20.
Ed
Ed Nicholls had thought that spending eight hours in a damp car park was the worst possible way to spend a night. Then he’d concluded that the worst way to spend a night was hoicking your guts up in a static caravan somewhere near Derby. He was wrong on both counts. The worst way to spend a night, it turned out, was in a tiny room a few feet from a slightly drunk, good-looking woman who wanted to have sex with you and whom you had, like an idiot, rebuffed.
Jess fell asleep, or pretended to: it was impossible to tell. Ed sat in the world’s most uncomfortable chair, staring out of the narrow gap in the curtains at the black moonlit sky, his right leg going to sleep, and his left foot freezing cold where it wouldn’t fit under the blanket and tried not to think about the fact that if he hadn’t leapt out of that bed he could be there, curled around her right now, her arms around his neck, his lips pressed against her skin, those lithe legs looped around …
No.
He had done the right thing, he told himself. He must have done. His life was complicated enough without adding an impulsive cleaner with an eccentric family to the mix (he hated himself for letting the word ‘cleaner’ appear in that little mental riff). Even as Jess, uncharacteristically still in those last few moments, had lain against him and his brain had started to melt, he had tried to apply logic to the situation, and had concluded, with the few cells still functioning, that it couldn’t end well. Either (a) the sex would have been terrible, they would have been mortified afterwards, and the five hours spent travelling to the Olympiad would have been excruciating. Or (b) the sex would have been fine, they would have woken up embarrassed and the journey would still have been excruciating. Worse, they could have ended up with (c): the sex would have been off the scale (he slightly suspected this one was correct – he kept getting a hard-on just thinking about her mouth), they would develop feelings for each other based purely on sexual chemistry and either (d) would have to adjust to the fact that they had nothing in common and were just completely unsuited in every other way or (e) they would find they were not entirely unsuited, but then he would be sent to prison. And none of this considered (f), which was that Jess had actual kids. Kids who needed stability in their lives and not someone such as him: he liked children as a concept, but in the same way that he liked the Indian subcontinent – i.e. it was nice to know it existed but he had no knowledge about it and had never felt any real desire to spend time there.
And all this was without the added factor of (g): that he was obviously crap at relationships, had only just come out of the two most disastrous examples anyone could imagine, and the odds of him getting it right with someone else on the basis of a lengthy car journey that had begun because he couldn’t think how to get out of it were lower than a very low thing indeed.
Plus the whole horse conversation had been, frankly, weird.
And these points could be supplemented by the wilder possibilities that he had completely failed to consider. What if Jess was a psycho, and all that stuff about not wanting a relationship was just a way to reel him in? She didn’t seem that sort of girl, sure.
But neither had Deanna.
Ed sat pondering this and other tangled things and wishing he could talk a single one of them through with Ronan, until the sky turned orange then neon blue and his leg became completely dead and his hangover, which had formerly manifested itself as a vague tightness at his temples, turned into an emphatic, skull-crushing headache. Ed tried not to look at the girl sleeping in the bed a few feet away as the outline of her face and body under the duvet became clear in the encroaching light.
And he tried not to feel wistful for a time when having sex with a woman you liked had just been about having sex with a woman you liked and hadn’t involved a series of equations so complex and unlikely that probably only Tanzie could have got anywhere near understanding them.
‘Come on. We’re running late.’ Jess shepherded Nicky – a pale, T-shirt-clad zombie – towards the car.
‘I didn’t get any breakfast.’
‘That’s because you wouldn’t get up when I told you. We’ll get you something on the way. Tanze. Tanzie? Has the dog been to the loo?’
The morning sky was the colour of lead and seemed to have descended to a point around their ears. A faint drizzle promised heavier rain. Ed sat in the driving seat as Jess ran around, organizing, scolding, promising, in a fury of activity. She had been like this since he’d woken, groggily, from what seemed like twenty minutes’ sleep, folding and packing, dragging bags downstairs, supervising breakfast. He didn’t think she had met his eye once. Tanzie climbed silently into the back seat.
‘You okay?’ He yawned and looked at the little girl in the rear-view mirror.
She nodded silently.
‘Nerves?’
She didn’t say anything.
‘Been sick?’
She nodded.
‘It’s all the rage on this trip. You’ll be great. Really.’
She gave him the exact look he would have given any adult if they had said the same, then turned to stare out of the window, her face round and pale, her eyes mauve with exhaustion. Ed wondered how late she had stayed up revising.
