Page 122 of The One Plus One
She couldn’t work out if he was more upset than he was letting on.
He tried to call someone else, but the answer phone kicked in. ‘It’s Ronan here. Leave a message.’ He hung up without saying anything.
With every mile, real life moved steadily towards themlike an encroaching tide, cold, unstoppable. Jess thought about the fact that there was a whole swathe of his life she knew nothing about, and tried not to think about bubbles.
They finally arrived back shortly after four. As the Audi pulled into the street the rain had eased to a fine drizzle, the road looked oily with damp, the sprawling Danehall estate struggling to show spring promise. There was the little house, somehow smaller and scruffier than Jess remembered it and, oddly, like something that had nothing to do with her. Ed pulled up outside, and she peered out of the window at the peeling paintwork on the upstairs windows that Marty had never got round to painting because he said, really, you had to do a proper job, sanding it first and taking off the old paint and using filler to plug the gaps, and he had always been either too busy or too tired to do any of it. Just for a moment, she felt a wave of depression wash over her at the thought of all the problems that had been sitting there waiting for them on their return. And all the greater ones that she had created in her absence. And then she looked at Ed, who was helping Tanzie with her bag, and laughing at something Nicky said, leaning over to hear him better, and it passed.
He had stopped at a DIY superstore about an hour out of town – his detour – emerging with a great box of stuff that he had to wrestle into the back alongside their bags. It was possible he needed to tidy his house before he sold it. Jess couldn’t think what you would do to that house to make it any nicer.
He dropped the last of the bags by the front door and stood there, holding the cardboard box. The children had disappeared immediately to their rooms, like creatures in some sort of homing experiment. Jess felt embarrassed then by the cluttered little house, the woodchip wallpaper, the long row of battered paperbacks that snaked along the hall.
‘I’m going back to my dad’s tomorrow.’
A reflexive twinge at the thought of his absence. ‘Good. That’s good.’
‘Just for a few days. Until the police thing. But I thought I’d put these up first.’
Jess looked down at the boxes.
‘Security camera and motion-activated light. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.’
‘You bought that for us?’
‘Nicky got beaten up. Tanzie plainly doesn’t feel safe. I thought it would make you all feel better. You know…if I’m not here.’
She stared at the box, at what it meant. She felt suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that this man had considered these things and wanted to protect them. She spoke before she knew what she wanted to say. ‘You – you don’t have to do that,’ she stammered. ‘I’m good at DIY. I’ll do it.’
‘On a ladder. With a busted foot.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You know, Jessica Rae Thomas, at some point you’re going to have to let someone help you.’
‘At some point you’re going to have to stop calling me Jessica Rae Thomas.’
‘I can’t help it. I like it.’
She liked it too. ‘Well, what shall I do, then?’
‘Sit down. Stay still. Put your injured foot up. And then afterwards I’ll walk into town with Nicky and we’ll buy a disgustingly unhealthy waste-of-money takeaway because it might be the last one I get for a while. And then we’ll sit here and eat it and afterwards you and I will lie around gazing in awe at the size of each other’s stomachs.’
‘Oh, my God, I love it when you talk dirty.’
So she sat. Doing nothing. On her own sofa. And Tanzie came and sat with her for a while and Ed went up a ladder outside and waved the drill at her through the window and pretended that he was going to fall off until it made her anxious. ‘I’ve been in two different hospitals in eight days,’ she yelled at him through the window, crossly. ‘I do not want to make it a third.’ And then, because she was not very good at sitting still, she sorted some dirty washing and put a load in, but after that she sat down again and just let everyone else move because she had to admit that resting her foot was a lot less painful than trying to do things on it.
And there was something so good about having everyone just potter around her, listening to the sound of Ed’s drill and catching his eye through the window as he attached the camera and called at her to come, come and look. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done something to the house and it hadn’t been her. ‘Is that okay?’
She limped outside to see him. He stood back on the garden path, gazing up at the front of the house. ‘Ifigured if I put it there it’ll catch anyone who comes not just in your front garden but who hangs around outside. It’s got a convex lens, see?’ She tried to look interested. She was wondering whether once the children had gone to bed she could persuade him to stay over.
‘And often, with these sorts of things, you find that just having a camera there is a deterrent.’
Would it really be that bad? He could always sneak out before they woke up. But, then, who were they really kidding? Nicky and Tanzie must have guessed something was going on, surely.
‘Jess?’
He was standing in front of her.
‘Mm?’
‘All I have to do is drill a hole there, and feed the wires in through that wall. Hopefully I can put a little junction just inside and it should be fairly simple to connect it all up.’
He wore the satisfied look that men assume when in possession of power tools. He patted his pocket, checking for screws, then looked at her carefully. ‘Were you listening to a single thing I’ve said?’
