One Plus One: A Novel (29 page)

T
he bearded man emerged from the swing doors wiping his hands on his white coat. “Norman Thomas?”

Jess had never considered that their dog might have a surname.

“Norman Thomas? Large, indeterminate breed?” he said, lowering his chin and looking straight at her.

She scrambled to standing in front of the plastic chairs. “He has suffered massive internal injuries,” he said, with no preamble. “He has a broken hip and several broken ribs and a fractured front leg and we won’t know what’s going on inside until the swelling’s gone down. And I’m afraid he’s definitely lost the left eye.” She noticed there were bright smears of blood on his blue plastic shoes.

She felt Tanzie’s hand tighten in hers. “But he’s still alive?”

“I don’t want to give you false hope. The next forty-eight hours will be critical.”

Beside her Tanzie gave a low moan of something that might have been joy or anguish; it was hard to tell.

“Walk with me.” He took Jess’s elbow, turning his back on the children, and lowered his voice. “I have to say that I’m not sure, given the extent of his injuries, if the kindest thing wouldn’t be to let him go.”

“But if he does survive forty-eight hours?”

“Then he may stand some chance of recovery. But as I said, Mrs. Thomas, I don’t want to give you false hope. He really isn’t a well lad.”

Around them the waiting clients were watching silently, their cats in pet carriers cradled on their laps, their small dogs panting gently under chairs. Nicky was staring at the vet, his jaw set in a tense line. His mascara was smudged around his eyes.

“And if we do proceed, it’s not going to be cheap. He may need more than one operation. Possibly even several. Is he insured?”

Jess shook her head.

Now the vet became awkward. “I need to warn you that going forward, his treatment is likely to cost a significant sum. And there are no guarantees of recovery. It’s very important that you understand that before we go any further.”

It was her neighbor Nigel who had saved him, she heard later. He had run from his house carrying two blankets, one to wrap around the shivering Tanzie, the other to cover the body of the dog. Go indoors, he had instructed Jess. Take the kids indoors. But as he drew the tartan rug gently over Norman’s head, he had paused, and said to Nathalie, “Did you see that?”

Jess hadn’t heard him at first, over the sound of the crowd and Tanzie’s muffled wailing and the children crying nearby because even though they didn’t know him, they understood the utter sadness of a dog lying motionless in the road.

“Nathalie? His tongue. Look. I think he’s panting. Here, let’s pick him up. Get him in the car. Quick!” It had taken three of Jess’s neighbors to lift him. They had laid him carefully on the rear seat, and had driven in a blur to the big veterinary practice on the outskirts of town. Jess loved Nigel for not once mentioning the blood that must have gotten all over his upholstery. They had rung her from the vet’s and told her to get down there as fast as she could. Under her jacket, she was still in her pajamas.

“So what do you want to do?”

Lisa Ritter had once told Jess about a huge deal her husband had done that had gone wrong. “Borrow five thousand and you can’t pay it back, and it’s your problem,” she said, quoting him. “Borrow five million and it’s the bank’s problem.”

Jess looked at her daughter’s pleading face. She looked at Nicky’s raw expression: the grief and love and fear that he finally felt able to
express. She was the only person who could make this right. She was the only person who would ever be able to make it right.

“Do whatever it takes,” she said. “I’ll find the money. Just do it.”

The short pause told her he thought she was a fool. But of a kind he was well used to dealing with. “Come this way, then,” he said. “I need you to sign some paperwork.”

—

Nigel drove them home. She tried to give him some money, but he waved her away gruffly and said, “What are neighbors for?” Belinda cried as she came out to greet them.

“We’re fine,” she muttered dully, her arm around Tanzie, who still shook intermittently. “We’re fine. Thank you.”

They would call, the vet said, if there was any news.

Jess didn’t tell the kids to go to bed. She wasn’t sure she wanted them to be alone in their rooms. She locked the door, bolted it twice, and put an old film on. Then she made three mugs of cocoa, brought her duvet down, and sat under it, one child on each side of her, watching television that they didn’t see, each alone with individual thoughts. Praying, praying that the telephone wouldn’t ring.