‘Right.’ Jess shoved Norman into the back seat. He brought with him an almost overwhelming scent of wet dog. She checked that Tanzie had done up her belt, climbed into the passenger seat and finally turned to Ed. Her expression was unreadable. ‘Let’s go.’
Ed’s car no longer looked like his car. In just three days its immaculate cream interior had acquired new scents and stains, a fine sprinkling of dog hair, jumpers and shoes that now lived on seats or wedged underneath them. The floor crunched underfoot with dropped sweet wrappers and crisps. The radio stations were no longer on settings he understood.
But something had happened while he had been driving along at forty m.p.h. The faint sense that he should actually have been somewhere else had begun to fade, almost without him being aware of it. He had stopped trying to anticipate what was going to happen next, stopped dreading the next phone call, stopped wondering whether there was any chance that Deanna Lewis would decide not to drag him down with her … and he had just started existing. Ed Nicholls drove mile after easy mile through the early-morning mist, slow enough to notice the landmarks, the subtle changes in landscape, the lives around him in little market towns, huge cities. He found himself glancing at the people they passed, buying food, driving their cars, walking their children to and from school in worlds completely different from his own, knowing nothing of his own little drama several hundred miles south. It made it all seem reduced in size, a model village of problems rather than something that loomed over him.
He drove on, and despite the pointed silence from the woman beside him, Nicky’s sleeping face in the rear-view mirror (‘Teenagers don’t really do Before Eleven o’Clock,’ Tanzie explained) and the occasional foul eruptions of the dog, it slowly dawned on him, as they crept closer to their destination, that he was feeling a complete lack of the relief he had expected to feel at the prospect of having his car, his life, back to himself. What he felt was more complex. Ed fiddled with the speakers, so that the music was loudest in the rear seats and temporarily silent in the front.
‘You okay?’
Jess didn’t look round. ‘I’m fine.’
Ed glanced behind him, making sure nobody was listening. ‘About last night,’ he began.
‘Forget it.’
He wanted to tell her that he regretted it. He wanted to tell her that his body had actually hurt with the effort of not climbing back into that sagging single bed. But what would have been the point? Like she’d said the previous evening, they were two people who had no reason to see each other ever again. ‘I can’t forget it. I wanted to explain –’
‘Nothing to explain. You were right. It was a stupid idea.’ She tucked her legs under her and stared away from him out of the window.
‘It’s just my life is too –’
‘Really. It’s not an issue. I just …’ she let out a deep breath ‘… I just want to make sure we get to the Olympiad on time.’
‘But I don’t want us to end it all like this.’
‘There’s nothing to end.’ She put her feet on the dashboard. It felt like a statement. ‘Let’s go.’
‘How many miles is it to Aberdeen?’ Tanzie’s face appeared between the front seats.
‘What, left?’
‘No. From Southampton.’
Ed pulled his phone from his jacket and handed it to her. ‘Look it up on the Maps app.’
She tapped the screen, her brow furrowed. ‘About five hundred and eighty?’
‘Sounds about right.’
‘So if we’re doing forty miles an hour we’d have had to do at least six hours’ driving a day. And if I didn’t get sick, we could have done it …’
‘In a day. At a push.’
‘One day.’ Tanzie digested this, her eyes trained on the Scottish hillsides in the distance ahead. ‘But we wouldn’t have had such a nice time then, would we?’
Ed glanced sideways at Jess. ‘No, we wouldn’t.’
It took a moment before Jess’s gaze slid back towards him. ‘No, sweetheart,’ she said, after a beat. And her smile was oddly rueful. ‘No, we wouldn’t.’
The car ate the miles sleekly and efficiently. They crossed the Scottish border, and Ed tried – failed – to raise a cheer. They stopped once for Tanzie to go to the loo, once twenty minutes later for Nicky to go (‘I can’t help it. I didn’t want to go when Tanze did’) and three times for Norman (two were false alarms). Jess sat silently beside him, checking her watch and chewing at her nails. She was still wearing flip-flops and he wondered fleetingly if her feet were cold. Nicky gazed groggily out of the window at the empty landscape, at the few flinty houses set into rolling hills. Ed wondered what would happen to him after this was over. He wanted to suggest fifty other things to help him, but he tried to imagine someone suggesting things to him at the same age, and guessed he would have taken no notice at all. He wondered how Jess would keep him safe when they returned home.
