40.
Jess
Jess had been trying to persuade Tanzie to open the door. The school counsellor had told her it would be a good way to start rebuilding her confidence in the outside world, as long as she was in the house. She would answer the door, safe in the knowledge that Jess was behind her. That confidence would slowly stretch to other people, to being in the garden. It would be a stepping stone. These things were incremental.
It was a nice theory. If Tanzie would only agree to do it.
‘Door. Mum.’
Her voice carried over the sound of the cartoons. Jess was wondering when to get tough with her on the television-watching. She had calculated last week that Tanzie now spent upwards of five hours a day lying on the sofa. ‘She has had a shock,’ Mrs Liversedge had said. ‘But I think she’d feel better sooner if she was doing something a little more constructive.’
‘I can’t answer it, Tanze,’ she called down. ‘I’m standing here with my hands in a bowlful of bleach.’
Her voice, a whine, a new development these last days: ‘Can’t you get Nicky to open it?’
‘Nicky’s gone to the shop.’
Silence.
The sound of canned laughter echoed up the stairs. Jess could feel, if not see, the presence of whoever was waiting at the door, the shadow behind the glass. She wondered if it was Aileen Trent. She had arrived uninvited four times over the last two weeks with ‘unmissable bargains’ for the children. She wondered if she’d heard about Nicky’s blog money. Everyone on the estate seemed to know about it.
Jess yelled down, ‘Look, I’ll stand at the top of the stairs. All you have to do is open it.’
The doorbell rang again, twice.
‘Come on, Tanze. It’s not going to be anything bad. Look, put Norman on the lead and bring him with you.’
Silence.
Out of sight, she let her head drop down and wiped her eyes in the crook of her arm. She couldn’t ignore it: Tanzie was getting worse, not better. In the last fortnight she had taken to sleeping in Jess’s bed. She no longer woke, crying, but crept across the hallway in the small hours and simply climbed in, so that Jess woke beside her with no idea of how long she had been there. She hadn’t had the heart to tell her not to, but the counsellor said pointedly that she was a little old to do that indefinitely.
‘Tanze?’
Nothing. The doorbell rang a third time, impatient now.
Jess waited, her ears trained on the silence. She was going to have to go down and do it herself.
‘Hold on,’ she called wearily. She began to peel off her rubber gloves, and then she stopped as she heard the footfall in the hallway. The lumbering, wheezing sound of Norman being tugged along. Tanzie’s sweet voice entreating him to come with her, a tone she only used with him these days.
And then the front door opening. Her satisfaction at the sound was tempered by the sudden realization that she should have told Tanzie to tell Aileen to go away. Given half a chance she would be in with her black bag on wheels and straight past her, settling herself on the sofa and her ‘bargains’ spread out on the living-room floor.
But it wasn’t Aileen’s voice she heard.
‘Hey, Norman.’
Jess froze.
‘Whoa. What happened to his face?’
‘He only has one eye now.’ Tanzie’s voice.
Jess tiptoed to the top of the stairs. She could see his feet. His Converse trainers. Her heart began to thump.
‘Did he have some kind of accident?’
‘He saved me. From the Fishers.’
‘He what?’
And then Tanzie’s voice – her mouth opening and the words coming out in a rush. ‘The Fishers tried to get me in a car and Norman bust through the fence to save me but he got hit by a car and we had no money but all these people sent money to us because of what Nicky wrote and then the vet let us off half the bill because he said he’d never met such a brave dog.’
Her daughter. Talking as if she wouldn’t stop.
Jess took one step down, and then another.
‘He nearly died,’ Tanzie said. ‘He nearly died and the vet didn’t even want to give him an operation because he was so sick with infernal injuries and he thought we should just let him go. But Mum said she didn’t want to and that we should give him a chance. And then Nicky wrote this blog about how everything had gone wrong and some people just sent him money. Well, lots of people sent little bits of money. For no reason. And we had enough to save him. So Norman saved me and people we don’t even know saved him, which is sort of cool. But he only has one eye now and he gets really tired because he’s still in recovery and he doesn’t do very much.’
She could see him now. He had crouched down, and was stroking Norman’s head. And she stared at him as if she couldn’t tear her eyes away: the dark hair, the way his shoulders fitted his T-shirt. That grey T-shirt. Something rose up in her and a muffled half-sob came out so that she had to press her arm against her mouth. And then he looked up at her daughter from his low position and his face was deadly serious. ‘Are you okay, Tanzie?’
She lifted a hand and twisted a lock of her hair, as if deciding how much to tell him. ‘Sort of.’
