One Plus One: A Novel (27 page)

He brought his hand down over his face, wiping the moisture from it. He looked suddenly serious. “Do you think this is a bubble?”

“Um, there’re lots of bubbles. It’s a—”

“No. This. A bubble. We’re on this weird journey, where the normal rules don’t apply. Real life doesn’t apply. This whole trip has been . . . like time out of real life.”

Water was pooling on the bathroom floor.

“Don’t look at that. Talk to me.”

She dropped her lips to his collarbone, thinking. “Well,” she said, lifting her head again, “in a little more than five days, we’ve dealt with illness, distraught children, sick relatives, unexpected acts of violence, busted feet, police, and car accidents. I’d say that was quite enough real life for anyone.”

“I like your thinking.”

“I like your everything.”

“We seem to spend a lot of time talking rubbish to each other.”

“Well, I like that, too.”

The water had started to cool. She wriggled out of his arms and stood, reaching for the heated towel rail. She handed him a towel, wrapping one around herself, noting the casual luxury of a warm, fluffy hotel towel.

Ed rubbed at his hair vigorously with one hand. She wondered, briefly, whether Ed was so used to fluffy hotel towels that he didn’t even notice. She felt suddenly bone weary.

She brushed her teeth, switched off the bathroom light, and when she turned back, he was already in the enormous hotel bed, holding back the covers to let her in. He flicked off the bedside lamp and she lay there beside him in the dark, feeling his damp skin against her own, wondering what it would be like to have this every night. She wondered if she would ever be able to lie quietly beside him without wanting to slide a leg over his.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Jess,” he said into the dark, as if he could hear her thoughts. His voice was a warning.

“You’ll be okay.”

“Seriously. You can’t do your optimism tricks on this one. Whatever happens, I’m probably going to lose everything.”

“So? That’s my default position.”

“But I might have to go away.”

“You won’t.”

“I might, Jess.” His voice was uncomfortably firm.

And she spoke before she knew what she was saying. “Then I’ll wait,” she said.

She felt his head tilt toward her, a question. “I’ll wait for you. If you want me to.”

—

He took three calls on the final leg home, all hands free. His lawyer—a man with an accent so grand he should have been announcing the arrival of the royal family at dinner—told him he was due at the police station the following Thursday. No, nothing had changed. Yes, said Ed, he understood what was happening. And yes, he had spoken to his family. The way he said it made her stomach tense. She couldn’t help herself afterward. She reached over and took his hand. When he squeezed it back, he didn’t look at her.

His sister rang to say his dad had had a better night. They had a long conversation about some insurance bonds that his father had been concerned about, some keys that were missing from a filing cabinet, and what Gemma had had for lunch. Nobody talked about dying. She said to say hello and Jess shouted hello back and felt a bit self-conscious and a bit pleased at the same time.

After lunch he took a call from a man called Lewis, and they discussed market values and percentages and the state of the mortgage market. It took Jess a while to realize he was talking about Beachfront.

“Time to sell,” he said when he rang off. “Still. Like you said, at least I have assets to dispose of.”

“What’s it all going to cost you? The prosecution?”

“Oh. Nobody’s saying. But reading between the lines, I think the answer is ‘most of it.’”

She couldn’t work out if he was more upset than he was letting on.

He tried to call someone else, but the voice mail kicked in. “It’s Ronan here. Leave a message.” He hung up without saying anything.

With every mile, real life moved steadily toward them like an encroaching tide: cold, unstoppable.

—

They finally arrived shortly after four. The rain had eased to a fine drizzle, the road looked oily with dampness, the sprawling streets of Danehall struggled to show spring promise. There was her house, looking somehow smaller and scruffier than Jess remembered it and, oddly, like something that had nothing to do with her. Ed pulled up outside, and she peered out of the window at the peeling paintwork on the upstairs windows that Marty had never got round to painting because, he said, really, you had to do a proper job, sanding it first and taking off the old paint and using filler to plug the gaps, and he had always been either too busy or too tired to do any of it. For a moment, she felt a wave of depression wash over her at the thought of all the problems that had been sitting there waiting for their return. And all the greater ones that she had created in her absence. And then she looked at Ed, who was helping Tanzie with her bag, and laughing at something Nicky said, leaning over to hear him better, and it passed.

He had stopped at a DIY superstore about an hour out of town—his detour—emerging with a great box of stuff that he had to wrestle into the back alongside their bags. It was possible he needed to tidy his house before he sold it. Jess couldn’t think what you would do to that house to make it any nicer.

He dropped the last of the bags by the front door and stood there, holding the cardboard box. The children had disappeared
immediately to their rooms, like creatures in some sort of homing experiment. Jess felt a bit embarrassed then by the cluttered little house, the wood-chip wallpaper, the rows of battered paperbacks.