The phone rang and he glanced over, his heart sinking. ‘Lara.’
‘Eduardo. Baby. I need to talk to you about this roof.’
He was aware of Jess’s sudden rigidity, the flicker of her gaze. He wished, suddenly, that he hadn’t chosen to answer the call.
‘Lara, I’m not going to discuss this now.’
‘It’s not a lot of money. Not for you. I spoke to my solicitor and he says it would be nothing for you to pay for it.’
‘I told you before, Lara, we made a final settlement.’
He was suddenly conscious of the acute stillness of three people in the car.
‘Eduardo. Baby. I need to sort this with you.’
‘Lara –’
Before he could say anything more, Jess reached over and picked up the phone. ‘Hello, Lara,’ she said. ‘Jess here. I’m awfully sorry but he can’t pay for your roof, so there’s really no point in ringing him any more.’
A short silence. Then an explosive: ‘Who is this?’
‘I’m his new wife. Oh – and he’d like his Chairman Mao picture back. Perhaps just leave it with his lawyer. Okay? In your own time. Thanks so much.’
The resulting silence had the same quality as the few seconds before an atomic explosion. But before any of them could hear what happened next, Jess flipped the off button, and handed it back to him. He took it gingerly, and turned it off.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I think.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She didn’t look at him when she spoke.
Ed glanced into his rear-view mirror. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought Nicky was trying very hard not to laugh.
Somewhere between Edinburgh and Dundee, on a narrow, wooded lane, they slowed and stopped for a herd of cows in the road. The animals moved around the car, gazing in at its inhabitants with vague curiosity, a moving black sea, eyes rolling in woolly black heads. Norman stared back, his body rigid with silent, confused outrage. Tanzie took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, gazing back at them, half blind.
‘Aberdeen Angus,’ said Nicky.
Suddenly, without warning, Norman hurled his whole body, snarling and growling at the window. The car physically jolted to one side and his deafening bark bounced off the interior, amplified in the confined space. The back seat became a chaotic mass of arms and noise and writhing dog. Nicky and Jess fought to reach him.
‘Mum!’
‘Norman! Stop!’ The dog was on top of Tanzie, his face hard against the window. Ed could just make out her pink jacket, flailing underneath him.
Jess lunged over the seat at the dog, grabbing for his collar. They dragged Norman back down from the window. He whined, shrill and hysterical, straining at their grasp, great gobs of drool spraying across the interior.
‘Norman, you big idiot! What the hell –’
‘He’s never seen a cow before.’ Tanzie, struggling upright, always defending him.
‘Jesus, Norman.’
‘You okay, Tanze?’
‘I’m fine.’
The cows continued to part around the car, unmoved by the dog’s outburst. Through the now steamed-up windows they could just make out the farmer at the rear, walking slowly and impassively, with the same lumbering gait as his bovine charges. He gave the barest of nods as he passed, as if he had all the time in the world. Norman whined and pulled against his collar.
‘I’ve never seen him like that before.’ Jess straightened her hair and blew out through her cheeks. ‘Perhaps he could smell beef.’
‘I didn’t know he had it in him,’ Ed said.
‘My glasses.’ Tanzie held up the twisted piece of metal. ‘Mum. Norman broke my glasses.’
It was a quarter past ten.
‘I can’t see anything without my glasses.’
Jess looked at Ed. Shit.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Grab a plastic bag. I’m going to have to put my foot down.’
They drove at speed, half frozen, the wind from the open windows a buffeting roar that thwarted conversation. The Scottish roads were wide and empty, and Ed drove so fast that the satnav had repeatedly to reassess its timing to their destination. Every minute they gained was an imaginary air punch in his head. Tanzie was sick twice. He refused to stop to allow her to vomit into the road.
‘She’s really ill.’
‘I’m fine,’ Tanzie kept saying, her face wedged into a plastic bag. ‘Really.’
‘You don’t want to stop, sweetheart? Just for a minute?’
‘No. Keep going. Bleurgh –’
There wasn’t time to stop. Not that this made the car journey any easier to bear. Nicky had turned away from his sister, his hand over his nose. Even Norman’s head was thrust as far out into the fresh air as he could get it.
