14.
Tanzie
There were four different types of Danish pastry at the breakfast buffet, and three different types of fruit juice and a whole rack of those little individual packets of cereal that Mum said were uneconomical and would never buy. She had knocked on the window at a quarter past eight to tell them they should wear their jackets to breakfast and stuff as many of each of them as they could into their pockets. Her hair had flattened on one side and she had no makeup on. Tanzie guessed the car hadn’t been that much of an adventure after all.
‘Not the butters or jams. Or anything that needs cutlery. Rolls, muffins, that kind of thing. Don’t get caught.’ She looked behind her to where Mr Nicholls seemed to be having an argument with a security guard. ‘And apples. Apples are healthy. And maybe some slices of ham for Norman.’
‘Where am I meant to put the ham?’
‘Or a sausage. Wrap them in a napkin.’
‘Isn’t that stealing?’
‘No.’
‘But –’
‘It’s just taking a bit more than you’re likely to eat at that exact moment. You’re just … Imagine you’re a guest with a hormone disorder and it makes you really, really hungry.’
‘But I haven’t got a hormone disorder.’
‘But you could have. That’s the point. You’re that hungry, sick person, Tanze. You’ve paid for your breakfast, but you need to eat a lot. More than you would normally eat.’
Tanzie folded her arms. ‘You said it was wrong to steal.’
‘It’s not stealing. It’s just getting your money’s worth.’
‘But we didn’t pay for it. Mr Nicholls did.’
‘Tanzie, just do as I say, please. Look, Mr Nicholls and I are going to have to leave the car park for half an hour. Just do it, then come back to the room and be ready to leave at nine. Okay?’ She leant through the window and kissed Tanzie, then trudged back towards the car, her jacket wrapped around her. She stopped, turned back and shouted, ‘Don’t forget to brush your teeth. And don’t leave any of your maths books.’
Nicky came out of the bathroom. He was wearing his really tight black jeans and a T-shirt that said WHEVS across the front.
‘You’re never going to get a sausage in those,’ she said, staring at his jeans.
‘I bet I can hide more than you can,’ he said.
Her eyes met his. ‘You’re on,’ Tanzie said, and ran to get dressed.
Mr Nicholls leant forward and squinted through his windscreen as Nicky and she walked across the car park. To be fair, Tanzie thought, she would probably have squinted at them too. Nicky had stuffed two large oranges and an apple down the front of his jeans and waddled across the asphalt like he’d had an accident in his trousers. She was in her jacket, despite feeling too hot, because she’d packed the front of her hoodie with little packets of cereal and if she didn’t wear her jacket she looked like she might be pregnant. With baby robots.
They couldn’t stop laughing.
‘Just get in, get in,’ said Mum, throwing their overnight bags into the boot and almost shoving them into the car as she glanced behind her. ‘What did you get?’ Mr Nicholls set off down the road. Tanzie could see him glancing in the mirror as they took turns to unload their haul and hand it forward to her.
Nicky pulled a white package from his pocket. ‘Three Danish pastries. Watch out – the icing got a bit stuck to the napkins. Four sausages and a few slices of bacon in a paper cup for Norman. Two slices of cheese, a yoghurt, and …’ He tugged his jacket over his crotch, reached down, grimacing, tensing, and pulled out the fruit. ‘I can’t believe I managed to fit those in there.’
‘There’s nothing I can say to that that’s in any way appropriate mother-son conversation,’ Mum said.
Tanzie had six small packets of cereal, two bananas, and a jam sandwich that she’d made out of toasted white bread. She sat eating while Norman stared at her and two stalactites of drool grew longer and longer from his lips until they were pooling on the seat of Mr Nicholls’s car.
‘That woman behind the poached eggs definitely saw us.’
‘I told her you had a hormone disorder,’ Tanzie said. ‘I told her you had to eat twice your bodyweight three times a day or you would faint in their dining room and you might actually die.’
‘Nice,’ said Nicky.
