One Plus One: A Novel (13 page)

T
here were four different types of Danish pastry at the breakfast buffet and three different types of fruit juice, and a whole rack of those little individual packets of cereal that Mum said were uneconomical and would never buy. She had knocked on the window at a quarter past eight to tell them they should wear their jackets to breakfast and stuff as many of each of them as they could into their pockets. Her hair had flattened on one side and she had no makeup on. Tanzie guessed the car hadn’t been that much of an adventure after all.

“Not the butters or jams. Or anything that needs cutlery. Rolls, muffins, that kind of thing. Don’t get caught.” She looked behind her to where Mr. Nicholls seemed to be having an argument with a security guard. “And apples. Apples are healthy. And maybe some slices of ham for Norman.”

“Where am I meant to put the ham?”

“Or a sausage. Wrap it in a napkin.”

“Isn’t that stealing?”

“No.”

“But—”

“It’s just taking a bit more than you’re likely to eat at that exact moment. You’re just . . . Imagine you’re a guest with a hormone disorder and it makes you really, really hungry.”

“But I haven’t got a hormone disorder.”

“But you could have. That’s the point. You’re that hungry, sick person, Tanze. You’ve paid for your breakfast, but you need to eat a lot. More than you would normally eat.”

Tanzie folded her arms. “You said it was wrong to steal.”

“It’s not stealing. It’s just getting your money’s worth.”

“But we didn’t pay for it. Mr. Nicholls did.”

“Tanzie, just do as I say, please. Look, Mr. Nicholls and I are going to have to leave the car park for half an hour. Just do it, then come back to the room and be ready to leave at nine. Okay?” Jess leaned through the window and kissed Tanzie, then trudged back toward the car, her jacket wrapped around her. She stopped, turned back, and shouted, “Don’t forget to brush your teeth. And don’t leave any of your maths books.”

Nicky came out of the bathroom. He was wearing his really tight black jeans and a T-shirt that said WHATEVS across the front.

“You’re never going to get a sausage in those,” Tanzie said, staring at his jeans.

“I bet I can hide more than you can,” he said.

Her eyes met his. “You’re on,” Tanzie said, and ran to get dressed.

—

Mr. Nicholls leaned forward and squinted through his windscreen as Nicky and she walked across the car park. To be fair, Tanzie thought, she would probably have squinted at them, too. Nicky had stuffed two large oranges and an apple down the front of his jeans and waddled across the asphalt like he’d had an accident in his trousers. She was in her sequined jacket, despite feeling too hot, because she’d packed the front of her hoodie with little packets of cereal and if she didn’t wear her jacket she looked like she might be pregnant. With baby robots.

They couldn’t stop laughing.

“Just get in, get in,” said Mum, throwing their overnight bags into the boot as she glanced behind her. “What did you get?”

Mr. Nicholls set off down the road. Tanzie could see him glancing in the mirror as they took turns unloading their haul and handing it forward to Mum.

Nicky pulled a white package from his pocket. “Three Danish
pastries. Watch out—the icing got a bit stuck to the napkins. Four sausages and a few slices of bacon in a paper cup for Norman. Two slices of cheese, a yogurt, and—” He tugged his jacket over his crotch, reached down, grimacing, tensing, and pulled out the fruit. “I can’t believe I managed to fit those in there.”

“There is nothing I can say to that that’s in any way appropriate mother-son conversation,” Mum said.

Tanzie had six small packets of cereal, two bananas, and a jam sandwich. She sat eating from one of the packets while Norman stared at her and two stalactites of drool grew longer and longer from his lips until they were pooling on the seat of Mr. Nicholls’s car.

“That woman behind the poached eggs definitely saw us.”

“I told her you had a hormone disorder,” Tanzie said. “I told her you had to eat twice your body weight three times a day or you would faint in their dining room and you might actually die.”

“Nice,” said Nicky.

“You win on numbers,” she said, counting out his items. “But I win extra points for skill.” She leaned forward and, as everyone watched, she carefully lifted the two polystyrene cups of coffee from each of her pockets, packed with paper napkins so that they would stay upright. She handed one to Mum and the other she placed in the cup holder next to Mr. Nicholls.