‘Oh, sweetheart.’
Tanzie hesitated, her toe rotating on the floor behind her, and then she simply stepped forward and walked into his open arms. He closed them around her, as if he had been waiting for just that thing, letting her rest her head against his shoulder and they just stayed there, her wrapped in his arms, in the hallway. Jess watched him close his eyes, and she had to take one step back up to where she couldn’t be seen because she was afraid if he saw her she wouldn’t be able to stop crying.
‘Well, you know, I knew,’ he said finally, when he pulled back, and his voice was oddly determined. ‘I knew there was something special about this dog. I could see it.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. You and him. A team. Anyone with any sense could see it. And you know what? He looks pretty cool with one eye. He looks kind of tough. Nobody’s going to mess with Norman.’
Jess didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to go downstairs because she couldn’t bear him to look at her the way he did before. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t go down and she couldn’t move.
‘Mum told us why you don’t come round any more.’
‘She did?’
‘It was because she took your money.’
A painfully long silence.
‘She said she made a big mistake and she didn’t want us to do the same thing.’ Another silence. ‘Have you come to get it back?’
‘No. That’s not why I’ve come at all.’ He looked behind him. ‘Is she here?’
There was no avoiding it. Jess took one step down. And then another, her hand on the banister. She stood on the stairs with her rubber gloves on and waited as his eyes lifted to hers. And what he said next was the last thing she had expected him to say. ‘We need to get Tanzie to Basingstoke.’
‘What?’
‘The Olympiad. There was a mistake with the paper last time. And they’re resitting it. Today.’
Tanzie turned and looked up the stairs at her, frowning, as confused as Jess was. And then she looked as if a light-bulb had just gone on in her head. ‘Was it question one?’ she said.
He nodded.
‘I knew it!’ And she smiled, an abrupt, brilliant smile. ‘I knew there was something wrong with it!’
‘They want her to resit the whole paper?’
‘This afternoon.’
‘But that’s impossible.’
‘Not in Scotland. Basingstoke. It’s doable.’
She didn’t know what to say. She thought of all the ways in which she had destroyed her daughter’s confidence by pushing her to the Olympiad the previous time. She thought of her mad schemes, of how much hurt and damage their single trip had caused. ‘I don’t know …’
He was still balanced on his haunches. He reached out a hand and touched Tanzie’s arm. ‘You want to give it a go?’
Jess could see her uncertainty. Tanzie’s grip on Norman’s collar tightened. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. ‘You don’t have to, Tanze,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter one bit if you’d rather not.’
‘But you need to know that nobody got it right.’ Ed’s voice was calm and certain. ‘The man told me it was impossible. Not a single person in that examination room got question one correct.’
Nicky had appeared behind him, holding a plastic bag full of stationery from his shopping trip. It was hard to tell how long he’d been there.
‘So, yes, your mum is quite right, and you absolutely don’t have to go,’ Ed said. ‘But I have to admit that, personally, I would quite like to see you whup those boys at maths. And I know you can do it.’
‘Go on, Titch,’ Nicky said. ‘Go and show them what you’re really made of.’
She looked round at Jess. And then she turned back and pushed her glasses up her nose.
It’s possible that all four people held their breath.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But only if we can bring Norman.’
Jess’s hand went to her mouth. ‘You really want to do this?’
‘Yes. I could do all the other questions, Mum. I just panicked when I couldn’t get the first one to work. And then it all went a bit wrong from there.’
Jess took two more steps down the stairs, her heart racing. Her hands had started to sweat in her rubber gloves. ‘But how will we get there in time?’
Ed Nicholls straightened up, and looked her in the eye. His expression was both determined and oddly unreadable. ‘I’ll take you.’
It’s not easy driving four people and a large dog in a Mini, especially not on a hot day and in a car with no air-conditioning. Especially if the dog’s intestinal system is even more challenged than it once was, and if time constraints mean you have to go at speeds of more than forty miles an hour with all the inevitable consequences that brings. They drove with all of the windows open, in near silence, Tanzie murmuring to herself as she tried to remember all of the things she’d become convinced she’d forgotten, and occasionally pausing to bury her face in a strategically placed plastic bag.
Jess map-read, as Ed’s new car had no built-in satnav, and tried to steer a route away from motorway traffic jams and clogged shopping centres. Within an hour and three-quarters, all conducted in a peculiar near-silence, they were there: a 1970s glass and concrete block with a piece of paper marked OLYMPIAD flapping in the wind, taped to a sign that said ‘Keep Off the Grass’.
