One Plus One: A Novel (28 page)

T
anzie had sat in her room for almost an hour trying to draw Mum a card. She couldn’t work out what to put on it. Mum seemed like she was sick, but Nicky said she wasn’t really sick, not like Mr. Nicholls had been sick, so it didn’t seem right to write a Get Well Soon card. She thought about writing “Be Happy!” but it sounded like an instruction. Or even an accusation. And then she thought about just writing “I love you,” but she’d wanted to do it in red and all her red felt-tips had dried out. So then she thought she’d buy a card because Mum always said that Dad had never bought her a single one, apart from a really cheesy padded Valentine’s Day card once when they were courting. And she would burst out laughing at the word “courting.”

Mostly Tanzie just wanted her to cheer up. A mum should be in charge, taking care of things and bustling around downstairs, not lying up there in the dark, like she was really a million miles away. It made Tanzie scared. Ever since Mr. Nicholls had gone, the house had felt too quiet, and a massive lump had lodged itself in her stomach, like something bad was about to happen. She had crept into Mum’s room that morning when she woke up and crawled into bed with her for a cuddle, and Mum had put her arms around her and kissed the top of her head.

“Are you ill, Mum?” she’d said.

“I’m just tired, Tanze.” Mum’s voice did sound like the saddest, tiredest thing in the world. “I’ll get up soon. I promise.”

“Is it . . . because of me?”

“What?”

“Not wanting to do maths anymore. Is that what’s making you sad?”

And then Mum’s eyes filled with tears, and Tanzie felt like she’d somehow made things even worse. “No, Tanze,” she said, and pulled her close. “No, darling. It has absolutely nothing to do with you and maths. That is the last thing you should think.”

But she didn’t get up.

So Tanzie was walking along the road with two pounds fifteen in her pocket that Nicky had given her, even though she could tell he thought a card was a stupid idea, and wondering if it was better to get a cheaper card and some chocolate or if a cheap card spoiled the whole point of a card when a car pulled up alongside. She thought it was someone looking for directions to Beachfront (people were always asking for directions to Beachfront), but it was Jason Fisher.

“Oi. Freak,” he said, and she kept walking. His hair was gelled up in spikes and his eyes were narrowed, like he spent his whole life squinting at things he didn’t like.

“I said, Freak.”

Tanzie tried not to look at him. Her heart had begun to thump. She walked a little bit faster.

He pulled forward and she thought maybe he was going to go away. But he stopped the car and got out and swaggered over so that he was in front of her and she couldn’t actually go any farther without pushing past him. He leaned to one side, like he was explaining something to someone stupid. “It’s rude not to answer someone when they’re talking to you. Did your mum never tell you that?”

Tanzie was so frightened that she couldn’t talk.

“Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice came out as a whisper.

“Yes, you do, you little four-eyed freak. Your brother thinks he’s been a bit clever messing around with my Facebook.”

“He didn’t,” she said. But she was a really bad liar, and she knew as soon as she’d said it that he knew she was lying.

He took two steps toward her. “You tell him that I’m going to have
him, the cocky little shit. He thinks he’s so clever. Tell him I’m going to mess with his profile for real.”

The other Fisher, the cousin whose name she never remembered, muttered something to him that Tanzie didn’t hear. They were all out of the car now, walking slowly toward her.

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Your brother needs to understand something. He messes with something of mine, we mess around with something of his.” He lifted his chin and spat noisily on the pavement. It sat there in front of her, a great green slug.

She wondered if they could see how hard she was breathing.

“Get in the car.”

“What?”

“Get in the fucking car.”

“No.” She began to back away from them. She glanced around her, trying to work out if anyone was coming down the road. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a bird in a cage.

“Get in the fucking car, Costanza.” He said it like her name was something disgusting. She wanted to run then, but she was really bad at running—and she knew they would catch her. She wanted to cross the road and turn toward home, but it was too far. And then a hand landed on her shoulder.

“Look at her hair.”

“You know about boys, Four Eyes?”

“Course she doesn’t know about boys. Look at the state of her.”

“She’s got lipstick on, the little tart. Still fugly, though.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to look at its face, do you?” They started laughing.

Her voice came out sounding like someone else’s: “Just leave me alone. Nicky didn’t do anything. We just want to be left alone.”

