by Moyes, Jojo
No.
He had done the right thing, he told himself. He must have done. His life was complicated enough without adding an impulsive cleaner with an eccentric family to the mix (he hated himself for letting the word ‘cleaner’ appear in that little mental riff). Even as Jess, uncharacteristically still in those last few moments, had lain against him and his brain had started to melt, he had tried to apply logic to the situation, and had concluded, with the few cells still functioning, that it couldn’t end well. Either (a) the sex would have been terrible, they would have been mortified afterwards, and the five hours spent travelling to the Olympiad would have been excruciating. Or (b) the sex would have been fine, they would have woken up embarrassed and the journey would still have been excruciating. Worse, they could have ended up with (c): the sex would have been off the scale (he slightly suspected this one was correct – he kept getting a hard-on just thinking about her mouth), they would develop feelings for each other based purely on sexual chemistry and either (d) would have to adjust to the fact that they had nothing in common and were just completely unsuited in every other way or (e) they would find they were not entirely unsuited, but then he would be sent to prison. And none of this considered (f), which was that Jess had actual kids. Kids who needed stability in their lives and not someone such as him: he liked children as a concept, but in the same way that he liked the Indian subcontinent – i.e. it was nice to know it existed but he had no knowledge about it and had never felt any real desire to spend time there.
And all this was without the added factor of (g): that he was obviously crap at relationships, had only just come out of the two most disastrous examples anyone could imagine, and the odds of him getting it right with someone else on the basis of a lengthy car journey that had begun because he couldn’t think how to get out of it were lower than a very low thing indeed.
Plus the whole horse conversation had been, frankly, weird.
And these points could be supplemented by the wilder possibilities that he had completely failed to consider. What if Jess was a psycho, and all that stuff about not wanting a relationship was just a way to reel him in? She didn’t seem that sort of girl, sure.
But neither had Deanna.
Ed sat pondering this and other tangled things and wishing he could talk a single one of them through with Ronan, until the sky turned orange then neon blue and his leg became completely dead and his hangover, which had formerly manifested itself as a vague tightness at his temples, turned into an emphatic, skull-crushing headache. Ed tried not to look at the girl sleeping in the bed a few feet away as the outline of her face and body under the duvet became clear in the encroaching light.
And he tried not to feel wistful for a time when having sex with a woman you liked had just been about having sex with a woman you liked and hadn’t involved a series of equations so complex and unlikely that probably only Tanzie could have got anywhere near understanding them.
‘Come on. We’re running late.’ Jess shepherded Nicky – a pale, T-shirt-clad zombie – towards the car.
‘I didn’t get any breakfast.’
‘That’s because you wouldn’t get up when I told you. We’ll get you something on the way. Tanze. Tanzie? Has the dog been to the loo?’
The morning sky was the colour of lead and seemed to have descended to a point around their ears. A faint drizzle promised heavier rain. Ed sat in the driving seat as Jess ran around, organizing, scolding, promising, in a fury of activity. She had been like this since he’d woken, groggily, from what seemed like twenty minutes’ sleep, folding and packing, dragging bags downstairs, supervising breakfast. He didn’t think she had met his eye once. Tanzie climbed silently into the back seat.
‘You okay?’ He yawned and looked at the little girl in the rear-view mirror.
She nodded silently.
‘Nerves?’
She didn’t say anything.
‘Been sick?’
She nodded.
‘It’s all the rage on this trip. You’ll be great. Really.’
She gave him the exact look he would have given any adult if they had said the same, then turned to stare out of the window, her face round and pale, her eyes mauve with exhaustion. Ed wondered how late she had stayed up revising.
‘Right.’ Jess shoved Norman into the back seat. He brought with him an almost overwhelming scent of wet dog. She checked that Tanzie had done up her belt, climbed into the passenger seat and finally turned to Ed. Her expression was unreadable. ‘Let’s go.’
