One Plus One: A Novel (14 page)

Mum pulled one of the buffet apples from her bag and bit into it. She chewed for a minute before speaking. “Rich is paying every single bill on time without thinking about it. Rich is being able to have a holiday or get through Christmas without having to borrow against January and February. Actually, rich would be just not thinking about money all the bloody time.”

“Everyone thinks about money. Even rich people.”

“Yes, but you’re just thinking what to do with it to make more money. Whereas I’m thinking how the hell we can get enough of it to get through another week.”

Mr. Nicholls made a
harrumph
ing sound. “I can’t believe I’m driving you to Scotland and you’re giving me a hard time because you’ve misguidedly decided I’m some kind of Donald Trump.”

“I’m not giving you a hard time.”

“Noooo.”

“I’m just pointing out that there’s a difference between what you consider to be rich and what is actually rich.”

There was a sort of awkward silence. Mum blushed like she’d said too much and started eating her apple with big, noisy bites, even though she would have told Tanzie off if she had eaten like that. Tanzie was distracted from sock permutations. She didn’t want Mum and Mr. Nicholls to stop talking to each other because they were having quite a nice day, so she put her head through the front seats. “Actually, I read somewhere that to qualify for the top one percent in this country, you would need to earn more than a hundred and forty thousand pounds a year,” she said helpfully. “So if Mr. Nicholls doesn’t earn that much, then he probably
isn’t
rich.” She smiled and sat back in her seat.

Mum looked at Mr. Nicholls. She kept looking at him.

Mr. Nicholls rubbed his head. “I tell you what,” he said after a while, “shall we stop off and get some tea?”

—

Moreton Marston looked like it had been invented for tourists. Everything was made of the same gray stone and was really old, and everyone’s gardens were perfect, with tiny blue flowers creeping over the tops of walls, and immaculate little baskets of trailing leaves, like something out of a book. The shops were all the kind you get on Christmas cards. In the market square there was a woman dressed in Victorian clothing, selling buns from a tray, with groups of tourists wandering around taking pictures. Tanzie was so busy gazing out of the window that she didn’t notice Nicky at first. It was only when they pulled into the parking space that she saw he had gone really white. She asked him whether his ribs were hurting, and he said no, and when she asked if he had an apple down his trousers that he couldn’t get out, he said, “No, Tanze, just drop it,” but the way he said it, there was definitely something. Tanzie looked at Mum, but she was busy not looking at Mr. Nicholls and Mr. Nicholls was busy making this big to-do about finding the best parking space. Norman just looked up at Tanzie, like “Don’t even bother asking.”

Everyone got out and stretched and Mr. Nicholls said they were all having tea and cake and it was his treat and please could we not make a big financial deal out of it as it was just tea, okay? Mum raised her eyebrows like she was going to say something and then just muttered, “Thank you,” but not with good grace.

They sat down in a café whose name was Ye Spotted Sowe Tea Shoppe, even though Tanzie would bet there were no tea shops in medieval times. Nobody else seemed to mind. Nicky got up to go to the loo. And Mr. Nicholls and Mum were at the counter choosing what to eat, so she clicked on Mr. Nicholls’s phone and the first thing that came up was Nicky’s Facebook page. She waited for a minute because Nicky got really annoyed if people looked at his
stuff, and then when she was sure he really was in the loo, she made the screen go bigger so she could read it, and then she went cold. The Fishers had posted messages and pictures of men doing rude things to other men all over Nicky’s timeline. They had called him “gimp” and “fagboy,” and even though Tanzie didn’t know what the words meant, she knew they were bad and she suddenly felt sick. She looked up and Mum was coming back holding a tray.

“Tanzie! Be careful with Mr. Nicholls’s phone!”

The phone had clattered onto the edge of the table. She didn’t want to touch it. She wondered if Nicky was crying in the loo. She would be.

When she looked up, Mum was staring at her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

She sat down and pushed an orange cupcake on a plate across the table. Tanzie wasn’t hungry anymore, even though it was covered with sprinkles.

