‘They never say that on Jeremy Kyle.’

The traffic cleared, and they headed out onto the dual carriageway. Ed put his foot down. It was a beautiful day, and he was tempted to take the coast road, but he didn’t want to risk getting caught in traffic again. The dog whined, the boy played silently with a Nintendo, his head down in intense concentration, and Tanzie grew quieter. He turned the radio on – a hits channel – and for a moment or two he started to think this could be okay. It was just a day out of his life, if they didn’t hit too much traffic. And it was better than being stuck in the house.

‘The satnav reckons about eight hours if we don’t hit any jams,’ he said.

‘By motorway?’

‘Well, yeah.’ He glanced left. ‘Even a top-of-the-range Audi doesn’t have wings.’ He tried to smile, to show her he was joking, but she was still straight-faced.

‘Uh … there’s a bit of a problem.’

‘A problem.’

‘Tanzie gets sick if we go fast.’

‘What do you mean “fast”? Eighty? Ninety?’

‘Um … actually, fifty. Okay, maybe forty.’

Ed glanced into the rear-view mirror. Was it his imagination or had the child grown a little paler? She was gazing out of the window, her hand resting on the dog’s head. ‘Forty?’ He slowed. ‘You’re joking, right? You’re saying we have to drive to Scotland via B roads?’

‘No. Well, maybe. Look, it’s possible she’s grown out of it. But she doesn’t travel by car very much and we used to have big problems with it and … I just don’t want to mess up your nice car.’

Ed glanced into the rear-view mirror again. ‘We can’t take the minor roads – that’s ridiculous. It would take days to get there. Anyway, she’ll be fine. This car is brand new. It has award-winning suspension. Nobody gets sick in it.’

She looked straight ahead. ‘You don’t have kids, do you?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘No reason.’

It took twenty-five minutes to disinfect and shampoo the back seat, and even then every time he put his head inside the interior Ed got a faint whiff of vomit. Jess borrowed a bucket from a petrol station and used shampoo that she had packed in one of the kids’ bags. Nicky sat on the verge beside the garage, hiding behind a pair of oversized shades, and Tanzie sat with the dog, holding a balled tissue to her mouth, like a consumptive.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Jess kept saying, her sleeves rolled up, her face set in a grim line of concentration.

‘It’s fine. You’re the one cleaning it.’

‘I’ll pay for you to get your car valeted afterwards.’

He raised an eyebrow at her. He was laying a plastic bin bag over the seat so that the kids wouldn’t get damp when they sat down again.

‘Well, okay, I’ll do it. It will smell better, whatever.’

Some time later they climbed back into the car. Nobody remarked on the smell. He ensured his window was as low as it could go, and began reprogramming the satnav.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Scotland it is. Via B roads.’ He pressed the ‘destination’ button. ‘Glasgow or Edinburgh?’

‘Aberdeen.’

He looked at Jess.

‘Aberdeen. Of course.’ He looked behind him, trying not to let the despair seep into his voice. ‘Everyone happy? Water? Plastic bag on seat? Sick bags in place? Good. Let’s go.’

Ed heard his sister’s voice as he pulled back onto the road. Ha-ha-ha Ed. SERVED.

It began to rain shortly after Portsmouth. Ed drove through the back roads, keeping at a steady thirty-eight all the way, feeling the fine spit of raindrops from the half-inch of window he had not felt able to close. He found he had to focus on not putting his foot too far down on the accelerator the whole time. It was a constant frustration, going at this sedate speed, like having an itch you couldn’t quite scratch. In the end he switched on cruise control.

Nicky fell asleep. Jess muttered something about him only coming out of hospital the previous day. He half wanted to ask her what had happened, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know quite how much trouble this family was likely to be.

Given the snail’s pace, he had time to study Jess surreptitiously. She remained silent, her head mostly turned away from him, as if he had done something to annoy her. He remembered her in her hallway now, demanding money, her chin tilted (she was quite short) and her unfriendly eyes unblinking. And then he remembered her behaviour at the bar, that she had had to babysit him all the way home. She still seemed to think he was an arsehole. Come on, he told himself. Two, three days maximum. And then you never have to see them again. Let’s play nice.

‘So … do you clean many houses?’

She frowned a little. ‘Yes.’

‘You have a lot of regulars?’

‘It’s a holiday park.’