Ed’s car no longer looked like his car. In just three days its immaculate cream interior had acquired new scents and stains, a fine sprinkling of dog hair, jumpers and shoes that now lived on seats or wedged underneath them. The floor crunched underfoot with dropped sweet wrappers and crisps. The radio stations were no longer on settings he understood.
But something had happened while he had been driving along at forty m.p.h. The faint sense that he should actually have been somewhere else had begun to fade, almost without him being aware of it. He had stopped trying to anticipate what was going to happen next, stopped dreading the next phone call, stopped wondering whether there was any chance that Deanna Lewis would decide not to drag him down with her … and he had just started existing. Ed Nicholls drove mile after easy mile through the early-morning mist, slow enough to notice the landmarks, the subtle changes in landscape, the lives around him in little market towns, huge cities. He found himself glancing at the people they passed, buying food, driving their cars, walking their children to and from school in worlds completely different from his own, knowing nothing of his own little drama several hundred miles south. It made it all seem reduced in size, a model village of problems rather than something that loomed over him.
He drove on, and despite the pointed silence from the woman beside him, Nicky’s sleeping face in the rear-view mirror (‘Teenagers don’t really do Before Eleven o’Clock,’ Tanzie explained) and the occasional foul eruptions of the dog, it slowly dawned on him, as they crept closer to their destination, that he was feeling a complete lack of the relief he had expected to feel at the prospect of having his car, his life, back to himself. What he felt was more complex. Ed fiddled with the speakers, so that the music was loudest in the rear seats and temporarily silent in the front.
‘You okay?’
Jess didn’t look round. ‘I’m fine.’
Ed glanced behind him, making sure nobody was listening. ‘About last night,’ he began.
‘Forget it.’
He wanted to tell her that he regretted it. He wanted to tell her that his body had actually hurt with the effort of not climbing back into that sagging single bed. But what would have been the point? Like she’d said the previous evening, they were two people who had no reason to see each other ever again. ‘I can’t forget it. I wanted to explain –’
‘Nothing to explain. You were right. It was a stupid idea.’ She tucked her legs under her and stared away from him out of the window.
‘It’s just my life is too –’
‘Really. It’s not an issue. I just …’ she let out a deep breath ‘… I just want to make sure we get to the Olympiad on time.’
‘But I don’t want us to end it all like this.’
‘There’s nothing to end.’ She put her feet on the dashboard. It felt like a statement. ‘Let’s go.’
‘How many miles is it to Aberdeen?’ Tanzie’s face appeared between the front seats.
‘What, left?’
‘No. From Southampton.’
Ed pulled his phone from his jacket and handed it to her. ‘Look it up on the Maps app.’
She tapped the screen, her brow furrowed. ‘About five hundred and eighty?’
‘Sounds about right.’
‘So if we’re doing forty miles an hour we’d have had to do at least six hours’ driving a day. And if I didn’t get sick, we could have done it …’
‘In a day. At a push.’
‘One day.’ Tanzie dig
ested this, her eyes trained on the Scottish hillsides in the distance ahead. ‘But we wouldn’t have had such a nice time then, would we?’
Ed glanced sideways at Jess. ‘No, we wouldn’t.’
It took a moment before Jess’s gaze slid back towards him. ‘No, sweetheart,’ she said, after a beat. And her smile was oddly rueful. ‘No, we wouldn’t.’
The car ate the miles sleekly and efficiently. They crossed the Scottish border, and Ed tried – failed – to raise a cheer. They stopped once for Tanzie to go to the loo, once twenty minutes later for Nicky to go (‘I can’t help it. I didn’t want to go when Tanze did’) and three times for Norman (two were false alarms). Jess sat silently beside him, checking her watch and chewing at her nails. She was still wearing flip-flops and he wondered fleetingly if her feet were cold. Nicky gazed groggily out of the window at the empty landscape, at the few flinty houses set into rolling hills. Ed wondered what would happen to him after this was over. He wanted to suggest fifty other things to help him, but he tried to imagine someone suggesting things to him at the same age, and guessed he would have taken no notice at all. He wondered how Jess would keep him safe when they returned home.
