One Plus One

  She straightened up and glared at him. "You're more than welcome to suck the cork out, if you'd rather."

  He held up his hand. "No, no. You go ahead. Broken glass in my socks is exactly how I hoped to end tonight."

  Jess checked the cork and thumped again. And there--a centimeter of it protruded from the neck of the bottle. Thump. Another centimeter. She held it carefully, gave it one more thump, and there it was: she pulled the rest of the cork gently from the neck and handed it to him.

  He stared at it, and then at her. She handed him back his shoe.

  "Wow. You're a useful woman to know."

  "I can also put up shelves, replace rotting floorboards, and make a fan belt out of a tied stocking."

  "Really?"

  "Not the fan belt." She climbed into the car and accepted the plastic cup of wine. "I tried it once. It shredded before we'd got thirty yards down the road. Total waste of Marks & Spencer opaques." She took a sip. "And the car stank of burned tights for weeks."

  Behind them, Norman whimpered in his sleep.

  "Truce," Mr. Nicholls said, and held up his cup.

  "Truce. You're not going to drive afterward, are you?" she said, holding up her own.

  "I won't if you won't."

  "Oh, very funny."

  And suddenly the evening became a little easier.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ed

  So these were the things Ed discovered about Jessica Thomas, once she'd had a drink or two (actually, four or five) and stopped being chippy: One, the boy wasn't actually her kid. He was the son of her ex and her ex's ex, and given that both of them had effectively walked out on him, she was pretty much the only person he had left. "Kind of you," he said.

  "Not really," she said. "Nicky is as good as mine. He's been with me since he was eight. He looks out for Tanzie. And besides, families are different shapes now, right?" The defensive way she said it made him think she had had this conversation many times before.

  Two, the little girl was ten. He did some mental arithmetic, and Jess cut in before he said a word.

  "Seventeen."

  "That's . . . young."

  "I was a wild kid. I knew everything. I actually knew nothing. Marty came along, I dropped out of school, and then I got pregnant. I wasn't always going to be a cleaner, you know. My mum was a teacher." Her gaze had slid toward him, as if she knew this fact would shock.

  "Okay."

  "Retired now. She lives in Cornwall. We don't really get on. She doesn't agree with what she calls my life choices. I never could explain that once you have a baby at seventeen, there are no choices."

  "Not even now?"

  "Nope." She twisted a lock of hair between her fingers. "Because you never quite catch up. Your friends are at college, you're at home with a tiny baby. You haven't even had time to think about what your ambitions might be. Your friends are starting their careers, you're down at the housing office trying to find somewhere to live. Your friends are buying their first cars and houses and you're trying to find a job that you can fit round child care. And all the jobs you can fit round school hours have really crappy wages. And that was before the economy went splat. Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't regret having Tanzie, not for a minute. And I don't regret taking Nicky on. But if I had my time again, sure, I'd have had them after I had done something with my life. It would be nice to be able to give them . . . something better."

  She hadn't bothered to put the seat back up while she told him this. She lay propped on her elbow facing him under the duvet and her bare feet rested on the dashboard. Ed found he didn't mind them so much.

  "You could still have a career," he said. "You're young. I mean . . . you could get an after-school nanny or something?"

  She actually laughed. A great seal bark, "Ha!" Her laugh was big, abrupt, and awkward, at odds with her size and shape. She sat bolt upright and took a swig of her wine. "Yeah. Right, Mr. Nicholls. Sure I could."

  Three, she liked fixing things. She sometimes wondered if she could have made that her career. She did odd jobs around the council estate, from rewiring plugs to tiling people's bathrooms. "I did everything around the house. I'm good at making stuff. I can even block-print wallpaper."

  "You make your own wallpaper?"

  "Don't look at me like that. It's in Tanzie's room. I made her clothes, too, until recently."

  "Are you actually from the Second World War? Do you save jam jars and string, too?"

  "So what did you want to be?"

  "What I was," he said. And then he realized he didn't want to talk about it and changed the subject.