“I’m going back to my dad’s tomorrow.”

A reflexive twinge at the thought of his going. “Good. That’s good.”

“Just for a few days. Until the police thing. But I thought I’d put these up first.”

Jess looked down at the boxes.

“Security camera and motion-activated light. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”

“You bought that for us?”

“Nicky got beaten up. Tanzie plainly doesn’t feel safe. I thought it would make you all feel better. You know . . . if I’m not here.”

She stared at the box, at what it meant. She spoke before she knew what she wanted to say. “You—you don’t have to do that,” she stammered. “I’m good at DIY. I’ll do it.”

“On a ladder. With a busted foot.” He raised an eyebrow. “You know, Jessica Rae Thomas, at some point you’re going to have to let someone help you.”

“Well, what shall I do, then?”

“Sit down. Stay still. Put your injured foot up. And then afterward I’ll walk into town with Nicky and we’ll buy a disgustingly unhealthy waste-of-money takeaway because it might be the last one I get for a while. And then we’ll sit here and eat it, and afterward you and I will lie around gazing in awe at the size of each other’s stomachs.”

“Oh, my God, I love it when you talk dirty.”

So she sat. Doing nothing. On her own sofa. And Tanzie came and sat with her for a while and Ed went up a ladder outside and waved the drill at her through the window and pretended that he was going to fall off until it made her anxious. “I’ve been in two different hospitals in eight days,” she yelled at him through the window, crossly. “I do not want to make it a third.” And then, because
she was not very good at sitting still, she sorted some dirty washing and put a load in, but after that she sat down again and just let everyone else move because she had to admit that resting her foot was a lot less painful than trying to do things on it.

“Is that okay?” Ed asked.

She limped outside to see him. He stood back on the garden path, gazing up at the front of the house. “I figured if I put it there it’ll catch anyone who comes not just in your front garden but who hangs around outside. It’s got a convex lens, see?” She tried to look interested. She was wondering whether once the children had gone to bed, she could persuade him to stay over.

“And often, with these sorts of things, you find that just by having a camera there is a deterrent.”

Would it really be that bad? He could always sneak out before they woke up. But then, who were they kidding? Nicky and Tanzie must have guessed something was going on, surely.

“Jess?”

He was standing in front of her.

“Mm?”

“All I have to do is drill a hole there, and feed the wires in through that wall. Hopefully I can put a little junction just inside and it should be fairly simple to connect it all up. I’m pretty good at wiring. DIY is the one thing Dad taught me that I was actually okay at.”

He wore the satisfied look that men assume when in possession of power tools. He patted his pocket, checking for screws, then looked at her carefully. “Were you listening to a single thing I’ve said?”

Jess grinned at him guiltily.

“Oh, you’re incorrigible,” he said after a minute. “Honestly.”

Glancing around to make sure nobody was looking, he hooked his arm gently around her neck, pulled her close, and kissed her. His chin was thick with stubble. “Now let me get on. Undistracted. Go and dig out that takeaway menu.”

Jess limped, smiling, into the kitchen and began rooting through
the drawers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had ordered a takeaway. She was pretty sure none of the menus were up to date. Ed went upstairs to connect the wiring. He shouted down that he was going to need to move some furniture to get at the baseboards.

“Fine by me,” she yelled back. She heard the rumbling, thunderous sound of large things being dragged around the floor above her head as he tried to find the connection box, and marveled again that somebody other than her was going to do it.

And then she lay back on the sofa and started going through the fistful of old menus that she had uncovered in the tea-towel drawer, unpicking the pages of those splashed with sauce, or yellowed with age. She was pretty sure the Chinese place didn’t exist anymore. Some business with environmental health. The pizza place was unreliable. The curry-house menu looked pretty standard, but she couldn’t shake the thought of that curly little hair in Nathalie’s Jalfrezi. Still, C
hicken Balti. Pilau Rice. Poppadums
. She was so distracted that she didn’t hear his footsteps as he came slowly down the stairs. “Jess?”

“I think this one will do it.” She held up the menu. “I’ve decided a hair of unknown provenance is a small price to pay for a decent Jal—”

It was then that she saw his expression. And what he held, disbelieving, in his hand.

“Jess?” he said, and his voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. “Why would my security pass be in your sock drawer?”

W
hen Nicky came downstairs, she was just sitting on the sofa staring straight ahead of her, like she was in a trance. The Black & Decker drill sat on the windowsill and the ladder was still propped against the front of the house.

“Has Mr. Nicholls gone to get the takeaway?” Nicky was a little annoyed that he hadn’t got to choose.