‘Did you … Was it something you wanted to do?’

‘Did I grow up wanting to clean houses?’ She raised an eyebrow, as if checking that he had seriously asked that question. ‘Um, no. I wanted to be a professional scuba diver. But I had Tanze and I couldn’t work out how to get the pram to float.’

‘Okay, it was a dumb question.’

She rubbed her nose. ‘It’s not my dream job, no. But it’s fine. I can work around the kids and I like most of the people I clean for.’

Most of.

‘Can you make a living out of it?’

Her head shot round. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just what I said. Can you make a living? Is it lucrative?’

Her face closed. ‘We get by.’

‘No, we don’t,’ said Tanzie, from the back.

‘Tanze.’

‘You’re always saying we haven’t got enough money.’

‘It’s just a figure of speech.’ She blushed.

‘So what do you do, Mr Nicholls?’ said Tanzie.

‘I work for a company that creates software. You know what that is?’

‘Of course.’

Nicky looked up. In the rear-view mirror Ed watched him remove his ear-buds. When the boy saw him looking, he glanced away.

‘Do you design games?’

‘Not games, no.’

‘What, then?’

‘Well, for the last few years we’ve been working on a piece of software that will hopefully move us closer to a cashless society.’

‘How would that work?’

‘Well, when you buy something, or pay a bill, you wave your phone, which has a thing a bit like a bar code, and for every transaction you pay a tiny, tiny amount, like nought point nought one of a pound.’

‘We would pay to pay?’ said Jess. ‘No one will want that.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. The banks love it. Retailers like it because it gives them one uniform system instead of cards, cash, cheques … and you’ll pay less per transaction than you do on a credit card. So it works for both sides.’

‘Some of us don’t use credit cards unless we’re desperate.’

‘Then it would just be linked to your bank account. You wouldn’t, like, have to do anything.’

‘So if every bank and retailer picks this up, we won’t get a choice.’

‘That’s a long way off.’

There was a brief silence. Jess pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them. ‘So basically the rich get richer – the banks and the retailers – and the poor get poorer.’

‘Well, in theory, perhaps. But that’s the joy of it. It’s such a tiny amount you won’t notice it. And it will be very convenient.’

Jess muttered something he didn’t catch.

‘How much is it again?’ said Tanzie.

‘Point nought one per transaction. So it works out as a little less than a penny.’

‘How many transactions a day?’

‘Twenty? Fifty? Depends how much you do.’

‘So that’s fifty pence a day.’

‘Exactly. Nothing.’

‘Three pounds fifty a week,’ said Jess.

‘One hundred and eighty-two pounds a year,’ said Tanzie. ‘Depending on how close the fee actually is to a penny. And whether it’s a leap year.’

Ed lifted one hand from the wheel. ‘At the outside. Even you can’t say that’s very much.’

Jess swivelled in her seat. ‘What does one hundred and eighty-two pounds buy us, Tanze?’

‘Two supermarket pairs of school trousers, four school blouses, a pair of shoes. A gym kit and a five pack of white socks. If you buy them from the supermarket. That comes to eighty-five pounds ninety-seven. The one hundred is exactly nine point two days of groceries, depending on whether anyone comes round and whether Mum buys a bottle of wine. That would be supermarket own-brand.’ She thought for a minute. ‘Or one month’s council tax for a Band D property. We’re Band D, right, Mum?’

‘Yes, we are. Unless we get re-banded.’

‘Or an out-of-season three-day holiday at the holiday village in Kent. One hundred and seventy-five pounds, inclusive of VAT.’ She leant forward. ‘That’s where we went last year. We got an extra night free because Mum mended the man’s curtains. And they had a waterslide.’

There was a brief silence.

Ed was about to speak when Tanzie’s head appeared between the two front seats. ‘Or a whole month’s cleaning of a four-bedroom house from Mum, laundering of sheets and towels included, at her current rates. Give or take a pound.’ She leant back in her seat, apparently satisfied.

They drove three miles, turned right at a T-junction, left onto a narrow lane. Ed wanted to say something but found his voice had temporarily disappeared. Behind him, Nicky put his ear-buds back in and turned away. The sun hid briefly behind a cloud.

‘Still,’ said Jess, putting her bare feet up on the dashboard, and leaning forward to turn up the music, ‘let’s hope you do really well with it, eh?’

12.

Jess