‘You win on numbers,’ she said, counting out his items. ‘But I win extra points for skill.’ She leant forward and, as everyone watched, she carefully lifted the two polystyrene cups of coffee from her pockets, packed out with paper napkins so that they would stay upright. She handed one to Mum and the other she placed in the cup holder next to Mr Nicholls.
‘You are a genius,’ Mum said, peeling off the lid. ‘Oh, Tanze, you have no idea how much I needed this.’ She took a sip, closing her eyes. Tanzie wasn’t sure if it was that they’d done so well with the buffet, or just that Nicky was laughing for the first time in ages, but for a moment she looked happier than she had done since Dad left.
Mr Nicholls just stared like they were a bunch of aliens.
‘Okay, so we can make sandwiches for lunch with the ham, cheese and sausages. You guys can eat the pastries now. Fruit for pudding. Want one?’ She held an orange towards Mr Nicholls. ‘It’s a bit warm still. But I can peel it.’
‘Uh … kind of you,’ he said, tearing his gaze away. ‘But I think I’ll just stop at a Starbucks.’
The next part of the journey was actually quite nice. There were no traffic jams once they’d got out of town and Mum persuaded Mr Nicholls to put on her favourite radio station and sang along to six songs, getting louder with each one. She would do this thing where when she didn’t know the lyrics she just substituted random words like ‘custard tarts’ or ‘bald-headed policeman’ and sometimes it made Tanzie cringe but today it was really funny. She made Tanzie and Nicky join in too and Mr Nicholls looked fed up at first but Tanzie noticed that after a few miles he was tapping the steering-wheel like he was sort of enjoying himself. The sun got really hot and Mr Nicholls slid the roof back. Norman sat bolt upright so that he could scent the air as they were going along and it meant that he didn’t squish them into each door, which was also nice.
It reminded Tanzie a bit of when Dad lived with them and they would sometimes go on outings in his car. Except Dad always drove too fast and got grumpy when Mum asked him to slow down. And they could never agree on where to stop and eat. And Dad would say he didn’t understand why they couldn’t just blow some money on a pub lunch and Mum would say that she’d made the sandwiches now and it would be silly to waste them. And Dad would tell Nicky to get his head out of whatever game he was playing and enjoy the damn scenery and Nicky would mutter that he hadn’t actually asked to come, which would make Dad even madder.
And then Tanzie thought that while she did love Dad she probably preferred this trip without him.
After two hours Mr Nicholls said he needed to stretch, and Norman needed to wee, so they stopped at the edge of a country park. Mum put some of the buffet haul out and they sat in a little clearing in the shade at a proper wooden picnic table and ate. Tanzie did some revision (prime numbers and quadratic equations), then took Norman for a walk around the woods. He was really happy and stopped every two minutes to sniff at something, and the sun kept sending little moving spotlights through the trees and they saw a deer and two pheasants and it was like they were actually on holiday.
‘You okay, lovely?’ Mum said, walking up with her arms crossed. From where they stood they could just see Nicky talking to Mr Nicholls at the table through the trees. ‘Feeling confident?’
‘I think so,’ she said.
‘Did you go through the past papers last night?’
‘Yes. I do find the prime-number sequences a bit difficult, but I wrote them all down and when I saw the sequencing laid out I found it easier.’
‘No more nightmares about the Fishers?’
‘Last night,’ Tanzie said, ‘I dreamt about a cabbage that could rollerskate. It was called Kevin.’
Mum gave her a long look. ‘Right.’
They walked a bit further. It was cooler in the forest, and it smelt of good damp, mossy and green and alive, not like the damp in the back room, which just smelt mouldy. Mum stopped on the path and turned back towards the car. ‘I told you good things happen, didn’t I?’ She waited for Tanzie to catch up. ‘Mr Nicholls is going to get us there tomorrow. We’ll have a quiet night, get you through this competition, and you’ll start at your new school. Then, hopefully, all our lives will change a little for the better. And this is fun, isn’t it? This is a nice trip?’