She didn’t seem to hear him.

“Jess?”

Her face was sort of frozen. She gave a little shake of her head and said quietly, “No.”

“He is coming back, though, right?” he said after a minute. He opened the fridge door. He didn’t know what he expected to find. There was a pack of shriveled lemons and a half-empty jar of Branston pickles.

A long pause. “I don’t know,” she said. And then, “I don’t know.”

“So . . . we’re not getting a takeaway?”

“No.”

Nicky let out a groan of disappointment. “Well, I guess he’ll have to come back at some point. I’ve got his laptop upstairs.”

They’d obviously had some kind of row, but she wasn’t behaving like she did when she and Dad had had a row. Then she would slam a door and you’d hear her muttering
Dick
under her breath, or wearing that really tight expression that said,
Why do I have to live with this idiot?
Now she looked like someone who’d just been given six months to live.

“Are you okay?”

She blinked and put a hand to her forehead, like she was taking her temperature. “Um. Nicky. I need . . . I need to lie down. Can you . . . can you sort yourself out? There’s stuff. Food. In the freezer.”

In all the years Nicky had lived with her, Jess had never asked him to sort himself out. Even that time she’d had the flu for two weeks. Before he could say anything, she turned and limped upstairs, really slowly.

—

At first Nicky thought Jess was just being melodramatic. But twenty-four hours later, Jess was still in her room. He and Tanzie hovered outside her door, talking in whispers. Then they took her in some tea and toast, but she was just staring at the wall. The window was still open, and it was getting cold outside. Nicky shut it and left to put the ladder and the drill back in the garage, which seemed really enormous without the Rolls in it. And when he came back a couple of hours later to collect her plate, the tea and toast were still there, lying cold on the bedside table.

“She’s probably exhausted from all the traveling,” said Tanzie, like an old lady.

But the next day Jess stayed in bed. When Nicky went in, the covers were barely rumpled and she was still wearing the same clothes she’d gone to bed in.

“Are you ill?” he said, opening the curtains. “Do you want me to call the doctor?”

“I just need a day in bed, Nicky,” she said quietly.

“Nathalie came round. I said you’d call her. Something about cleaning.”

“Tell her I’m ill.”

“But you’re not ill. And the police pound rang up to ask when you’re picking up the car. And Mr. Tsvangarai rang up, but I didn’t know what to say to him so I just let him leave a message on the answering machine.”

“Nicky. Please?” Her face was so sad that he felt bad for even saying anything. She waited a moment, then pulled the duvet up to her chin and turned away.

Nicky got breakfast for Tanzie. He felt oddly useful in the mornings now. He wasn’t even missing his stash. He let Norman into the garden and cleaned up after him. Mr. Nicholls had left the security light out by the window. It was still in its box, which had become damp because of the rain, but nobody had nicked it. Nicky picked it up, brought it inside, and sat there looking at it.

He thought about ringing Mr. Nicholls, but he didn’t know what he would say if he did. And he felt a bit weird asking Mr. Nicholls to come back a second time. If someone wanted to be with you, after all, they just made it happen. Nicky knew that better than anyone. Whatever had gone on between him and Mum was serious enough that he hadn’t come back for his laptop. Serious enough that Nicky wasn’t sure he should interfere.

He cleaned his room. He walked along the seafront and took a few pictures on Mr. Nicholls’s phone. He went online for a while, but he was bored by gaming. He stared out of the window at the roofs of the high street and the distant orange brick of the leisure center and he knew he didn’t want to be an armor-clad droid shooting aliens out of the sky anymore. He didn’t want to be stuck in this room. Nicky thought back to the open road, and the feeling of Mr. Nicholls’s car taking them vast distances, that endless time when they didn’t even know where they were headed next, and he realized that, more than anything, he wanted to be out of this little town.

He wanted to find his tribe.

—

Nicky had given it some considerable thought and concluded that by the afternoon of day two he was entitled to feel a little freaked out. School was due to start again soon, and he wasn’t sure how he was meant to look after Jess as well as Titch and the dog and everything
else. He vacuumed the house and rewashed the load of damp laundry that he found sitting in the washing machine, which had started to smell musty. He walked with Tanzie to the shop and they bought some bread and milk and dog food. He tried not to show it, but he was quite relieved that there was nobody hanging around outside to call him a fagboy or freak or whatever. And Nicky thought maybe, just maybe, Jess had been right and that things did change. And that maybe a new stage of his life was finally beginning.

A short time later, as he was going through the post, Tanzie arrived in the kitchen. “Can we go back to the shop?”

He didn’t look up. He was wondering whether to open the official letter addressed to Mrs. J. Thomas. “We’ve just been to the shop.”

“Then can I go by myself?”

