One Plus One: A Novel (12 page)

Mr. Nicholls rolled his eyes. He was clearly losing patience. “Okay, then. The kids sleep in the hotel room. You and I sleep in the car with the dog. Everyone’s happy.” He didn’t look happy.

“I’ve never stayed in a hotel. Have I stayed in a hotel, Mum?”

There was a brief silence. Jess could feel the situation sliding away from her.

“I’ll mind Tanze,” said Nicky. He looked hopeful. His face, where it wasn’t bruised, was the color of putty. “A bath would be good.”

“Would you read me a story?”

“Only if it has zombies in it.” Jess watched as Nicky half smiled at Tanzie.

“Okay,” she said. And she tried to fight the wave of nausea at what she had just agreed to.

—

The mini-mart squatted in the shadow of a food distribution company, its windows bright with exclamation marks and offers of crispy fish bites and fizzy drinks. Jess bought rolls and cheese, crisps, and overpriced apples and made the kids a picnic supper, which they ate on the grassy slope around the car park. On the other side the traffic thundered past in a purple haze toward the south. She offered Mr. Nicholls some of their meal, but he peered at the contents of her bag and said thanks but he’d eat in the restaurant.

Once he was out of sight, Jess relaxed. She set the kids up in their room, feeling faintly wistful that she wasn’t in with them. It was on the ground floor, facing the car park. She had asked Mr. Nicholls to park as close to their window as possible, and Tanzie made her go outside three times, just so she could wave at Jess through the curtains and squash her nose sideways against the glass.

Nicky disappeared into the bathroom for an hour, the taps running. He came out, switched on the television, and lay on the bed, looking simultaneously exhausted and relieved.

Jess laid out his pills, got Tanzie bathed and into her pajamas, and warned them not to stay up too late. “And no smoking,” she warned him. “Seriously.”

“How can I?” he said. “You’ve got my stash.”

Tanzie lay on her side, working her way through her maths books. Jess fed and walked the dog, sat in the passenger seat with the door open, ate a cheese roll, and waited for Mr. Nicholls to finish his meal.

It was a quarter past nine, and she was struggling to read a newspaper in the fading light when he appeared. He was holding a phone in a way that suggested he had just come off another call, and he seemed about as pleased to see her as she was him. He opened the door, climbed in, and shut it.

“I’ve asked Reception to ring me if anyone cancels a booking.” He stared ahead at the windscreen. “Obviously I didn’t tell them I’d be waiting in their car park.”

Norman was lying on the tarmac, looking as if he’d been dropped from a great height. She wondered whether she should bring him in. Without the children in the back, and with the encroaching darkness, it felt even odder to be in the car beside Mr. Nicholls.

“Are the kids okay?”

“They’re very happy. Thank you.”

“Your boy looks pretty bashed up.”

“He’ll be all right.”

There was a long silence. He looked at her. Then he put both
hands on the wheel and leaned backward in his seat. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and turned to face her. “Okay . . . so have I done something else to upset you?”

“What?”

“You’ve acted all day like I’m bugging you. I apologized for the thing in the pub the other night. I’ve done what I can to help you out here. And yet still I get the feeling I’ve done something wrong.”

“You . . . you haven’t done anything wrong,” she stammered.

He studied her for a minute. “Is this, like, a woman’s ‘There’s nothing wrong’ when actually what you mean is that I’ve done something massive and I’m actually supposed to guess? And then you get really mad if I don’t?”

“No.”

“You see, now I don’t know. Because that ‘no’ might be part of the woman’s ‘There’s nothing wrong.’”

“I’m not speaking in code. There’s nothing wrong.”

“Then can we just ease up around each other a bit? You’re making me really uncomfortable.”

“I’m making you uncomfortable?”

His head swiveled slowly toward her.

“You’ve looked like you regretted offering us this lift since the moment we got into the car. In fact, since before we got in.”
Shut up, Jess
, she warned herself.
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up
. “I’m not even sure why you did it.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, turning away. “Forget it.”

He stared ahead of him out of the windscreen. He looked suddenly really, really tired.

