7.
Jess
She dozed through the small hours on the plastic chair, waking occasionally from discomfort and the sound of distant tragedies in the ward beyond the curtain. She watched the newly stitched Nicky as he finally slept, wondering how she was supposed to protect him. She wondered what was going on in his head. She wondered, with a clench of her stomach that no longer seemed to go away, what was coming next. A nurse popped her head around the curtain at seven and said she’d made her some tea and toast. This small act of kindness caused her to fight back embarrassed tears. The consultant stopped by shortly after eight, and said Nicky would probably spend another night in while they checked that there was no internal bleeding. There was a shadow they hadn’t quite got to the bottom of on the X-ray and they wanted to be sure. The best thing Jess could do would be to go home and get some rest. Nathalie rang to say she’d taken Tanzie to school with her kids and that everything was fine.
Everything was fine.
She got off the bus two stops before her house, walked round to Leanne Fisher’s, knocked on her door and told her, with as much politeness as she could muster, that if Jason came anywhere near Nicky again she would have the police on him. Whereupon Leanne Fisher spat at her and said if Jess didn’t fuck right off she’d put a brick through her effing window. There was a burst of laughter from within the house as Jess walked away.
It was pretty much the response she’d expected.
She let herself into her empty home. She paid the water bill with the council-tax money. She paid the electric with her cleaning money. She showered and changed and did her lunchtime shift at the pub, so lost in thought that Stewart Pringle rested his hand on her arse for a full thirty seconds before she noticed. She poured his half-pint of best bitter slowly over his shoes.
‘What did you do that for?’ Des yelled, when Stewart Pringle complained.
‘If you’re so okay with it, you stand there and let him rest his hand on your arse,’ she said, and went back to cleaning the glasses.
‘She has a point,’ Des said.
She vacuumed the entire house before Tanzie came home. She was so tired that she should have been comatose, but in fact she was so angry it was possible she did it all at double speed. She couldn’t stop herself. She cleaned and folded and sorted because if she didn’t she would take Marty’s old sledgehammer down from the two hooks in the musty garage, walk round to the Fishers’ house and do something that would finish them all off completely. She cleaned because if she didn’t she would stand in her overgrown little back garden, lift her face to the sky and scream and scream and scream and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.
By the time she heard the footsteps on the path, the house floated in a toxic fug of furniture polish and kitchen cleaner. She took two deep breaths, coughed a bit, then made herself take one more before she opened the door, a reassuring smile already plastered on her face. Nathalie stood on the path, her hands on Tanzie’s shoulders. Tanzie walked up to her, put her arms around her waist and held her tightly, her eyes shut.
‘He’s okay, sweetheart,’ Jess told her, stroking her hair. ‘It’s all right. It’s just a silly boys’ fight.’
Nathalie touched Jess’s arm, gave a tiny shake of her head, and left. ‘You take care,’ she said.
Jess made Tanzie a sandwich and watched her wander away into the shady part of the little garden with the dog to do algorithms and told herself she would tell her about St Anne’s tomorrow. She would definitely tell her tomorrow.
And then she disappeared into the bathroom and unrolled the money she had found in Mr Nicholls’s taxi. Four hundred and eighty pounds. She laid it out in neat piles on the floor with the door locked.
Jess knew what she should do. Of course she did. It wasn’t her money. It was a lesson she drummed into the kids every day: You don’t steal. You don’t take what is not yours. Do the right thing, and you will be rewarded for it in the end.
Do the right thing.
So why didn’t she take it back?
A new, darker voice had begun a low internal hum in her ear. Why should you give it back? He won’t miss it. He was passed out in the car park, in the taxi, in his house. It could have fallen out anywhere. It was only luck that you found it, after all. And what if someone else from round here had picked it up? You think they would have handed it back to him? Really?
His security card said the name of his company was Mayfly. His first name was Ed.
She would take the money back to Mr Nicholls. Her brain whirred round and round in time with the clothes-airer.
And still she didn’t do it.
Jess never used to think about money. Marty handled the finances, and they generally had enough for him to go down the pub a couple of nights a week, and for her to have the odd night out with Nathalie. They took the occasional holiday. Some years they did better than others, but they got by.
