One Plus One: A Novel (24 page)

“Get off!”

“Stop the car!
Jess, stop the car!
”

“Get off, Ed! You’ll get hurt!” She batted at his hand, and the car swerved dangerously to the left.

“What the—” With a leap he managed to wrestle the keys from the ignition. The car juddered and stalled abruptly. His right
shoulder collided hard with the door. Jess’s nose hit the steering wheel with a crack.

“Fuck.”
Ed landed heavily on his side, his head hitting something hard.
“Fuck it.”
He lay on the ground winded, his head spinning. It took a second for his thoughts to clear, and then he scrambled unsteadily to his feet, hauling himself up by the still-open door. He could see, through blurred vision, that they were feet from the lake, its shoreline an inky black near his wheels. Jess’s arms rested against the wheel, her face buried in the gap between them. He reached across her and pulled on the hand brake, before she could somehow set the thing in motion again.

“What the hell were you doing? What were you
doing
?” Adrenaline and pain coursed through him. The woman was a nightmare. “Jesus, my head. Oh no. Where’s my towel? Where’s the damn towel?”

Lights were flicking on in the other cabins. He glanced up, and there were silhouettes in windows that he hadn’t known were there, figures looking out at him. He cupped himself as best he could with one hand and half walked, half ran for the towel, which was lying muddied on the path. As he walked, he lifted his other hand toward them as if to say,
Nothing to see here
(given the cold night air, this had swiftly become true), and a couple of them shut their curtains hurriedly.

She was sitting where he had left her. “Do you know how much you’ve drunk tonight?” he yelled, through the open door. “How much dope you’ve smoked? You could have killed yourself. You could have killed us both.”

He wanted to shake her. “Are you really so determined to dig yourself deeper and deeper into more crap? What the hell is wrong with you?”

And then he heard it. She had her head in her hands and she was crying into them, a soft, desolate sound. “I’m sorry.”

Ed deflated a little, hitched the towel around his waist. “What the hell were you doing, Jess?”

“I wanted to get them. I couldn’t leave them there. With him.”

He took a breath, made a fist and released it. “But we’ve discussed this. They’re absolutely fine. Nicky said he’d call if there were any problems. And we’re going to get them first thing tomorrow. You know that. So what the hell—”

“I’m scared, Ed.”

“Scared? Of what?”

Her nose was bleeding, a dark scarlet trickle winding its way down to her lip, her eyes smudged black with mascara. “I’m scared that . . . I’m scared that they’ll like it at Marty’s.” Her face crumpled. “I’m scared they won’t want to come back.”

And Jess Thomas came to rest, gently, against him, her face buried in his bare chest. And finally Ed put his arms around her and held her close and let her cry.

—

He had heard religious people talk about having revelatory experiences. Like there was one moment where everything became clear to them and all the crap and ephemera just floated away. It had always seemed pretty unlikely to him. But then Ed Nicholls had one such moment in a log cabin beside a stretch of water that might have been a lake, or might well have been a canal for all he could tell, somewhere near Carlisle.

And he realized in that moment that he had to make things right. He felt Jess’s injustices more fiercely than he had ever felt anything for himself. He realized, as he held her to him and kissed the top of her head and felt her cling to him, that he would do anything he could to make her and her kids happy, to keep them safe and give them a fair chance.

He didn’t ask himself how he could know this after four days. It just seemed clearer to him than anything he had worked out in entire decades before.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said softly into her hair. “It’s going to be okay because I’m going to make it okay.”

Then he told her, in the quiet tones of someone offloading a confession, that she was the most amazing woman he had ever met. And when she lifted her swollen eyes to his, Ed mopped her bleeding nose, and he dropped his lips gently onto hers, and he did what he had wanted to do for the past forty-eight hours, even if he had been initially too dumb to know it. He kissed her. And when she kissed him back—tentatively at first, and then with a fierce, gratifying passion, her hand stealing up to his neck, her eyes closing—he picked her up and carried her back to the house. And in the only way he could offer that he was sure wouldn’t be misunderstood, he tried to show her.

Because in that one moment, Ed Nicholls saw that he had been more like Marty than he was like Jess. He had been that coward who spent his life running from things rather than facing up to them. And that had to change.

