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 got grumpy when Mum asked him to slow down. 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 a little clearing 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, lovely?’ 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 past 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 dreamt about a cabbage that could rollerskate. It was called Kevin.’
Mum gave her a long look. ‘Right.’
They walked a bit further. It was cooler in the forest, and it smelt of good damp, mossy and green and alive, not like the damp in the back room, which just smelt mouldy. Mum stopped on the path and turned back towards 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. She had half turned away from Mr Nicholls, held up her compact and put on the mascara even though every time it went over a bump she ended up with a black blob on her face. Tanzie wasn’t really sure why she bothered. She looked perfectly nice without it. ‘Mum,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘We did sort of steal the food from that buffet, didn’t we? I mean, if you look at it proportionally, we did take more than our share.’
Mum stared at her feet for a minute, thinking. ‘If you’re really worried, when we get your prize money we’ll put five pounds in an envelope and send it to them. How does that sound?’
‘I think, given the items we took, it would probably be nearer six pounds. Probably six pounds fifty,’ Tanzie said.
‘Then that’s what we’ll send them. And now I think we should work really, really hard to get this fat old dog of yours to run around a bit, so that (a) he’s tired enough to sleep the next leg of the journey, and (b) it might encourage him to go to the loo here and not fart his way through the next eighty miles.’
They hit the road again. It rained. Mr Nicholls had had One of His Phone Calls with a man called Sidney and talked about share prices and market movements and looked a bit serious, so Mum didn’t sing for a bit. Everyone was quiet. She tried not to sneak looks at her maths papers (Mum said it would make her sick) and Nicky’s Nintendo had run out of power again so he just stared out of the window and sighed a lot. That part of the journey seemed to take for ever. Nicky was having one of his quiet days. Tanzie wanted to talk to him, but you could tell when he didn’t want to talk as his mouth just turned into a straight line and he wouldn’t meet your eye. Tanzie’s legs kept sticking to Mr Nicholls’s leather seats and she was sort of regretting wearing her shorts. Plus Norman had rolled in something in the woods and she kept getting this whiff of something really bad, but she didn’t want to say anything in case Mr Nicholls decided he’d had enough of them and their stinky dog so she just held her nose with her fingers and tried to breathe through her mouth and only let herself open her nostrils every thirty lampposts.
It rolled on. The weather cleared. They headed past Coventry and up towards Derby, with its ring roads and its big dark red factories, and she gazed at the landscape as it got wilder and woollier, and let the numbers run through her head in little strings, trying to do calculations in her head without actually looking at them so she wouldn’t get nauseous.
Mr Nicholls’s phone rang and a woman immediately started shouting at him in Italian. He just turned it off without saying anything.
Mum sat in the front and counted the money in her purse. She had £63.91, but she hadn’t yet seen that one of the ten-pence pieces was actually foreign money so it was going to be £63.81 unless she could get someone else to take it.