“Tanze. What’s wrong? Talk to me.”

She pushed the phone slowly across the wooden table with the tip of her finger, like it was going to burn her or something. Mum frowned, and then looked down at it. She clicked on it and stared. “Jesus Christ,” she said after a minute.

Mr. Nicholls sat down beside her. He had the biggest slice of chocolate cake Tanzie had ever seen. “Everyone happy?” he said. He looked happy.

“The little bastards,” Mum said. And her eyes filled with tears.

“What?” Mr. Nicholls had a mouthful of cake.

“Is that like a pervert?”

Mum didn’t seem to hear her. She pushed the chair back with a massive screech and began striding toward the toilets.

“That’s the Gents, madam,” a woman called, as Mum pushed the door open.

“I can read, thank you,” Mum said, and she disappeared inside.

“What? What’s going on now?” Mr. Nicholls struggled to swallow
his mouthful. He glanced over at where Mum had gone. Then, when Tanzie didn’t say anything, he looked down at his phone and tapped it twice. He just kept staring. Then he moved the screen around like he was reading everything. Tanzie felt a bit weird. She wasn’t sure he should be looking at that.

“Did . . . is this something to do with what happened to your brother?”

She wanted to cry. She felt like the Fishers had ruined the nice day. It was as if they had followed them here, like they would never get away from them. She couldn’t speak.

“Hey,” he said, as a great big tear plopped down on the table. “Hey.” He held out a paper napkin toward her and Tanzie wiped her eyes, and when she couldn’t hide the sob that burst upward, he moved around the table and put an arm around her and pulled her in for a hug. He felt big and solid and smelled of lemons and men. She hadn’t smelled that man smell since Dad left and that made her even sadder.

“Hey. Don’t cry.”

“Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for. I’d cry if someone did that to my sister. That’s—that’s . . .” He clicked the phone off. “Sheez.” He shook his head and blew out his cheeks. “Do they do that to him a lot?”

“I don’t know.” She sniffed. “He doesn’t say much anymore.”

Mr. Nicholls waited until she had stopped crying and then he moved back around the table and ordered a hot chocolate with marshmallows, chocolate shavings, and extra cream. “Cures all known ills,” he said, pushing it toward her. “Trust me. I know everything.”

And the weird thing was it was actually true.

—

Tanzie had finished her chocolate and cupcake by the time Mum and Nicky came out of the loo. Mum put on this bright smile, like nothing was wrong, and had her arm around Nicky’s shoulders, which actually looked a bit odd now that he was half a head taller
than her. He slid into the seat beside her at the table and stared at his cake. Tanzie watched Mr. Nicholls looking at Nicky and wondered if he was going to say anything about what was on his phone, but he didn’t. She thought maybe he didn’t want Nicky to get embarrassed. Either way, the happy day, she thought sadly, was over.

Mum got up to check on Norman, who was tied up outside, and Mr. Nicholls ordered a second cup of coffee and started stirring it slowly, like he was thinking about something. He looked up at Nicky from under his eyebrows and said quietly, “So. Nicky. You know anything about hacking?”

She got the feeling she wasn’t supposed to listen, so she just stared really hard at the quadratic equations.

“No,” said Nicky.

Mr. Nicholls leaned forward over the table and lowered his voice. “Well, I think now might be a good time to start.”

—

“Where are they?” Mum said when she came back, looking around the room.

“They’ve gone to Mr. Nicholls’s car. Mr. Nicholls said they’re not to be disturbed.” Tanzie sucked the end of her pencil.

Mum’s eyebrows shot somewhere into her hairline.

“Mr. Nicholls said you’d look like that. He said to tell you he’s sorting it out. The Facebook thing.”

“He’s doing what? How?”

“He said you’d say that, too.” She rubbed at a two, which looked a bit too much like a five and blew away the rubbings. “He said to tell you to please give them twenty minutes, and he’s ordered you another cup of tea and you should have some cake while you’re waiting. They’ll come back and fetch us when they’re finished. And also to tell you the chocolate cake is really good.”

