‘Marmite,’ said Nicky, arriving back and peeling apart two slices of bread.
‘I was in a rush.’
‘Have we got anything else?’
‘Jam.’
He sighed, and reached into the bag. Tanzie sat on the end of the bench, already lost in maths papers. She couldn’t read them in the car, as it made her nauseous, so she wanted to take every opportunity to work. Jess watched her scribbling algebraic equations on her exercise book, lost in concentration, and wondered for the hundredth time where she had come from.
‘Here,’ said Mr Nicholls, arriving with a tray. ‘I thought we could all do with some drinks.’ He pushed two bottles of cola towards the kids. ‘I didn’t know what you wanted so I got a selection.’ He had bought a bottle of Italian beer, what looked like a half of cider, a glass of white wine, another cola, a lemonade and a bottle of orange juice. He had a mineral water. A small mountain of different-flavoured crisps sat in the middle.
‘You bought all that?’
‘There was a queue. I couldn’t be bothered to come back out to ask.’
‘I – I haven’t got that much cash.’
He looked at her as if she was the weird one. ‘It’s a drink. I’m not buying you a house.’
And then his phone rang. He grabbed it and strode off across the car park, already talking as he went.
‘Shall I see if he wants one of our sandwiches?’ Tanzie said.
Jess watched him stride along the lane, one hand thrust deep in a pocket, until he was out of sight. ‘Not just now,’ she said.
Nicky said nothing. When she asked him which bit hurt the most, he just muttered that he was fine.
‘It’ll get easier,’ Jess said, reaching out a hand. ‘Really. We’ll have this break, get Tanze sorted and work out what to do. Sometimes you need time away to sort things out in your head. It makes everything clearer.’
‘I don’t think what’s in my head is the problem.’
She gave him his painkillers, and watched him wash them down with cola, then stretch out his gangly limbs tentatively. In the car, she had tried to move the dog so that Nicky wasn’t pressed up against the door, but it was tough. Norman was too wide to fit in the footwell. He could sit up in the middle of the back seat – they actually put a belt round him for a while – but then he would gradually slump until he was horizontal; a canine landslip, his head on Tanzie’s lap, his great backside shoving Nicky along the leather seat.
Nicky took the dog off for a walk, his shoulders hunched, and his feet dragging. She wondered if he had cigarettes. He was out of sorts because his Nintendo had run out of charge some twenty miles back. Jess wasn’t sure he knew what to do with himself when he wasn’t surgically attached to a gaming device.
They watched him go in silence.
Jess thought of the way his few smiles had steadily grown fewer, his watchfulness, the way he now seemed like a fish out of water, pale and vulnerable, in the rare hours he was out of his bedroom. She thought of his face, resigned, expressionless, in that hospital. Who was it who had said you were only as happy as your unhappiest child?
Tanzie bent over her papers. ‘I’m going to live somewhere else when I’m a teenager, I think.’
Jess looked at her. ‘What?’
‘I think I might live in a university. I don’t really want to grow up near the Fishers.’ She scribbled a figure in her workbook, then rubbed out one digit, replacing it with a four. ‘They scare me a bit,’ she said quietly.
‘The Fishers?’
‘I had a nightmare about them.’
Jess swallowed. ‘You don’t need to be scared of them,’ she said. ‘They’re just stupid boys. What they did is what cowards do. They’re nothing.’
‘They don’t feel like nothing.’
‘Tanze, I’m going to work out what to do about them, and we’re going to fix it. Okay? You don’t need to have nightmares. I’m going to fix this.’
They sat in silence. The lane was silent, apart from the sound of a distant tractor. Birds wheeled overhead in the infinite blue. Mr Nicholls was walking back slowly. He had straightened up, as if he had resolved something, and his phone was loose in his hand. Jess rubbed at her eyes.
‘I think I’ve finished the complex equations. Do you want to see?’
Tanzie held up a page of numbers. Jess looked at her daughter’s lovely open face. She reached forward and straightened her glasses on her nose. ‘Yes,’ she said, her smile bright. ‘I would totally love to look at some complex equations.’
It took two and a half hours to do the next leg of the journey. Mr Nicholls tapped the steering-wheel as if they were stuck in a jam (they weren’t), took two calls during the journey, one from the woman called Gemma, which he cut off (his ex-wife?) and one that was obviously to do with his business. He said he would ring them later. He was silent for a whole forty minutes after he’d taken the second. A woman with an Italian accent called just after they pulled into a petrol station, and at the words ‘Eduardo, baby’ Mr Nicholls ripped his phone from the hands-free holder and went and stood outside by the pump. ‘No, Lara,’ he said, turning away from them. ‘We’ve discussed this … Well, your solicitor is wrong … No, calling me a lobster really isn’t going to make any difference.’
Nicky slept for an hour, his blue-black hair flopping over his swollen cheekbone, his face briefly untroubled in sleep. Tanzie sang under her breath and stroked the dog. Norman slept, farted audibly several times, and slowly infused the car with his odour. Nobody complained. It actually masked the lingering smell of vomit.