Because, in that one moment, Ed Nicholls saw that he had been more like Marty than he was like Jess. He had been that coward, who spent his life running from things rather than facing up to them. And that something had to change.
‘Jess?’ he said, softly, into her skin, some time later, as he lay awake, marvelling at the 180-degree swings of life in general. ‘Will you do something for me?’
‘Again?’ she said sleepily. Her hand rested lightly on his chest. ‘Good God.’
‘No. Tomorrow.’ He leant his head into hers.
She shifted, so that her leg slid across his. He felt her lips on his skin. ‘Sure. What do you want?’
He gazed up at the ceiling. ‘Will you come with me to my dad’s?’
24.
Nicky
So Jess’s favourite saying, next to ‘It’s all going to be fine’ and ‘We’ll work something out’ and ‘Oh, Christ, NORMAN’ is that families come in all different shapes and sizes. ‘It’s not all 2.4 now,’ she says, like if she says it enough times we’ll all have to actually believe it.
Well, if our family was a weird shape before, it’s pretty much insane now.
I don’t really have a full-time mum, not like you probably have a mum, but it looks like I’ve acquired another part-time version. Linzie. Linzie Fogarty. I’m not sure what she makes of me: I can see her watching me out of the corner of her eye, trying to work out if I’m going to do something dark and Gothic, or chew up a terrapin or something. Dad said she does something high up in the local council. He said it like he was really proud, like he’s gone up in the world. I’m not sure he ever looked at Jess the way he looks at her.
For about the first hour after we got here I just felt really awkward, like I basically just acquired one more place to feel like I didn’t fit. The house is really tidy and they don’t have any books, unlike ours, where Jess has stuffed them into pretty much every room except the bathroom and there’s usually one by the loo anyway. And I kept staring at Dad because I couldn’t believe he’d been living here like a totally normal person while lying to us all the time. It made me hate her, like I hate him.
But then Tanzie said something at supper, and Linzie burst out laughing, and it was this really goofy, honking laugh – FOGHORN FOGARTY, I thought – and she clamped her hand over her mouth and she and Dad exchanged a look like it was a sound she should have tried really, really hard not to make, and something about the way her eyes wrinkled up made me think maybe she was okay.
I mean, her family has just taken on a weird shape too. She had two kids, Suze and Josh, and Dad. And suddenly there’s me – Gothboy, as Dad calls me, like that’s funny – and Tanze, who has taken to wearing two pairs of glasses on top of each other because she says the one pair isn’t quite right, and Jess going nutso on her drive, and kicking holes in her car, and Mr Nicholls, who definitely has a thing about Mum, hanging around and calmly trying to sort everyone out like the only grown-up in the place. And no doubt Dad has had to tell her about my biological mum, who might also end up on her drive shouting one day, like that first Christmas after I moved in with Jess where she threw bottles at our windows and screamed herself hoarse until the neighbours called the police. So, all things considered, Foghorn Fogarty might legitimately be feeling like her family isn’t quite the shape she expected either.
I don’t really know why I’m telling you this. It’s just it’s three thirty a.m. and everyone else in this house is asleep and I’m in Josh’s room with Tanzie and he has his own computer (both of them have their own computers, Apple Macs, no less) and I can’t remember his codes to do any gaming, but I’ve been thinking about what Mr Nicholls said about blogging and how somehow if you write it and put it out there your people might come.
You probably aren’t my people. You’re probably people who made a typo while doing a search on discount tyres or p**n or something. But I’m putting it out here anyway. Just in case you happen to be anything like me.
Because this last twenty-four hours has made me see something. I might not fit in the way that you fit with your family, neatly, a little row of round pegs in perfectly round holes. In our family we’ve had to whittle at our pegs and our holes because they all belonged somewhere else first, and they’re all sort of jammed in and a bit lopsided. But here’s the thing. I realized something when Dad sat down and told me it was good to see me and his eyes got all moist: my dad might be an arse, but he’s my arse, and he’s the only arse I’ve got. And feeling the weight of Jess’s hand as she sat by my hospital bed, or hearing her try not to cry down the phone at the thought of leaving me here – and watching my little sister, who is trying to be really, really brave about the whole school thing, even though I can tell her world has basically ended – it all made me see that I do sort of belong somewhere.
I think I sort of belong to them.
25.
Jess
Ed lay propped against the pillows, watching her do her makeup, painting out the bruises on her face with a little tube of concealer. She had just about covered the blue bruise on her temple where her head had bounced off the airbag. But her nose was purple, the skin stretched tight over a bump that hadn’t been there before, and her upper lip bore the swollen, oversized look of a woman who had ill-advisedly indulged in backstreet fillers. ‘You look like someone punched you in the nose.’