“In fact, you could just drop us at a station tomorrow morning. We won’t bother you anymore.”

“Is that what you want?” he said.

She drew her knees up to her chest. “It might be the best thing.”

The skies darkened to pitch around them. Twice Jess opened her
mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Mr. Nicholls stared through the windscreen at the closed curtains of the hotel room, apparently deep in thought.

She thought of Nicky and Tanzie, sleeping peacefully on the other side, and wished she were with them. She felt sick. Why couldn’t she have just pretended? Why couldn’t she have been nicer? She was an idiot. She had blown it all again.

It had grown chill. Finally, she pulled Nicky’s duvet from the backseat and thrust it at him. “Here,” she said.

“Oh.” He looked at the huge picture of Super Mario. “Thanks.”

She called the dog in, reclined her seat just far enough for it not to be touching him, and then she pulled Tanzie’s duvet over herself. “Good night.” She stared at the plush interior a matter of inches from her nose, breathing in the new-car smell, her mind a jumble. How far away was the station? How much would the fare cost? They would have to pay for an extra day’s bed-and-breakfast somewhere, at least. And what was she going to do with the dog? She could hear Norman’s faint snore and thought grimly that she was damned if she would vacuum that rear seat now.

“It’s half past nine.” Mr. Nicholls’s voice broke into the silence.

Jess lay very still.

“Half. Past. Nine.” He let out a deep sigh. “I never thought I’d say it, but this is actually worse than being married.”

“What, am I breathing too loud?”

He opened his door abruptly. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, and set off across the car park.

Jess pushed herself upright and watched him jogging across the road to the mini-mart, disappearing into its fluorescent-lit interior. He reappeared a few minutes later with a bottle of wine and a packet of plastic cups.

“It’s probably awful,” he said, climbing back into the driver’s seat. “But right now I couldn’t give a toss.”

She gazed at the bottle.

“Truce, Jessica Thomas? It’s been a long day. And a shitty week. And, spacious as it is, this car isn’t big enough for two people who aren’t talking to each other.”

He looked at her. His eyes were exhausted and stubble was starting to show through on his chin. It made him seem curiously vulnerable.

She took a cup from him. “Sorry. I’m not used to people helping us out. It makes me . . .”

“Suspicious? Crabby?”

“I was going to say it makes me think I should get out more.”

He let out a breath. “Right.” He glanced down at the bottle. “Then let’s—oh, for crying out loud.”

“What?”

“I thought it was a screw top.” He stared at it as if it were just one more thing designed to annoy him. “Great. I don’t suppose you have a bottle opener?”

“No.”

“You think they’ll exchange it?”

“Did you take the receipt?”

He let out a deep sigh, which she interrupted. “No need,” she said, taking it from him. She opened her door and climbed out. Norman’s head shot up.

“You’re not going to smash it into my windscreen?”

“Nope.” She peeled off the foil. “Take off your shoe.”

“What?”

“Take off your shoe. It won’t work with flip-flops.”

“Please don’t use it as a glass. My ex did that once with a stiletto, and it was really, really hard pretending that champagne smelling of feet was an erotic experience.”

She held out her hand. He finally took his shoe off and handed it to her. As he looked on, Jess placed the base of the wine bottle inside it and, holding the two together carefully, stood alongside the hotel and thumped them hard against the wall.

“I suppose there’s no point me asking you what you’re doing.”

“Just give me a minute,” she said through gritted teeth, and thumped again.

Mr. Nicholls shook his head slowly.

She straightened up and glared at him. “You’re more than welcome to suck the cork out, if you’d rather.”

He held up his hand. “No, no. You go ahead. Broken glass in my socks is exactly how I hoped to end tonight.”

Jess checked the cork and thumped again. And there—a centimeter of it protruded from the neck of the bottle. Thump. Another centimeter. She held it carefully, gave it one more thump, and there it was: she pulled the rest of the cork gently from the neck and handed it to him.

He stared at it, and then at her. She handed him back his shoe.

“Wow. You’re a useful woman to know.”

