One Plus One: A Novel (6 page)

“I’m saving you from a driving ban.” She held them aloft, and turned back toward the bar.

“Oh, for crissakes,” he said. He made it sound as if she were the last in a long line of irritations. It made her want to kick him.

“I’ll get you a taxi. Just . . . just sit there. I’ll give you your keys back once you’re safely inside it.”

—

She texted Liam from her phone in the back hall.

Does this mean I get lucky?
he replied.

If you like them hairy. And male.

She walked back outside and Mr. Nicholls was gone. His car was still there. She called him twice, wondering if he’d headed off to a bush to relieve himself, then glanced down and there he was, fast asleep on the outside bench.

She thought, briefly, about leaving him there. But it was chilly, and the sea mists were unpredictable, and he would likely wake up without his wallet.

“I’m not taking that,” Liam said through the driver’s window when his taxi pulled into the car park.

“He’s fine. He’s just asleep. I can tell you where he’s got to go.”

“Nuh-uh. Last sleeper I had woke up and vomited all down my new seat covers. Then somehow perked up enough to do a runner.”

“He lives on Beachfront. He’s hardly going to do a runner.” She glanced down at her watch. “Oh, come on, Liam. It’s late. I just want to get home.”

“Then leave him. Sorry, Jess.”

“Okay. How about I stay in the car while you drop him off? If he’s ill, I’ll clean it up. Then you can drop me home. He can pay.” She picked up Mr. Nicholls’s change from where he had dropped it on the ground beside the bench and sifted through it. “Thirteen pounds should do it, yes?”

He pulled a face. “Ah, Jess. Don’t make it hard for me.”

“Please, Liam.” She smiled. She placed a hand on his arm. “Pretty please.”

He gazed down the road. “All right.”

She lowered her head to Mr. Nicholls’s sleeping face, then straightened and nodded. “He says that’s fine.”

Liam shook his head. The flirtatious air of earlier had evaporated.

“Oh, come on, Liam. Help me get him in. I need to go home.”

Mr. Nicholls lay with his head on her lap, like a sick child. She didn’t know where to put her hands. She held them across the back of the rear seat, and spent the whole journey praying that he wouldn’t be sick. Every time he groaned, or shifted, she wound down a window, or leaned across to check his face. Don’t you dare, she told him silently. Just don’t you dare. They were two minutes from the holiday park when her phone buzzed. It was Belinda, her neighbor. She squinted at the illuminated screen:
Boys have been after your Nicky again. Got him outside the chip shop. Nigel’s taken him to hospital.

A large, cold weight landed on her chest.
On my way,
she typed.

Nigel says he’ll stay with him till you’re there. I’ll stay here with Tanzie.

Thanks, Belinda. I’ll be as quick as I can.

Mr. Nicholls shifted and let out an elongated snore. She stared at him, at his expensive haircut and his too-blue jeans, and was suddenly furious. She might have been home by now if it weren’t for him. It would have been her walking the dog, not Nicky.

“Here we are.”

Jess directed him to Mr. Nicholls’s house, and they dragged him in between them, his arms slung over their shoulders, Jess’s knees buckling a little under his surprising weight. He stirred a little when they reached his front door, and she fumbled through his keys, trying to find the right one, before she decided it would be easier to use her own.

“Where do you want him?” said Liam, puffing.

“Sofa. I’m not lugging him upstairs.”

She pushed him briskly into the recovery position. She took his glasses off, threw a nearby jacket over him, and dropped his keys on the side table that she had polished earlier that day.

And then she felt able to speak the words: “Liam, can you drop me at the hospital? Nicky’s had an accident.”

—

The car sped through the empty lanes in silence. Her mind was racing. She was afraid of what she might find. How badly was he hurt? Had Tanzie seen any of it? And then, under the fear, the stupid, mundane stuff, like, Will I be hours at the hospital? A taxi from there would be at least fifteen pounds.

“You want me to wait?” asked Liam, when he pulled up at A and E.

She was running across the tarmac before he had even stopped the car.

He was in a side cubicle. When the nurse showed her in through the curtain, Nigel rose from his plastic chair, his kind, doughy face taut with anxiety. Nicky was turned away, his cheekbone covered with a dressing and the beginnings of a black eye leaking color into the socket above it. A temporary bandage snaked its way around his hairline.

It was all she could do not to let out a sob.

“They’re going to stitch it. But they want to keep him in. Check for fractures and whatnot.” Nigel looked awkward. “He didn’t want me to call the police.” He gestured in the general direction of outside. “If you’re all right, I’ll be getting back to Belinda. It’s late . . .”

Jess whispered her thanks, and moved over to Nicky. She placed her hand on the blanket, where his shoulder was.

“Tanzie’s okay,” he whispered, not looking at her.