“Jess?” he said softly into her skin, sometime later as he lay awake, marveling at the 180-degree swings of life in general. “Will you do something for me?”

“Again?” she said sleepily. Her hand rested lightly on his chest. “Good God.”

“No. Tomorrow.” He leaned his head into hers.

She shifted, so that her leg slid across his. He felt her lips on his skin. “Sure. What do you want?”

He gazed up at the ceiling. “Will you come with me to my dad’s?”

So Jess’s favorite saying (next to “It’s all going to be fine” and “We’ll work something out” and “Oh, Christ,
Norman
!”) is that families come in all different shapes and sizes. “It’s not all two point three now,” she says, like if she says it enough times we’ll all have to actually believe it.

Well, if our family was a weird shape before, it’s pretty much insane now.

I don’t really have a full-time mum, not like you probably have a mum, but it looks like I’ve acquired another part-time version. Linzie. Linzie Fogarty. I’m not sure what she makes of me: I can see her watching me out of the corner of her eye, trying to work out if I’m going to do something dark and Gothic or chew up a terrapin or something. Dad said she’s somebody high up in the local council. He said it like he was really proud, like he’s gone up in the world. I’m not sure he ever looked at Jess the way he looks at her.

For about the first hour after we got here I just felt really awkward, like I basically just acquired one more place to feel like I didn’t fit. The house is really tidy and they don’t have any books, unlike ours, where Jess has stuffed them into pretty much every room except the bathroom and there’s usually one by the loo anyway. And I kept staring at Dad because I couldn’t believe he’d been living here like a totally normal person while lying to us all the time. It made me hate her, like I hate him.

But then Tanzie said something at supper, and Linzie burst out laughing, and it was this really goofy, honking laugh—
Foghorn Fogarty,
I thought—and she clamped her hand over her mouth and she and Dad exchanged a look like it was a sound she should have tried really, really hard not to make. And something about the way her eyes wrinkled up made me think maybe she was okay.

I mean, her family has just taken on a weird shape, too. She had two kids, Suze and Josh, and Dad. And suddenly there’s me—Gothboy, as Dad calls me, like that’s funny—and Tanze, who has taken to wearing two pairs of glasses on top of each other because she says the one pair isn’t quite right; and Jess going nutso on her driveway, kicking holes in her car; and Mr. Nicholls, who definitely has a thing about Mum, hanging around and calmly trying to sort everyone out like the only grown-up in the place. And no doubt Dad has had to tell her about my biological mum, who might also end up on her driveway one day, shouting like that first Christmas after I moved in with Jess when she threw bottles at our windows and screamed herself hoarse until the neighbors called the police. So all things considered, Foghorn Fogarty might honestly be feeling like her family isn’t in quite the shape she expected, either.

I don’t really know why I’m telling you this. It’s just that it’s three thirty a.m. and everyone else in this house is asleep and I’m in Josh’s room with Tanzie and he has his own computer—both of them have their own computers (Macs, no less)—and I can’t remember his codes to do any gaming. But I’ve been thinking about what Mr. Nicholls said about blogging and how somehow if you write it and put it out there, like that baseball audience in
Field of Dreams
, your people might just come.

You probably aren’t my people. You’re probably people who made a typo while doing a search on discount tires or porn or something. But I’m putting it out here anyway. Just in case you happen to be anything like me.

Because this last twenty-four hours has made me see something. I might not fit in the way that you fit with your family, neatly, a little row of round pegs in perfectly round holes. In our family all our pegs and holes belonged somewhere else first, and they’re all sort of jammed in and a bit lopsided. But here’s the thing. I don’t know if it’s being away from everything, or how intense these last few days have been, but I realized something when Dad sat down and told me it was good to see me and his eyes got all moist: my dad might be an arse, but he’s my arse, and he’s the only arse I’ve got. And feeling the weight of Jess’s hand as she sat by my hospital bed, or hearing her try not to cry on the phone at the thought of leaving me here, and watching my little sister, who is trying to be really, really brave about the whole school thing, even though I can tell that her world has basically ended—it all made me see that I do sort of belong somewhere.

I think I sort of belong to them.

