One Plus One: A Novel (30 page)

“What did you do with the money?” Tanzie’s head had become unusually still.

Jess swallowed. “I can’t remember now.”

“Did you use it for my registration?”

She kept combing. Smooth and comb. Tug, tug, release. “I honestly can’t remember, Tanzie. Anyway, what I did with it is irrelevant.”

Jess could feel Nicky’s eyes on her the whole time she spoke.

“So why are you telling us now?”

Tug, smooth, release.

“Because . . . because I want you to know that I made a terrible mistake and I’m sorry. Even if I planned to pay it back, I should never have taken that money. There was no excuse for it. And Ed—Mr. Nicholls—was well within his rights to leave when he found out because, well, the most important thing you have with another human being is trust.” She tried to keep her voice measured and unemotional. It was becoming harder. “So I want you to know that I’m sorry I let you both down. I know that I’ve always told you how to behave, and then I did the complete opposite. I’m telling you because not telling you would make me a hypocrite. But I’m also telling you because I want you to see that doing the wrong thing has a consequence. In my case I lost someone I cared about. Very much.”

They were both silent.

After a minute, Tanzie reached a hand round. Her fingers sought Jess’s, and closed briefly around them. “It’s okay, Mum,” she said. “We all make mistakes.”

Jess closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, Nicky lifted his head. He looked
genuinely bemused. “He would have given it to you,” he said, and there was a faint, but unmistakable, trace of anger in his voice.

Jess stared at him.

“He would have given it to you. If you’d asked.”

“Yes,” she said, and her hands stilled on Tanzie’s hair. “Yes, that’s the worst bit. I think he probably would have.”

A
week went by. They caught the bus to see Norman every day. The vet had sewn up his eye socket so there wasn’t an actual hole, but it still looked pretty grim. The first time Tanzie saw his face she burst into tears. They said he might bump into things for a while once he was up and about. They said he would spend a lot of time sleeping. Nicky didn’t tell them he wasn’t sure anyone would be able to tell the difference. Jess stroked Norman’s head and told him he was a wonderful brave boy, and when his tail thumped gently on the tiled floor of his pen, she blinked a lot and turned away.

On Friday, Jess asked Nicky to wait in Reception with Tanzie, and she walked over to the front desk to speak to the woman about the bill. He guessed it was about the bill. They printed out a sheet of paper, then a second sheet, then, incredibly, a third, and she ran her finger the whole way down each page and made a little choking sound when it reached the bottom. They walked home that day, even though Jess was still limping.

The town started to get busier as the sea turned from mucky gray to glinting blue. It felt weird at first, the Fishers being gone. It was as if no one could actually believe it. Nobody’s tires got slashed. Mrs. Worboys started to walk to bingo in the evenings again. Nicky got used to being able to walk to the shop and back and realized that the butterflies he still felt in his stomach didn’t have to be there. He told them this repeatedly, but they refused to get the message. Tanzie didn’t go outside at all unless Jess was with her.

Nicky didn’t look at his blog for almost ten days. He had written his “my family of losers” post when Norman was hurt and he was so
full of anger that he had had to get it out somewhere. He had never felt rage, real rage, where he had wanted to break stuff and hit people before, but for days after the Fishers had done what they did, Nicky felt it. It boiled in his blood like poison. It made him want to scream. For those awful few days, at least, writing it down and putting it out there had actually helped. It had felt like he was telling someone, even if that someone didn’t really know who he was and probably didn’t care. He just hoped that someone would hear what had happened, would see the injustice of it.

And then, after his blood had cooled, and they heard that the Fishers were going to have to pay, Nicky felt kind of like an idiot. It felt like that thing when you tell someone a bit too much and you feel exposed and spend the following weeks praying they’ll forget what you told them, afraid they might use it against you. And what was the point of putting it out there, anyway? The only people who’d want to look at all that emotional crap were the kind of people who slowed down to look at car crashes.