“You are a genius,” Mum said, peeling off the lid. “Oh, Tanze, you have no idea how much I needed this.” She took a sip, closing her eyes. Tanzie wasn’t sure if it was that they’d done so well with the buffet, or just that Nicky was laughing for the first time in ages, but for a moment her mum looked happier than she had since Dad left.

Mr. Nicholls just stared like they were a bunch of aliens.

“Okay, so we can make sandwiches for lunch with the ham, cheese, and sausages. You guys can eat the pastries now. Fruit for dessert. Want one?” She held an orange toward Mr. Nicholls. “It’s a bit warm still. But I can peel it.”

“Uh, kind of you,” he said, tearing his gaze away. “But I think I’ll just stop at a Starbucks.”

—

The next part of the journey was actually quite nice. There were no traffic jams and Mum persuaded Mr. Nicholls to put on her favorite radio station and sang along to six songs, getting louder with each one. She made Tanzie and Nicky join in, too, and Mr. Nicholls looked fed up at first, but Tanzie noticed that after a few miles he was nodding his head like he was actually enjoying himself. The sun got really hot and Mr. Nicholls slid the roof back. Norman sat bolt upright so that he could smell the air as they were going along and it meant that he didn’t squish them into each door, which was also nice.

It reminded Tanzie a bit of when Dad lived with them and they would sometimes go on outings in his car. Except Dad always drove too fast and they could never agree on where to stop and eat. And Dad would say he didn’t understand why they couldn’t just blow some money on a pub lunch and Mum would say that she’d made the sandwiches now and it would be silly to waste them. And Dad would tell Nicky to get his head out of whatever game he was playing and enjoy the damn scenery and Nicky would mutter that he hadn’t actually asked to come, which would make Dad even madder.

And then Tanzie thought that while she did love Dad, she probably preferred this trip without him.

After two hours Mr. Nicholls said he needed to stretch, and Norman needed to wee, so they stopped at the edge of a country park. Mum put some of the buffet haul out and they sat in the shade at a proper wooden picnic table and ate. Tanzie did some revision (prime numbers and quadratic equations), then took Norman for a walk around the woods. He was really happy and stopped every two minutes to sniff at something, and the sun kept sending little moving spotlights through the trees and they saw a deer and two pheasants and it was like they were actually on holiday.

“You okay, lovey?” Mum said, walking up with her arms crossed. From where they stood they could just see Nicky talking to Mr. Nicholls at the table through the trees. “Feeling confident?”

“I think so,” she said.

“Did you go through the old test papers last night?”

“Yes. I do find the prime-number sequences a bit difficult, but I wrote them all down and when I saw the sequencing laid out I found it easier.”

“No more nightmares about the Fishers?”

“Last night,” Tanzie said, “I dreamed about a cabbage that could roller-skate. It was called Kevin.”

Mum gave her a long look. “Right.”

It was cooler in the forest, and it smelled of good damp, mossy and green and alive, not like the damp in their back room, which just smelled moldy. Mum stopped on the path and turned back toward the car. “I told you good things happen, didn’t I?” She waited for Tanzie to catch up. “Mr. Nicholls is going to get us there tomorrow. We’ll have a quiet night, get you through this competition, and you’ll start at your new school. Then, hopefully, all our lives will change a little for the better. And this is fun, isn’t it? This is a nice trip?”

She kept her eyes on the car as she spoke and her voice did that thing where she was saying one thing and thinking about something else. Tanzie noticed she’d put her makeup on while they were in the car. “Mum,” she said.

“Yes?”

“We did sort of steal the food from that buffet, didn’t we? I mean, if you look at it proportionally, we did take more than our share.”

Mum stared at her feet for a minute, thinking. “If you’re really worried, when we get your prize money we’ll put five pounds in an envelope and send it to them. How does that sound?”

“I think, given the items we took, it would probably be nearer six pounds. Probably six pounds fifty,” Tanzie said.

“Then that’s what we’ll send them. And now I think we should work really, really hard to get this fat old dog of yours to run around a bit, so that (a) he’s tired enough to sleep the next leg of the journey, and (b) it might encourage him to go to the loo here and not fart his way through the next eighty miles.”