This time they were prepared. Jess signed Tanzie in, handed her a spare pair of spectacles (‘She never goes anywhere without a spare pair, now,’ Nicky told Ed), a pen, a pencil and a rubber. Then they all hugged her and reassured her that this didn’t matter, not one bit, and stood in silence as Tanzie walked in to do battle with a bunch of abstract numbers, and possibly the demons in her own head. The door closed behind her.
Jess hovered at the desk and finished signing the paperwork, acutely conscious of Nicky and Ed chatting on the grass verge through the open door. She watched them with surreptitious sideways looks. Nicky was showing Mr Nicholls something on Mr Nicholls’s old phone. Occasionally Mr Nicholls would shake his head. She wondered if it was his blog.
‘She’ll be cool, Mum,’ said Nicky, cheerfully, as Jess emerged. ‘Don’t stress.’ He was holding Norman’s lead. He had promised Tanzie they would not go more than five hundred feet from the building, so that she could feel their special bond even through the walls of the examination hall.
‘Yeah. She’ll be great,’ said Ed, his hands thrust deep in his pockets.
Nicky’s gaze flicked between the two of them, then down at the dog. ‘Well. We’re going to take a comfort break. The dog’s. Not mine,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a while.’ Jess watched him wander slowly along the quadrant and fought the urge to say that she would go with him.
And then it was just the two of them.
‘So,’ she said. She picked at a bit of paint on her jeans. She wished she had had the chance to change into something smarter.
‘So.’
‘Yet again you save us.’
‘You seem to have done a pretty good job of saving yourselves.’
They stood in silence. Across the car park a car skidded in, a mother and a young boy hurling themselves from the back seat and running towards the door.
‘How’s the foot?’
‘Getting there.’
‘No flip-flops.’
She gazed down at her white tennis shoes. ‘No.’
He ran his hand over his head and stared at the sky. ‘I got your envelopes.’
She couldn’t speak.
‘I got them this morning. I wasn’t ignoring you. If I’d known … everything … I wouldn’t have left you to deal with all that alone.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said briskly. ‘You’d done enough.’ A large piece of flint was embedded in the ground in front of her. She kicked at some dirt with her good foot, trying to dislodge it. ‘And it was very kind of you to bring us to the Olympiad. Whatever happens I’ll always be –’
‘Will you stop?’
‘What?’
‘Stop kicking stuff. And stop talking like …’ He turned to her. ‘Come on. Let’s go and sit in the car.’
‘What?’
‘And talk.’
‘No … thank you.’
‘What?’
‘I just … Can’t we talk out here?’
‘Why can’t we sit in the car?’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘I don’t understand. Why can’t we sit in the car?’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know.’ Tears sprang to her eyes. She wiped at them furiously with the palm of her hand.
‘I don’t know, Jess.’
‘Then I can’t tell you.’
‘Oh, this is ridiculous. Just come and sit in the car.’
‘No.’
‘Why? I’m not going to stand out here unless you give me a good reason.’
‘Because …’ her voice broke ‘… because that’s where we were happy. That’s where I was happy. Happier than I’ve been for years. And I can’t do it. I can’t sit in there, just you and me, now that …’
Her voice failed. She turned away from him, not wanting him to see what she felt. Not wanting him to see her tears. She heard him come and stand close behind her. The closer he got the more she couldn’t breathe. She wanted to tell him to go but she couldn’t bear it if he did.
His voice was low in her ear. ‘I’m trying to tell you something.’
She stared at the ground.
‘I want to be with you. I know we’ve made an unholy mess of it but I still feel more right with you doing wrong than I feel when everything’s supposedly right and you’re not there. Fuck. I’m no good at this stuff. I don’t know what I’m saying.’
Jess turned slowly. He was gazing at his feet, his hands in his pockets. He looked up suddenly.
‘They told me what Tanzie’s wrong question was.’
‘What?’
‘It was about the theory of emergence. Strong emergence says that the sum of a number can be more than its constituent parts. You know what I’m saying?’
‘No. I’m crap at maths.’
‘I don’t want to go back over it all. What you did. It’s not like I’m perfect. But I just … I want to try. It might prove to be a huge fuck-up. But I’ll take that chance.’
He reached out then and gently took hold of the belt loop of her jeans. He pulled her slowly towards him. She couldn’t tear her eyes from his hands. And then, when she finally did lift her face to his, he was gazing straight at her and Jess found she was crying and smiling, perhaps the first time she had smiled properly in about a million years.
‘I want to see what we can add up to, Jessica Rae Thomas. All of us. What do you say?’