Ed drove like someone in a luxury car advert, speeding through empty bends, along the winding base of ancient windswept hillsides. The car gripped the greasy roads as if it had been meant for this. He forgot he was cold, that his car interior was pretty much destroyed, his life a mess. There were moments, in that astonishing landscape, his whole being focused on driving as fast and as safely as he could, when it felt like an almost spiritual experience. A spiritual experience broken only by the occasional sound of a child gagging into a fresh plastic bag.
He would get them there. He knew this as surely as he knew anything. He felt filled with purpose in a way that he hadn’t done in months. And as Aberdeen finally loomed before them, its buildings vast and silver grey, the oddly modern high-rises thrusting into the distant sky, his mind raced ahead of them. He headed for the centre, watched as the roads narrowed and became cobbled streets. They came through the docks, the enormous tankers on their right, and that was where the traffic slowed, and slowly, unstoppably, his confidence began to unravel. They slowed and then sat in an increasingly anxious silence, Ed punching in alternative routes across Aberdeen that offered no time gain and often no sense. The satnav started to work against him, adding back the time it had subtracted. It was fifteen, nineteen, twenty-two minutes until they reached the university building. Twenty-five minutes. Too many.
‘What’s the delay?’ said Jess, to nobody in particular. She fiddled with the radio buttons, trying to find the traffic reports. ‘What’s the hold-up?’
‘It’s just sheer weight of traffic.’
‘That’s such a lame expression,’ said Nicky. ‘Of course a traffic jam is sheer weight of traffic. What else would it be down to?’
‘There could have been an accident,’ said Tanzie.
‘But the jam itself would still comprise the traffic. So the problem is still the sheer weight of traffic.’
‘No, the volume of traffic slowing itself down is something completely different.’
‘But it’s the same result.’
‘But then it’s an inaccurate description.’
Jess peered at the satnav. ‘Are we in the right place? I wouldn’t have thought the docks would be near the university.’
‘We have to get through the docks to get to the university.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure, Jess.’ Ed tried to suppress the tension in his voice. ‘Look at the satnav.’
There was a brief silence. In front of them the traffic-lights changed through two cycles without anybody moving. Jess, on the other hand, moved incessantly, fidgeting in her seat, peering around her to see if there was some clear route they might have missed. He couldn’t blame her. He felt the same.
‘I don’t think we’ve got time to get new glasses,’ he murmured to Jess, when they’d sat through the fourth cycle.
‘But she can’t see without them.’
‘If we look for a chemist we’re not going to make it there for midday.’
She bit her lip, then turned round in her seat. ‘Tanze? Is there any way you can see through the unbroken lens? Any way at all?’
A pale green face emerged from the plastic bag. ‘I’ll try,’ it said.
Traffic stopped and stalled. They grew silent, the tension within the car ratcheting up. When Norman whined, they growled, ‘Shut up, Norman!’ as one. Ed felt his blood pressure rising, even as the weight of responsibility for getting them there seemed to grow heavier. Why hadn’t they left half an hour earlier? Why hadn’t he worked this out better? What would happen if they missed it? He glanced sideways to where Jess was tapping her knee nervously and guessed that she was probably thinking the same thing. And then finally, inexplicably, as if the gods had been toying with them, the traffic cleared.
He flung the car through the cobbled streets, Jess yelling, ‘GO! GO!’ leaning forwards on the dashboard as if she were a coachman driving a horse. He skidded the car around the bends, almost too fast for the satnav, which actually started to burble, and entered the university campus on two wheels, following the small printed signs that had been placed haphazardly on random poles, until they found the Downes Building, an unlovely 1970s office block in the same grey granite as everything else.
The car screeched into a parking space in front of it, and everything stopped. Ed let out a long breath and glanced at the clock. It was six minutes to twelve.
‘This is it?’
‘This is it.’
Jess appeared suddenly paralysed, as if she couldn’t believe they were actually there. She undid her seatbelt and stared at the car park, at the boys strolling in as if they had all the time in the world, some reading off electronic devices, others accompanied by tense-looking parents. They were all wearing the uniforms of minor public schools. ‘I thought it would be … bigger,’ she said.
Nicky gazed out through the dank grey drizzle. ‘Yeah. Because advanced maths is such a crowd-puller.’
‘I can’t see anything,’ said Tanzie.
‘Look, you guys go in and register. I’ll get her some glasses.’
Jess turned to him. ‘But they won’t be the right prescription.’
‘I’ll sort it. Just go. GO.’
He could see her staring after him as he skidded out of the car park and headed back towards the city centre.