He looked up then and started a little. She had done something weird to her hair, putting it up on one side with a load of glittery barrettes. She didn’t look like Tanzie.

“I want to get Mum a card,” she said. “To cheer her up a bit.”

Nicky was pretty sure a card wasn’t going to do it. “Why don’t you make her one, Titch? Save your money.”

“I always make her one. Sometimes it’s nice to get a shop card.”

He studied her face. “Have you got makeup on?”

“Only lipstick.”

“Jess wouldn’t let you wear lipstick. Take it off.”

“Suze wears it.”

“I don’t think that’s going to make Jess any happier about it, Titch. Look, take it off and I’ll give you a proper makeup lesson when you get back.”

She pulled her jacket from the hook. “I’ll rub it off on the way,” she called over her shoulder.

“Take Norman with you,” he yelled, because it was what Jess would have said. Then he made a cup of coffee and carried it upstairs. It was time to sort out Jess.

The room was dark. It was a quarter to three in the afternoon. “Leave it on the side,” she murmured. The room held the fug of unwashed bodies and undisturbed air.

“It’s stopped raining.”

“Good.”

“Jess, you need to get up.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Really. You need to get up. It’s starting to honk in here.”

“I’m tired, Nicky. I just need . . . a rest.”

“You don’t need rest. You’re . . . you’re like our household Tigger.”

“Please, love.”

“I don’t get it, Jess. What’s going on?”

She turned over, really slowly, then propped herself up on one elbow. Downstairs the dog had begun to bark at something, insistent, erratic. Jess rubbed at her eyes. “Where’s Tanzie?”

“Gone to the shop.”

“Has she eaten?”

“Yes. But mostly cereal. I can’t really cook anything more than fish fingers, and she’s sick of those.”

She looked at Nicky, then out toward the window, as if weighing something up. And then she said, “He’s not coming back.” And her face sort of crumpled.

The dog was really barking outside now, the idiot. Nicky tried to stay focused on what Jess was saying. “Really? Never?”

A great fat tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away with the flat of her hand and shook her head. “You know the really stupid bit, Nicky? I actually forgot. I forgot I did it. I was so happy while we were away, it was like all the time before had happened to someone else. Oh, that bloody dog.”

She wasn’t really making sense. He wondered if she actually was ill.

“You could call him.”

“I tried. He’s not picking up.”

“Do you want me to go over there?”

Even as he asked he slightly regretted it. Because even though he really liked Mr. Nicholls, he knew better than anyone that you couldn’t make someone stay with you. There was no point trying to hang on to someone who didn’t want you.

It’s possible she’d told him because she didn’t have anyone else to tell. “I loved him, Nicky. I know it sounds stupid after such a short time, but I loved him.” It was a shock to hear her say it. All that emotion, just blurted out there. But it didn’t make him want to run. Nicky sat on the bed, leaned over, and although he still felt a bit weird about actual physical contact, he hugged her. And she felt quite small, even though he’d always thought of her as sort of bigger than he was. And she rested her head against him and he felt sad because for once he did want to say something, but he didn’t know what.

It was at that point that Norman’s barking got hysterical. Like when he saw the cows in Scotland. Nicky pulled back, distracted. “He sounds like he’s going insane.”

“Bloody dog. It’ll be that Chihuahua from fifty-six.” Jess sniffed and wiped at her eyes. “I swear it torments him on purpose.”

Nicky climbed up off the bed and walked over to the window. Norman was in the garden, barking hysterically, his head thrust through the gap in the fence where the wood was rotten and two of the panels had half broken away. It took him a few seconds to register that he didn’t look like Norman. This dog was rigidly upright, his hair bristling. Nicky pulled the curtain back farther, and it was then that he saw Tanzie across the road. There were two Fishers and a boy he didn’t recognize and they had backed her up against the wall. As Nicky watched, one of them grabbed at her jacket and she tried to bat his hand away. “Hey! Hey!” he yelled, but they didn’t hear him. His heart thumping, Nicky wrestled with the sash window but it refused to budge. He banged on the glass, trying to make them stop. “HEY! Shit. HEY!”

“What?” said Jess, swiveling in the bed.

“Fishers.”

They heard Tanzie’s high-pitched scream. As Jess dived out of bed, Norman stilled for a split second, then hurled himself against the weakest section of the fence. He went through it like a canine battering ram, sending pieces of wood splintering into the air around him. Straight toward the sound of Tanzie’s voice. Nicky saw the Fishers spin round to see this enormous black missile coming for them and their mouths opened. And then he heard the screech of brakes, a surprisingly loud
whumph,
Jess’s
Oh, God, oh, God,
and then a silence that seemed to go on and on forever.