One Plus One, Page 28

  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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Tanzie

  Tanzie 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 hi
m. 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jess

  He 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?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Tanzie

  Mum 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Ed

  "Sometimes," 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 hi
m 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.