The phone rang and he glanced over, his heart sinking. ‘Lara.’
‘Eduardo. Baby. I need to talk to you about this roof.’
He was aware of Jess’s sudden rigidity, the flicker of her gaze. He wished, suddenly, that he hadn’t chosen to answer the call.
‘Lara, I’m not going to discuss this now.’
‘It’s not a lot of money. Not for you. I spoke to my solicitor and he says it would be nothing for you to pay for it.’
‘I told you before, Lara, we made a final settlement.’
He was suddenly conscious of the acute stillness of three people in the car.
‘Eduardo. Baby. I need to sort this with you.’
‘Lara –’
Before he could say anything more, Jess reached over and picked up the phone. ‘Hello, Lara,’ she said. ‘Jess here. I’m awfully sorry but he can’t pay for your roof, so there’s really no point in ringing him any more.’
A short silence. Then an explosive: ‘Who is this?’
‘I’m his new wife. Oh – and he’d like his Chairman Mao picture back. Perhaps just leave it with his lawyer. Okay? In your own time. Thanks so much.’
The resulting silence had the same quality as the few seconds before an atomic explosion. But before any of them could hear what happened next, Jess flipped the off button, and handed it back to him. He took it gingerly, and turned it off.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I think.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She didn’t look at him when she spoke.
Ed glanced into his rear-view mirror. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought Nicky was trying very hard not to laugh.
Somewhere between Edinburgh and Dundee, on a narrow, wooded lane, they slowed and stopped for a herd of cows in the road. The animals moved around the car, gazing in at its inhabitants with vague curiosity, a moving black sea, eyes rolling in woolly black heads. Norman stared back, his body rigid with silent, confused outrage. Tanzie took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, gazing back at them, half blind.
‘Aberdeen Angus,’ said Nicky.
Suddenly, without warning, Norman hurled his whole body, snarling and growling at the window. The car physically jolted to one side and his deafening bark bounced off the interior, amplified in the confined space. The back seat became a chaotic mass of arms and noise and writhing dog. Nicky and Jess fought to reach him.
‘Mum!’
‘Norman! Stop!’ The dog was on top of Tanzie, his face hard against the window. Ed could just make out her pink jacket, flailing underneath him.
Jess lunged over the seat at the dog, grabbing for his collar. They dragged Norman back down from the window. He whined, shrill and hysterical, straining at their grasp, great gobs of drool spraying across the interior.
‘Norman, you big idiot! What the hell –’
‘He’s never seen a cow before.’ Tanzie, struggling upright, always defending him.
‘Jesus, Norman.’
‘You okay, Tanze?’
‘I’m fine.’
The cows continued to part around the car, unmoved by the dog’s outburst. Through the now steamed-up windows they could just make out the farmer at the rear, walking slowly and impassively, with the same lumbering gait as his bovine charges. He gave the barest of nods as he passed, as if he had all the time in the world. Norman whined and pulled against his collar.
‘I’ve never seen him like that before.’ Jess straightened her hair and blew out through her cheeks. ‘Perhaps he could smell beef.’
‘I didn’t know he had it in him,’ Ed said.
‘My glasses.’ Tanzie held up the twisted piece of metal. ‘Mum. Norman broke my glasses.’
It was a quarter past ten.
‘I can’t see anything without my glasses.’
Jess looked at Ed. Shit.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Grab a plastic bag. I’m going to have to put my foot down.’
They drove at speed, half frozen, the wind from the open windows a buffeting roar that thwarted conversation. The Scottish roads were wide and empty, and Ed drove so fast that the satnav had repeatedly to reassess its timing to their destination. Every minute they gained was an imaginary air punch in his head. Tanzie was sick twice. He refused to stop to allow her to vomit into the road.
‘She’s really ill.’
‘I’m fine,’ Tanzie kept saying, her face wedged into a plastic bag. ‘Really.’
