One Plus One: A Novel (16 page)

“Do you want me to drive?” Mum said.

“No,” everyone said at once, and she smiled and tried to look like she wasn’t offended.

—

The Bluebell Haven was the only place within ten miles that had a vacancy sign. It had eighteen stationary RVs, a playground with two swings and a sandpit, and a sign that said
NO DOGS
.

Mr. Nicholls let his face drop against the steering wheel. “We’ll find somewhere else.” He winced and doubled over. “Just give me a minute.”

“No need.”

“You said you can’t leave the dog in the car.”

“We won’t leave him in the car. Tanzie,” said Mum. “The sunglasses.”

There was a mobile home by the front gate marked
RECEPTION
. Mum went in first, and Tanzie put the sunglasses on and waited outside on the step, watching through the bubbled-glass door. The fat man who raised himself wearily from a chair said she was lucky as there was only one still available, and they could have it for a special price.

“How much is that?” said Mum.

“Eighty pounds.”

“For one night? In a stationary RV?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“And it’s seven o’clock at night and you had nobody in it.”

“Someone might still come.”

“Yeah. I heard Madonna was having a pint and a packet of chips down the road and looking for somewhere to park her entourage.”

“No need to be snarky.”

“No need to rip me off. Thirty pounds,” Mum said, pulling the notes from her pocket.

“Forty.”

“Thirty-five.” Mum held out a hand. “It’s all I’ve got. Oh, and we’ve got a dog.”

He lifted a meaty hand. “Read the sign. No dogs.”

“He’s a guide dog. For my little girl. I’d remind you that it’s illegal to bar a person on the grounds of disability.”

Nicky opened the door and, holding her elbow, guided Tanzie in. She stood motionless behind her dark glasses while Norman stood patiently in front of her. They had done this twice when they’d had to catch the coach to Portsmouth after Dad had left.

“He’s well trained,” Mum said. “He’ll be no trouble.”

“He’s my eyes,” Tanzie said. “My life would be nothing without him.”

The man stared at Tanzie’s hand, and then at her face. His jowls reminded Tanzie of Norman’s. She had to remember not to glance up at the television.

“You’re busting my balls, lady.”

“Oh, I do hope not,” Mum said cheerfully.

He shook his head, withdrew his huge hand, and moved heavily toward a key cabinet. “Golden Acres. Second lane, fourth on the right. Near the toilet block.”

—

Mr. Nicholls was so ill by the time they reached the static that it was possible he didn’t even notice where they were. He kept moaning softly and clutching his stomach and when he saw the word “Toilets” he let out a little cry and disappeared. They didn’t see him for the best part of an hour.

Golden Acres wasn’t gold and didn’t look anything like even half
an acre, but Mum said any port in a storm. There were two tiny bedrooms, and the sofa in the living room converted into another bed. Mum said that Nicky and Tanzie could stay in the room with twin beds, Mr. Nicholls could go in the other, and she would have the sofa. It was actually okay in their bedroom, even if Nicky’s feet did hang over the end of his bed and everywhere smelled of cigarettes. Mum opened some windows for a bit, then made up the beds with the duvets and ran the water until it came hot because she said Mr. Nicholls would probably want a shower when he came back in.

Tanzie inspected the chemical loo in the bathroom, then pressed her nose to the window and counted all the lights in the other stationary RVs. (Only two seemed to be occupied. “That lying git,” said Mum.)

She had put her phone on to charge for precisely fifteen seconds when it rang. She started and picked it up, still plugged into the wall.

“Hello? Des?” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, God. Des, I’m not going to make it back in time.”

A series of muffled explosions at the other end.

“I’m really sorry. I know what I said. But things have gone a bit crazy. I’m in . . .” She pulled a face at Tanzie. “Where are we?”

“Near Ashby de la Zouch,” she said.

“Ashby de la Zouch,” Mum said. And then, her hand in her hair, “Ashby de la Zouch. I know. I’m really sorry. The journey didn’t quite go as I planned and our driver got sick and my phone ran out and with all the . . . What?” She glanced at Tanzie. “I don’t know. Probably not before Tuesday. Maybe even Wednesday. It’s taking longer than we thought.”

Tanzie could definitely hear him shouting then.

“Can’t Chelsea cover it? I’ve done enough of her shifts. I know it’s the busy period. I know, Des, I’m really sorry. I’ve said I—” She paused. “No. I can’t get back before then. No. I’m really . . . What do you mean? I’ve never missed a shift this past year. I—Des? . . . Des?” She broke off and stared at the phone.