This is the story of a family who didn’t fit in. A little girl who was a bit geeky and liked maths more than makeup. And a boy who liked makeup and didn’t fit into any tribes. And this is what happens to families who don’t fit in—they end up broken and skint and sad. No happy ending here, folks.

Mum doesn’t stay in bed anymore, but I catch her wiping her eyes as she washes up or gazes down at Norman’s basket. She’s busy all the time: working, cleaning, sorting out the house. She does it with her head down and her jaw set. She packed up three whole boxes of her paperback books and took them back to the charity shop because she said she’d never have time to read them and, besides, it’s pointless believing in fiction.

I miss Norman. It’s weird how you can miss something you only ever complained about. Our house is quiet without him. But since the first forty-eight hours passed, and the vet said he was in with a chance, and we all cheered on the phone, I’ve started to worry about other stuff. We sat on the sofa last night after Tanzie went to bed and the phone still didn’t ring and then I said to Mum, “So what are we going to do?”

She looked up from the television.

“I mean, if he lives.”

She let out a long breath, like this was something that had already occurred to her. And then she said, “You know what, Nicky? We didn’t have a choice. He’s Tanzie’s
dog, and he saved her. If you don’t have a choice, then it’s actually quite simple.”

I could see that even though she really did believe this, and it might actually be quite simple, the extra debt is like a new weight settling on her. That with each new problem she just looks a bit older, and flatter, and wearier.

She doesn’t talk about Mr. Nicholls.

I couldn’t believe after how they’d been together that it could just end like that. Like one minute you can seem really happy and then nothing. I thought you got all that stuff sorted out when you get older, but clearly you don’t. So that’s something else to look forward to.

I walked up to her then, and I gave her a hug. And that might not be a big deal in your family, but I can tell you in mine it is. It’s about the only stupid difference I can make.

So this is the thing I don’t understand. I don’t understand how our family can basically do the right thing and yet always end up in the crap. I don’t understand how my little sister can be brilliant and kind and some sort of damn genius, and yet now wakes up crying and having nightmares, and I have to lie awake listening to Mum pottering across the landing at four a.m. trying to calm her down. And how my sister stays inside during the day, even though it’s finally warm and sunny, because she’s too afraid to go outside anymore in case the Fishers come back to get her. And how in six months’ time she’ll be at a school whose main message is that she should be like everyone else or she’ll get her head kicked in, like her freak of a brother did. I think about Tanzie without maths, and it just feels like the whole universe has gone mad. It’s like . . . cheeseburgers without the cheese, or a Jennifer
Aniston headline without the word “heartbreak.” I just can’t imagine who Tanze will be if she doesn’t do maths anymore.

I don’t understand why I had just got used to sleeping and now I lie awake listening for nonexistent sounds downstairs, and how now when I want to go to the shop to buy a paper or some sweets, I feel sick again and have to fight the urge to look over my shoulder.

I don’t understand how a big, useless, soppy dog, who has basically never done anything worse than dribble on everyone, had to lose an eye and get his insides rearranged just because he tried to protect the person he loves.

Mostly, I don’t understand how the bullies and the thieves and the people who just destroy everything—the arseholes—get away with it. The boys who punch you in your kidneys for your dinner money, and the police who think it’s funny to treat you like you’re an idiot, and the kids who take the piss out of anyone who isn’t just like them. Or the dads who walk right out and just start afresh somewhere new that smells of Febreze with a woman who drives her own Toyota and owns a couch with no marks on it and laughs at all his stupid jokes like he’s God’s gift and not actually a slimeball who lied to all the people who loved him for two years. Two whole years.

I’m sorry if this blog has just got really depressing, but that’s how our life is right now. My family, the eternal losers. It’s not much of a story, really, is it?

Mum always told us that good things happen to good people. Guess what? She doesn’t say that anymore.