‘You don’t want to stop, sweetheart? Just for a minute?’
‘No. Keep going. Bleurgh –’
There wasn’t time to stop. Not that this made the car journey any easier to bear. Nicky had turned away from his sister, his hand over his nose. Even Norman’s head was thrust as far out into the fresh air as he could get it.
Ed drove like someone in a luxury car advert, speeding through empty bends, along the winding base of ancient windswept hillsides. The car gripped the greasy roads as if it had been meant for this. He forgot he was cold, that his car interior was pretty much destroyed, his life a mess. There were moments, in that astonishing landscape, his whole being focused on driving as fast and as safely as he could, when it felt like an almost spiritual experience. A spiritual experience broken only by the occasional sound of a child gagging into a fresh plastic bag.
He would get them there. He knew this as surely as he knew anything. He felt filled with purpose in a way that he hadn’t done in months. And as Aberdeen finally loomed before them, its buildings vast and silver grey, the oddly modern high-rises thrusting into the distant sky, his mind raced ahead of them. He headed for the centre, watched as the roads narrowed and became cobbled streets. They came through the docks, the enormous tankers on their right, and that was where the traffic slowed, and slowly, unstoppably, his confidence began to unravel. They slowed and then sat in an increasingly anxious silence, Ed punching in alternative routes across Aberdeen that offered no time gain and often no sense. The satnav started to work against him, adding back the time it had subtracted. It was fifteen, nineteen, twenty-two minutes until they reached the university building. Twenty-five minutes. Too many.
‘What’s the delay?’ said Jess, to nobody in particular. She fiddled with the radio buttons, trying to find the traffic reports. ‘What’s the hold-up?’
‘It’s just sheer weight of traffic.’
‘That’s such a lame expression,’ said Nicky. ‘Of course a traffic jam is sheer weight of traffic. What else would it be down to?’
‘There could have been an accident,’ said Tanzie.
‘But the jam itself would still comprise the traffic. So the problem is still the sheer weight of traffic.’
‘No, the volume of traffic slowing itself down is something completely different.’
‘But it’s the same result.’
‘But then it’s an inaccurate desc
ription.’
Jess peered at the satnav. ‘Are we in the right place? I wouldn’t have thought the docks would be near the university.’
‘We have to get through the docks to get to the university.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure, Jess.’ Ed tried to suppress the tension in his voice. ‘Look at the satnav.’
There was a brief silence. In front of them the traffic-lights changed through two cycles without anybody moving. Jess, on the other hand, moved incessantly, fidgeting in her seat, peering around her to see if there was some clear route they might have missed. He couldn’t blame her. He felt the same.
‘I don’t think we’ve got time to get new glasses,’ he murmured to Jess, when they’d sat through the fourth cycle.
‘But she can’t see without them.’
‘If we look for a chemist we’re not going to make it there for midday.’
She bit her lip, then turned round in her seat. ‘Tanze? Is there any way you can see through the unbroken lens? Any way at all?’
A pale green face emerged from the plastic bag. ‘I’ll try,’ it said.
Traffic stopped and stalled. They grew silent, the tension within the car ratcheting up. When Norman whined, they growled, ‘Shut up, Norman!’ as one. Ed felt his blood pressure rising, even as the weight of responsibility for getting them there seemed to grow heavier. Why hadn’t they left half an hour earlier? Why hadn’t he worked this out better? What would happen if they missed it? He glanced sideways to where Jess was tapping her knee nervously and guessed that she was probably thinking the same thing. And then finally, inexplicably, as if the gods had been toying with them, the traffic cleared.
He flung the car through the cobbled streets, Jess yelling, ‘GO! GO!’ leaning forwards on the dashboard as if she were a coachman driving a horse. He skidded the car around the bends, almost too fast for the satnav, which actually started to burble, and entered the university campus on two wheels, following the small printed signs that had been placed haphazardly on random poles, until they found the Downes Building, an unlovely 1970s office block in the same grey granite as everything else.