‘So … do you clean many houses?’
She frowned a little. ‘Yes.’
‘You have a lot of regulars?’
‘It’s a holiday park.’
‘Did you … Was it something you wanted to do?’
‘Did I grow up wanting to clean houses?’ She raised an eyebrow, as if checking that he had seriously asked that question. ‘Um, no. I wanted to be a professional scuba diver. But I had Tanze and I couldn’t work out how to get the pram to float.’
‘Okay, it was a dumb question.’
She rubbed her nose. ‘It’s not my dream job, no. But it’s fine. I can work around the kids and I like most of the people I clean for.’
Most of.
‘Can you make a living out of it?’
Her head shot round. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just what I said. Can you make a living? Is it lucrative?’
Her face closed. ‘We get by.’
‘No, we don’t,’ said Tanzie, from the back.
‘Tanze.’
‘You’re always saying we haven’t got enough money.’
‘It’s just a figure of speech.’ She blushed.
‘So what do you do, Mr Nicholls?’ said Tanzie.
‘I work for a company that creates software. You know what that is?’
‘Of course.’
Nicky looked up. In the rear-view mirror Ed watched him remove his ear-buds. When the boy saw him looking, he glanced away.
‘Do you design games?’
‘Not games, no.’
‘What, then?’
‘Well, for the last few years we’ve been working on a piece of software that will hopefully move us closer to a cashless society.’
‘How would that work?’
‘Well, when you buy something, or pay a bill, you wave your phone, which has a thing a bit like a bar code, and for every transaction you pay a tiny, tiny amount, like nought point nought one of a pound.’
‘We would pay to pay?’ said Jess. ‘No one will want that.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong. The banks love it. Retailers like it because it gives them one uniform system instead of cards, cash, cheques … and you’ll pay less per transaction than you do on a credit card. So it works for both sides.’
‘Some of us don’t use credit cards unless we’re desperate.’
‘Then it would just be linked to your bank account. You wouldn’t, like, have to do anything.’
‘So if every bank and retailer picks this up, we won’t get a choice.’
‘That’s a long way off.’
There was a brief silence. Jess pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them. ‘So basically the rich get richer – the banks and the retailers – and the poor get poorer.’
‘Well, in theory, perhaps. But that’s the joy of it. It’s such a tiny amount you won’t notice it. And it will be very convenient.’
Jess muttered something he didn’t catch.
‘How much is it again?’ said Tanzie.
‘Point nought one per transaction. So it works out as a little less than a penny.’
‘How many transactions a day?’
‘Twenty? Fifty? Depends how much you do.’
‘So that’s fifty pence a day.’
‘Exactly. Nothing.’
‘Three pounds fifty a week,’ said Jess.
‘One hundred and eighty-two pounds a year,’ said Tanzie. ‘Depending on how close the fee actually is to a penny. And whether it’s a leap year.’
Ed lifted one hand from the wheel. ‘At the outside. Even you can’t say that’s very much.’
Jess swivelled in her seat. ‘What does one hundred and eighty-two pounds buy us, Tanze?’
‘Two supermarket pairs of school trousers, four school blouses, a pair of shoes. A gym kit and a five pack of white socks. If you buy them from the supermarket. That comes to eighty-five pounds ninety-seven. The one hundred is exactly nine point two days of groceries, depending on whether anyone comes round and whether Mum buys a bottle of wine. That would be supermarket own-brand.’ She thought for a minute. ‘Or one month’s council tax for a Band D property. We’re Band D, right, Mum?’
‘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.