At ten thirty the door of the little room opened with a squeak and Mr Nicholls emerged, blinking, in his T-shirt and boxers. He raised a palm in greeting. He looked disoriented, a castaway waking on an island. A long crease bisected his cheek from the pillow. ‘We are in …’
‘Ashby de la Zouch. Or somewhere nearby. It’s not quite Beachfront.’
‘Is it late?’
‘Quarter to eleven.’
‘Quarter to eleven. Okay.’ His jaw was thick with stubble, and his hair stuck up on one side. Jess pretended to read her book. He smelt of warm, sleepy male. She had forgotten what a weirdly potent scent that was.
‘Quarter to eleven.’ He rubbed at the stubble on his chin, then walked unsteadily to the window and peered out. ‘I feel like I’ve been asleep for a million years.’ He sat down heavily on the sofa cushion opposite her, running his hand over his jaw.
‘Dude,’ said Nicky from beside her. ‘Jailbreak alert.’
‘What?’
Nicky waved a biro. ‘You need to put the prisoners back in the pen.’
Mr Nicholls stared at him, then turned to Jess, as if to say, ‘Your son has gone mad.’
‘Oh, God.’
He frowned. ‘Oh God what?’
Following Nicky’s gaze, Jess looked down and swiftly away. ‘You could at least have taken me out to dinner first,’ she said, standing to clear the breakfast things.
‘Oh.’ Mr Nicholls looked down and adjusted himself. ‘Sorry. Right. Okay.’ He stood, and made for the bathroom. ‘I’ll – uh – I … Am I okay to have another shower?’
‘We saved you some hot water,’ said Tanzie, who was head-down over her exam sheet in the corner. ‘Well, actually, all of it. You smelt really bad yesterday.’
He emerged twenty minutes later, his hair damp and smelling of shampoo, his jaw clean-shaven. Jess was busy whisking salt and sugar into a glass of water and trying not to think about what she had just seen. She handed it to him.
‘What’s that?’ He pulled a face.
‘Rehydrating solution. To replace some of what you lost last night.’
‘You want me to drink a glass of salty water? After I’ve spent all night being sick?’
‘Just drink it.’ She was too tired to argue with him. While he was grimacing and gagging, she fixed him some plain toast and a black coffee. He sat across the little Formica table, took a sip of coffee and a few tentative bites of toast, and ten minutes later, in a voice that held some surprise, acknowledged that he did actually feel a bit better.
‘Better, as in able-to-drive-without-having-an-accident better?’
‘By having an accident, you mean …’
‘Not crashing into a lay-by.’
‘Thank you for clarifying that.’ He took another, more confident, bite of toast. ‘Yeah. Give me another twenty minutes, though. I want to make sure I’m …’
‘… safe in cars.’
‘Ha.’ He grinned, and it was curiously pleasing to see him smile. ‘Yes. Quite. Oh, man, I do feel better.’ He ran a hand across the plastic-covered table and took a swig of coffee, sighing with apparent satisfaction. He finished the first round of toast, asked if there was any more going, then looked around the table. ‘Although, you know, I might feel even better if you weren’t all staring at me while I eat. I’m worried some other part of me is poking out.’
‘You’ll know,’ said Nicky. ‘Because we’ll all run screaming.’
‘Mum said you pretty much brought up an organ,’ said Tanzie. ‘I was wondering what it felt like.’
He glanced up at Jess and stirred his coffee. He didn’t shift his gaze until she had blushed. ‘Truthfully? Not so different from most of my Saturday nights, these days.’ He drank the rest and put down his cup. ‘Okay. I’m good. The rogue kebab is defeated. Let’s hit the road.’
The landscape altered by the mile as they drove through the afternoon, the hills growing steeper and less bucolic, the walls that banked them morphing from hedgerows into flinty grey stone. The skies opened, the light around them grew brighter and they passed the distant symbols of an industrial landscape: red-brick factories, huge power stations that belched mustard-coloured clouds. Jess watched surreptitiously as Mr Nicholls drove, at first wary that he would suddenly clutch his stomach, and then later with a vague satisfaction at the sight of normal colour returning to his face.
‘I don’t think we’re going to make Aberdeen today,’ he said, and there was a hint of apology in his voice.
‘Let’s just get as far as we can and do the last stretch early tomorrow morning.’
‘That’s exactly what I was going to suggest.’
‘Still loads of time.’
‘Loads.’
She let the miles roll by, dozed intermittently and tried not to worry about all the things she needed to worry about. She positioned her mirror surreptitiously so that she could watch Nicky in the back seat. His bruises had faded, even in the short time they had been away. He seemed to be talking more than he had been. But he was still closed to her. Sometimes Jess worried he would be like that for the rest of his life. It didn’t seem to make any difference how often she told him she loved him, or that they were his family. ‘You’re too late,’ her mother had said, when Jess had told her he was coming to live with them. ‘With a child that age, the damage has been done. I should know.’
As a schoolteacher, her mother could keep a class of thirty eight-year-olds in a narcoleptic silence, could steer them through tests like a shepherd streaming sheep through a pen. But Jess couldn’t remember her ever smiling at her with pleasure, the kind of pleasure you’re meant to get just from looking at someone you gave birth to.
She had been right about many things. She had told Jess on the day she started secondary school: ‘The choices you make now will determine the rest of your life.’ All Jess heard by then was someone telling her she should pin her whole self down, like a butterfly. That was the thing: when you put someone down all the time, eventually they stopped listening to the sensible stuff.
When Jess had had Tanzie, young and daft as she had been, she’d had enough wisdom to know she was going to tell her how much she loved her every day. She would hug her and wipe her tears and flop with her on the sofa with their legs entwined like spaghetti. She would cocoon her in love. When she was tiny Jess had slept with her in their bed, her arms wrapped around her, so that Marty would haul himself grumpily into the spare room, moaning that there wasn’t any room for him. She barely even heard him.