‘Oh, my God, I love it when you talk dirty.’
So she sat. Doing nothing. On her own sofa. And Tanzie came and sat with her for a while and Ed went up a ladder outside and waved the drill at her through the window and pretended that he was going to fall off until it made her anxious. ‘I’ve been in two different hospitals in eight days,’ she yelled at him through the window, crossly. ‘I do not want to make it a third.’ And then, because she was not very good at sitting still, she sorted some dirty washing and put a load in, but after that she sat down again and just let everyone else move because she had to admit that resting her foot was a lot less painful than trying to do things on it.
And there was something so good about having everyone just potter around her, listening to the sound of Ed’s drill and catching his eye through the window as he attached the camera and called at her to come, come and look. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done something to the house and it hadn’t been her. ‘Is that okay?’
She limped outside to see him. He stood back on the garden path, gazing up at the front of the house. ‘I figured if I put it there it’ll catch anyone who comes not just in your front garden but who hangs around outside. It’s got a convex lens, see?’ She tried to look interested. She was wondering whether once the children had gone to bed she could persuade him to stay over.
‘And often, with these sorts of things, you find that just having a camera there is a deterrent.’
Would it really be that bad? He could always sneak out before they woke up. But, then, who were they really kidding? Nicky and Tanzie must have guessed something was going on, surely.
‘Jess?’
He was standing in front of her.
‘Mm?’
‘All I have to do is drill a hole there, and feed the wires in through that wall. Hopefully I can put a little junction just inside and it should be fairly simple to connect it all up.’
He wore the satisfied look that men assume when in possession of power tools. He patted his pocket, checking for screws, then looked at her carefully. ‘Were you listening to a single thing I’ve said?’
Jess grinned at him guiltily.
‘Oh, you’re incorrigible,’ he said, after a minute. ‘Honestly.’
Glancing around to make sure nobody was looking, he hooked his arm gently around her neck, pulled her close and kissed her. His chin was thick with stubble. ‘Now let me get on. Undistracted. Go and dig out that takeaway menu.’
Jess limped, grinning, into the kitchen, and began rootling through the drawers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had ordered a takeaway. She was pretty sure none of the menus were up to date. Ed went upstairs to connect up the wiring. He shouted down that he was going to need to move some furniture to get at the skirting.
‘Fine by me,’ she yelled back. She heard the rumbling, thunderous sound of large things being dragged around the floor above her head, as he tried to access the electricity, and marvelled again that somebody other than her was going to do it.
And then she lay back on the sofa, put a fresh bag of ice on her foot, and started going through the fistful of old menus that she had uncovered in the tea-towel drawer, unpicking the pages of those splashed with sauce, or yellowed with age, weeding out the restaurants that were miles away, or long closed. She was pretty sure the Chinese didn’t exist any more. Some business with environmental health. The pizza place was unreliable. The curry-house menu looked pretty standard, but she couldn’t shake the thought of that curly little hair in Nathalie’s Jalfrezi. Still, chicken balti. Pilau rice. Poppadums. She thought of what he’d said about the two of them, side by side, gazing in awe at each other’s stomachs. And then she forgot the curry and just thought about his naked stomach.
She was so distracted that she didn’t hear his footsteps as he came slowly down the stairs. ‘Jess?’
‘I think this one will do it.’ She held up the menu. ‘I’ve decided a hair of unknown provenance is a small price to pay for a decent jal –’
It was then that she saw his expression. And what he held, disbelieving, in his hand.
‘Jess?’ he said, and his voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. ‘Why would my security pass be in your sock drawer?’
28.
Nicky
Jess stayed in bed for almost two days.
Nicky came downstairs and she was just sitting on the sofa staring straight ahead of her, like she was in a trance. The Black & Decker drill sat on the windowsill and the ladder was still propped against the front of the house.
‘Has Mr Nicholls gone to get the takeaway?’ Nicky was a little annoyed that he didn’t get to ask for onion bhajis.
She didn’t seem to hear him.
‘Jess?’
Her face was sort of frozen. She gave a little shake of her head and said, quietly, ‘No.’
‘He is coming back, though, right?’ he said, after a minute. He opened the fridge door. He didn’t know what he expected to find. There was a pack of shrivelled lemons and a half-empty jar of Branston pickle.
There was a long pause. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. And then, like she’d forgotten she’d said it, ‘I don’t know.’
‘So … we’re not getting a takeaway?’
‘No.’
Nicky let out a groan of disappointment. ‘Well, I guess he’ll have to come back at some point. I’ve got his laptop upstairs.’
They’d obviously had some kind of row, but she wasn’t behaving like she did when she and Dad had had a row. Then she would slam a door and you’d hear her muttering, ‘Dick,’ under her breath, or wearing that really tight expression that said, Why do I have to live with this idiot? yet not saying anything when he shouted at her because of the children. Now she looked like someone who’d just been given six months to live.
‘Are you okay?’
She blinked and put a hand to her forehead, like she was taking her temperature. ‘Um. Nicky. I need … I need to lie down. Can you … can you sort yourself out? There’s stuff. Food. In the freezer.’
In all the years Nicky had lived with her, Jess had never asked him to sort himself out. Even that time she’d had flu for two weeks. Before he could say anything, she turned and limped upstairs, really slowly, leaving him with it all.
At first when she didn’t come down he had thought it was just because she and Mr Nicholls had had an argument, and she was being all melodramatic about it. He and Tanzie hovered outside her bedroom, discussing it in whispers. Then they took her in some tea and toast but she was just staring at the wall, even though the window was still open and it was getting cold outside. She hadn’t seemed to notice. Nicky closed the window and put the ladder and the drill back in the garage, which seemed really enormous without the Rolls in it. And when he came back a couple of hours later to collect her plate the tea and toast were still there, just congealing on the bedside table beside her.