“Was that Des from the pub?” Tanzie liked Des from the pub. Once she had sat outside with Norman on a Sunday afternoon, waiting for Mum, and he had given her a packet of scampi fries.

At that minute, the door to the RV opened, and Mr. Nicholls pretty much fell in. “Lie down,” he muttered, and he pulled himself briefly upright, before collapsing onto the floral sofa cushions. He looked up at Mum with a gray face and big hollow eyes. “Lying down. Sorry,” he mumbled.

Mum just sat there, staring at her mobile.

He blinked at her. “Were you trying to reach me?”

“He’s sacked me,” Mum said. “I don’t believe it. He’s bloody sacked me.”

T
he night took on a weird, disjointed quality, the hours running into each other, fluid and endless. Jess had never seen a man be so ill without actually hacking up a kidney. She gave up trying to sleep. She stared at the caramel-colored, wipe-clean walls of the caravan, read a bit, nodded off. Mr. Nicholls groaned beside her, occasionally getting up to shuffle backward and forward to the toilet block. She closed the kids’ door and sat waiting for him in the little caravan, sometimes dozing on the far end of the L-shaped sofa, handing him water and tissues when he staggered in.

Shortly after three, Mr. Nicholls said he wanted a shower. She made him promise to leave the bathroom door unlocked, took his clothes down to the launderette (a washer-dryer in a shed), and spent three pounds twenty on a sixty-minute cycle. She didn’t have any change for the dryer.

He was still in the shower when she arrived back at the caravan. She draped his clothes from hangers over the heater, hoping they might dry a bit by morning, then knocked quietly on the door. There was no answer, just the sound of running water, and a belch of steam. She peeped around the door. The glass was clouded but she could make him out, slumped and exhausted on the floor. She waited a moment, staring at his broad back pressed against the glass panel, a pale inverted triangle, surprisingly muscular, then watched as he lifted his hand and ran it wearily over his face.

“Mr. Nicholls?” she whispered behind him, then again when he didn’t say anything. “Mr. Nicholls?”

He turned then, and saw her. His eyes were red rimmed and his head had sunk deep into his shoulders.

“Fucksake. I can’t even get up. And the water’s starting to go cold,” he said.

“Want me to help?”

“No. Yes. Ah, Jesus.”

“Hold on.”

She held up the towel, whether to shield him or herself, she wasn’t sure, reached in, and turned off the shower, soaking her arm. Then she crouched down, so that he could cover himself, and leaned in. “Put your arm around my neck.”

“You’re tiny. I’ll just pull you over.”

“I’m stronger than I look.”

He didn’t move.

“You’re going to have to help me here. I’m not up to a fireman’s lift.”

His wet arm slid around her, he hooked the towel around his waist. Jess braced herself against the wall of the shower, and finally, shakily, they stood. Usefully, the RV was so small that at every step there was a wall for him to lean on. They made their way unsteadily to the couch.

“This is what my life has come to.” He groaned, eyeing the bucket, as she placed it beside the sofa.

“Yup.” Jess viewed the peeling wallpaper, the nicotine-stained paintwork. “Well, I’ve had better Saturday nights myself.”

It was a little after four. Her eyes were gritty and sore, and she closed them for a minute.

“Thanks,” he said weakly.

“What for?”

He pushed himself upright. “For bringing a loo roll out to me in the middle of the night. For washing my disgusting clothes. For helping me out of the shower. And for not once acting like it was my own fault for buying a dodgy doner from a place called Keith’s Kebabs.”

“Even though it was your own fault.”

“See? Now you’re spoiling it.”

He lay back on the pillow, his forearm over his eyes. She tried not to look at the broad expanse of chest above the strategically placed towel. She couldn’t remember when she had last seen a man’s naked torso other than at Des’s ill-advised Pub Beach Volleyball Match the previous August.

“Go and lie down in the bedroom. You’ll be more comfortable.”

He opened one eye. “Do I get a SpongeBob duvet?”

“You get my pink stripy one. But I promise not to regard it as any reflection whatsoever on your masculinity.”

“Where will you sleep?”

“Out here. It’s fine,” she said, as he started to protest. “I’m not sure I’ll sleep much anyway.”