T
he police came on the fourth day after Norman’s accident. Jess watched the officer coming up the garden path through the living- room window and for one stupid minute she thought she had come to tell her Norman had died. A young woman, red hair pulled back in a neat ponytail. One Jess hadn’t seen before.

She was coming in response to reports about a road traffic accident, she said, as Jess opened the door.

“Don’t tell me,” Jess said, walking back down the hall to the kitchen. “The driver’s going to sue us for damaging his car.” It was Nigel who had warned her this might happen. She had actually started to laugh when he said it.

The officer looked at her notebook. “Well, not at the moment, at least. The damage to his car seems to be minimal. And there have been conflicting statements as to whether he was exceeding the speed limit. But we’ve had various reports about what happened in the lead-up to the accident, and I was wondering if you could clarify a few things?”

“What’s the point?” Jess said, turning back to the washing up. “Your lot never take any notice.”

She knew how she sounded: like half the residents of the neighborhood—antagonistic, braced for confrontation, hard done by. She no longer cared. But the officer was too new, too keen, to play that game.

“Well, do you think you could tell me what happened, anyway? I’ll only take five minutes of your time.”

So Jess told her, in the flat tones of someone who didn’t expect to be
believed. She told her about the Fishers, and their history with them, and the fact that she now had a daughter who was afraid to play in her own garden. She told her about her daft cow-sized dog who was racking up bills at the vet’s roughly equivalent to her buying him a suite in a luxury hotel. She told her how her son’s sole aim now was to get as far from this town as possible, and how, thanks to the Fishers having made a misery of his exam year at school, this was unlikely to happen.

PC Kenworthy didn’t look bored. She stood, leaning against the kitchen cabinets, taking notes. Then she asked Jess to show her the fence. “There,” Jess said, pointing through the window. “You can see where I’ve mended it, by the lighter wood. And the accident, if that’s what we’re calling it, happened about fifty yards up on the right.” She watched the officer walk outside. Aileen Trent, pulling her shopping trolley, gave Jess a cheery wave over the hedge. Then, when she registered who was in the garden, she ducked her head and walked swiftly the other way.

The officer was out there for almost ten minutes. Jess was unloading the washing machine when she let herself back in.

“Can I ask you a question, Mrs. Thomas?” she said, closing the back door behind her.

“That’s your job,” Jess said.

“You’ve probably been through this a dozen times already. But your CCTV camera. Does it have any film in it?”

—

Jess watched the footage three times after PC Kenworthy called her into the station, sitting beside her on a plastic chair in interview suite three. It chilled her every time: the tiny figure, her sequined sleeves glinting in the sun, walking slowly along the edge of the screen, pausing to push her spectacles up her nose. The car that slows, the door that opens. One, two, three of them. Tanzie’s slight step backward, the nervous glance behind, back down the road. The raised hands. And then they’re on her and Jess cannot watch.

“I’d say that was pretty conclusive evidence, Mrs. Thomas. And on good-quality footage. The Crown Prosecution Service will be delighted,” she said cheerfully, and it took Jess several seconds to grasp that she meant this. That somebody was actually taking them seriously.

At first Fisher had denied it, of course. He said they were “having a joke” with Tanzie. “But we have her testimony. And two witnesses who have come forward. And we have screenshots of Jason Fisher’s Facebook account discussing how he was going to do it.”

“Do what?”

Her smile faded for a minute. “Something not very nice to your daughter.”

Jess didn’t ask anything else.

They had received an anonymous tip that he used his name as his password. The eejit, PC Kenworthy said. She actually said “eejit.” “Between us,” she said, as she let Jess out, “that hacked evidence may not be strictly admissible in court. But let’s just say it gave us a leg up.”

The case was reported in vague terms at first. Several local youths, the local papers said. Arrested for assault of a minor and attempted kidnap. But they were in the newspapers again the following week, and named. Apparently, the Fisher family had been instructed to move out of their council house. The Thomases were not the only people they had been harassing. The housing association was quoted as saying the family had long been on a last warning.

