The boy wasn’t actually her kid. He was the son of her ex and her ex’s ex and, given that both of them had effectively walked out on him, she was pretty much the only person he had left. ‘Kind of you,’ he said.‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Nicky is as good as mine. He’s been with me since he was eight. He looks out for Tanzie. And, besides, families are different shapes now, right? It doesn’t have to be two point four any more.’ The defensive way she said it made him think she had had this conversation many times before.
The little girl was ten. He did some mental arithmetic, and Jess cut in before he said a word. ‘Seventeen.’ ‘That’s … young.’
‘I was a wild kid. I knew everything. I actually knew nothing. Marty came along, I dropped out of school, and then I got pregnant. I wasn’t always going to be a cleaner, you know. My mum was a teacher.’ Her gaze had slid towards him, as if she knew this fact would shock.
‘Okay.’
‘Retired now. She lives in Cornwall. We don’t really get on. She doesn’t agree with what she calls my life choices. I never could explain that once you have a baby at seventeen there are no choices.’
‘Not even now?’
‘Nope.’ She twisted a lock of hair between her fingers. ‘Because you never quite catch up. Your friends are at college, you’re at home with a tiny baby. Your friends are starting their careers, you’re down the housing office trying to find somewhere to live. Your friends are buying their first cars and houses and you’re trying to find a job that you can fit round childcare. And all the jobs you can fit round school hours have really crappy wages. And that was before the economy went splat. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t regret having Tanzie, not for a minute. And I don’t regret taking Nicky on. But if I had my time again, sure, I’d have had them after I had done something with my life. It would be nice to be able to give them … something better.’
She hadn’t bothered to put the seat back up while she told him this. She lay propped on her elbow facing him under the duvet and her bare feet rested on the dashboard. Ed found he didn’t mind them so much.
‘You could still have a career,’ he said. ‘You’re young. I mean … you could get an after-school nanny or something?’
She actually laughed. A great seal-bark ‘Ha!’ that exploded into the interior of the car. She sat bolt upright, and took a swig of her wine. ‘Yeah. Right, Mr Nicholls. Sure I could.’
She liked fixing things. She did odd jobs around the estate, from rewiring plugs to tiling people’s bathrooms. ‘I did everything around the house. I’m good at making stuff. I can even block-print wallpaper.’ ‘You make your own wallpaper.’
‘Don’t look at me like that. It’s in Tanzie’s room. I made her clothes too, until recently.’
‘Are you actually from the Second World War? Do you save jam jars and string too?’
‘So what did you want to be?’
‘What I was,’ he said. And then he realized he didn’t want to talk about it and changed the subject.
She had seriously tiny feet. As in she bought child-sized shoes. (Apparently they were cheaper.) After she’d said this he had to stop himself sneaking looks at her feet like some kind of weirdo.
Before she’d had children she could drink four double vodkas in a row and still walk a straight line. ‘Yup, I could hold my drink. Obviously not enough to remember birth control.’ He believed her: they drank two bottles of wine and he thought she had twice as much as he did, and while she did relax a bit, there wasn’t a point at which he thought she was even a bit drunk.She almost never drank at home. ‘When I’m working at the pub and someone offers me one I just take the cash. And when I’m at home I worry that something might happen to the kids and I’ll need to be together.’ She stared out of the window. ‘Now I think about it, this is the closest thing I’ve had to a night out in … five months.’
‘A man who shut a door in your face, two bottles of rot-gut wine and a car park.’
‘I’m not knocking it.’
She didn’t explain what made her worry so much about the kids. He thought back to Nicky’s face and decided not to ask.
She had a scar under her chin from when she’d fallen off a bike and a piece of gravel had lodged in it for two whole weeks. She tried to show him but the light in the car wasn’t strong enough. She also had a tattoo on the base of her spine. ‘A proper tramp stamp, according to Marty. He wouldn’t talk to me for two whole days after I got it.’ She paused. ‘I think that’s probably why I got it.’
Her middle name was Rae. She had to spell it out every single time.
She didn’t mind cleaning but she really, really hated people treating her like she was ‘just’ a cleaner. (He had the grace to colour a little here.)
She hadn’t had a date in the two years since her ex had left.‘You haven’t had sex for two and a half years?’
‘I said he left two years ago.’
‘It’s a reasonable calculation.’
She pushed herself upright, and gave him a sideways look. ‘Three and a half. If we’re counting. Apart from one – um – episode last year. And you don’t have to look so shocked.’
‘I’m not shocked,’ he said, and tried to rearrange his face. He shrugged. ‘Three and a half years. I mean, it’s only, what, a quarter of your adult life? No time at all.’
‘Yeah. Thanks for that.’ And then he wasn’t sure what happened, but something in the atmosphere changed. She mumbled something that he couldn’t make out, pulled her hair into another ponytail and said maybe it was really time for them to be getting some sleep.
Ed thought he would lie awake for ages. There was something oddly unsettling about being in a darkened car just arm’s length from an attractive woman you had just shared two bottles of wine with. Even if she was huddled under a SpongeBob SquarePants duvet. He looked out of the sunroof at the stars, listened to the lorries rumbling past towards London, listened to the dog in the rear seats whimper in his sleep and thought that his real life – the one with his company and his office and the never-ending hangover of Deanna Lewis – was now a million miles away.
‘Still awake?’
He turned his head, wondering if she’d been watching him. ‘No.’