His wet arm slid around her, he hooked the towel around his waist. Jess braced herself against the wall of the shower, and finally, shakily, they stood. Usefully, the caravan was so small that at every step there was a wall for him to lean on. They made their way unsteadily to what would have been the living room and he collapsed onto the sofa cushions.
‘This is what my life has come to.’ He groaned, eyeing the bucket as she placed it beside the bed.
‘Yup.’ Jess viewed the peeling wallpaper, the nicotine-stained paintwork. ‘Well, I’ve had better Saturday nights myself.’
She made herself a cup of tea. It was a little after four. Her eyes were gritty and sore, and she felt light-headed. She sat down and closed them for a minute.
‘Thanks,’ he said, weakly.
‘What for?’
He pushed himself upright. ‘For bringing loo roll out to me in the middle of the night. For washing my disgusting clothes. For helping me out of the shower. And for not once acting like it was my own fault for buying a dodgy doner from a place called Keith’s Kebabs.’
‘Even though it was your own fault.’
‘See? Now you’re spoiling it.’
He lay back on the pillow, his forearm over his eyes. She tried not to look at the broad expanse of chest above the strategically placed towel. She couldn’t remember when she had last seen a man’s n**ed torso other than at Des’s ill-advised Pub Beach Volleyball Match the previous August.
‘Go and lie down in the bedroom. You’ll be more comfortable.’
He opened one eye. ‘Do I get a SpongeBob duvet?’
‘You get my pink stripy one. But I promise not to regard it as any reflection whatsoever on your masculinity.’
‘Where will you sleep?’
‘Out here. It’s fine,’ she said, as he started to protest. ‘I’m not sure I’ll sleep much now anyway.’
He let her lead him into the tiny bedroom. He groaned as he collapsed onto the bed, as if even that caused him discomfort, and she pulled the duvet over him gently. The shadows under his eyes were ash-coloured and his voice had become drowsy. ‘I’ll be ready to go in a couple of hours.’
‘Sure you will,’ she said, observing the ghostly pallor of his skin. ‘Take your time.’
‘Where the hell are we, anyway?’
‘On the Yellow Brick Road.’
‘Is that the one with the God-like Lion who saves everyone?’
‘You’re thinking of Narnia. This one is cowardly and useless.’
‘Figures.’
And finally he slept.
Jess left the room silently, and lay down on the narrow sofa under a peach-coloured blanket that smelt of damp and furtively smoked cigarettes, and tried not to look at the clock. She and Nicky had studied the map while Mr Nicholls was in the toilet block the previous evening and had reconfigured the journey as best they could.
We still have plenty of time, she told herself. And then, finally, she, too, slept.
All was silent within Mr Nicholls’s room well into the morning. Jess thought about waking him, but each time she made a move towards his door, she remembered the sight of him slumped against the shower cabinet and her fingers stilled on the handle. She opened the door only once, when Nicky pointed out that it was just possible he had choked to death on his own vomit. He seemed the faintest bit disappointed when it turned out Mr Nicholls was just in a really deep sleep. The children took Norman up the road, Tanzie in her dark glasses for authenticity, bought supplies from a convenience store and breakfasted in whispers. Jess converted the remaining bread into sandwiches (‘Oh, good,’ said Nicky), cleaned the caravan, for something to do, went outside and left a message on Des’s answerphone, apologizing again. He didn’t pick up.
At ten thirty the door of the little room opened with a squeak and Mr Nicholls emerged, blinking, in his T-shirt and boxers. He raised a palm in greeting. He looked disoriented, a castaway waking on an island. A long crease bisected his cheek from the pillow. ‘We are in …’
‘Ashby de la Zouch. Or somewhere nearby. It’s not quite Beachfront.’
‘Is it late?’
‘Quarter to eleven.’
‘Quarter to eleven. Okay.’ His jaw was thick with stubble, and his hair stuck up on one side. Jess pretended to read her book. He smelt of warm, sleepy male. She had forgotten what a weirdly potent scent that was.
‘Quarter to eleven.’ He rubbed at the stubble on his chin, then walked unsteadily to the window and peered out. ‘I feel like I’ve been asleep for a million years.’ He sat down heavily on the sofa cushion opposite her, running his hand over his jaw.
‘Dude,’ said Nicky from beside her. ‘Jailbreak alert.’
‘What?’
Nicky waved a biro. ‘You need to put the prisoners back in the pen.’
Mr Nicholls stared at him, then turned to Jess, as if to say, ‘Your son has gone mad.’
‘Oh, God.’
He frowned. ‘Oh God what?’
Following Nicky’s gaze, Jess looked down and swiftly away. ‘You could at least have taken me out to dinner first,’ she said, standing to clear the breakfast things.
‘Oh.’ Mr Nicholls looked down and adjusted himself. ‘Sorry. Right. Okay.’ He stood, and made for the bathroom. ‘I’ll – uh – I … Am I okay to have another shower?’
‘We saved you some hot water,’ said Tanzie, who was head-down over her exam sheet in the corner. ‘Well, actually, all of it. You smelt really bad yesterday.’