  Four, she had seriously tiny feet. As in she bought child-sized shoes. (Apparently they were cheaper.) After she'd said this he had to stop himself from sneaking looks at her feet like some kind of weirdo.

  Five, before she'd had children, she could drink four double vodkas in a row and still walk a straight line. "Yup, I could hold my drink. Obviously not enough to remember birth control."

  She almost never drank at home. "When I'm working at the pub and someone offers me one, I just take the cash. And when I'm at home, I worry that something might happen to the kids and I'll need to be together." She stared out of the window. "Now I think about it, this is the closest thing I've had to a night out in . . . five months."

  "A man who shut a door in your face, two bottles of rot-gut wine, and a car park."

  "I'm not knocking it."

  She didn't explain what made her worry so much about the kids. He thought back to Nicky's face and decided not to ask.

  Six, she had a scar under her chin from when she'd fallen off a bike and a piece of gravel had been lodged in it for two whole weeks. She tried to show him, but the light in the car wasn't strong enough. She also had a tattoo on the base of her spine. "A proper tramp stamp, according to Marty. He wouldn't talk to me for two whole days after I got it." She paused. "I think that's probably why I got it."

  Seven, her middle name was Rae. She had to spell it out every single time.

  Eight, she didn't mind cleaning, but she really, really hated people treating her as if she were "just" a cleaner. (He had the grace to color a little here.) Nine, she hadn't had a date in the two years since her ex had left.

  "You haven't had sex for two and a half years?"

  "I said he left two years ago."

  "It's a reasonable calculation."

  She pushed herself upright and gave him a sideways look. "Three and a half, actually. If we're counting. Apart from one, um, episode last year. And you don't have to look so shocked."

  "I'm not shocked," he said, and tried to rearrange his face. He shrugged. "Three and a half years. I mean, it's only, what, a quarter of your adult life? No time at all."

  "Yeah. Thanks for that." And then he wasn't sure what happened, but something in the atmosphere changed. She mumbled something that he couldn't make out, pulled her hair into another ponytail--she tied her hair back for no reason when she felt nervous, he noticed, as if she needed to be doing something--and said maybe it was really time for them to be getting some sleep.

  Ed thought he would lie awake for ages. There was something oddly unsettling about being in a darkened car just an arm's length from an attractive woman you had just shared two bottles of wine with. Even if she was huddled under a SpongeBob SquarePants duvet. He looked out of the sunroof at the stars, listened to the lorries rumbling toward London, and thought that his real life--the one with his company and his office and the never-ending hangover of Deanna Lewis--was now a million miles away.

  "Still awake?"

  He turned his head, wondering if she'd been watching him. "No."

  "Okay," came the murmur from the passenger seat. "Truth game."

  He raised his eyes to the roof. "Go on, then."

  "You first."

  He couldn't come up with anything.

  "You must be able to think of something."

  "Okay, why are you wearing flip-flops?"

  "That's your questio
n?"

  "It's freezing out. It's been the coldest, wettest spring since records began. And you're wearing flip-flops."

  "Does it bug you that much?"

  "I just don't understand it. You're obviously cold."

  She pointed a toe. "It's spring."

  "So?"

  "So. It's spring. Therefore the weather will get better."

  "You're wearing flip-flops as an expression of faith."

  "If you like."

  He couldn't think of how to reply to this.

  "Okay, my turn."

  He waited.

  "Did you think about driving off and leaving us this morning?"

  "No."

  "Liar."

  "Okay. Maybe a bit. Your neighbor wanted to smash my head in with a baseball bat and your dog smells really bad."

  "Pfft. Any excuse."

  He heard her shift in the seat. Her feet disappeared under the duvet. Her hair smelled of coconut.

  "So why didn't you?"

  He thought for a minute before he responded. Perhaps it was because he couldn't see her face. Perhaps the drink and the late hour had lowered his defenses, because he wouldn't normally have answered like he did. "Because I've done some stupid stuff lately. And maybe some part of me just wanted to do something I could feel good about."

  Ed thought she was going to say something. He sort of hoped she would. But she didn't.