He opened the post up at first because he was going to delete it. And then he thought,
No, people
will have seen it. I’ll look even more stupid if I take it down.
So he decided to write a short thing about the Fishers being evicted and that would be the end of it. He wasn’t going to name them, but he wanted to post something good so that if anyone ever did come across what he had written, they wouldn’t think his whole family was completely tragic. He read through what he’d written the previous week—the emotion and the rawness of it—and his toes actually curled with shame. He wondered who out there in cyberspace had read it. He wondered how many people in the world now thought he was a total fool as well as a freak.

And then he reached the bottom. And he saw the comments.

Hang on in there, Gothboy. People like that make me sick.

Your blog got sent to me by a friend and it made me cry. I hope your dog is okay. Please post and let us know when you get a chance.

Hey Nicky. I’m Viktor from Portugal. I don’t know you but my friend linked to your blog on Facebook and I just wanted to say that I felt like you a year back and things did get better. Don’t worry. Peace!

He scrolled down some more. There was message after message. He typed his name into Google: it had been copied and linked hundreds, then thousands of times. Nicky looked at the statistics, then sat back in his chair and stared in disbelief: 2,876 people had read it. In a single week. Almost 3,000 people had read his words. More than 400 of them had taken the trouble to send him a note about it. And only 2 had called him a wanker.

But that wasn’t all. People had sent money. Actual money. Someone had opened an online donation account to help with the vet’s fees and left a message telling him how he could access it using a PayPal account.

Hey Gothboy (is that your real name??) have you thought of a rescue dog? That way something good might come out of it. I enclose a contribution! Rescue centers always need donations ;-)

A little something to help with the vet’s bills. Give your sister a hug from me. I’m so mad at what happened to you all.

My dog got hit by a car and was saved by the PDSA. I’m guessing you don’t have one near you. I thought it would be nice, as someone helped me, to help you a little. Please accept my £10 toward his recuperation.

From a fellow girl maths geek. Please tell your little sister to keep on. Don’t let them win.

There were 459 shares. Nicky counted 130 names on the donations page, £2 being the smallest donation, and £250 the highest. A total stranger had sent £250. The final tally sat at £932.50, the last having come in an hour previously. He kept refreshing the page and staring at the figure, wondering if they had put a period in the wrong place.

His heart was doing something strange. He placed his palm against his chest, wondering if this was what it felt like to have a heart attack. He wondered if he was going to die. What he wanted to do, though, he discovered, was laugh. He wanted to laugh at the magnificence of total strangers. At their kindness and their goodness and the fact that there were actual people out there being good and nice and giving money to people they had never met and never would. And because, most crazy of all, all that kindness, all that magnificence, was sitting there just because of his words.

—

Jess was standing by the cupboard holding a parcel of pink paper when he scooted into the living room. “Here,” he said. “Look.” He pulled at her arm, dragging her over to the sofa.

“What?”

“Put that down.”

Nicky opened the laptop and placed it on her lap. She almost flinched, as if it were actually painful for her to be so close to something that belonged to Mr. Nicholls.

“Look.” He pointed at the donations page. “Look at this. People have sent money. For Norman.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just look, Jess.”

She squinted at the screen, moving the page up and down as she read, then reread it. “But . . . we can’t take that.”

“It’s not for us. It’s for Tanzie. And Norman.”

“I don’t understand. Why would people we don’t know send us money?”

“Because they’re upset about what happened. Because they can see it wasn’t fair. Because they want to help. I don’t know.”

“But how did they know?”

“I wrote a blog about it.”

“You did what?”

“Something Mr. Nicholls told me. I just . . . put it out there. What was happening to us.”

“Show me.”

Nicky switched pages then and showed her the blog. She read it slowly, her brow furrowed in concentration, and he felt suddenly awkward, like he was showing her part of himself that he didn’t show anyone. Somehow it was harder to show all that emotional stuff to someone you knew.

“So, how much is the vet?” he said when he could see that she’d finished.

She spoke like someone in a daze. “Eight hundred and seventy-eight pounds. And forty-two pence. So far.”

Nicky lifted his hands in the air. “So we’re okay, yes? Look at the total. We’re okay!”