E
d lay propped against the pillows, watching her do her makeup, painting over the bruises on her face with a little tube of concealer. She had just about covered the blue one on her temple where her head had bounced off the air bag. But her nose was purple, the skin stretched tight over a bump that hadn’t been there before, and her upper lip bore the swollen, oversized look of a woman who had ill-advisedly indulged in backstreet plastic surgery. “You look like someone punched you in the nose.”

Jess rubbed her finger gently over her mouth. “So do you.”

“
It
did. My own car, thanks to you.”

She tilted her head, gazing at his reflection behind her. He had this slow, lopsided grin, and his chin was a giant bristly shadow. She couldn’t not smile back.

“Jess, I’m not sure there’s really any point trying to cover it. You’re going to look bashed up whatever you do.”

“I thought I’d tell your parents, sorrowfully, that I walked into a door. Maybe with a bit of a furtive sideways look at you.”

He let out a sigh and stretched, closing his eyes. “If that’s the worst they think of me by the end of today, I suspect I’ll be doing quite well.”

She gave up on her face, and shut her makeup bag. He was right: short of spending the day pressed against an ice pack, there was little she could do to make it look less battered. She ran a speculative tongue over her sore upper lip. “I can’t believe I didn’t feel this when we were . . . well, last night.”

Last night.

She turned and crawled up the bed until she was lying full length
alongside him, luxuriating in the feel of him against her. She couldn’t believe that they had not even properly met each other a week previously. He opened his eyes, sleepily, reached out, and toyed lazily with a lock of her hair.

“That’ll be the sheer power of my animal magnetism.”

“Or the two joints and a bottle and a half of Merlot.”

He hooked his arm around her neck and pulled her into him. She closed her eyes briefly, breathing in the scent of his skin. He smelled pleasingly of sex. “Be nice,” he growled softly. “I’m a bit broken today.”

“I’ll run you a bath.” She traced the mark on his head where it had hit the car door. They kissed, long and slow and sweet, and it raised a possibility.

“Are you okay?”

“Never felt better.” He opened one eye.

“No. About lunch.”

He looked briefly serious, and let his head fall back on the pillow. She regretted mentioning it. “No. But I guess I’ll feel better when it’s done.”

—

She sat in the loo, agonizing in private, then rang Marty at a quarter to nine and told him she had something to sort out and that she would now pick the children up between three and four. She didn’t ask. From now on, she had decided, she was just going to tell him how it was going to be. He put Tanzie on the phone, and she wanted to know how Norman had coped without her. The dog was stretched out in front of the fire, like a three-dimensional rug. She wasn’t entirely sure he’d moved in twelve hours, besides to eat breakfast.

“He survived. Just.”

“Dad said he’s going to make bacon sandwiches. And then we might go to the park. Just him and me and Nicky. Linzie’s taking Suze to ballet. She has ballet lessons twice a week.”

“That sounds great,” Jess said. She wondered whether being able
to sound cheerful about things that made her want to kick something was her superpower.

“I’ll be back some time after three,” she said to Marty, when he came back on the phone. “Please make sure Tanzie wears her coat.”

“Jess,” he said, as she was about to ring off.

“What?”

“They’re great. The pair of them. I just—”

Jess swallowed. “After three. I’ll ring if I’m going to be any later.”

—

She walked the dog and when she returned, Ed was up and breakfasted. They drove the hour to his parents’ house in silence. He had shaved and changed his T-shirt twice, even though they were both exactly the same. She sat beside him and said nothing, and felt, with the morning and the miles, the intimacy of the previous evening slowly seep away. Several times she opened her mouth to speak and then found she didn’t know what to say. She felt as if someone had peeled a layer of skin off her, leaving all her nerve endings exposed. Her laugh was too loud, her movements unnatural and self-conscious. She felt as if she had been asleep for a million years and someone had just blasted her awake.

What she really wanted to do was touch him, to rest a hand on his thigh. And yet she wasn’t sure whether, now that they were out of the bedroom and in the unforgiving light of day, that was appropriate. She wasn’t entirely sure what he thought had taken place.

Jess lifted her bruised foot and placed the bag of refrozen peas back onto it. Taking it off and putting it back on again.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” She had mostly done it for something to do. She smiled fleetingly at him and he smiled back.

