a hospital sleeping in the backseat 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 backseat.

“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.”