She looked at him and he could see on her face the exact expression he must have worn half an hour previously.

“It’s good news, Jess! Be pleased!” And for a minute her eyes brimmed with tears. And then she looked so confused that he leaned forward and hugged her. This was his third voluntary hug in three years.

“Mascara,” she said when she pulled back.

“Oh.” He wiped under his eyes. She wiped hers.

“Good?”

“Fine. Me?”

She leaned forward and ran a thumb under the outer edge of his eye.

Then she let out a breath and suddenly she was a bit like the old Jess again. She stood up and brushed down her jeans. “We’ll have to pay them all back, of course.”

“Most of them are, like, three pounds. Good luck with working that out.”

“Tanzie will sort it out.” Jess picked up the pink tissue parcel, and then, almost as an afterthought, she shoved it into a cupboard. She pushed her hair from her face. “And you have to show her the messages about maths. It’s really important she sees those.”

Nicky looked upstairs toward Tanzie’s bedroom. “I will,” he said, and just for a minute his mood dipped. “But I’m not sure it’s going to make any difference.”

N
orman came home. “It’s time for us to say good-bye to our old hero, isn’t it, old chap?” the vet said, patting Norman’s side. The way he spoke to him, and the way that Norman immediately flopped to the ground for a tummy scratch, made Jess think this was not the first time he’d done it. As the vet dropped right down onto the floor, she caught a glimpse of the man beyond the careful professional manner. His broad smile, the way his eyes crinkled when he looked at the dog. And she heard Nicky’s phrase running through her head, as it had done for days: the kindness of strangers.

“I’m glad you made the decision you did, Mrs. Thomas,” he said, pushing himself back onto his feet while they diplomatically ignored the pistol crack of his knees. Norman stayed on his back, his tongue lolling, ever hopeful. Or perhaps just too fat to get up. “He deserved his chance. If I’d known how his injuries had come about, I would have been a bit less reticent about proceeding.”

Tanzie stayed pressed close to Norman’s enormous black body as they lumbered home, his lead wrapped twice around her fist. The walk from the vet’s was the first time she had been outside in three weeks that she hadn’t insisted on holding Jess’s hand.

Jess had hoped that having him back would lift her daughter’s spirits. But Tanzie was still a little shadow, tailing her silently around the house, peering around corners, waiting anxiously beside her form teacher at the end of the day for Jess’s arrival at the school gates. At home she read in her room or lay silently on the sofa watching cartoons, one hand resting on the dog beside her. Mr. Tsvangarai had been off since term restarted—a family emergency—and Jess felt a reflexive sadness when she pictured him discovering Tanzie’s
determination to push mathematics from her life, the disappearance of the singular, quirky little girl she’d been. Sometimes she felt as if she had simply traded one unhappy, silent child for another.

St. Anne’s rang to discuss Tanzie’s orientation day at the school, and Jess had to tell them that she wasn’t coming. The words were a squat dry frog in her throat.

“Well, we do recommend it, Mrs. Thomas. We find the children settle a lot better if they’ve familiarized themselves a little. It’s good for her to meet a few fellow pupils as well. Is it a problem with getting time off from her current school?”

“No. I mean she—she’s not coming.”

“At all?”

“No.”

A short silence.

“Oh,” said the registrar. Jess heard her flicking through papers. “But this is the little girl with the ninety percent scholarship, yes? Costanza?”

She felt herself color. “Yes.”

“Is she going to Petersfield Academy instead? Did they offer her a scholarship, too?”

“No. That’s not it,” Jess replied. She closed her eyes as she spoke. “Look, I don’t suppose . . . Is there any way you could . . . increase the scholarship any further?”

“Further?” She sounded taken aback. “Mrs. Thomas, it was already the most generous scholarship we’ve ever offered. I’m sorry, but there’s no question.”

Jess pressed on, glad that nobody could see her shame. “If I could get the money together by next year, would you consider deferring her place?”