It took seven minutes and three attempts to find a chemist large enough to sell reading glasses. Ed screeched to a halt so dramatic that Norman shot forward and his great head collided with his shoulder. He resettled himself on the back seat, grumbling.
‘Stay here,’ Ed told him, and bolted inside.
The shop was empty, aside from an old woman with a basket and two assistants talking in lowered voices. He skidded around the shelves, past tampons and toothbrushes, corn plasters and reduced Christmas-gift sets, until he finally found the stand by the till. Dammit. Why the hell hadn’t he checked whether she was long- or short-sighted? He reached for his phone to ask, then remembered he didn’t have Jess’s number.
‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’ Ed stood there, trying to guess. Tanzie’s glasses looked as if they might be pretty strong. He had never seen her without them. Would that mean she was more likely to be short-sighted? Didn’t all children tend to be short-sighted? It was adults who held things away from them to see, surely. He hesitated for about ten seconds and then, after a moment’s indecision, he pulled them all from their rack, long- and short-sighted, mild and super-strength, and dumped them on the counter in a clear plastic-wrapped pile.
The girl broke off her conversation with the old woman. She looked down at them then up at him. Ed saw her clock the drool on his collar and tried to wipe it surreptitiously with his sleeve. This succeeded in smearing it across his lapel.
‘All of them. I’ll take all of them,’ he said. ‘But only if you can ring them up in less than thirty seconds.’
She looked over at her supervisor, who gave Ed a penetrating stare, then an imperceptible nod. Without a word, the girl began to ring them up, carefully positioning each pair in a bag. ‘No. No time. Just chuck them in,’ he said, reaching past her to thrust them into the plastic carrier.
‘Do you have a loyalty card?’
‘No. No loyalty card.’
‘We’re doing a special three for two offer on diet bars today. Would you like –’
Ed scrambled to pick up the glasses that had fallen from the counter. ‘No diet bars,’ he said. ‘No offers. Thank you.’
‘That’ll be a hundred and seventy-four pounds,’ she said finally. ‘Sir.’
She peered over her shoulder then, as if half expecting the arrival of a prank television crew. But Ed stabbed out his PIN, grabbed the carrier bag and ran for the car. He heard, ‘No manners,’ in a strong Scottish accent, as he left.
There was nobody in the car park when he returned. He pulled up right outside the door, leaving Norman clambering wearily back onto the back seat, and ran inside, down the echoing corridor. ‘Maths competition? Maths competition?’ he yelled at anyone he passed. A man pointed wordlessly to a laminated sign. He bolted up a flight of steps two at a time, along another corridor, and into an anteroom. Two men sat behind a desk. On the other side of the room stood Jess and Nicky. She took a step towards him. ‘Got them.’ He held up the carrier bag, triumphantly. He was so out of breath he could barely speak.
‘She’s gone in,’ she said. ‘They’ve started.’
He looked up at the clock, breathing hard. It was seven minutes past twelve.
‘Excuse me?’ he said to the man at the desk. ‘I need to give a girl in there her glasses.’
The man looked up slowly. He eyed the plastic bag Ed held in front of him.
Ed leant right over the desk, thrusting the bag towards him. ‘She broke her glasses on the way here. She can’t see without them.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I can’t let anyone in now.’
Ed nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, you can. Look, I’m not trying to cheat or sneak anything in. I just didn’t know her glasses type so I had to buy every pair. You can check them. All of them. Look. No secret codes. Just glasses.’ He held the bag open in front of him. ‘You have to take them in to her so she can find a pair that fits.’
The man gave a slow shake of his head.
‘Sir. We can’t allow anything to disrupt the other –’
‘Yes. Yes, you can. It’s an emergency.’
‘It’s the rules.’
Ed stared at him hard for a full ten seconds. Then he straightened up, put a hand to his head and started to walk away from him. He could feel a new pressure building inside him, like a kettle juddering on a hotplate. ‘You know something?’ he said, turning around, slowly. ‘It has taken us three solid days and nights to get here. Three days in which I have had my very nice car filled with vomit, and unmentionable things done to my upholstery by a dog. I don’t even like dogs. I have slept in a car with a virtual stranger. Not in a good way. I have stayed places no reasonable human being should have to stay. I have eaten an apple that had been down the too-tight trousers of a teenage boy and a kebab that for all I know contained human flesh. I have left a huge, huge, personal crisis in London and driven five hundred and eighty miles with people I don’t know – very nice people – because even I could see that this competition was really, really important to them. Vitally important. Because all that little girl in there cares about is maths. And if she doesn’t get a pair of glasses that she can actually see through, she can’t compete fairly in your competition. And if she can’t compete fairly, she blows her only chance to go to the school that she really, really needs to go to. And if that happens, you know what I’ll do?’