She thought about leaning across and kissing him. She thought about running her finger lightly along the back of his neck so that he would look over at her like he had the previous night. About undoing her seat belt and edging across the front seat and forcing him to
pull over, just so she could take his mind off things for another twenty minutes. And then she remembered Nathalie, who, three years previously, in an effort to be impulsive, had given Dean a surprise blow job while he was driving his truck. He had yelled, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” and plowed straight into the back of a Mini Metro, and before he’d had a chance to do himself up, Nathalie’s aunt Doreen had come running out of the supermarket to see what had happened. She had never looked at Nathalie in quite the same way again.

So maybe not. As they drove she kept stealing looks at him. She found she couldn’t see his hands without picturing them on her skin, and then that soft mop of hair traveling slowly down her bare stomach. Oh, God. She crossed her legs and stared out of the window.

But Ed’s mind was elsewhere. He had grown quieter, the muscle in his jaw tightening, his hands a fraction too fixed on the wheel.

She turned to the front, adjusted the frozen peas, and thought about trains. And lampposts. And Maths Olympiads. They drove on in silence, their thoughts humming like twin wheels.

—

Ed’s parents lived in a gray stone Victorian house at the end of a terrace, the kind of street where neighbors try to outdo each other with the neatness of their window boxes. Ed pulled up, let the engine tick down. He didn’t move.

Almost without thinking, she reached out and touched his hand. He turned to her as if he’d forgotten she was there. “You sure you don’t mind coming in with me?”

“Of course not,” she stuttered.

“I’m really grateful. I know you wanted to get the kids.”

She rested her hand on his briefly. “It’s fine.”

They walked up the path, and Ed paused, then knocked sharply on the front door. They glanced at each other, smiled awkwardly, and waited. And waited some more.

After about thirty seconds, he knocked again, louder this time. And then he crouched to peer through the letter box.

He straightened up and reached for his phone. “Odd. I’m sure Gem said the lunch was today. Let me check.” He flicked through some messages, nodded, then knocked again.

“I’m pretty sure if anyone was there they would have heard,” Jess said. The thought occurred, in passing, that it would be quite nice just for once to walk up to a house and have a clue what was happening on the other side of the door.

They startled at the stuttering sound of a sash window being raised above their heads. Ed took a step back and peered up at next door.

“Is that you, Ed?”

“Hi, Mrs. Harris. I’m after my parents. Any idea where they are?”

The woman grimaced. “Oh, Ed dear, they’ve gone to the hospital. I’m afraid your father took ill again early this morning.”

Ed put his hand up to his eyes. “Which hospital?”

She hesitated. “The Royal, dear. It’s about four miles away if you head for the dual motorway. You want to go left at the end of the road—”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Harris. I know where it is. Thank you.”

“Give him our best,” she called, and Jess heard the window being pulled down. Ed was already opening the car door.

—

They reached the hospital in a matter of minutes. Jess didn’t speak. She had no idea what to say. At one point she ventured, “Well, at least they’ll be glad to see you.” But it was a stupid thing to say and he was so deep in thought that he didn’t seem to hear. He gave his father’s name at the information desk and the receptionist ran a finger down her screen. “You know where Oncology is, yes?” she added, looking up from her screen.

They entered a steel lift and traveled up two floors. Ed gave his name on the intercom, cleaned his hands with the antibacterial
lotion by the ward’s door, and, when the doors finally clicked open, she followed him through.

A woman walked down the hospital corridor toward them. She was wearing a felt skirt and colored tights. Her hair was cut in a short, feathery style.

“Hey, Gem,” he said, slowing as she drew near.

The woman looked at him, disbelieving. Her jaw dropped, and for a moment Jess thought she was going to say something.

“It’s good to s—” he began. From nowhere, the woman’s hand shot out, smacking Ed across the face. The sound actually echoed down the corridor.

Ed staggered backward, clutching his cheek. “What the—”

“You fucking wanker,” she said. “You fucking, fucking wanker.”

The two of them stared at each other, Ed lowering his hand as if to check for blood.