“We just want to be left alone.” Their voices were mocking. Fisher took a step closer. His voice lowered. “Just get into the fucking car, Costanza.”

“Leave me alone!”

He started grabbing at her then, his hands snatching at her clothes. Panic washed over her in an icy wave, tightening her throat. She tried to push him away. She might have been shouting, but nobody came. The two of them grabbed her arms and were pulling her toward the car. She could hear their grunts of effort, smell their deodorant, as her feet scrabbled for purchase on the pavement. And she knew like she knew anything that she should not get inside. Because as that door opened in front of her, like the jaws of some great animal, she suddenly remembered an American statistic for girls who got into strange men’s cars. Your odds of survival dropped by 72 percent as soon as you put your foot in that footwell. That statistic became a solid thing in front of her. Tanzie took hold of it and she hit and she kicked and she bit and she heard someone swear as her foot made contact with soft flesh and then something hit the side of her head and she reeled and spun and there was a crack as she hit the ground. Everything went sideways. There was scuffling, a distant shout. And she lifted her head and her sight was all blurry, but she thought she saw Norman coming toward her across the road at a speed she’d never seen, his teeth bared and his eyes black, looking not like Norman at all but some kind of demon, and then there was a flash of red and the squeal of brakes and all Tanzie saw was something black flying into the air like a ball of washing. And all she heard was the scream, the screaming that went on and on, the sound of the end of the world, the worst sound you ever heard, and she realized it was her it was her it was the sound of her own voice.

H
e was on the ground. Jess ran, breathless, barefoot, into the street and the man was standing there, both hands on his head, rocking on his feet, saying, “I never even saw it. I never saw it. It just ran straight out into the road.”

Nicky was beside Norman, cradling his head, white as a sheet and murmuring, “Come on, fella. Come on.” Tanzie was wide-eyed with shock, her arms rigid at her sides.

Jess knelt. Norman’s eyes were glass marbles. Blood seeped from his mouth and ear. “Oh no, you daft old thing. Oh, Norman. Oh no.” She put her ear to his chest. Nothing. A great sob rose into her throat.

She felt Tanzie’s hand on her shoulder, her fist grabbing a handful of her T-shirt and pulling at it again and again. “Mum, make it all right. Mum, make him all right.” Tanzie dropped to her knees and buried her face in his coat. “Norman. Norman.” And then she started to howl.

Beneath her shrieking, Nicky’s words emerged garbled and confused. “They were trying to get Tanzie into the car. I was trying to get you, but I couldn’t open the window. I just couldn’t open it, and I was shouting and he went through the fence. He knew. He was trying to help her.”

Nathalie came running down the road, her shirt fastened with the wrong buttons, hair half done in rollers. She wrapped her arms around Tanzie and held her close, rocking her, trying to stop the noise.

Norman’s eyes had stilled. Jess lowered her head to his and felt her heart break.

“I’ve called the emergency vet,” someone said.

She stroked his big soft ear. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“We’ve got to do something, Jess.” Nicky said it again, more urgently. “Now.”

She put a trembling hand on Nicky’s shoulder. “I think he’s gone, sweetheart.”

“No. You don’t say that. You’re the one who said we don’t say that. We don’t give in. You’re the one who says it’s all going to be okay. You don’t say that.”

And as Tanzie began to wail again, Nicky’s face crumpled. And then he sobbed, one elbow bent across his face, huge, gasping sobs, as if a dam had finally broken.

Jess sat in the middle of the road, as the cars crawled around her, and the curious neighbors hovered on the front steps of their houses, and she held her old dog’s enormous bloodied head on her lap and she lifted her face to the heavens and said silently,
What now?
What the hell now?

M
um brought her indoors. Tanzie didn’t want to leave him. She didn’t want him to die out there on the tarmac, alone, strangers staring at him with open mouths and murmured whispers, but Mum wouldn’t listen. Nigel from next door came running out and said he would take over, and the next thing Mum had her arms tight around Tanzie. And as she kicked and screamed for him, Mum’s voice was close in Tanzie’s ear: “Sweetheart, it’s all right, sweetheart, come on inside, don’t look, it’s all going to be okay.” But as Mum closed the front door, head against hers, pulling Tanzie to her, and her eyes were blind with tears, Tanzie could hear Nicky sobbing behind them in the hallway, weird jagged sobs like it wasn’t even something he knew how to do. And Mum was finally lying to her because it wasn’t going to be okay, it never could be because it was actually the end of everything.

