‘Yes, we are. Unless we get re-banded.’
‘Or an out-of-season three-day holiday at the holiday village in Kent. One hundred and seventy-five pounds, inclusive of VAT.’ She leant forward. ‘That’s where we went last year. We got an extra night free because Mum mended the man’s curtains. And they had a waterslide.’
There was a brief silence.
Ed was about to speak when Tanzie’s head appeared between the two front seats. ‘Or a whole month’s cleaning of a four-bedroom house from Mum, laundering of sheets and towels included, at her current rates. Give or take a pound.’ She leant back in her seat, apparently satisfied.
They drove three miles, turned right at a T-junction, left onto a narrow lane. Ed wanted to say something but found his voice had temporarily disappeared. Behind him, Nicky put his ear-buds back in and turned away. The sun hid briefly behind a cloud.
‘Still,’ said Jess, putting her bare feet up on the dashboard, and leaning forward to turn up the music, ‘let’s hope you do really well with it, eh?’
12.
Jess
Jess’s grandmother had often stated that the key to a happy life was a short memory. Admittedly that was before she got dementia and used to forget where she lived, but Jess took her point. She had to forget about that money. She was never going to survive being stuck in a car with Mr Nicholls if she let herself think too hard about what she had done. Marty used to tell her she had the world’s worst poker face: her feelings floated across them like reflections on a still pond. She would give herself away within hours and blurt out a confession like one of those North Koreans. Or she would go crazy with the tension and start plucking at bits of the upholstery with her fingernails.
She sat in the car and listened to Tanzie chatting, and she told herself she would find a way to pay it all back before he discovered what she had done. She would take it out of Tanzie’s winnings. She would work it out somehow. She told herself he was just a man who had offered them a lift and with whom she had to make polite conversation for a few hours a day.
And periodically she glanced behind her at the two kids and thought, What else could I have done?
It shouldn’t have been hard to sit back and enjoy the ride. The country lanes were banked with wild flowers, and when the rain cleared the clouds revealed skies the azure blue of 1950s postcards. Tanzie wasn’t sick again, and with every mile they travelled from home she found her shoulders starting to inch downwards from her ears. She saw now that it had been months since she had felt even remotely at ease. Her life these days held a constant underlying drumbeat of worry: what were the Fishers going to do next? What was going on in Nicky’s head? What was she to do about Tanzie? And the grim bass percussion underneath it all: Money. Money. Money.
‘You okay?’ said Mr Nicholls.
Hauled from her thoughts, Jess muttered, ‘Fine. Thanks.’ They nodded awkwardly at each other. He hadn’t relaxed. It was obvious in his intermittently tightened jaw, in the way he was deep in thought behind his sunglasses, at the way his knuckles showed white on the steering-wheel. Jess wasn’t sure what on earth had been behind his decision to offer to drive, but she was pretty sure he had regretted it from the moment Tanzie had first wailed that she needed a sick bag.
‘Um, is there any chance you could stop with the tapping?’
‘Tapping?’
‘Your feet. On the dashboard.’
She looked at her feet.
‘It’s really distracting.’
‘You want me to stop tapping my feet.’
He looked straight ahead through the windscreen. ‘Yes. Please.’
She let her feet slide down, but she was uncomfortable, so after a moment she lifted them and tucked them under her on the seat. She rested her head on the window.
‘Your hand.’
‘What?’
‘Your hand. You’re hitting your knee now.’
She had been tapping it absentmindedly. ‘You want me to stay completely still while you drive.’
‘I’m not saying that. But the tapping thing is making it hard for me to focus.’
‘You can’t drive if I’m moving any part of my body?’
‘That’s not it.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s tapping. I just find … tapping … irritating.’
Jess took a deep breath. ‘Kids, nobody is to move. Okay? We don’t want to irritate Mr Nicholls.’
‘The kids aren’t doing it,’ he said mildly. ‘It’s just you.’
‘You do fidget a lot, Mum.’
‘Thanks, Tanze.’ Jess clasped her hands in front of her. She sat and clenched her teeth and concentrated on staying still, trying to focus on the good, which was that Mr Nicholls hadn’t changed his mind. It had been almost sixty miles now and he hadn’t changed his mind. And when you were basically responsible for an entire household, it was kind of nice not to be in charge for a while.
She let her head fall back against the headrest, closed her eyes and cleared her mind of money, of Marty’s stupid car, of her worries for the children, letting them float away with the miles, and she tried to let the quiet hum of an expensive engine pass through her; she let the breeze from the open window ripple over her face and the music fill her ears and just briefly she felt like a woman in a different sort of life altogether.
They stopped for lunch at a pub somewhere outside Oxford, unfurling themselves and letting out little sighs of relief as they cracked joints and stretched cramped limbs. Mr Nicholls disappeared into the pub and she sat on a picnic table and unpacked the sandwiches she had made hastily that morning when it turned out they were going to get a lift after all.