He let her lead him into the tiny bedroom. He groaned as he fell onto the bed, as if even that caused him discomfort, and she pulled the duvet over him gently. The shadows under his eyes were ash colored and his voice had become drowsy. “I’ll be ready to go in a couple of hours.”

“Sure you will,” she said, observing the ghostly pallor of his skin. “Take your time.”

“Where the hell are we, anyway?”

“Oh, somewhere on the Yellow Brick Road.”

“Is that the one with the godlike lion that saves everyone?”

“You’re thinking of Narnia. This one is cowardly and useless.”

“Figures.”

And finally he slept.

Jess left the room silently and lay down on the narrow sofa, trying not to look at the clock. She and Nicky had studied the map while Mr. Nicholls was in the toilet block the previous evening and had reconfigured the journey as best they could.

We still have plenty of time, she told herself. And then, finally, she, too, fell asleep.

—

All was silent within Mr. Nicholls’s room well into the morning. Jess thought about waking him, but each time she made a move toward his door, she remembered the sight of him slumped against the shower cabinet and her fingers stilled on the handle. She opened the door only once, when Nicky pointed out that it was possible he had choked to death on his own vomit. He seemed the faintest bit disappointed when it turned out Mr. Nicholls was just in a really deep sleep. The children took Norman up the road—Tanzie in her dark glasses for authenticity—bought supplies from a convenience store, and breakfasted in whispers. Jess converted the remaining bread into sandwiches (“Oh, good,” said Nicky), cleaned the caravan—for something to do—and left a voice mail for Des, apologizing again. He didn’t pick up.

Then the door of the little room opened with a squeak and Mr. Nicholls emerged, blinking, in his T-shirt and boxers. He raised a palm in greeting. A long crease bisected his cheek from the pillow. “We are in . . . ?”

“Ashby de la Zouch. Or somewhere nearby. It’s not quite Beachfront.”

“Is it late?”

“Quarter to eleven.”

“Quarter to eleven. Okay.” His jaw was thick with stubble, and his hair stuck up on one side. Jess pretended to read her book. He smelled of warm, sleepy male. She had forgotten what a weirdly potent scent that was.

“Quarter to eleven.” He rubbed at the stubble on his chin, then walked unsteadily to the window and peered out. “I feel like I’ve been asleep for a million years.” He sat down heavily on the sofa cushion opposite her, running his hand over his jaw.

“Dude,” said Nicky from beside Jess. “Jailbreak alert.”

“What?”

Nicky waved a ballpoint. “You need to put the prisoners back in the pen.”

Mr. Nicholls stared at him, then turned to Jess, as if to say,
Your son has gone mad.

Following Nicky’s gaze, Jess looked down and swiftly away. “Oh, God.”

Mr. Nicholls frowned. “‘Oh, God’ what?”

“You could at least have taken me out to dinner first,” she said, standing to clear the breakfast things. She felt her ears go pink.

“Oh.” Mr. Nicholls looked down and adjusted himself. “Sorry. Right. Okay.” He stood, and made for the bathroom. “I’ll, uh, I . . . am I okay to have another shower?”

“We saved you some hot water,” said Tanzie, who was head down over her exam sheet in the corner. “You smelled really bad yesterday.”

He emerged twenty minutes later, his hair damp and smelling of shampoo, his face clean shaven. Jess was busy whisking salt and sugar into a glass of water and trying not to think about naked bits of Mr. Nicholls. She handed it to him.

“What’s that?” He pulled a face.

“Rehydrating solution. To replace some of what you lost last night.”

“You want me to drink a glass of salty water? After I’ve spent all night being sick?”

“Just drink it.” While he was grimacing and gagging, she fixed him some plain toast and black coffee. He sat across the little Formica table, took a sip of coffee and a few tentative bites of toast, and ten minutes later, in a voice that held some surprise, acknowledged that he did actually feel a bit better.

“Better, as in able-to-drive-without-having-an-accident better?”

“By having an accident, you mean—”

“Not crashing into a lay-by.”

“Thank you for clarifying that.” He took another, more confident, bite of toast. “Yeah. Give me another twenty minutes, though. I want to make sure I’m—”

“Safe in cars.”

“Ha.” He grinned, and it was pleasing to see him smile. “Yes. Quite. Oh, man, I do feel better.” He ran a hand across the plastic-covered table and took a swig of coffee, sighing with apparent satisfaction. He finished the first round of toast, asked if there was any more going, then looked around the table. “Although, you know, I might feel even better if you weren’t all staring at me while I eat. I’m worried some other part of me is poking out.”