“I can also put up shelves, replace rotting floorboards, and make a fan belt out of a tied stocking.”

“Really?”

“Not the fan belt.” She climbed into the car and accepted the plastic cup of wine. “I tried it once. It shredded before we’d got thirty yards down the road. Total waste of Marks & Spencer opaques.” She took a sip. “And the car stank of burned tights for weeks.”

Behind them, Norman whimpered in his sleep.

“Truce,” Mr. Nicholls said, and held up his cup.

“Truce. You’re not going to drive afterward, are you?” she said, holding up her own.

“I won’t if you won’t.”

“Oh, very funny.”

And suddenly the evening became a little easier.

S
o these were the things Ed discovered about Jessica Thomas, once she’d had a drink or two (actually, four or five) and stopped being chippy:

One, the boy wasn’t actually her kid. He was the son of her ex and her ex’s ex, and given that both of them had effectively walked out on him, she was pretty much the only person he had left. “Kind of you,” he said.

“Not really,” she said. “Nicky is as good as mine. He’s been with me since he was eight. He looks out for Tanzie. And besides, families are different shapes now, right?” The defensive way she said it made him think she had had this conversation many times before.

Two, the little girl was ten. He did some mental arithmetic, and Jess cut in before he said a word.

“Seventeen.”

“That’s . . . young.”

“I was a wild kid. I knew everything. I actually knew nothing. Marty came along, I dropped out of school, and then I got pregnant. I wasn’t always going to be a cleaner, you know. My mum was a teacher.” Her gaze had slid toward him, as if she knew this fact would shock.

“Okay.”

“Retired now. She lives in Cornwall. We don’t really get on. She doesn’t agree with what she calls my life choices. I never could explain that once you have a baby at seventeen, there are no choices.”

“Not even now?”

“Nope.” She twisted a lock of hair between her fingers. “Because you never quite catch up. Your friends are at college, you’re at home
with a tiny baby. You haven’t even had time to think about what your ambitions might be. Your friends are starting their careers, you’re down at the housing office trying to find somewhere to live. Your friends are buying their first cars and houses and you’re trying to find a job that you can fit round child care. And all the jobs you can fit round school hours have really crappy wages. And that was before the economy went splat. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t regret having Tanzie, not for a minute. And I don’t regret taking Nicky on. But if I had my time again, sure, I’d have had them after I had done something with my life. It would be nice to be able to give them . . . something better.”

She hadn’t bothered to put the seat back up while she told him this. She lay propped on her elbow facing him under the duvet and her bare feet rested on the dashboard. Ed found he didn’t mind them so much.

“You could still have a career,” he said. “You’re young. I mean . . . you could get an after-school nanny or something?”

She actually laughed. A great seal bark, “Ha!” Her laugh was big, abrupt, and awkward, at odds with her size and shape. She sat bolt upright and took a swig of her wine. “Yeah. Right, Mr. Nicholls. Sure I could.”

Three, she liked fixing things. She sometimes wondered if she could have made that her career. She did odd jobs around the council estate, from rewiring plugs to tiling people’s bathrooms. “I did everything around the house. I’m good at making stuff. I can even block-print wallpaper.”

“You make your own wallpaper?”

“Don’t look at me like that. It’s in Tanzie’s room. I made her clothes, too, until recently.”

“Are you actually from the Second World War? Do you save jam jars and string, too?”

“So what did you want to be?”

“What I was,” he said. And then he realized he didn’t want to talk about it and changed the subject.

Four, she had seriously tiny feet. As in she bought child-sized shoes. (Apparently they were cheaper.) After she’d said this he had to stop himself from sneaking looks at her feet like some kind of weirdo.

Five, before she’d had children, she could drink four double vodkas in a row and still walk a straight line. “Yup, I could hold my drink. Obviously not enough to remember birth control.”

She almost never drank at home. “When I’m working at the pub and someone offers me one, I just take the cash. And when I’m at home, I worry that something might happen to the kids and I’ll need to be together.” She stared out of the window. “Now I think about it, this is the closest thing I’ve had to a night out in . . . five months.”