He emerged twenty minutes later, his hair damp and smelling of shampoo, his jaw clean-shaven. Jess was busy whisking salt and sugar into a glass of water and trying not to think about what she had just seen. She handed it to him.
‘What’s that?’ He pulled a face.
‘Rehydrating solution. To replace some of what you lost last night.’
‘You want me to drink a glass of salty water? After I’ve spent all night being sick?’
‘Just drink it.’ She was too tired to argue with him. While he was grimacing and gagging, she fixed him some plain toast and a black coffee. He sat across the little Formica table, took a sip of coffee and a few tentative bites of toast, and ten minutes later, in a voice that held some surprise, acknowledged that he did actually feel a bit better.
‘Better, as in able-to-drive-without-having-an-accident better?’
‘By having an accident, you mean …’
‘Not crashing into a lay-by.’
‘Thank you for clarifying that.’ He took another, more confident, bite of toast. ‘Yeah. Give me another twenty minutes, though. I want to make sure I’m …’
‘… safe in cars.’
‘Ha.’ He grinned, and it was curiously pleasing to see him smile. ‘Yes. Quite. Oh, man, I do feel better.’ He ran a hand across the plastic-covered table and took a swig of coffee, sighing with apparent satisfaction. He finished the first round of toast, asked if there was any more going, then looked around the table. ‘Although, you know, I might feel even better if you weren’t all staring at me while I eat. I’m worried some other part of me is poking out.’
‘You’ll know,’ said Nicky. ‘Because we’ll all run screaming.’
‘Mum said you pretty much brought up an organ,’ said Tanzie. ‘I was wondering what it felt like.’
He glanced up at Jess and stirred his coffee. He didn’t shift his gaze until she had blushed. ‘Truthfully? Not so different from most of my Saturday nights, these days.’ He drank the rest and put down his cup. ‘Okay. I’m good. The rogue kebab is defeated. Let’s hit the road.’
The landscape altered by the mile as they drove through the afternoon, the hills growing steeper and less bucolic, the walls that banked them morphing from hedgerows into flinty grey stone. The skies opened, the light around them grew brighter and they passed the distant symbols of an industrial landscape: red-brick factories, huge power stations that belched mustard-coloured clouds. Jess watched surreptitiously as Mr Nicholls drove, at first wary that he would suddenly clutch his stomach, and then later with a vague satisfaction at the sight of normal colour returning to his face.
‘I don’t think we’re going to make Aberdeen today,’ he said, and there was a hint of apology in his voice.
‘Let’s just get as far as we can and do the last stretch early tomorrow morning.’
‘That’s exactly what I was going to suggest.’
‘Still loads of time.’
‘Loads.’
She let the miles roll by, dozed intermittently and tried not to worry about all the things she needed to worry about. She positioned her mirror surreptitiously so that she could watch Nicky in the back seat. His bruises had faded, even in the short time they had been away. He seemed to be talking more than he had been. But he was still closed to her. Sometimes Jess worried he would be like that for the rest of his life. It didn’t seem to make any difference how often she told him she loved him, or that they were his family. ‘You’re too late,’ her mother had said, when Jess had told her he was coming to live with them. ‘With a child that age, the damage has been done. I should know.’
As a schoolteacher, her mother could keep a class of thirty eight-year-olds in a narcoleptic silence, could steer them through tests like a shepherd streaming sheep through a pen. But Jess couldn’t remember her ever smiling at her with pleasure, the kind of pleasure you’re meant to get just from looking at someone you gave birth to.
She had been right about many things. She had told Jess on the day she started secondary school: ‘The choices you make now will determine the rest of your life.’ All Jess heard by then was someone telling her she should pin her whole self down, like a butterfly. That was the thing: when you put someone down all the time, eventually they stopped listening to the sensible stuff.
When Jess had had Tanzie, young and daft as she had been, she’d had enough wisdom to know she was going to tell her how much she loved her every day. She would hug her and wipe her tears and flop with her on the sofa with their legs entwined like spaghetti. She would cocoon her in love. When she was tiny Jess had slept with her in their bed, her arms wrapped around her, so that Marty would haul himself grumpily into the spare room, moaning that there wasn’t any room for him. She barely even heard him.
And when Nicky had turned up two years later, and everyone had told her she was mad to take on someone else’s child, a child who was already eight years old and from a troubled background – you know how boys like that turn out – she’d ignored them. Because she could see instantly in the wary little shadow who had stood a minimum twelve inches away from anyone, from his father even, a little of what she had felt. Because she knew that something happened to you when your mother didn’t hold you close, or tell you all the time that you were the best thing ever, or even notice when you were home: a little part of you sealed over. You didn’t need her. You didn’t need anyone. And, without even knowing you were doing it, you waited. You waited for anyone who got close to you to see something they didn’t like in you, something they hadn’t seen initially, and to grow cold and disappear, like so much sea mist, too. Because there had to be something wrong, didn’t there, if even your own mother didn’t really love you?
It was why she hadn’t been devastated when Marty left. Why would she be? He couldn’t hurt her. The only thing Jess really cared about was those two children, and letting them know they were okay by her. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved. Jess hadn’t done much to be proud of in her life, but the thing she was most proud of was that Tanzie knew it. Strange little bean that she was, Jess knew she knew it.