Page 56 of The One Plus One
13.
Ed
So these were the things Ed discovered about Jessica Thomas, once she’d had a drink or two (actually, four or five) and stopped being chippy. The facts of her life, other than the other things he just observed, which were that she tied her hair back for no reason when she felt awkward, as if she needed to be doing something, and that she had a laugh like a seal’s bark – big, abrupt and awkward, at odds with her size and shape. Her lean figure betrayed that she did physical work for a living, her roots had grown out some months earlier, and she wore cheap jeans. He slightly hated himself for noticing, but Lara used to point out things like denim colour and stitching and it was one of those weird things, unlike the date of Lara’s birthday, that had stuck with him.
The boy wasn’t actually her kid. He was the son of her ex and her ex’s ex and, given that both of them had effectively walked out on him, she was pretty much the only person he had left. ‘Kind of you,’ he said.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Nicky is as good as mine. He’s been with me since he was eight. He looksout for Tanzie. And, besides, families are different shapes now, right? It doesn’t have to be two point four any more.’ The defensive way she said it made him think she had had this conversation many times before.
The little girl was ten. He did some mental arithmetic, and Jess cut in before he said a word. ‘Seventeen.’
‘That’s…young.’
‘I was a wild kid. I knew everything. I actually knew nothing. Marty came along, I dropped out of school, and then I got pregnant. I wasn’t always going to be a cleaner, you know. My mum was a teacher.’ Her gaze had slid towards him, as if she knew this fact would shock.
‘Okay.’
‘Retired now. She lives in Cornwall. We don’t really get on. She doesn’t agree with what she calls my life choices. I never could explain that once you have a baby at seventeen there are no choices.’
‘Not even now?’
‘Nope.’ She twisted a lock of hair between her fingers. ‘Because you never quite catch up. Your friends are at college, you’re at home with a tiny baby. Your friends are starting their careers, you’re down the housing office trying to findsomewhere to live. Your friends are buying their first cars and houses and you’re trying to find a job that you can fit round childcare. And all the jobs you can fit round school hours have really crappy wages. And that was before the economy went splat. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t regret having Tanzie, not for a minute. And I don’t regret taking Nicky on. But if I had my time again, sure, I’d have had them after I had done something with my life. It would be nice to be able to give them…something better.’
She hadn’t bothered to put the seat back up while she told him this. She lay propped on her elbow facing him under the duvet and her bare feet rested on the dashboard. Ed found he didn’t mind them so much.
‘You could still have a career,’ he said. ‘You’re young. I mean…you could get an after-school nanny or something?’
She actually laughed. A great seal-bark ‘Ha!’ that exploded into the interior of the car. She sat bolt upright, and took a swig of her wine. ‘Yeah. Right, Mr Nicholls. Sure I could.’
She liked fixing things. She did odd jobs around the estate, from rewiring plugs to tiling people’s bathrooms. ‘I did everything around the house. I’m good at making stuff. I can even block-print wallpaper.’
‘You make your own wallpaper.’
‘Don’t look at me like that. It’s in Tanzie’s room. I made her clothes too, until recently.’
‘Are you actually from the Second World War? Do you save jam jars and string too?’
‘So what did you want to be?’
‘What I was,’ he said. And then he realized he didn’t want to talk about it and changed the subject.