The man stared.
‘I will go into that room of yours and I will walk around every single maths paper and I will rip it into teeny-tiny pieces. And I will do it very, very quickly, before you have a chance to call your security guards. And you know why I will do this?’
The man swallowed. ‘No.’
‘Because all this has to have been worth something.’ Ed went back to him and leant close to him. ‘It has to. And because right now, at this exact minute, I really, really don’t feel like I have anything left to lose.’
Something had happened to Ed’s face. He could feel it, in the way it seemed to have twisted itself into shapes he had never felt before. He could see it in the way the man was staring at him. And he could feel it in the way Jess stepped forward and gently put her hand on his arm and handed the man the bag of glasses.
‘We’d be really, really grateful if you took her the glasses,’ she said quietly.
The man stood up and walked around the desk towards the door. He kept his eyes on Ed at all times. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. And the door closed gently behind him.
They walked out to the car in silence, oblivious to the rain. Jess unloaded the bags. Nicky stood off to the side, his hands thrust as far into his jeans pockets as he could manage. Which, given the tightness of his jeans, wasn’t very far.
‘Well, we made it.’ She allowed herself a small smile.
‘I said we would.’ Ed nodded towards the car. ‘Shall I wait here until she’s finished?’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘No. You’re fine. We’ve held you up long enough.’
Ed felt his smile sag a little. ‘Where will you sleep tonight?’
‘If she wins, I might treat us to a fancy hotel. If she loses …’ She shrugged. ‘Bus shelter.’ The way she said this suggested she didn’t believe it.
She walked around to the rear door of the car. Norman, who had glanced at the rain and decided not to get out, looked up at her.
Jess stuck her head through the door. ‘Norman, time to go.’
A small pile of bags sat on the wet ground behind the Audi. She hauled a jacket out of a bag and handed it to Nicky. ‘Come on, it’s cold.’
‘So … is this … it?’ The air held the salt tang of the sea. It made him think suddenly of Beachfront.
‘This is it. Thank you for the lift. I … we … all appreciate it. The glasses. Everything.’
They looked at each other properly for the first time, and there were about a billion things he wanted to say.
Nicky lifted an awkward hand. ‘Yeah. Mr Nicholls. Thanks.’
‘Oh. Here.’ Ed reached into his pocket for the phone he had pulled from the glove compartment, and tossed it to him. ‘It’s a back-up. I – um – don’t need it any more.’
‘Really?’ Nicky caught it one-handed, and gazed at it, disbelieving.
Jess frowned. ‘We can’t take that. You’ve done enough for us.’
‘It’s not a big deal. Really. If Nicky doesn’t take it I’ll only have to send it off to one of those recycling places. You’re just saving me a job.’
Jess glanced down at her feet as if she were going to say something else. And then she looked up, and hauled her hair briskly into an unnecessary ponytail.
‘Well. Thanks again.’ She thrust a hand towards him. Ed hesitated then shook it, trying to ignore the sudden flash of memory of the previous evening.
‘Good luck with your dad. And the lunch. And the whole work thing. I’m sure it will come good. Remember, good things happen.’ When she pulled her hand away he felt weirdly as if he’d lost something. She turned, and looked over her shoulder, already distracted. ‘Right. Let’s find somewhere dry to stick our stuff.’
‘Hold on.’ Ed hauled a business card from his jacket, scribbled a number and walked over to her. ‘Call me.’
One of the numbers was smudged. He saw her staring at it.
‘That’s a three.’ He altered it, then shoved his hands into his pockets, feeling like an awkward teenager. ‘I’d like to know how Tanzie gets on. Please.’
She nodded, her face unreadable. And then she was gone, propelling the boy in front of her like a particularly vigilant shepherd. He sat and watched them, lugging their oversized holdalls and the huffing, recalcitrant dog, until they rounded the corner of the grey concrete building and were gone.