Nicky held up the local newspaper over tea, and he read the story aloud. They were all silent for a moment, unable to believe what they had heard.

“It actually says the Fishers have to move somewhere else?” Jess said, her fork still halfway to her mouth.

“That’s what it says,” Nicky said.

“But what will happen to them?”

“Well, it says here, they’re going to move to Surrey, to live with some relatives.”

“Surrey? But—”

“They’re not the housing association’s responsibility anymore. None of them. Jason Fisher. And his cousin and his family.” He scanned the page. “They’re moving in with some uncle. And even better, there’s a restraining order preventing them from returning to the neighborhood. Look, there’re two pictures of his mum crying and saying they’ve been misunderstood and Jason wouldn’t hurt a fly.” He pushed the newspaper across the table toward her.

Jess read the story twice, just to check he’d understood it correctly. That she’d understood it correctly. “They actually get arrested if they come back?”

“See, Mum?” he said, chewing on a piece of bread. “You were right. Things can change.”

Jess sat very still. She looked at the newspaper, then back at him, until he realized what he had called her, and she could see him coloring, hoping she wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. So she swallowed and then she wiped both her eyes with the heels of her palms and stared at her plate for a minute before she began eating again. “Right,” she said, her voice strangled. “Well. That’s good news. Very good news.”

“Do you really think things can change?” Tanzie’s eyes were big and dark and wary.

Jess put down her knife and fork. “I think I do, love. I mean, we all have our down moments. But yes, I do.”

And Tanzie looked at Nicky and back at Jess, and then she carried on eating.

—

Life went on. Jess walked to the Feathers on a Saturday lunchtime, hiding her limp for the last twenty yards, and pleaded for her job back. Des told her he’d taken on a girl from the City of Paris. “Not the actual City of Paris. That would be uneconomical.”

“Can she take apart the pumps when they go wrong?” Jess said. “Will she fix the cistern in the men’s loo?”

Des leaned on the bar. “Probably not, Jess.” He ran a chubby hand through his mullet. “But I need someone reliable. You’re not reliable.”

“Give me a break, Des. One missed week in two years. Please. I need this. I really need this.”

He said he’d think about it.

The children went back to school. Tanzie wanted Jess there to pick her up every afternoon. Nicky got up without her having to go in six times to wake him. He was actually eating breakfast when she got out of the shower. He didn’t ask to renew his prescription of antianxiety medication. The flick on his eyeliner was point perfect.

“I was thinking. I might not leave school. I might want to stay on and do sixth form after all. And then, you know, I’ll be around when Tanzie starts big school.”

Jess blinked. “That’s a great idea.”

She cleaned alongside Nathalie, listening to her gossip about the final days of the Fishers—how they had pulled every plug socket off the walls, and kicked holes in the plaster in the kitchen before they’d left the house on Pleasant View. Someone—she pulled a face—had set fire to a mattress outside the housing association office on Sunday night.

“You must feel relieved, though, eh?” she said.

“Sure,” Jess said.

“So are you going to tell me about this trip?” Nathalie straightened and rubbed her back. “I meant to ask, what was it like going all the way to Scotland with Mr. Nicholls? It must have been weird.”

Jess leaned over the sink and paused, looking out the window at the infinite crescent of the sea. “It was fine.”

“Didn’t you run out of things to say to him, stuck in that car? I know I would.”

Jess’s eyes prickled with tears so that she had to pretend to be scrubbing at an invisible mark on the stainless steel. “No,” she said. “Funnily enough. I didn’t.”

—

Here was the truth of it: Jess felt the absence of Ed like a thick blanket, smothering everything. She missed his smile, his lips, his skin, the bit where a trace of soft dark hair snaked up toward his belly button. She missed feeling like she had when he was there, that she was somehow more attractive, more sexy, more everything. She missed feeling as if anything was possible. She couldn’t believe losing someone you had known such a short time could feel like losing part of yourself, that it could make food taste wrong and colors seem dull.