Mum didn’t like it. Tanzie sat and finished her unit until she was happy with the answers while Mum fidgeted and looked out of the window and made as if to speak, then closed her mouth again. She
didn’t eat any chocolate cake. She left the five pounds that Mr. Nicholls had put on the table sitting there and Tanzie put her eraser on it because she was worried that when someone opened the door it would blow away.

Finally, just as the woman was sweeping up close enough to their table to send a silent message, the door opened, a little bell rang, and Mr. Nicholls walked in with Nicky. Nicky had his hands in his pockets and his hair over his eyes, but there was a little smirk on his face.

Mum stood up and looked from one to the other. You could tell she really, really wanted to say something, but she didn’t know what.

“Did you try the chocolate cake?” Mr. Nicholls said. His face was all bland, like a game-show host’s.

“No.”

“Shame. It was really good. Thank you! Your cake is the best!” he called to the woman, who went all smiley and twinkly. Then Mr. Nicholls and Nicky went straight back out again, striding across the road like they’d been mates all their lives, leaving Tanzie and Mum to gather up their things and hurry out after them.

T
here was this article in the newspaper once, about a hairless baboon. Her skin wasn’t black all over, like you’d expect, but kind of mottled, pink and black. Her eyes were black rimmed, like she had this really cool eyeliner on, and she had one long pink nipple and one black one, like a simian, booby David Bowie.

But she was all on her own. It turns out baboons don’t like difference. And literally not one baboon was prepared to hang out with her. So she was photographed in picture after picture, just out looking for food, all bare and vulnerable, without a single baboon mate. Because even though all the other baboons, like, knew she was still a baboon, their dislike of difference was stronger than any genetic urge they had to stick with her.

Nicky thought this one thing quite often: that there was nothing sadder than a lonely hairless baboon.

Obviously, Mr. Nicholls was about to give him a lecture on the dangers of social networking or say that he had to report it all to his teachers or the police or something. But he opened his car door, pulled out his laptop from the boot, plugged the power lead into a connector near his gearshift, and then plugged in a dongle so that they had broadband.

“Right,” he said, as Nicky eased himself into the passenger seat. “Tell me everything you know about this little charmer. Brothers, sisters, dates of birth, pets, address—whatever you’ve got.”

“What?”

“We need to work out his password. Come on—you must know something.”

They were sitting in the car park. There was no graffiti here, no
discarded shopping trolley. This was the kind of place where they walked actual miles to return a shopping trolley. Nicky would have bet money they had one of those Best Kept Village signs, too. A gray-haired woman loading her car beside them caught his eye and smiled. She actually smiled. Or maybe she smiled at Norman, whose big head was hanging over Nicky’s shoulder.

“Nicky?”

“Yeah. I’m thinking.” He reeled off everything he knew about Fisher. He went through his address, his sister’s name, his mum’s name. He actually knew his birthday, as it was only three weeks previously and his dad had bought him one of those quad bikes, which he’d smashed up within a week.

Mr. Nicholls kept tapping away. “Nope. Nope. Come on. There must be something else. What music does he like? What team does he support? Oh, look, he’s got a Hotmail address. Great, we can put that in.”

Nothing worked. And then Nicky had a sudden thought. “Tulisa. He’s got a thing about Tulisa. The singer.”

Mr. Nicholls tapped away at his keyboard, then shook his head.

“Try Tulisa’s Arse,” Nicky said.

Mr. Nicholls typed. “Nope.”

“IShaggedTulisa. All one word.”

“Nope.”

“Tulisa Fisher.”

“Mmm. Nope. Nice try, though.”

They sat there, thinking.

“You could just try his name,” said Nicky.

Mr. Nicholls shook his head. “Nobody’s stupid enough to use his name as a password.”

Nicky looked at him. Mr. Nicholls typed a few letters, then stared at the screen. “Well, what do you know?” He leaned back in his seat. “You’re a natural.”