  He lay there for a few minutes, gazing out at the sodium lights and listening to Jessica Rae Thomas's breathing and thought how much he missed just sleeping near another person. Most days he felt like the loneliest man on the planet. He thought about those tiny feet and polished toenails and realized he had probably had too much to drink. Don't be an idiot, Nicholls, he told himself, and turned so that he had his back to her.

  And then he must have fallen asleep, because suddenly it was cold and pale gray outside and his arm was numb and he was so groggy that it took two whole minutes to figure out that the banging he could hear was the security guard knocking on the driver's window to tell them they couldn't sleep there.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Tanzie

  There were four different types of Danish pastry at the breakfast buffet and three different types of fruit juice, and a whole rack of those little individual packets of cereal that Mum said were uneconomical and would never buy. She had knocked on the window at a quarter past eight to tell them they should wear their jackets to breakfast and stuff as many of each of them as they could into their pockets. Her hair had flattened on one side and she had no makeup on. Tanzie guessed the car hadn't been that much of an adventure after all.

  "Not the butters or jams. Or anything that needs cutlery. Rolls, muffins, that kind of thing. Don't get caught." She looked behind her to where Mr. Nicholls seemed to be having an argument with a security guard. "And apples. Apples are healthy. And maybe some slices of ham for Norman."

  "Where am I meant to put the ham?"

  "Or a sausage. Wrap it in a napkin."

  "Isn't that stealing?"

  "No."

  "But--"

  "It's just taking a bit more than you're likely to eat at that exact moment. You're just . . . Imagine you're a guest with a hormone disorder and it makes you really, really hungry."

  "But I haven't got a hormone disorder."

  "But you could have. That's the point. You're that hungry, sick person, Tanze. You've paid for your breakfast, but you need to eat a lot. More than you would normally eat."

  Tanzie folded her arms. "You said it was wrong to steal."

  "It's not stealing. It's just getting your money's worth."

  "But we didn't pay for it. Mr. Nicholls did."

  "Tanzie, just do as I say, please. Look, Mr. Nicholls and I are going to have to leave the car park for half an hour. Just do it, then come back to the room and be ready to leave at nine. Okay?" Jess leaned through the window and kissed Tanzie, then trudged back toward the car, her jacket wrapped around her. She stopped, turned back, and shouted, "Don't forget to brush your teeth. And don't leave any of your maths books."

  Nicky came out of the bathroom. He was wearing his really tight black jeans and a T-shirt that said WHATEVS across the front.

  "You're never going to get a sausage in those," Tanzie said, staring at his jeans.

  "I bet I can hide more than you can," he said.

  Her eyes met his. "You're on," Tanzie said, and ran to get dressed.

  --

  Mr. Nicholls leaned forward and squinted through his windscreen as Nicky and she walked across the car park. To be fair, Tanzie thought, she would probably have squinted at them, too. Nicky had stuffed two large oranges and an apple down the front of his jeans and waddled across the asphalt like he'd had an accident in his trousers. She was in her sequined jacket, despite feeling too hot, because she'd packed the front of her hoodie with little packets of cereal and if she didn't wear her jacket she looked like she might be pregnant. With baby robots.

  They couldn't stop laughing.

  "Just get in, get in," said Mum, throwing their overnight bags into the boot as she glanced behind her. "What did you get?"

  Mr. Nicholls set off down the road. Tanzie could see him glancing in the mirror as they took turns unloading their haul and handing it forward to Mum.

  Nicky pulled a white package from his pocket. "Three Danish pastries. Watch out--the icing got a bit stuck to the napkins. Four sausages and a few slices of bacon in a paper cup for Norman. Two slices of cheese, a yogurt, and--" He tugged his jacket over his crotch, reached down, grimacing, tensing, and pulled out the fruit. "I can't believe I managed to fit those in there."

  "There is nothing I can say to that that's in any way appropriate mother-son conversation," Mum said.

  Tanzie had six small packets of cereal, two bananas, and a jam sandwich. She sat eating from one of the packets while Norman stared at her and two stalactites of drool grew longer and longer from his lips until they were pooling on the seat of Mr. Nicholls's car.