“I’m not sure whether that would be possible. Or even if it would be fair to the other candidates.” She hesitated, perhaps suddenly conscious of Jess’s silence. “But of course we’d certainly look at her favorably if ever she did want to reapply.”

Jess stared at the spot on the carpet where Marty had brought a motorbike into the front room and it had leaked oil. A huge lump had risen into her throat. “Well, thank you for letting me know.”

“Look, Mrs. Thomas,” the woman said, her voice suddenly conciliatory, “there’s still another week to go before we have to close the place. We’ll hold it for you until the last possible minute.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you. But, really, there’s no point.”

Jess knew it and the woman knew it. It wasn’t going to happen for them. Some leaps were just too big to make.

She asked Jess to pass on her best wishes to Tanzie for her new school. As she put the phone down, Jess imagined her already scanning her lists for the next suitable candidate.

—

She didn’t tell Tanzie. Two nights previously Jess discovered that Tanzie had removed all her maths books from her shelf and stacked them with Jess’s remaining books on the upstairs landing, inserting them between thrillers and a historical romance so that she wouldn’t notice. Jess put them in a neat pile in her wardrobe, where they couldn’t be seen. She wasn’t sure if this was saving Tanzie’s feelings or her own.

Marty received the solicitor’s letter and rang, protesting and blustering about why he couldn’t pay. She told him it was out of her hands. She said she hoped they could be civil about it. She told him his children needed shoes. He didn’t mention coming down at half term.

She got her job back at the pub. The girl from the City of Paris had apparently disappeared to the Texas Rib Shack three shifts after she’d started. Tips were better and there was no Stewart Pringle making random grabs at your backside.

“No loss. She didn’t know not to talk during the guitar solo of ‘Layla,’” Des mused. “What kind of barmaid doesn’t know to keep quiet during the guitar solo of ‘Layla’?”

She cleaned four days a week with Nathalie, and avoided number two Beachfront. She preferred jobs like scrubbing ovens, where she
was unlikely to accidentally look through the window and catch sight of it, with its jaunty blue-and-white for-sale placard. If Nathalie thought she was behaving a little oddly, she didn’t say anything.

She put an advert in the local newsagent’s offering her services as a handyperson. No Job Too Small. Her first job came in less than twenty-four hours later: putting up a bathroom cabinet for a pensioner in Aden Crescent. The old woman was so happy with the result that she gave Jess a five-pound tip. She said she didn’t like having men in her house and that in the forty-two years she had been married to her husband he had only ever seen her with her good wool vest on. She recommended Jess to a friend who managed a nursing home and needed a washer replaced and carpet gripper installed. Two other jobs followed, also pensioners. Jess sent a second installment of cash to number two Beachfront. Nathalie dropped it in. The for-sale sign was still up.

Nicky was the only one in the family who seemed genuinely cheerful. It was as if the blog had given him a new sense of purpose. He wrote it most evenings, posting about Norman’s progress, pictures from his life, chatting with new friends. He met up with one of them IRL, he said, translating that for Jess: “In Real Life.” He was all right, he said. And no, not like that. He wanted to go to open days at two different colleges. He was speaking to his form tutor about how to apply for a hardship grant. He’d looked it up. He smiled, often several times a day and without being asked, dropped to his knees with pleasure when he saw Norman wagging his tail in the kitchen, waved unself-consciously at Lila, the girl from number forty-seven (who, Jess noticed, had dyed her hair the same shade as his), and played an air guitar solo in the front room. He walked into town frequently, his skinny legs seeming to gain a longer stride, his shoulders not exactly back, but not slumped, defeated, as they had been in the past. Once he even wore a yellow T-shirt.

“Where’s the laptop gone?” Jess said when she went into his room one afternoon and found him working away on their old computer.

“I took it back.” He shrugged. “Nathalie let me in.”

“Did you see him?” she said, before she could stop herself.

Nicky’s eyes slid away. “Sorry. His stuff’s there, but it’s all boxed up. I’m not sure he stays there anymore.”

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but as Jess made her way downstairs she found herself holding her stomach with both hands, as if she had been punched.