She kept her eyes on the car as she spoke and her voice did that thing where she was saying one thing and thinking about something else. Tanzie noticed she’d put her makeup on while they were in the car. She had half turned away from Mr Nicholls, held up her compact and put on the mascara even though every time it went over a bump she ended up with a black blob on her face. Tanzie wasn’t really sure why she bothered. She looked perfectly nice without it. ‘Mum,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘We did sort of steal the food from that buffet, didn’t we? I mean, if you look at it proportionally, we did take more than our share.’
Mum stared at her feet for a minute, thinking. ‘If you’re really worried, when we get your prize money we’ll put five pounds in an envelope and send it to them. How does that sound?’
‘I think, given the items we took, it would probably be nearer six pounds. Probably six pounds fifty,’ Tanzie said.
‘Then that’s what we’ll send them. And now I think we should work really, really hard to get this fat old dog of yours to run around a bit, so that (a) he’s tired enough to sleep the next leg of the journey, and (b) it might encourage him to go to the loo here and not fart his way through the next eighty miles.’
They hit the road again. It rained. Mr Nicholls had had One of His Phone Calls with a man called Sidney and talked about share prices and market movements and looked a bit serious, so Mum didn’t sing for a bit. Everyone was quiet. She tried not to sneak looks at her maths papers (Mum said it would make her sick) and Nicky’s Nintendo had run out of power again so he just stared out of the window and sighed a lot. That part of the journey seemed to take for ever. Nicky was having one of his quiet days. Tanzie wanted to talk to him, but you could tell when he didn’t want to talk as his mouth just turned into a straight line and he wouldn’t meet your eye. Tanzie’s legs kept sticking to Mr Nicholls’s leather seats and she was sort of regretting wearing her shorts. Plus Norman had rolled in something in the woods and she kept getting this whiff of something really bad, but she didn’t want to say anything in case Mr Nicholls decided he’d had enough of them and their stinky dog so she just held her nose with her fingers and tried to breathe through her mouth and only let herself open her nostrils every thirty lampposts.
It rolled on. The weather cleared. They headed past Coventry and up towards Derby, with its ring roads and its big dark red factories, and she gazed at the landscape as it got wilder and woollier, and let the numbers run through her head in little strings, trying to do calculations in her head without actually looking at them so she wouldn’t get nauseous.
Mr Nicholls’s phone rang and a woman immediately started shouting at him in Italian. He just turned it off without saying anything.
Mum sat in the front and counted the money in her purse. She had £63.91, but she hadn’t yet seen that one of the ten-pence pieces was actually foreign money so it was going to be £63.81 unless she could get someone else to take it.
‘Nicky.’
He looked up. Mr Nicholls was watching him in the rear-view mirror.
‘You want to borrow my phone? It doesn’t have many games on it, but you could log onto Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is you lot are into these days.’
‘Really?’ Nicky pushed himself upright from his slumped position.
‘Sure. It’s in the pocket of my jacket.’
Mum took it out and handed it to him. ‘Be very careful with it, Nicky.’
‘I’ve deactivated the PIN. Just … you know, no movies.’
‘Cool.’ Nicky didn’t actually smile – he didn’t really do smiling much any more, Tanzie thought – but you could tell he was pleased.
‘Not you, Tanzie.’ Mum’s voice came across the seats. ‘Don’t you look at it or you’ll get sick.’
Tanzie sighed. It was SO boring being her sometimes. Norman’s head was really heavy on her lap and she tried to move it gently because her legs were getting pins and needles. She wondered how long it would take them to get to Scotland. She was really, really bored, but she knew that if she said so Mum would get all We’re all bored, Tanzie. There’s nothing I can do about it. She started to doze off, her head bumping against the window frame. Mum and Mr Nicholls started talking. It was possible they’d forgotten anyone else was in the car.
‘So, tell me about your wife.’
‘Ex-wife. And no thanks.’