“S
ometimes,” Gemma said, glancing behind her at the puce screaming child, arching its back at the next table, “I think the worst sort of parenting is not actually witnessed by social workers but by baristas.” She stirred her coffee briskly, as if biting back a natural urge to say something.

The mother, her blond corkscrew curls cascading stylishly over her back, continued to ask the child in soothing tones to stop and drink its babycino. It ignored her.

“I don’t see why we couldn’t go to the pub,” Ed said.

“At eleven fifteen in the morning? Jesus, why doesn’t she just tell him to stop? Or take him out? Does nobody know how to distract a child anymore?”

The child screamed louder. Ed’s head had begun to hurt. “We could go.”

“Go where?”

“The pub. It would be quieter.”

She stared at him, and then she ran a speculative finger across his chin. “Ed, how much did you drink last night?”

He had emerged from the police station spent. They had met his barrister afterward—Ed had already forgotten his name—with Paul Wilkes and two other solicitors, one of whom specialized in insider-trading cases. They sat around the mahogany table and spoke as if choreographed, laying out the prosecution case baldly so that Ed was in no doubt about what lay ahead. Against him: the e-mail trail, Deanna Lewis’s testimony, her brother’s phone calls, the FSA’s new determination to clamp down on perpetrators of insider trading. His own check, complete with signature.

Deanna had sworn that she had not known what she was doing was wrong. She said Ed had pressed the money on her. She said that had she known what he was suggesting was illegal, she would never have done it. Nor would she have told her brother.

The evidence for him: that he had plainly not gained a cent from the transaction. His legal team said—in his opinion, a little too cheerfully—that they would stress his ignorance, his ineptitude, that he was new to money, the ramifications and responsibilities of directorship. They would claim that Deanna Lewis knew very well what she was doing; that his and Deanna’s short relationship was actually evidence of her and her brother’s entrapment. The investigating team had been all over Ed’s accounts and found them gratifyingly unrewarding. He paid the full whack of tax every year. He had no investments. He had always liked things simple.

And the check was not addressed to her. It was in her possession, but her name was in her own writing. They would assert that she had taken a blank check from his home at some point during the relationship, they said.

“But she didn’t,” he said.

Nobody seemed to hear.

It could go either way with the prison sentence, they told him, but whatever happened, Ed was undoubtedly looking at a hefty fine. And obviously the end of his time with Mayfly. He would be banned from holding a directorship, possibly for some considerable time. Ed needed to be prepared for all these things. They began to confer among themselves.

And then he had said it: “I want to plead guilty.”

“What?”

The room fell silent.

“I did tell her to do it. I didn’t think about it being illegal. I just wanted her to go away, so I told her how she could make some money.”

They stared at each other.

“Ed—” his sister began.

“I want to tell the truth.”

One of the solicitors leaned forward. “We actually have quite a strong defense, Mr. Nicholls. I think that given the lack of your handwriting on the check—their only substantive piece of evidence—we can successfully claim that Ms. Lewis used your account for her own ends.”

“But I did give her the check.”

Paul Wilkes leaned forward. “Ed, you need to be clear about this. If you plead guilty, you substantially increase your chance of a custodial sentence.”

“I don’t care.”

“You will care for your own safety when you’re doing twenty-three hours in solitary in Winchester,” Gemma said.

He barely heard her. “I just want to tell the truth. That’s how it was.”

“Ed,” his sister grabbed at his arm, “the truth has no place in a courtroom. You’re going to make things worse.”

But he shook his head and sat back in his chair. And then he didn’t say anything more.

He knew they thought he was insane, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t bring himself to look exercised by any of it. He sat there, numb, his sister asking most of the questions. He heard
Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 blah blah blah
. He heard
open prison and punitive fines and Criminal Justice Act 1993 blah blah blah
. He honestly couldn’t make himself care about any of it. So he was going to prison for a bit? So what? He had lost everything anyway, twice over.

“Ed? Did you hear what I said?”

“Sorry.”

Sorry. It’s all he seemed to say these days. Sorry, I didn’t hear you. Sorry, I wasn’t listening. Sorry, I fucked it all up. Sorry, I was stupid
enough to fall in love with someone who actually believed I was an idiot.