The car was silent. Even in the hours when nobody spoke, Ed had become used to the faintly steamed windows, the vague sense of constant movement that came from being in close confinement with other people. The muffled ping of Nicky’s games console. Jess’s constant fidgeting. Now he gazed around the car’s interior at the long black hairs and ghostly trails of dried slobber across the middle of the rear seat where Norman had been, and felt as if he was standing in a deserted house. He saw the crumbs and the apple core that had been stuffed into the rear ashtray, the melted chocolate, the newspaper folded into the pocket of the seat. His damp clothes hung from wire hangers across the rear windows. He saw the maths book, half wedged down the side of the seat that Tanzie had evidently missed in her hurry to get out, and wondered whether to take it to her. But what was the point? It was too late.
It was too late.
He sat in the grey, bleak car park, watching the last of the parents walking to their cars, killing time as they waited for their charges. He leant forward and rested his head on the steering-wheel for some time. And then, when his was the only car left there, he put his key into the ignition and finally began to drive.
Ed had gone about twenty miles before he became aware of quite how tired he was. The combination of three nights of broken sleep, a hangover and hundreds of miles of driving hit him like a demolition ball, and he felt his eyes drooping. He turned up the radio, opened his windows, and when that failed, he pulled into a roadside café to get some coffee.
It was half empty despite it being lunchtime. In one corner a short-order chef fried something unseen on a griddle dark with grease, his hat pushed back on his head. A couple of suited men sat at opposite ends of the room, lost in mobile phones and paperwork, the wall behind them offering sixteen different permutations of sausage, egg, bacon, chips and beans. Ed grabbed a newspaper from the stand, and made his way to a table. He ordered coffee from the waitress.
‘I’m sorry, sir, but at this time of day we reserve tables for those eating.’ Her accent was strong enough that he had to think quite hard to work out what she had said.
‘Oh. Right. Well, I –’
He stared at the newspaper headline.
‘Sir?’
‘Mm?’ His skin began to prickle.
‘You have to order some food. If you want to sit down.’
‘Oh.’
The Financial Services Authority confirmed last night that it is investigating a traded UK technology company for insider trading worth millions of pounds. The investigation is understood to be taking place on both sides of the Atlantic, and involves the London and New York stock exchanges, and the SEC, the US equivalent to the FSA.
Nobody has yet been arrested, but a source within the City of London police said that this was ‘simply a matter of time’.
‘Sir?’
She’d said it twice before he heard her. He looked up. A young woman, her nose freckled, her natural hair teased and fluffed into a kind of matted arrangement. She was waiting in front of him. ‘What would you like to eat?’
‘Whatever.’ His mouth was the consistency of powder.
A pause.
‘Um. Do you want me to tell you today’s specials? Or some of our more popular dishes?’
Simply a matter of time.
‘We do an all-day Burns breakfast –’
‘Fine.’
‘And we … You want the Burns breakfast?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want white or brown bread with that?’
‘Whatever.’
He felt her staring at him. And then she scribbled a note, tucked her pad carefully into her waistband and walked away. And he sat and stared at the newspaper on the Formica table. Over the past seventy-two hours he might have felt like the whole world had gone topsy-turvy, but that had been a mere taster for what had been about to come.
‘I’m with a client.’
‘This won’t take a minute.’ He took a breath. ‘I’m not going to be at Dad’s lunch.’
A short, ominous silence
‘Please tell me I’m hallucinating through my ears.’
‘I can’t. Something’s come up.’
‘Something.’
‘I’ll explain later.’
‘No. You wait. Hold on.’
He heard the muffled sound of a hand over a phone. Possibly a clenched fist. ‘Sandra. I need to take this outside. Back in a …’ Footsteps. And then, as if someone had turned the volume up to full blast: ‘Really? Are you fucking kidding me? Really?’
Ed stared at the booth across the restaurant. An old couple sat side by side, saying nothing, eating their fish and chips with methodical accuracy. He had thought this would be a good time to do it. How could it have been any worse?
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I can’t believe it. It’s tomorrow, Ed. Do you have any idea how hard Mum’s worked to pull it together? Deirdre, Simon, the Grahams, that couple from down the road they’re always going on about? They’re all coming. They’re coming because Mum and Dad want to show you off. Do you have any idea how much they’re looking forward to seeing you? Dad sat down last week and worked out how long it had been since they last saw you. December, Ed. That’s four months. Four months in which he’s got more and more sick and you have fucking well failed to do anything useful other than send him some stupid fucking magazines.’
‘He said he liked the New Yorker. I thought it gave him something to do.’