‘Why not? You weren’t unfaithful. I’m guessing she wasn’t, or you would have made that face.’
‘What face?’
There was a short silence. Maybe ten lampposts.
‘I’m not sure I would ever have made that face. But no. She wasn’t. And, no, I don’t really want to discuss it. It’s …’
‘Private?’
‘I just don’t like talking about personal stuff. Do you want to talk about your ex?’
‘In front of his children? Yup, that’s always a great idea.’
They carried on in silence for a few miles. Mum started tapping on the window. Tanzie glanced over at Mr Nicholls. Every time Mum tapped a little muscle tweaked in his jaw.
‘So what shall we talk about, then? I’m not very interested in software and I’m guessing you have zero interest in what I do. And there are only so many times I can point at a field and say: “Oh, look, cows.”’
Mr Nicholls sighed.
‘Come on. It’s a long way to Scotland.’
There was a thirty-lamppost silence.
‘I could sing if you like. We could all sing. Let me see if I can find something –’
‘Lara. Italian. Model.’
‘Model.’ Mum laughed this great big laugh. ‘Of course.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Mr Nicholls said grumpily.
‘All men like you go out with models.’
‘What do you mean, men like me?’
Mum pressed her lips together.
‘What do you mean, men like me? Come on.’
‘Rich men.’
‘I’m not rich.’
Mum shook her head. ‘Noooo.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I think it depends how you define rich.’
‘I’ve seen rich. I’m not rich. I’m well-off, yes. But I’m a long way from rich.’
Mum turned to him. He really had no idea whom he was dealing with. ‘Do you have more than one house?’
He signalled and swung the wheel. ‘I might.’
‘Do you have more than one car?’
He glanced sideways. ‘Yes.’
‘Then you’re rich.’
‘Nope. Rich is private jets and yachts. Rich is staff.’
‘So what am I?’
Mr Nicholls shook his head. ‘Not staff. You’re …’
‘What?’
‘I’m just trying to imagine your face if I’d referred to you as my staff.’
Mum started to laugh. ‘My woman-servant. My cleaning wench.’
‘Yeah. Or those. Okay, well, what would you say is rich?’
Mum pulled one of the buffet apples from her bag and bit into it. She chewed for a minute before speaking. ‘Rich is paying every single bill on time without thinking about it. Rich is being able to have a holiday or get through Christmas without having to borrow against January and February. Actually, rich would be just not thinking about money all the bloody time.’
‘Everyone thinks about money. Even rich people.’
‘Yes, but you’re just thinking what to do with it to make more money. Whereas I’m thinking how the hell we can get enough of it to get through another week.’
Mr Nicholls made a sort of harrumphing sound. ‘I can’t believe I’m driving you to Scotland and you’re giving me a hard time because you’ve misguidedly decided I’m some kind of Donald Trump.’
‘I’m not giving you a hard time.’
‘Noooo.’
‘I’m just pointing out that there’s a difference between what you consider to be rich and what is actually rich.’
There was a sort of awkward silence. Mum blushed like she’d said too much and started eating her apple with big, noisy bites, even though she would have told Tanzie off if she had eaten like that. She had come awake again by then and she didn’t want Mum and Mr Nicholls to stop talking to each other because they were having quite a nice day, so she put her head through the front seats. ‘Actually, I read somewhere that to qualify for the top one per cent in this country you would need to earn more than a hundred and forty thousand pounds a year,’ she said helpfully. ‘So if Mr Nicholls doesn’t earn that much then he probably isn’t rich.’ She smiled and sat back in her seat.
Mum looked at Mr Nicholls. She kept looking at him.
Mr Nicholls rubbed his head. ‘I tell you what,’ he said, after a while, ‘shall we stop off and get some tea?’