And there it was: the now familiar clench at the thought of her. How could she have lied to him? How could they have sat side by side in that car for the best part of a week, and she hadn’t even begun to let on what she had done?

How could she have talked to him of her financial fears? How could she have talked to him of trust, have collapsed into his arms, all the while knowing that she had stolen money right out of his pocket?

She hadn’t even needed to say anything in the end. It was her silence that told him. The fractional delay between her registering the sight of the security card that he held, disbelieving in his hand, and her stuttering attempt to explain it.

I was going to tell you.

It’s not what you’re thinking. The hand to the mouth.

I wasn’t thinking.

Oh, God. It’s not—

She was worse than Lara. At least Lara had been honest, in her way, about his attractions. She liked the money. She liked how he looked, once she had shaped him according to what she wanted. He thought they had both understood, deep down, that their marriage was a kind of deal. He had told himself that everybody’s marriages were, one way or another.

But Jess? Jess had behaved as if he were the only man she had ever truly wanted. Jess had let him think it was the real him she liked, even when he was puking, even with his bashed-up face, afraid to meet his own parents. She had let him think it was him.

“Ed?”

“Sorry?” He lifted his head from his hands.

“I know it’s tough. But you will survive this.” His sister reached across and squeezed his hand. Somewhere behind her the child screamed. His head pulsed.

“Sure,” he said.

The moment she left he went to the pub.

—

They had fast-tracked the hearing, following his revised plea, and Ed spent the last few days before it took place with his father. It was partly down to choice, partly because he no longer had a flat in London that contained any furniture, everything having been packed for storage, ready for the completion of the sale.

It had sold for the asking price without a single viewing. The estate agent didn’t seem to find this surprising. “We have a waiting list for this block,” he said, as Ed handed him the spare keys. “Investors, wanting a safe place for their money. To be honest, it will probably just sit there empty for a few years until they feel like selling it.”

For three nights Ed stayed at his parents’ house, sleeping in his childhood room, waking in the small hours and running his fingers across the surface of the textured wallpaper behind his headboard, recalling the sound of his teenage sister’s feet thundering up the stairs, the slam of her bedroom door as she digested whatever insult their father had directed her way this time. In the mornings he sat and had breakfast with his mother and slowly grasped that his father was never coming home. That they would never see him there again, flicking his paper irritably into straight corners, reaching without looking for his mug of strong black coffee (no sugar). Occasionally she would burst into tears, apologizing and waving Ed away as she pressed a napkin to her eyes.
I’m fine, I’m fine. Really, love. Just ignore me.

In the overheated confines of room three, Victoria Ward, Bob Nicholls spoke less, ate less, did less. Ed didn’t need to speak to a doctor to see what was happening. The flesh seemed to be disappearing from him, melting away, leaving his skull pulled into a translucent veil, his eyes great bruised sockets.

They played chess. His father often fell asleep midgame, drifting off during a move, and Ed would sit patiently at his bedside and
wait for him to wake. And when his eyes opened, and he took a moment or two to register where he was, his mouth closing, and his eyebrows lowering, Ed would move a piece and act as if it had been a minute, not an hour, that he had been missing from the game.

They talked. Not about the important stuff. Ed wasn’t sure either of them was built that way. They talked about cricket and the weather. Ed’s father talked about the nurse with the dimples who always thought up something funny to tell him. He asked Ed to look after his mother. He worried she was doing too much. He worried that the man who cleared the gutters would overcharge her if he wasn’t there. He was annoyed that he had spent lots of money in in the autumn having the moss removed from the lawn and he wouldn’t get to see the results. Ed didn’t try to argue. It would have seemed patronizing.

“So, where’s the firecracker?” he said one evening. He was two moves from checkmate. Ed was trying to work out how to block him.

“The what?”

“Your girl.”

“Lara? Dad, you know we got—”

“Not her. The other one.”

Ed took a breath. “Jess? She’s . . . uh . . . she’s at home, I think.”

“I liked her. She had a way of looking at you.” He pushed his castle forward slowly onto a black square. “I’m glad you have her.” He gave a slight nod. “Trouble,” he murmured, almost to himself, and smiled.

Ed’s strategy went to pieces. His father beat him in three moves.