Page 63 of The One Plus One
She pushed the phone slowly across the wooden table with the tip of her finger, like it was going to burn her or something. Mum frowned, and then looked down at it. She clicked on it and stared. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said, after a minute.
Mr Nicholls sat down beside her. He had the biggest slice of chocolate cake Tanzie had ever seen. ‘Everyone happy?’ he said. He looked happy.
‘The little bastards,’ Mum said. And her eyes filled with tears.
‘What?’ Mr Nicholls had a mouthful of cake.
‘Is that like a prevert?’
Mum didn’t seem to hear her. She pushed the chairback with a massive screech and began striding towards the toilets.
‘That’s the Gents, madam,’ a woman called, as Mum pushed the door open.
‘I can read, thank you,’ Mum said, and she disappeared inside.
‘What? What’s going on now?’ Mr Nicholls struggled to swallow his mouthful. He glanced over at where Mum had gone. Then, when Tanzie didn’t say anything, he looked down at his phone and tapped it twice. He didn’t say anything, just kept staring. Then he moved the screen around like he was reading everything. Tanzie felt a bit weird. She wasn’t sure he should be looking at that.
‘Did…Is this something to do with what happened to your brother?’
She wanted to cry. She felt like the Fishers had ruined the nice day. She felt like they had followed them here, like they would never get away from them. She couldn’t speak.
‘Hey,’ he said, as a great big tear plopped down on the table. ‘Hey.’ He held out a paper napkin towards her and Tanzie wiped her eyes and when she couldn’t hide the sob that burst upwards he moved around the table and put an arm around her and pulled her in for a hug. He smelt of lemons and men. She hadn’t smelt that man smell since Dad left and it made her even sadder.
‘Hey. Don’t cry.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Nothing to be sorry for. I’d cry if someone did that to my sister. That’s – that’s…’ He clicked the phone off.‘Sheez.’ He shook his head and blew out his cheeks. ‘Do they do that to him a lot?’
‘I don’t know.’ She sniffed. ‘He doesn’t say much any more.’
Mr Nicholls waited until she had stopped crying and then he moved back around the table and ordered a hot chocolate with marshmallows, chocolate shavings and extra cream. ‘Cures all known ills,’ he said, pushing it towards her. ‘Trust me. I know everything.’
And the weird thing was, it was actually true.
Tanzie had finished her chocolate and her cupcake by the time Mum and Nicky came out of the loos. Mum put on this bright smile, like nothing was wrong, and had her arm around Nicky’s shoulders, which actually looked a bit odd now he was half a head taller than her. He slid into the seat beside her at the table and stared at his cake like he wasn’t hungry. His face had gone back to how it was before they went away: like a shop dummy so you couldn’t see what he was thinking. Tanzie watched Mr Nicholls watching him and wondered if he was going to say anything about what was on his phone but he didn’t. She thought maybe he didn’t want Nicky to get embarrassed. Either way, the happy day, she thought sadly, was over.
And then Mum got up to check on Norman who was tied up outside and Mr Nicholls ordered a second cup of coffee and started stirring it slowly like he was thinking about something. And then he looked up at Nicky from under his eyebrows, and said quietly, ‘So. Nicky. You know anything about hacking?’
She got the feeling she wasn’t supposed to listen so she just stared really hard at the quadratic equations.
‘No,’ said Nicky.
Mr Nicholls leant forward over the table and lowered his voice. ‘Well, I think now might be a good time to start.’
When Mum came back, Mr Nicholls and Nicky had disappeared. ‘Where are they?’ she said, looking around the room.
‘They’ve gone to Mr Nicholls’s car. Mr Nicholls said they’re not to be disturbed.’ Tanzie sucked the end of her pencil.
Mum’s eyebrows shot somewhere into her hairline.
‘Mr Nicholls said you’d look like that. He said to tell you he’s sorting it out. The Facebook thing.’
‘He’s doing what? How?’
‘He said you’d say that too.’ She rubbed at a 2, which looked a bit too much like a 5 and blew away the rubbings. ‘He said to tell you to please give them twenty minutes and he’s ordered you another cup of tea and you should have some cake while you’re waiting. They’ll come back and fetch us when they’re finished. And also to tell you the chocolate cake is really good.’
Mum didn’t like it. Tanzie sat and finished her unit until she was happy with the answers, while Mum fidgeted and looked out of the window and made as if to speak, then closed her mouth again. She didn’t eat any chocolate cake. She just left the five pounds that Mr Nicholls had put on the table sitting there and Tanzieput her rubber on it because she was worried that when someone opened the door it would blow away.