  "That woman behind the poached eggs definitely saw us."

  "I told her you had a hormone disorder," Tanzie said. "I told her you had to eat twice your body weight three times a day or you would faint in their dining room and you might actually die."

  "Nice," said Nicky.

  "You win on numbers," she said, counting out his items. "But I win extra points for skill." She leaned forward and, as everyone watched, she carefully lifted the two polystyrene cups of coffee from each of her pockets, packed with paper napkins so that they would stay upright. She handed one to Mum and the other she placed in the cup holder next to Mr. Nicholls.

  "You are a genius," Mum said, peeling off the lid. "Oh, Tanze, you have no idea how much I needed this." She took a sip, closing her eyes. Tanzie wasn't sure if it was that they'd done so well with the buffet, or just that Nicky was laughing for the first time in ages, but for a moment her mum looked happier than she had since Dad left.

  Mr. Nicholls just stared like they were a bunch of aliens.

  "Okay, so we can make sandwiches for lunch with the ham, cheese, and sausages. You guys can eat the pastries now. Fruit for dessert. Want one?" She held an orange toward Mr. Nicholls. "It's a bit warm still. But I can peel it."

  "Uh, kind of you," he said, tearing his gaze away. "But I think I'll just stop at a Starbucks."

  --

  The next part of the journey was actually quite nice. There were no traffic jams and Mum persuaded Mr. Nicholls to put on her favorite radio station and sang along to six songs, getting louder with each one. She made Tanzie and Nicky join in, too, and Mr. Nicholls looked fed up at first, but Tanzie noticed that after a few miles he was nodding his head like he was actually enjoying himself. The sun got really hot and Mr. Nicholls slid the roof back. Norman sat bolt upright so that he could smell the air as they were going along and it meant that he didn't squish them into each door, which was also nice.

  It reminded Tanzie a bit of when Dad lived with them and they would
sometimes go on outings in his car. Except Dad always drove too fast and they could never agree on where to stop and eat. And Dad would say he didn't understand why they couldn't just blow some money on a pub lunch and Mum would say that she'd made the sandwiches now and it would be silly to waste them. And Dad would tell Nicky to get his head out of whatever game he was playing and enjoy the damn scenery and Nicky would mutter that he hadn't actually asked to come, which would make Dad even madder.

  And then Tanzie thought that while she did love Dad, she probably preferred this trip without him.

  After two hours Mr. Nicholls said he needed to stretch, and Norman needed to wee, so they stopped at the edge of a country park. Mum put some of the buffet haul out and they sat in the shade at a proper wooden picnic table and ate. Tanzie did some revision (prime numbers and quadratic equations), then took Norman for a walk around the woods. He was really happy and stopped every two minutes to sniff at something, and the sun kept sending little moving spotlights through the trees and they saw a deer and two pheasants and it was like they were actually on holiday.

  "You okay, lovey?" Mum said, walking up with her arms crossed. From where they stood they could just see Nicky talking to Mr. Nicholls at the table through the trees. "Feeling confident?"

  "I think so," she said.

  "Did you go through the old test papers last night?"

  "Yes. I do find the prime-number sequences a bit difficult, but I wrote them all down and when I saw the sequencing laid out I found it easier."

  "No more nightmares about the Fishers?"

  "Last night," Tanzie said, "I dreamed about a cabbage that could roller-skate. It was called Kevin."

  Mum gave her a long look. "Right."

  It was cooler in the forest, and it smelled of good damp, mossy and green and alive, not like the damp in their back room, which just smelled moldy. Mum stopped on the path and turned back toward the car. "I told you good things happen, didn't I?" She waited for Tanzie to catch up. "Mr. Nicholls is going to get us there tomorrow. We'll have a quiet night, get you through this competition, and you'll start at your new school. Then, hopefully, all our lives will change a little for the better. And this is fun, isn't it? This is a nice trip?"

  She kept her eyes on the car as she spoke and her voice did that thing where she was saying one thing and thinking about something else. Tanzie noticed she'd put her makeup on while they were in the car. "Mum," she said.