Moreton Marston looked like it had been invented for tourists. Everything was made of the same grey stone and really old, and everyone’s gardens were perfect, with tiny blue flowers creeping over the tops of walls, and immaculate little baskets of trailing leaves, like something out of a book or maybe Midsomer Murders. There was a faint smell of sheep in the air, and you could hear them in the far distance, and there was this chill in the breeze, as if it was warning you what it could be like on a day that wasn’t sunny. The shops were all the kind you get on Christmas cards, in the market square a woman dressed as a Victorian was selling buns from a tray and groups of tourists wandered around taking pictures of everything. Tanzie was so busy gazing out of the window at it that she didn’t notice Nicky at first. It was only when they pulled into the parking space that she noticed he had gone really quiet. He wasn’t looking at the phone – even though, she knew, he had really, really wanted it – and his face was all white. She asked him whether his ribs were hurting, and he said no, and when she asked if he had an apple down his trousers that he couldn’t get out, he said, ‘No, Tanze, just drop it,’ but the way he said it, there was definitely something. Tanzie looked at Mum but she was busy not looking at Mr Nicholls and Mr Nicholls was busy making this big to-do about finding the best parking space. Norman just looked up at Tanzie, like ‘Don’t even bother asking.’
Everyone got out and stretched and Mr Nicholls said they were all having tea and cake and it was his treat and please could we not make a big financial deal out of it as it was just tea, okay, and Mum raised her eyebrows like she was going to say something and then just muttered, ‘Thank you,’ but not with good grace.
They sat down in a café whose name was Ye Spotted Sowe Tea Shoppe, even though Tanzie would bet there were no tea shoppes in medieval times. She was pretty sure they didn’t even have tea then. Nobody else seemed to mind. Nicky got up to go to the loo. And Mr Nicholls and Mum were at the counter choosing what to eat so she clicked on Mr Nicholls’s phone and the first thing that came up was Nicky’s Facebook page. She waited for a minute because Nicky got really annoyed if people looked at his stuff, and then when she was sure he really was in the loo she made the screen go bigger so she could read it and then she went cold. The Fishers had posted messages and pictures of men doing rude things to other men all over Nicky’s timeline. They had called him GIMP and FAGBOY, and even though Tanzie didn’t know what the words meant she knew they were bad and she suddenly felt sick. She looked up and Mum was coming back holding a tray.
‘Tanzie! Be careful with Mr Nicholls’s phone!’
The phone had clattered onto the edge of the table. She didn’t want to touch it. She wondered if Nicky was crying in the loos. She would have done.
When she looked up Mum was staring at her. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
She sat down and pushed an orange cupcake on a plate across the table. Tanzie wasn’t hungry any more, even though it was covered with sprinkles.
‘Tanze. What’s wrong? Talk to me.’
She pushed the phone slowly across the wooden table with the tip of her finger, like it was going to burn her or something. Mum frowned, and then looked down at it. She clicked on it and stared. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said, after a minute.
Mr Nicholls sat down beside her. He had the biggest slice of chocolate cake Tanzie had ever seen. ‘Everyone happy?’ he said. He looked happy.
‘The little bastards,’ Mum said. And her eyes filled with tears.
‘What?’ Mr Nicholls had a mouthful of cake.
‘Is that like a prevert?’
Mum didn’t seem to hear her. She pushed the chair back with a massive screech and began striding towards the toilets.
‘That’s the Gents, madam,’ a woman called, as Mum pushed the door open.
‘I can read, thank you,’ Mum said, and she disappeared inside.
‘What? What’s going on now?’ Mr Nicholls struggled to swallow his mouthful. He glanced over at where Mum had gone. Then, when Tanzie didn’t say anything, he looked down at his phone and tapped it twice. He didn’t say anything, just kept staring. Then he moved the screen around like he was reading everything. Tanzie felt a bit weird. She wasn’t sure he should be looking at that.
‘Did … Is this something to do with what happened to your brother?’
She wanted to cry. She felt like the Fishers had ruined the nice day. She felt like they had followed them here, like they would never get away from them. She couldn’t speak.