“A man who shut a door in your face, two bottles of rot-gut wine, and a car park.”

“I’m not knocking it.”

She didn’t explain what made her worry so much about the kids. He thought back to Nicky’s face and decided not to ask.

Six, she had a scar under her chin from when she’d fallen off a bike and a piece of gravel had been lodged in it for two whole weeks. She tried to show him, but the light in the car wasn’t strong enough. She also had a tattoo on the base of her spine. “A proper tramp stamp, according to Marty. He wouldn’t talk to me for two whole days after I got it.” She paused. “I think that’s probably why I got it.”

Seven, her middle name was Rae. She had to spell it out every single time.

Eight, she didn’t mind cleaning, but she really, really hated people treating her as if she were “just” a cleaner. (He had the grace to color a little here.)

Nine, she hadn’t had a date in the two years since her ex had left.

“You haven’t had sex for two and a half years?”

“I said he left two years ago.”

“It’s a reasonable calculation.”

She pushed herself upright and gave him a sideways look. “Three and a half, actually. If we’re counting. Apart from one, um, episode last year. And you don’t have to look so shocked.”

“I’m not shocked,” he said, and tried to rearrange his face. He shrugged. “Three and a half years. I mean, it’s only, what, a quarter of your adult life? No time at all.”

“Yeah. Thanks for that.” And then he wasn’t sure what happened, but something in the atmosphere changed. She mumbled something that he couldn’t make out, pulled her hair into another ponytail—she tied her hair back for no reason when she felt nervous, he noticed, as if she needed to be doing something—and said maybe it was really time for them to be getting some sleep.

Ed thought he would lie awake for ages. There was something oddly unsettling about being in a darkened car just an arm’s length from an attractive woman you had just shared two bottles of wine with. Even if she was huddled under a SpongeBob SquarePants duvet. He looked out of the sunroof at the stars, listened to the lorries rumbling toward London, and thought that his real life—the one with his company and his office and the never-ending hangover of Deanna Lewis—was now a million miles away.

“Still awake?”

He turned his head, wondering if she’d been watching him. “No.”

“Okay,” came the murmur from the passenger seat. “Truth game.”

He raised his eyes to the roof. “Go on, then.”

“You first.”

He couldn’t come up with anything.

“You must be able to think of something.”

“Okay, why are you wearing flip-flops?”

“That’s your question?”

“It’s freezing out. It’s been the coldest, wettest spring since records began. And you’re wearing flip-flops.”

“Does it bug you that much?”

“I just don’t understand it. You’re obviously cold.”

She pointed a toe. “It’s spring.”

“So?”

“So. It’s spring. Therefore the weather will get better.”

“You’re wearing flip-flops as an expression of faith.”

“If you like.”

He couldn’t think of how to reply to this.

“Okay, my turn.”

He waited.

“Did you think about driving off and leaving us this morning?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“Okay. Maybe a bit. Your neighbor wanted to smash my head in with a baseball bat and your dog smells really bad.”

“Pfft. Any excuse.”

He heard her shift in the seat. Her feet disappeared under the duvet. Her hair smelled of coconut.

“So why didn’t you?”

He thought for a minute before he responded. Perhaps it was because he couldn’t see her face. Perhaps the drink and the late hour had lowered his defenses, because he wouldn’t normally have answered like he did. “Because I’ve done some stupid stuff lately. And maybe some part of me just wanted to do something I could feel good about.”

Ed thought she was going to say something. He sort of hoped she would. But she didn’t.

He lay there for a few minutes, gazing out at the sodium lights and listening to Jessica Rae Thomas’s breathing and thought how much he missed just sleeping near another person. Most days he felt like the loneliest man on the planet. He thought about those tiny feet and polished toenails and realized he had probably had too much to drink.
Don’t be an idiot, Nicholls
, he told himself, and turned so that he had his back to her.

And then he must have fallen asleep, because suddenly it was cold and pale gray outside and his arm was numb and he was so groggy that it took two whole minutes to figure out that the banging he could hear was the security guard knocking on the driver’s window to tell them they couldn’t sleep there.