‘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.
‘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?’