“I know, sweetheart.” She sat down on the plastic chair beside his bed. “What happened?”

He gave a faint shrug. Nicky never wanted to talk about it. What was the point, after all? Everyone knew the score. You looked like a freak, you got battered. You still looked like a freak, they still kept coming after you. That was the crushing, immovable logic of a small town.

And just for once, she didn’t know what to say to him. She couldn’t tell him it was all right, because it wasn’t. She couldn’t tell him the police would get the Fishers, because they never did. She couldn’t tell him that things would change before he knew it, because when you were a teenager your life really only stretches in your imagination about two weeks ahead, and they both knew that it wasn’t going to get better by then. Or, probably, anytime soon after that.

—

“He all right?” said Liam, as she walked slowly back out to the car. The adrenaline had leached out of her, and Jess’s shoulders slumped with exhaustion. She opened the rear door to fetch her jacket and bag, and his eyes, in the rearview mirror, took it all in.

“He’ll live.”

“Little bastards. I was just talking to your neighbor. Someone ought to do something.” He adjusted his mirror. “I’d teach them a lesson myself if I didn’t have to watch out for my license. Boredom, that’s what it is. They don’t know what else to do with themselves but pick on someone. Make sure you got all your stuff, Jess.”

She had to half climb into the car to reach her coat. And as she did, she felt something under her feet. Semisolid, cylindrical. She moved her foot, reached down into the footwell, and came up with a fat roll of banknotes. She stared at it in the half dark, then at what had fallen down beside it. A laminated identity card, the kind you would use at an office. Both must have fallen out of Mr. Nicholls’s pocket when he was slumped on the backseat. Before she could think about it she stuffed them into her bag.

“Here,” she said, reaching into her purse, but Liam raised a hand.

“No. I’ve got it. You’ve enough on your plate.” He gave her a wink. “Give one of us a ring when you want picking up. On the house. Dan’s cleared it.”

“But—”

“No buts. Out you get now, Jess. Make sure that boy of yours is okay. I’ll see you at the pub.”

She felt almost tearful with gratitude. She stood there, one hand raised, as he circled the car park and shouted out of the driver’s window: “You should tell him, though, if he’d just try to look a bit more normal, he might not get his head bashed in so often.”

S
he dozed through the small hours on the plastic hospital chair, waking occasionally from discomfort and the sound of distant tragedies in the ward beyond the curtain. She watched the newly stitched Nicky as he finally slept, wondering how she was supposed to protect him. She wondered what was going on in his head. She wondered, with a clench of her stomach that no longer seemed to go away, what was coming next. A nurse popped her head around the curtain at seven and said she’d made her some tea and toast. This small act of kindness caused her to fight back embarrassed tears. The consultant stopped by shortly after eight, and said Nicky would probably spend another night while they checked that there was no internal bleeding. There was a shadow they hadn’t quite got to the bottom of on the X-ray and they wanted to be sure. The best thing Jess could do would be to go home and get some rest. Nathalie rang to say she’d taken Tanzie to school with her kids and that everything was fine.

Everything was fine.

She got off the bus two stops before her house, walked round to Leanne Fisher’s, knocked on her door and told her, with as much politeness as she could muster, that if Jason came anywhere near Nicky again she would have the police on him. Whereupon Leanne Fisher spat at her and said if Jess didn’t fuck right off she’d put a brick through her effing window. There was a burst of laughter from within the house as Jess walked away.

It was pretty much the response she’d expected.

She let herself into her empty home. She paid the water bill with what would have been the rent money. She paid the electric with her
cleaning money. She showered and changed and did her lunchtime shift at the pub, so lost in thought that Stewart Pringle rested his hand on her arse for a full ten seconds before she noticed. She poured his half pint of Best Bitter slowly over his shoes.

“What did you do that for?” Des yelled when Stewart complained.

“If you’re so okay with it, you stand there and let him rest his hand on your arse,” she said, and went back to cleaning the glasses.

“She has a point,” Des said.

She vacuumed the entire house before Tanzie came home. She was so tired she should have been comatose, but in fact she was so angry it was possible she did it all at double speed. She couldn’t stop herself. She cleaned and folded and sorted because if she didn’t she would take Marty’s old sledgehammer down from the two hooks in the musty garage, walk round to the Fishers’ house, and do something that would finish them all off completely. She cleaned because if she didn’t she would stand in her overgrown little back garden, lift her face to the sky, and scream and scream and scream, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.

By the time she heard the footsteps on the path, the house floated in a toxic fug of furniture polish and kitchen cleaner. She took two deep breaths, coughed a bit, then made herself take one more before she opened the door, a reassuring smile already plastered on her face. Nathalie stood on the path, her hands on Tanzie’s shoulders. Tanzie walked up to her, put her arms around her waist, and held her tightly, her eyes shut.