And then Marty got fed up with making do. There was a camping holiday in Wales where it rained for eight days solid and Marty became more and more dissatisfied, as if the weather was something to be taken personally. ‘Why can’t we go to Spain, or somewhere hot?’ he’d mutter, staring out through the flaps of the sodden tent. ‘This is crap. This isn’t a bloody holiday.’ He got fed up with driving; he found more and more to complain about. The other drivers were against him. The controller was cheating him. The passengers were tight. And then he started with the schemes. The pyramid scheme they joined two weeks too late. The knock-off T-shirts for a band that fell out of the charts as quickly as it had arrived. Import-export was the thing, he told Jess confidently, arriving home from the pub one night. He had met a bloke who could get cheap electrical goods from India, and they could sell them on to someone he knew.
And then – surprise, surprise – the someone who was going to sell them on turned out not to be the sure thing Marty had been promised. And that year’s summer turned into the wettest on record. And the few people who did buy them complained that they blew their electricity supply, and the rest of them rusted, even in the garage, so their meagre savings turned into a pile of useless white goods that had to be loaded, fourteen a week, into Marty’s car and taken to the dump. She still had the plugs under the stairs.
And then came the Rolls-Royce. Jess could at least see the sense in that one: Marty would spray it metallic grey, then rent himself out as a chauffeur for weddings and funerals. He’d bought it off eBay from a man in the Midlands, and made it halfway down the M6 before it conked out. Something to do with the starter motor, they said, peering under the bonnet. But the more they looked at it, the more seemed wrong with it. The first winter it spent on the drive, mice got into the upholstery so they needed money to replace the back seats before he could rent it out – because who wanted to sit on seats held together with duct tape on their wedding day? And then it turned out that replacement upholstered Rolls-Royce seats were about the only thing you couldn’t get on eBay. So it sat there in the garage, a daily reminder of how they never quite managed to get ahead, and the reason why her freezer had to live in the downstairs hall.
She’d taken over the money when Marty had got ill and started to spend most of each day in bed. Depression was an illness, everyone said so. Although, from what his mates said, he didn’t seem to suffer it on the two evenings he still managed to drag himself to the pub. She had peeled all the bank statements from their envelopes, and retrieved the savings book from its place in the hall desk and had finally seen for herself the trouble they were in. She’d tried to talk to him a couple of times, but he’d just pulled the duvet over his head and said he couldn’t cope. It was around then that he’d suggested he might go home to his mum’s for a bit. If she was honest, Jess was relieved to see him go. It was hard enough coping with Nicky, who was still a silent, skinny wraith, Tanzie and two jobs.
‘Go,’ she’d said, stroking his hair. She remembered thinking how long it had been since she’d touched him. ‘Go for a couple of weeks. You’ll feel better for a bit of a break.’ He had looked at her silently, his eyes red-rimmed, and squeezed her hand.
That had been two years ago. Neither of them had ever seriously raised the possibility of him coming back.
She tried to keep things normal until Tanzie went to bed, asking what she’d had to eat at Nathalie’s, telling her what Norman had done while she was out. She combed Tanzie’s hair, then sat on her bed and read her a story, like she was a much younger child, and just for once Tanzie didn’t tell her that actually she’d rather do some maths.
When Jess was finally sure she was asleep she rang the hospital, who said that Nicky was comfortable, and that the consultant was coming around again first thing, after which they thought he could probably be discharged. The X-rays had thrown up no evidence that his lung was punctured, and the small facial fracture would have to heal by itself.
She rang Marty, who listened in silence, then asked, ‘Does he still wear all that stuff on his face?’
‘He wears a bit of mascara, yes.’
There was a long silence.
‘Don’t say it, Marty. Don’t you dare say it.’ She put the phone down before he could.
And then the police rang at a quarter to ten and said that Fisher had denied all knowledge.
‘There were fourteen witnesses,’ she said, her voice tight with the effort of not shouting. ‘Including the man who runs the fish-and-chip shop. They jumped my son. There were four of them.’
‘Yes, but witnesses are only any use to us if they can identify the perpetrators, madam. And Mr Brent says it wasn’t clear who was actually doing the fighting.’ He let out a sigh, as if these sorts of calls were an endless chore, as if she should know what teenage boys were like. ‘I have to tell you, madam, the Fishers claim your son started it.’
‘He’s about as likely to start a fight as the Dalai bloody Lama. We’re talking about a boy who can’t put a duvet in its cover without worrying it might hurt someone.’