She shook her hand, looking quite surprised at herself, and then after a moment, held it gingerly toward Jess. “Hello, I’m Gemma.”

Jess hesitated, then shook it carefully. “Um . . . Jess.”

Gemma frowned. “The one with a child in need of urgent help.”

When Jess nodded, Gemma looked her up and down slowly. Her smile was weary, rather than unfriendly. “Yes, I rather thought you might be. Right. Mum’s down the end, Ed. You’d better come and say hello.”

—

“Is he here? Is it Ed?” The woman’s hair was gunmetal gray, pinned up in a neat twist. “Oh, Ed! It is you. Oh, darling. How lovely. But what have you done to yourself?”

He hugged her, then pulled back, ducking his face when she tried to touch his nose, and giving Jess the swiftest sideways look. “I . . . I walked into a door.”

She pulled him close again, patting his back. “Oh, it is so good to see you.”

He let her hold him for a minute, then gently disentangled himself. “Mum, this is Jess.”

“I’m . . . Ed’s friend.”

“Well, how lovely to meet you. I’m Anne.” Her gaze traveled briefly over Jess’s face, taking in her bruised nose, the faint swelling on her lip. She hesitated just a moment, then perhaps decided not to ask. “I’m afraid I can’t say Ed’s told me an awful lot about you, but he never does tell me an awful lot about anything, so I’m very much looking forward to hearing it from you.” She put her hand on Ed’s arm and her smile wavered a little. “We did have a rather nice lunch planned but . . .”

Gemma took a step closer to her mother and began rummaging around in her handbag. “But Dad was taken ill again.”

“He was so looking forward to this lunch. We had to put Simon and Deirdre off. They were just setting out from the Peak District.”

“I’m sorry,” Jess said.

“Yes. Well. Nothing to be done.” She seemed to pull herself together. “You know, it really is the most revolting disease. I have to work quite hard not to take it all personally.” She leaned into Jess with a rueful smile. “Sometimes I go into our bedroom and I call it the most dreadful names. Bob would be horrified.”

Jess smiled back at her. “I’ll give it a few from me, if you like.”

“Oh, please do! That would be wonderful. The filthier, the better. And loud. It has to be loud.”

“Jess can do loud,” Ed said, dabbing at his lip.

There was a short silence.

“I bought a whole salmon,” Anne said to nobody in particular.

Jess could feel Gemma studying her. Unconsciously she pulled at her T-shirt, not wanting her tattoo to show above her jeans. The words “social worker” always made her feel scrutinized.

And then Anne moved past her and was holding out her arms. The hungry way she pulled Ed to her again made Jess wince a little.
“Oh, darling. Darling boy. I know I’m being a terribly clingy mum but do indulge me. It really is so lovely to see you.” He hugged her back, his eyes raising to Jess’s briefly, guiltily.

“My mother last hugged me in 1997,” murmured Gemma. Jess wasn’t sure she was aware that she had said it out loud.

“I’m not sure mine ever did,” Jess said.

Gemma looked at her. “Um . . . about the whole whacking-my-brother thing. He’s probably told you what I do for a living. I just feel obliged to stress that I don’t usually hit people.”

“I don’t think brothers count.”

There was a sudden flicker of warmth behind Gemma’s eyes. “That’s a very sensible rule.”

“No problem,” Jess said. “Anyway, I’ve wanted to do it quite often myself over the past few days.”

—

Bob Nicholls lay in a hospital bed, a blanket up to his chin and his hands resting gently on its surface. His skin held a waxy, yellow pallor and the bones of his skull were almost visible beneath it. His head turned slowly toward the door as they entered. An oxygen mask sat on a bedside table, and two faint indents on his cheek told of its recent use. He was painful to look at.

“Hey, Dad.”

Jess watched Ed struggle to hide his shock. He stooped toward his father and hesitated before touching him lightly on the shoulder.

“Edward.” His voice was a croak

“Doesn’t he look well, Bob?” said his mother.

His father studied him from under shadowed lids. When he spoke, it was slowly, and with deliberation.

“No. He looks like someone beat the living daylights out of him.”

Jess could see the new color on Ed’s cheekbone where his sister had hit him. She found herself reaching unconsciously toward her injured lip.