‘He can barely fucking see, Ed. As you’d know if you’d bothered to come up. He likes bloody magazines if there’s someone to read them to him. And Mum gets so bored reading those long pieces that her brain actually starts to seep through her ears.’
On and on she went. It was like having a hairdryer turned on full strength in his ear.
‘Mum is so freaking desperate to see you. She’s actually cooked your favourite food rather than Dad’s for their anniversary lunch. That’s how much she wants to see you. And now, twenty-four hours before the actual thing, you just announce that you can’t come? Just like that? No explanation? What the hell is this? I can’t believe you. I defended you to Auntie Sheila when she said that that job was making you self-important, when she said you were getting too grand for your own family. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether she was right.’
His ears actually grew warm. He sat there, closed his eyes. When he opened them, it was twenty to two. The Olympiad would now be more than three-quarters through. He thought of Tanzie in that university hall, her head bent over her papers, the floor around her littered with redundant spectacles. He hoped for her sake that, faced with a page full of figures, she would relax and do the thing she was so plainly made to do. He thought of Nicky, sloping around outside, perhaps trying to find somewhere for a sneaky smoke.
He thought of Jess, seated on a holdall, the dog at her side, her hands clasped together on her knees as if in prayer, convinced that if she wished hard enough, good things would finally happen.
‘You are a bloody disgrace for a human being, Ed. Really.’ His sister’s voice was choked by tears.
‘I know.’
‘Oh, and don’t think I’m going to tell them. I’m not doing your damned dirty work for you.’
‘Gem. Please – there is a reason –’
‘Don’t even think about it. You want to break their hearts, then you do it. I’m done here, Ed. I can’t believe you’re my brother.’
Ed swallowed hard as she put down the phone. And then he let out a long slow, shuddering breath. What difference? It was only half of what they would all say if they knew the truth.
This way he could just be an uncaring, too-successful son. Too busy to see his family. Better than an utter failure. An embarrassment. A man who broke his father’s heart.
It was there, in the half-empty restaurant, seated on a red leatherette banquette and facing a slowly congealing breakfast he didn’t want that Ed finally understood how much he missed his father. He would have given anything just to see that reassuring nod, to watch that somehow oddly reluctant smile break over his face. He hadn’t missed his home for the fifteen years since he had left it, yet suddenly he felt so homesick that it overwhelmed him. He sat in the restaurant staring out of the faintly greasy window at the cars whizzing past on the motorway and something he couldn’t quite identify broke over him like the rolling of a vast wave. For the first time in his adult life – despite the divorce, the investigation, the thing with Deanna Lewis – Ed Nicholls found he was fighting back tears.
He sat and pressed his hands into his eyes and tightened his jaw until he could think about nothing other than the feeling of his back teeth pressing against each other.
‘Is everything okay?’
The young waitress’s eyes were vaguely wary, as if she were trying to assess whether this man was going to be trouble.
‘Fine,’ he said. He had meant to sound reassuring, but his voice cracked on the word. And then, when she didn’t seem convinced: ‘Migraine.’
Her face relaxed immediately. ‘Oh. Migraine. Sympathies. They’re buggers. You got something for it?’
Ed shook his head, not trusting himself to speak.
‘I knew there was something wrong.’ She stood in front of him for a moment. ‘Hold on.’ She walked over to the counter, one hand reaching up to the back of her head, where her hair was pinned into an elaborate twist. She leant over, fumbling towards something he couldn’t see, then walked back slowly. She glanced behind her, then dropped two pills in a foil casing on his table.
‘I’m not meant to give customers pills, obviously, but these are great. Only thing that works for mine. Don’t drink any more coffee, though – it’ll make it worse. I’ll get you some water.’
He blinked at her, then down at the pills.
‘It’s okay. They’re nothing dodgy. Just Migra-gone.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘They take about twenty minutes. But then – oh! Relief!’ Her smile wrinkled her nose. Kind eyes, under all the mascara, he saw now. A sweet, open face. A face whose emotions had not yet been battered by experience.
She took away his coffee mug, as if to protect him from himself. Ed found himself thinking about Jess. Good things happen. Sometimes when you least expect them.
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.
‘You’re welcome.’
And then his phone rang. The sound echoed in the roadside café and he gazed down at the screen as he stemmed the sound. Not a number he recognized.
‘Mr Nicholls?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Nicky. Nicky Thomas. Um. I’m really sorry to bother you. But we need your help.’