“You’ll know,” said Nicky, “because we’ll all run screaming.”

“Mum said you nearly brought up an organ,” said Tanzie. “I was wondering what it felt like.”

He glanced up at Jess and stirred his coffee. He didn’t shift his gaze until she had blushed. “Truthfully? Not so different from most of my Saturday nights, these days.”

Tanzie studied her exam sheet before folding it up carefully. “The thing about numbers,” she said, as if they had been having a different conversation altogether, “is they’re not always numbers. I mean,
i
is imaginary. Pi is transcendent. And so is
e.
But if you stick them together,
e
to the power of
i
times pi is minus one. So they make a number that isn’t there. Because minus one isn’t a number; it’s a place where a number should be.”

“Well, that makes perfect sense,” said Nicky.

“Does to me,” said Mr. Nicholls. “I feel pretty much like a space where a body should be.” He drank the rest of his coffee and put down his cup. “Okay. I’m good. Let’s hit the road.”

—

The landscape altered by the mile as they drove through the afternoon, the hills growing steeper and less bucolic, the walls that banked them morphing from hedgerows into flinty gray stone. The skies opened, the light around them grew brighter, and they passed the distant symbols of an industrial landscape: redbrick factories, huge power stations that belched mustard-colored clouds. Jess watched surreptitiously as Mr. Nicholls drove, at first wary that he
would suddenly clutch his stomach, and then later with a vague satisfaction at the sight of normal color returning to his face.

“I don’t think we’re going to make Aberdeen today,” he said, and there was a hint of apology in his voice.

“Let’s just get as far as we can and do the last stretch early tomorrow morning.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to suggest.”

“Still loads of time.”

“Loads.”

She let the miles roll by, dozed intermittently, and tried not to worry about all the things she needed to worry about. She positioned her mirror surreptitiously so that she could watch Nicky in the backseat. His bruises had faded, even in the short time they had been away. He seemed to be talking more than he had been. But he was still closed to her. Sometimes Jess worried he would be like that for the rest of his life. It didn’t seem to make any difference how often she told him she loved him, or that they were his family. “You’re too late,” her mother had said when Jess told her he was coming to live with them. “With a child that age, the damage has been done. I should know.”

As a schoolteacher, her mother could keep a class of thirty eight-year-olds in a narcoleptic silence, could steer them through tests like a shepherd streaming sheep through a pen. But Jess couldn’t remember her ever smiling at her with pleasure, the kind of pleasure you’re meant to get just from looking at someone you gave birth to.

She had been right about many things. She had told Jess on the day she started secondary school: “The choices you make now will determine the rest of your life.” All Jess heard was someone telling her she should pin down her whole self, like a butterfly. That was the thing: when you put someone down all the time, eventually they stopped listening to the sensible stuff.

When Jess had Tanzie, young and daft as she had been, she’d had enough wisdom to know she was going to tell her how much she loved her every day. She would hug her and wipe her tears and flop
with her on the sofa with their legs entwined like spaghetti. She would cocoon her in love. When Tanzie was tiny, Jess slept with her in their bed, her arms wrapped around her—Marty would haul himself grumpily into the spare room, moaning that there wasn’t any room for him. She barely even heard him.

And when Nicky had turned up two years later, and everyone had told her she was mad to take on someone else’s child, a child who was already eight years old and from a troubled background—
you know how boys like that turn out—
she’d ignored them. Because she could see instantly in the wary little shadow who had stood a minimum twelve inches away from anyone, a little of what she had felt. Because she knew that something happened to you when your mother didn’t hold you close, or tell you all the time that you were the best thing ever, or even notice when you were home: a little part of you sealed over. You didn’t need her. You didn’t need anyone. And without even knowing you were doing it, you waited. You waited for anyone who got close to you to see something they didn’t like in you, something they hadn’t seen initially, and to grow cold and disappear, too, like so much sea mist. Because there had to be something wrong, didn’t there, if even your own mother didn’t really love you?

It was why she hadn’t been devastated when Marty left. Why would she be? He couldn’t hurt her. The only things Jess really cared about were those two children and letting them know they were okay. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you had your mother at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved. Jess hadn’t done much to be proud of in her life, but the thing she was most proud of was that Tanzie knew it. Strange little bean that she was, Jess knew she knew it.

She was still working on Nicky.