“So what are you doing?”

“We’re just going to have a little play with Jason Fisher’s Facebook page. Actually, I’m not going to do it. I’m . . . uh . . . I can’t really risk anything on my IP address right now. But I know someone who can.” He dialed a number.

“But won’t he know it’s down to me?”

“How? We’re basically him right now. There’ll be nothing tracing this to you. He probably won’t even notice. Hang on. Jez? . . . Hey. It’s Ed . . . Yeah. Yeah, I’m just under the radar for a bit. I need you to do me a favor. It’ll take five minutes.”

Nicky listened as he told Jez Jason Fisher’s password and e-mail address. He said that Fisher had been “creating a few difficulties” for a friend. He looked at Nicky sideways as he said this. “Just have a bit of fun with it, yeah? Read through his stuff. You’ll get the picture. I’d do it myself, but I’ve got to keep my hands super clean right now . . . Yeah, I’ll explain when I see you. Appreciate it.”

Nicky couldn’t believe it was so easy. “Won’t he hack me back, though?”

Mr. Nicholls put down his phone. “I’m going to take a punt here. But a boy who can’t think further than his own name for a password is not really overflowing with computer skills.”

They sat there in the car and waited, refreshing Jason Fisher’s Facebook page again and again. And like magic, things began to change. Man, Fisher was such a douche. His wall was full of how he was going to “do” this girl or that girl from school, or how so-and-so was a slag and how he’d battered pretty much everyone outside his crew. His messages were much the same. Nicky glimpsed one message that had his name in it, but Mr. Nicholls read it really fast, scrolled up, and said, “Yeah. You don’t need to see that one.” The only time Fisher didn’t sound like a douche was when he messaged Chrissie Taylor and told her that he really liked her and did she want to come round his house? She didn’t sound too keen, but he kept messaging her. He said he’d take her out somewhere “really dope” and that he could borrow his dad’s car (he couldn’t—he was underage).
He told her she was the prettiest girl in school and that she was doing his head in and that if his mates knew she’d made him like this, they’d think he was “a mentalist.”

“Who says romance is dead?” Mr. Nicholls murmured.

And so it began. Jez messaged two of Fisher’s friends and told them that he had decided he was antiviolence, and didn’t want to hang out with them anymore. He messaged Chrissie and told her that he still liked her, but he had to get himself sorted out before he went out with her because he’d “picked up some stupid infection that the doctor says I need to get medicine for. I’ll be nice and clean when we get together, though, eh?”

“Oh, man.” Nicky was laughing so much that his ribs hurt. “Oh, man.”

“Jason” told another girl named Stacy that he really liked her and that his mum had picked out some really nice clothes for him if she ever wanted to go out, and he sent the same thing to a girl called Angela in his year whom he had once called a scuzz. And Jez deleted a new message from Danny Kane, who had tickets for some big football match and said Jason could have one, but he’d have to let him know by the end of the day. Which was today.

He made Fisher’s profile picture an image of a braying donkey. And then Mr. Nicholls stared at the screen, thinking, and picked up his mobile. “Actually, I think we should leave his photo there, mate, just for now,” he told Jez.

“Why?” said Nicky, after he’d put down the phone. The donkey thing was kind of excellent.

“Because it’s better to be subtle. If we just stick to his private messages for now, it’s entirely likely that he won’t even spot them. We send them, then delete them at this end. We’ll turn off his e-mail notifications. And so his friends, and this girl, will just think he’s become even more of an idiot. And he won’t have a clue why. Which is kind of the point.”

He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe someone could just mess with Fisher’s life like that.

Jez rang back to say he’d logged out, and they shut down Facebook. “And that’s it?” Nicky said.

“For now. It’s only a bit of fun. But it made you feel better, right? And he’s going to clean up your page so that none of the stuff Fisher put up is there anymore.”