‘We can only act on the evidence, madam.’ His flat tone said he had heard it all before.
The Fishers, she thought, as she slammed down the phone. With their reputation, she’d be lucky if a single person ‘remembered’ what they’d seen.
For a moment Jess let her head fall into her hands. They would never let up. And it would be Tanzie next, once she started secondary school. She would be a prime target with her maths and her oddness and her total lack of guile. The thought of it made her go cold. She thought about Marty’s sledgehammer in the garage. She thought about how it would feel to walk down to the Fishers’ house and –
The phone rang. She snatched it up. ‘What now? Are you going to tell me he beat himself up too? Is that it?’
‘Mrs Thomas?’
She blinked.
‘Mrs Thomas? It’s Mr Tsvangarai.’
‘Oh. Mr Tsvangarai, I’m sorry. It – it’s not a great time –’ She held out her hand in front of her. It was shaking.
‘I’m sorry to call you so late but it’s a matter of some urgency. I have discovered something of interest. It’s called a Maths Olympiad.’ He spoke the words carefully.
‘A what?’
‘It’s a new thing, in Scotland, for gifted students. A maths competition. And we still have time to enter Tanzie.’
‘A maths competition?’ Jess closed her eyes. ‘You know, that’s really nice, Mr Tsvangarai, but we have quite a lot going on here right now and I don’t think I –’
‘Mrs Thomas. Hear me out. The prizes are five hundred pounds, a thousand pounds and five thousand pounds. Five thousand pounds. If she won, you’d have at least the first year of your St Anne’s school fees sorted out.’
‘Say that again?’
He repeated it. Jess sat down on the chair, as he explained in greater depth.
‘This is an actual thing?’
‘It is an actual thing.’
‘And you really think she could do it?’
‘There is a category especially for her age group. I cannot see how she could fail.’
Five thousand pounds, a voice sang in her head. Enough to get her through at least the first year.
‘What’s the catch?’
‘No catch. Well, you have to do advanced maths, obviously. But I can’t see that this would be a problem for Tanzie.’
She stood up and sat down again.
‘And of course you would have to travel to Scotland.’
‘Details, Mr Tsvangarai. Details.’ Her head was spinning. ‘This is for real, right? This isn’t a joke?’
‘I am not a funny man, Mrs Thomas.’
‘Fuck. FUCK. Mr Tsvangarai, you are an absolute beauty.’
She could hear his embarrassed laugh. She thought he was less embarrassed by her swearing than that she was probably the first woman ever to have called him a beauty.
‘So … what do we do now?’
‘Well, they waived the qualifying test after I sent over some examples of Tanzie’s work. I understand they are very keen to have children from less advantaged schools. And, between you and me, it is, of course, an enormous benefit that she’s a girl. But we have to decide quickly. You see, this year’s Olympiad is only five days away.’
Five days. The deadline for registration at St Anne’s was tomorrow.
She stood in the middle of the room, thinking. Then she ran upstairs, pulled Mr Nicholls’s money from its nest among her tights, and before she could think she stuffed it into an envelope, scrawled a note, and wrote the address in careful letters on the front.
She would pay it back. Every penny.
But, right now, she didn’t have a choice.
That night, Jess sat at the kitchen table, studied the figures and worked out a rough plan. She paid off the minimum on her credit card, sent a holding letter to the gas company disputing her bill (that should buy her at least a month), and wrote cheques to the creditors whom she knew wouldn’t wait, like the housing association. She looked up the cost of three train tickets to Edinburgh, laughed a bit hysterically, then looked up coach tickets (£187, including the £13 it would cost to get to the coach station) and the cost of putting Norman in kennels for a week (£94). She put the palms of her hands into her eye sockets and let them stay there for a bit. And then, when the children were asleep, she dug out the keys to the Rolls-Royce, went outside, brushed the mouse droppings off the driver’s seat and tried the ignition.
It turned over on the third attempt.
Jess sat in the garage that always smelt of damp, even in high summer, surrounded by old garden furniture, bits of car, plastic buckets and spades and the empty boxes for air-conditioning units, letting the engine run and thinking. Then she leant forward and peeled back the faded tax disc. It was almost two years out of date. And she was uninsured.
She stared at it, then turned off the ignition and sat in the dark as the engine ticked down and the smell of oil gradually faded from the air, and she thought, for the hundredth time: Do the right thing.