“He’s okay, sweetheart,” Jess told her, stroking her hair. “It’s all right. It’s just a silly boys’ fight.”

Nathalie touched Jess’s arm, gave a tiny shake of her head. “You take care,” she said, and left.

Jess made Tanzie a sandwich and watched her wander away into the shady part of the garden to do algorithms and told herself she would let her know about St. Anne’s tomorrow. She would definitely tell her tomorrow.

And then she disappeared into the bathroom and unrolled the money she had found in Mr. Nicholls’s taxi. Four hundred and eighty pounds. She laid it out in neat piles on the floor with the door locked.

Jess knew what she should do. Of course she did. It wasn’t her money. It was a lesson she had drummed into the kids: You don’t steal. You don’t take what is not yours. Do the right thing, and you will be rewarded for it in the end.

Do the right thing.

But a new, darker voice had begun a low internal hum in her ear. Why should you give it back? He won’t miss it. He was passed out in the car park, in the taxi, in his house. It could have fallen out anywhere. It was only luck that you found it, after all. And what if someone else from round here had picked it up? You think they would have handed it back to him?

His security card said the name of his company was Mayfly. His first name was Ed.

She would take the money back to Mr. Nicholls. Her brain whirred round and round in time with the clothes dryer.

And still she didn’t do it.

—

Jess never used to think about money. Marty worked five days a week for a local taxi firm, handled all the finances, and they generally had enough for him to go down to the pub a couple of nights a week and for her to have the odd night out with Nathalie. They took the occasional holiday. Some years they did better than others, but they got by.

And then Marty got fed up with making do. There was a camping holiday in Wales where it rained for eight days solid and Marty became more and more dissatisfied, as if the weather were something to be taken personally. “Why can’t we go to Spain or somewhere hot?” he’d mutter, staring out through the flaps of the sodden tent. “This is crap. This isn’t a bloody holiday.”

He got fed up with his work; he found more and more to complain about. The other drivers were against him. The controller was cheating him. The passengers were tight.

And then he started with the schemes. The knockoff T-shirts for a band that fell out of the charts as quickly as it had arrived. The pyramid scheme they joined two weeks too late. Import-export was the thing, he told Jess confidently, arriving home from the pub one night. He had met a bloke who could get cheap electrical goods from India, and they could sell them on to someone he knew. And then—surprise, surprise—the someone who was going to sell them on turned out not to be the sure thing Marty had been promised. And the few people who did buy the appliances complained that they blew their electricity supply, and the rest of them rusted, even in the garage, so their meager savings turned into a pile of useless white goods that had to be loaded, fourteen a week, into Marty’s car and taken to the dump.

And then came the Rolls-Royce. At least Jess could see the sense in that one: Marty would spray it metallic gray, then rent himself out as a chauffeur for weddings and funerals. He’d bought it off eBay from a man in the Midlands, and made it halfway down the M6 before it conked out. Something to do with the starter motor, the mechanic said, peering under the bonnet. But the more he looked at it, the more seemed wrong with it. The first winter it spent on the drive, mice got into the upholstery so they needed money to replace the backseats before he could rent it out. And then it turned out that replacement upholstered Rolls-Royce seats were about the only thing you couldn’t get on eBay. So it sat there in the garage, a daily reminder of how they never quite managed to get ahead.

She’d taken over the money when Marty started to spend the better part of each day in bed. Depression was an illness, everyone said so. Although, from what his mates said, he didn’t seem to suffer it on the two evenings he still managed to drag himself to the pub.

When Jess peeled all the bank statements from their envelopes
and retrieved the savings book from its place in the hall desk, she had finally seen for herself the trouble they were in. She’d tried to talk to him a couple of times, but he’d just pulled the duvet over his head and said he couldn’t cope. It was around then that he’d suggested he might go home to his mum’s for a bit. If she was honest, Jess was relieved to see him go. It was hard enough coping with Nicky—who was still a silent, skinny wraith—Tanzie, and two jobs.

“Go,” she’d said, stroking his hair. She remembered thinking how long it had been since she’d touched him. “Go for a couple of weeks. You’ll feel better for a bit of a break.” He had looked at her silently, his eyes red rimmed, and squeezed her hand.

That had been two years ago. Neither of them had ever seriously raised the possibility of his coming back.

—

She tried to keep things normal until Tanzie went to bed, asking what she’d had to eat at Nathalie’s, telling her what Norman had done while she was out. She combed Tanzie’s hair, then sat on her bed and read her an old Harry Potter, as if she were a much younger child, and for once Tanzie didn’t tell her that actually she’d rather do some maths.

When Jess was sure that Tanzie was asleep, she rang the hospital. The nurse said that Nicky was comfortable: X-rays had shown no evidence that his lung was punctured. The small facial fracture would have to heal by itself.