It was a bit embarrassing then because when Nicky breathed out, he did this kind of shudder. He did feel better. It wasn’t like it really solved anything, but for once it was nice not to feel like the butt of the joke.

He messed with the hem of his T-shirt until his breathing went back to normal. It was possible Mr. Nicholls knew, because he looked out of the window like he was really interested even though there was nothing there apart from cars and old people.

“Why would you do all this? The hacking thing and driving us all the way to Scotland. I mean, you don’t even know us.”

Mr. Nicholls continued to stare out of the window and just for a moment it was like he wasn’t really talking to Nicky anymore. “I sort of owe your mum one. And I don’t like bullies. They didn’t start with your generation, you know.”

Mr. Nicholls sat there for a minute, and Nicky was suddenly afraid that he was going to try to make him talk about stuff. That he’d do that thing the counselor did at school, where he tried to act like he was your mate and said about fifty times that anything you said would be “just between us” until it sounded a little creepy.

“I’ll tell you one thing.”

Here it comes, Nicky thought. He wiped at his shoulder, where Norman had left a drool.

“Everyone I’ve ever met who was worth knowing was a bit different at school. You just need to find your people.”

“Find my people.”

“Your tribe.”

Nicky pulled a face.

“You know, you spend your whole life feeling like you don’t quite fit in anywhere. And then you walk into a room one day, whether it’s at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, ‘Ah. There they are.’ And suddenly you feel at home.”

“I don’t feel at home anywhere.”

“For now.”

Nicky considered this. “So where was yours?”

“Computing room at the university. I was your basic geek. I met my best mate Ronan there. And then . . . my company.” His face fell for a moment.

“But I’m stuck there until I finish school. And there’s nothing like that where we live, no tribes.” Nicky pulled his fringe down over his eyes. “You do things Fisher’s way or you stay out of his way.”

“So find your people online.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Look up online groups for things you’re . . . interested in? Lifestyle choices?”

Nicky registered his expression. “Oh. You think I’m gay, too, right?”

“No, I’m just saying that the Internet’s a big place. There’s always someone out there who shares your interests, whose life is like yours.”

“Nobody’s life is like mine.”

Mr. Nicholls shut his laptop and slid it into a case. He unplugged everything and glanced over toward the café.

“We should head back. Your mum will be wondering what we’re up to.” He opened his door and then turned back. “You know, you could always write a blog.”

“A blog?”

“Doesn’t have to be under your real name. But it’s a good way of talking about what’s going on in your life. You put a few keywords in, and people will find you. People like you, I mean.”

“People who wear mascara. And who don’t like football or musical theater.”

“And who have enormous stinking dogs and sisters who are maths prodigies. I bet you there’s at least one person like that somewhere.” He thought for a minute. “Maybe. Perhaps in Hoxton. Or Tupelo.”

Nicky pulled at his fringe some more, trying to cover the bruise, which had gone this really grim yellow. “Thanks, but blogs are . . . not really my thing. Blogs are like for middle-aged women writing about their divorces and cats and stuff. Or nail varnish obsessives.”

“Just putting it out there.”

“Do you write one?”

“Nope.” He climbed out of the car. “But then I don’t particularly want to talk to anyone.” Nicky climbed out after him. Mr. Nicholls pointed his key chain and the car locked down with an expensive thunk. “In the meantime,” he said, lowering his voice, “we didn’t have this conversation, okay? It wouldn’t go down too well if anyone knew I was teaching innocent kids how to hack into private information.”

“Jess wouldn’t mind.”

“I’m not just talking about Jess.”

Nicky held his gaze. “First rule of Geek Club. There is no Geek Club.”

—

“The sock thing,” said Tanzie, as they crossed the car park to meet them. She was holding up a napkin covered in scribbles. “I worked it out. If you had
n
number of socks, you’d have to sum a series of the fraction one over
n
to the power
n
.” She adjusted her glasses.

“Got it in one. Exactly what I would have suggested,” said Mr. Nicholls. And Mum looked at Nicky as though they were all basically people she had never met in her life.