—

They hit the road again. It rained. Mr. Nicholls had had One of His Phone Calls with a man called Sidney and talked about share prices and market movements and looked a bit serious, so Mum didn’t sing for a bit. Tanzie tried not to sneak looks at her maths papers (Mum said it would make her sick). Her legs kept sticking to Mr. Nicholls’s leather seats and she was sort of regretting wearing her shorts. Plus Norman had rolled in something in the woods and she kept getting this whiff of something really bad, but she didn’t want to say anything in case Mr. Nicholls decided he’d had enough of them and their stinky dog. So she just held her nose with her fingers and tried to breathe through her mouth, only letting herself open her nostrils every thirty lampposts.

“What are you thinking about, Tanze?” Mum looked back through the seats.

“I was thinking about permutations and combinations.”

Mum did that smile that she did when she didn’t really get what Tanzie was saying.

“Well, I was thinking about that fruit salad at the breakfast bar. Like that’s a combination—it doesn’t matter whether the apples, pears, and bananas are in any order, right? But with permutations it does.”

Mum still looked blank. Mr. Nicholls looked in the rearview mirror and then turned to Mum.

“Okay, so imagine pulling colored socks from a drawer. If you have six pairs of different-colored socks in the drawer—say twelve in total—there are six times five times four times three different combinations you could pull them out in, right?” he said.

“But if all twelve had different colors, you’d have a really big number of different ways of pulling them out—nearly half a billion.”

“That sounds pretty much like our sock drawers,” said Mum.

Mr. Nicholls looked back at Tanze and grinned. “So, Tanze, if you have a drawer with twelve socks but you can’t see them, how many do you have to pull out to decide if there are at least two pairs?”

Tanzie was thinking about this for ages, so she didn’t hear when Mr. Nicholls started talking to Nicky.

“You bored? You want to borrow my phone?”

“Really?” Nicky pushed himself upright from his slumped position.

“Sure. It’s in the pocket of my jacket.”

With Nicky glued again to a screen, Mum and Mr. Nicholls started talking. It was possible they’d forgotten anyone else was in the car.

“Still thinking about socks?” she said.

“Oh no. Those problems can fry your brain. I’ll leave that to your daughter.”

There was a short silence.

“So, tell me about your wife.”

“Ex-wife. And no thanks.”

“Why not? You weren’t unfaithful. I’m guessing she wasn’t, or you would have made that face.”

“What face?”

Another short silence. Maybe ten lampposts.

“I’m not sure I would ever have made
that
face. But no. She wasn’t. And no, I don’t really want to discuss it. It’s—”

“Private?”

“I just don’t like talking about personal stuff. Do you want to talk about your ex?”

“In front of his children? Yup, that’s always a great idea.”

Nobody spoke for a few miles. Mum started tapping on the window.
Tanzie glanced over at Mr. Nicholls. Every time Mum tapped, a little muscle tweaked in his jaw.

“So what shall we talk about, then? I’m not very interested in software and I’m guessing you have zero interest in what I do. I don’t understand sock-related maths. And there are only so many times I can point at a field and say: ‘Oh, look, cows.’”

Mr. Nicholls sighed.

“Come on. It’s a long way to Scotland.”

There was a thirty-lamppost silence. Nicky was taking pictures out of the window with Mr. Nicholls’s phone.

“Lara. Italian. Model.”

“Model.” Mum laughed this great big laugh. “Of course.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mr. Nicholls said grumpily.

“All men like you go out with models.”

“What do you mean, men like me?”

Mum pressed her lips together.

“What do you mean, men like me? Come on.”

“Rich men.”

“I’m not rich.”

Mum shook her head. “Noooo.”

“I’m not.”

“I think it depends on how you define rich.”

“I’ve seen rich. I’m not rich. I’m well-off, yes. But I’m a long way from rich.”

Mum turned to him. He really had no idea whom he was dealing with. “Do you have more than one house?”

He signaled and swung the wheel. “I might.”

“Do you have more than one car?”

He glanced sideways. “Yes.”

“Then you’re rich.”

“Nope. Rich is private jets and yachts. Rich is staff.”

“So what am I?”

Mr. Nicholls shook his head. “Not staff. You’re . . .”

“What?”

“I’m just trying to imagine your face if I’d referred to you as my staff.”

Mum started to laugh. “My woman servant. My cleaning wench.”

“Yeah. Or those. Okay, well, what would you say is rich?”