She rang Marty, who listened in silence, then asked, “Does he still wear all that stuff on his face?”

“He wears a bit of mascara, yes.”

There was a long silence.

“Don’t say it, Marty. Don’t you dare say it.” She put the phone down before he could.

And then the police rang at a quarter to ten and said that Jason Fisher had denied all knowledge.

“There were fourteen witnesses,” she said, her voice tight with the
effort of not shouting. “Including the man who runs the fish-and-chip shop. They jumped my son. There were four of them.”

“Yes, but witnesses are only any use to us if they can identify the perpetrators, madam. And Mr. Brent says it wasn’t clear who was actually doing the fighting.” He let out a sigh as if she should know what teenage boys were like. “I have to tell you, madam, the Fishers claim your son started it.”

“He’s about as likely to start a fight as the Dalai bloody Lama. We’re talking about a boy who can’t put a duvet in its cover without worrying it might hurt someone.”

“We can only act on the evidence, madam.”

The Fishers. With their reputation, she’d be lucky if a single person “remembered” what they’d seen.

For a moment Jess let her head fall into her hands. They would never let up. And it would be Tanzie next, once she started secondary school. She would be a prime target with her love of maths and her oddness and her total lack of guile. Jess went cold. She thought about Marty’s sledgehammer in the garage, and how it would feel to walk down to the Fishers’ house and—

The phone rang. She snatched it up. “What now? Are you going to tell me he beat himself up, too? Is that it?”

“Mrs. Thomas?”

She blinked.

“Mrs. Thomas? It’s Mr. Tsvangarai.”

“Oh. Mr. Tsvangarai, I’m sorry. It—it’s not a great time.” She held out her hand in front of her. It was shaking.

“I’m sorry to call you so late, but it’s a matter of some urgency. I have discovered something of interest. It’s called the Maths Olympiad.” He spoke the words carefully.

“The what?”

“It’s a new thing, in Scotland, for gifted students. A maths competition. And we still have time to enter Tanzie.”

“A maths competition?” Jess closed her eyes. “You know, that’s
really nice, Mr. Tsvangarai, but we have quite a lot going on here right now, and I don’t think I—”

“Mrs. Thomas, the prizes are five hundred pounds, a thousand pounds, and five thousand pounds. Five thousand pounds. If she won, you’d have at least the first year of your St. Anne’s school fees sorted out.”

“Say that again.”

Jess sat down on the chair as he explained in greater depth.

“This is an actual thing?”

“It is an actual thing.”

“And you really think she could do it?”

“There is a category especially for her age group. I cannot see how she could fail.”

Five thousand pounds, a voice sang in her head. Enough to get her through the first two years.

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch. Well, you have to do advanced maths, obviously. But I can’t see that this would be a problem for Tanzie.”

She stood up and sat down again.

“And of course you would have to travel to Scotland.”

“Details, Mr. Tsvangarai. Details.” Her head was spinning. “This is for real, right? This isn’t a joke?”

“I am not a funny man, Mrs. Thomas.”

“Fuck.
Fuck!
Mr. Tsvangarai, you are an absolute beauty.”

She could hear his embarrassed laugh.

“So . . . what do we do now?”

“Well, they waived the qualifying test after I sent over some examples of Tanzie’s work. I understand they are very keen to have children from less-advantaged schools. And between you and me, it is, of course, an enormous benefit that she’s a girl. But we have to decide quickly. You see, this year’s Olympiad is only five days away.”

Five days. The deadline for registration at St. Anne’s was tomorrow.

She stood in the middle of the room, thinking. Then she ran
upstairs, pulled Mr. Nicholls’s money from its nest among her tights, and before she could think she stuffed it into an envelope, scrawled a note, and wrote
ADMISSIONS OFFICE, ST. ANNE’S
in careful letters on the front. She would drop it in on the way to clean tomorrow.

She would pay it back. Every penny.

But right now she didn’t have a choice.

—

That night, Jess sat at the kitchen table and worked out a rough plan. She looked up the schedule for trains to Edinburgh, laughed a bit hysterically, then looked up the cost of three coach tickets (£187, including the £13 it would cost to get to the station) and the cost of putting Norman in a kennel for a week (£94). She put the palms of her hands into her eye sockets and let them stay there for a bit. And then, when the children were asleep, she dug out the keys to the Rolls-Royce, went outside, brushed the mouse droppings off the driver’s seat and tried the ignition.

It turned over on the third attempt.

Jess sat in the garage that always smelled of damp, surrounded by old garden furniture, bits of car, plastic buckets, and let the engine run. Then she leaned forward and peeled back the faded tax disc. It was almost two years out of date. And she didn’t have insurance.

She turned off the ignition and sat in the dark as the smell of oil gradually faded from the air, and she thought, for the hundredth time: Do the right thing.