Jess saw now that when Marty had left, everything she had felt had been related to practical matters. She had worried about how the children would feel with him gone. She had worried about money, about who would mind them if she had to do an evening shift at the pub, about who would take the bins out on a Thursday. But what she mostly felt was a vague relief.

Ed was different. Ed’s absence was a kick in the guts first thing in the morning, a black hole in the dead of night. Ed was a constant running conversation in the back of her mind:
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, I love you.

More than anything she hated the fact that a man who had seen only the best in her now thought the worst. To Ed she was now no better than any of the other people who had let him down or messed him up. In fact, she was probably worse. And it was all her fault. That was the thing she could never escape from. It was entirely her own fault.

She thought about it for three nights, then she wrote him a letter. These were the last lines.

So in one ill-thought-out minute, I became the person I have always taught my children not to be. We are all tested eventually, and I failed.

I’m sorry.

I miss you.

PS I know you’ll never believe me. But I was always going to pay it back.

She put her phone number on it and twenty pounds in an envelope, marked
FIRST INSTALLMENT
. And she gave it to Nathalie and asked her to put it with his post at Beachfront Reception. The next day, Nathalie said a for-sale sign had gone up outside number two. And she looked at Jess sideways and then stopped asking questions about Mr. Nicholls.

When five days had gone by and Jess realized he wasn’t going to respond, she spent an entire night awake, and then she told herself firmly that she could lie around feeling miserable no longer. It was time to move on. Heartbreak was a luxury too costly for the single parent.

—

On Monday she made herself a cup of tea, sat down at the kitchen table, and called the credit-card company; she was told that she needed to up her minimum monthly payment. She opened a letter from the police that said that she would be fined a thousand pounds for driving without tax and insurance and that if she wanted to appeal the penalty, she should apply for a court hearing in the following ways. She opened the letter from the auto pound, which said she owed a hundred and twenty pounds up to the previous Thursday for the safekeeping of the Rolls. She opened the first bill from the vet and shoved it back in the envelope. There was only so much news you could digest in one day. She got a text from Marty, who wanted to know if he could come and see the kids at half term.

“What do you think?” she said to them, over breakfast.

They shrugged.

After her cleaning shift on Tuesday she walked into town to the low-cost solicitors and paid them twenty-five pounds to draft a
letter to Marty asking for a divorce and for back payments in child support.

“How long?” the woman asked.

“Two years.”

The woman didn’t even look up. Jess wondered what kinds of stories she heard every day. She tapped in some figures, then turned the screen to Jess’s side of the desk. “That’s what it comes to. Quite a sum. He’ll ask to pay in installments. They usually do.”

“Fine.” Jess reached for her bag. “Do what you have to do.”

She worked her way methodically through the list of things she needed to sort out, and she tried to see a bigger picture beyond that small town. Beyond a little family with financial problems, and a brief love story that had snapped in two before it had really begun. Sometimes, she told herself, life was a series of obstacles that just had to be negotiated, possibly through sheer act of will. She stared out at the muddy blue of the endless sea, gulped in the air, lifted her chin, and decided that she could survive this. She could survive most things. It was nobody’s right to be happy, after all.

Jess walked along the pebbly beach, her feet sinking, stepping over the breakwaters, and counted her blessings on three fingers, as if she were playing a piano in her pocket: Tanzie was safe. Nicky was safe. Norman was getting better. That was what it all boiled down to, in the end, wasn’t it? The rest was just detail.

—

Two evenings later, they sat in the garden on the old plastic furniture. Tanzie had washed her hair and was on Jess’s lap while Jess tugged the comb through her wet tangles. Jess told them why Mr. Nicholls wouldn’t be coming back.

Nicky stared at her. “From his pocket?”

“No. It had fallen out of his pocket. It was in a taxi. But I knew whose it was.”

There was a shocked silence. Jess couldn’t see Tanzie’s face. She
wasn’t sure she wanted to look at Nicky’s. Jess kept combing gently, smoothing her daughter’s hair, her voice calm and reasonable, as if that might bring reason to what she had done.