‘Hey,’ he said, as a great big tear plopped down on the table. ‘Hey.’ He held out a paper napkin towards her and Tanzie wiped her eyes and when she couldn’t hide the sob that burst upwards he moved around the table and put an arm around her and pulled her in for a hug. He smelt of lemons and men. She hadn’t smelt that man smell since Dad left and it made her even sadder.
‘Hey. Don’t cry.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Nothing to be sorry for. I’d cry if someone did that to my sister. That’s – that’s …’ He clicked the phone off. ‘Sheez.’ He shook his head and blew out his cheeks. ‘Do they do that to him a lot?’
‘I don’t know.’ She sniffed. ‘He doesn’t say much any more.’
Mr Nicholls waited until she had stopped crying and then he moved back around the table and ordered a hot chocolate with marshmallows, chocolate shavings and extra cream. ‘Cures all known ills,’ he said, pushing it towards her. ‘Trust me. I know everything.’
And the weird thing was, it was actually true.
Tanzie had finished her chocolate and her cupcake by the time Mum and Nicky came out of the loos. Mum put on this bright smile, like nothing was wrong, and had her arm around Nicky’s shoulders, which actually looked a bit odd now he was half a head taller than her. He slid into the seat beside her at the table and stared at his cake like he wasn’t hungry. His face had gone back to how it was before they went away: like a shop dummy so you couldn’t see what he was thinking. Tanzie watched Mr Nicholls watching him and wondered if he was going to say anything about what was on his phone but he didn’t. She thought maybe he didn’t want Nicky to get embarrassed. Either way, the happy day, she thought sadly, was over.
And then Mum got up to check on Norman who was tied up outside and Mr Nicholls ordered a second cup of coffee and started stirring it slowly like he was thinking about something. And then he looked up at Nicky from under his eyebrows, and said quietly, ‘So. Nicky. You know anything about hacking?’
She got the feeling she wasn’t supposed to listen so she just stared really hard at the quadratic equations.
‘No,’ said Nicky.
Mr Nicholls leant forward over the table and lowered his voice. ‘Well, I think now might be a good time to start.’
When Mum came back, Mr Nicholls and Nicky had disappeared. ‘Where are they?’ she said, looking around the room.
‘They’ve gone to Mr Nicholls’s car. Mr Nicholls said they’re not to be disturbed.’ Tanzie sucked the end of her pencil.
Mum’s eyebrows shot somewhere into her hairline.
‘Mr Nicholls said you’d look like that. He said to tell you he’s sorting it out. The Facebook thing.’
‘He’s doing what? How?’
‘He said you’d say that too.’ She rubbed at a 2, which looked a bit too much like a 5 and blew away the rubbings. ‘He said to tell you to please give them twenty minutes and he’s ordered you another cup of tea and you should have some cake while you’re waiting. They’ll come back and fetch us when they’re finished. And also to tell you the chocolate cake is really good.’
Mum didn’t like it. Tanzie sat and finished her unit until she was happy with the answers, while Mum fidgeted and looked out of the window and made as if to speak, then closed her mouth again. She didn’t eat any chocolate cake. She just left the five pounds that Mr Nicholls had put on the table sitting there and Tanzie put her rubber on it because she was worried that when someone opened the door it would blow away.
Finally, just as the woman was sweeping up close enough to their table to send a silent message, the door opened, a little bell rang and Mr Nicholls walked in with Nicky. Nicky had his hands in his pocket and his hair over his eyes but there was a little smirk on his face.
Mum stood up and looked from one to the other. You could tell she really, really wanted to say something but she didn’t know what.
‘Did you try the chocolate cake?’ Mr Nicholls said. His face was all bland, like a game-show host’s.
‘No.’
‘Shame. It was really good. Thank you! Your cake is the best!’ he called to the woman, who went all smiley and twinkly even though she hadn’t looked at Mum like that. Then Mr Nicholls and Nicky went straight back out again, striding across the road like they’d been mates all their lives, leaving Tanzie and Mum to gather up their things and hurry out after them.