4.

Jess

There had always been something a bit different about Tanzie. At a year old she would line up her blocks in rows or organize them into patterns, then pull one or two away, making new shapes. By the time she was two she was obsessed with numbers. Before she even started school she would go through those books you can get full of maths problems and ask questions, like, ‘Why is a one written as “1” and not “2”?’ or tell Jess that multiplication was ‘just another way of doing addition’. At six she could explain the meaning of ‘tessellate’.

Marty didn’t like it. It made him uncomfortable. But then anything that wasn’t ‘normal’ made Marty uncomfortable. It was the thing that made Tanzie happy, just sitting there, ploughing through problems that neither of them could begin to understand. Marty’s mother, on the rare occasions that she visited, used to call her a swot. She would say it like it wasn’t a very nice thing to be.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘There’s nothing I can do right now.’

‘Wouldn’t it feel weird, her mixing with all the private-school kids?’

‘I don’t know. Yes. But that would be our problem. Not hers.’

‘What if she grows away from you? What if she falls in with a posh lot and gets embarrassed by her background?’

‘What?’

‘I’m just saying. I think you could mess her up. I think she could lose sight of where she comes from.’

Jess looked over at Nathalie, who was driving. ‘She comes from the Shitty Estate of Doom, Nat. As far as that goes, I would be happy if she got early-onset Alzheimer’s.’

Something weird had happened since Jess had told Nathalie about the interview. It was as if she had taken it personally. All morning she had gone on and on about how her children were happy at the local school, about how glad she was that they were ‘normal’, how it didn’t do for a child to be ‘different’.

The truth of it was, Jess thought, that Tanzie had come home from the interview more excited than she had been in months. Her scores had been 100 per cent in maths and 99 per cent in non-verbal reasoning. (She was actually annoyed by the missing one per cent.) Mr Tsvangarai, ringing to tell her, said there might be other sources of funding. Details, he kept calling them, although Jess couldn’t help thinking that people who thought money was a ‘detail’ were the kind who had never really had to worry about it.

‘And you know she’d have to wear that prissy uniform,’ Nathalie said, as they pulled up at Beachfront.

‘She won’t be wearing a prissy uniform,’ Jess responded irritably.

‘Then she’ll get teased for not being like the rest of them.’

‘She won’t be wearing a prissy uniform because she won’t be bloody going. I haven’t got a hope of sending her, Nathalie. Okay?’

Jess got out of the car, slamming the door and walking in ahead of her so that she didn’t have to listen to anything else.

It was only the locals who called Beachfront ‘the holiday park’; the developers called it a ‘destination resort’. Because this was not a holiday park like the Sea Bright caravan park on the top of the hill, a chaotic jumble of wind-battered mobile homes and seasonal lean-to tents: this was a spotless array of architect-designed ‘living spaces’ set among carefully manicured paths and lodges, in tended patches of woodland. There was a sports club, a spa, tennis courts, a huge pool complex, which the locals were not allowed to use after all, a handful of overpriced boutiques and a mini-supermarket so that residents did not have to venture into the scrappier confines of the town.

Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays Benson & Thomas cleaned the two three-bedroomed rental properties that overlooked the clubhouse, then moved on to the newer properties: six glass-fronted modernist houses that stood on the chalk cliff and looked straight out across the sea.

Mr Nicholls kept a spotless Audi in his driveway that they had never once seen move. A woman who said she was his sister came once with two small children and a grey-looking husband (they left the place immaculately clean). Mr Nicholls himself rarely visited, and had never, in the year they’d been doing it, used either the kitchen or the laundry room. Jess made extra cash doing his towels and sheets, laundering and ironing them weekly for guests who never came.

It was a vast house; its slate floors echoed, its living areas were covered with great expanses of sea-grass matting and there was an expensive sound system wired into the walls. The glass frontages gazed out onto the wide blue arc of the horizon. But there were no photographs on the walls, or suggestions of any kind of actual life. Nathalie always said that even when he came it was as if he was camping there. There must have been women – Nathalie once found a lipstick in the bathroom, and last year they had discovered a pair of tiny lacy knickers under the bed (La Perla) and a bikini top – but there was little to suggest anything else about him.

Jess thought of her own house, the narrow, creaking stairs, the peeling wallpaper, and unusually (she rarely thought about clients’ houses in relation to her own – that truly was the way to madness) she felt briefly wistful for all this space. This was a man who’d never had to put a clothes rail on the upstairs landing, or run out of space for bookshelves. This was a man who’d never fretted about how to find a registration fee.

‘He’s here,’ muttered Nathalie.

As they closed the front door, a man’s voice echoed down the corridor, his voice loud, his tone argumentative, as if on the telephone. Nathalie pulled a face at Jess and walked slowly through the hallway.

‘Cleaners,’ she called. He did not respond, but he must have heard.

The argument continued the whole time it took to clean the kitchen (he had used one mug, and the bin held two empty takeaway cartons). There was broken glass in the corner by the fridge, small green splinters, as if someone had picked up the larger pieces but couldn’t be bothered with the rest. And there was wine up the walls. Jess washed them down carefully. The place smelt like a brewery. And he was still arguing. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, as his door was partially closed and too far away, but even muffled and at a distance his frustration was evident. She and Nathalie worked in silence, speaking in murmurs, trying to pretend they couldn’t hear.

When they had finished the kitchen Nathalie moved on to the living room and Jess headed down the hall. She did the downstairs loo, then the dining room, with its untouched bleached oak table and perfectly matched chairs. She dusted the picture frames with a soft cloth, tilting the odd one a centimetre or two to show they’d been done. Outside on the decking sat an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s with one glass; she picked them up and brought them inside.

While she washed up, she thought about Nicky, who had returned from school the previous day with a cut ear, the knees of his trousers scuffed with dirt. He shrugged off any attempt to talk about it. His preferred life now consisted of people on the other side of a screen; boys Jess had never met and never would, boys he called SK8RBOI and TERM-N-ATOR who shot and disembowelled each other for fun. Who could blame him? His real life seemed to be the actual war zone.

She thought about Tanzie, and how she’d looked while talking to that maths teacher. Ever since the interview Jess had lain awake, doing calculations in her head, adding and subtracting in a way that would have made Tanzie laugh. The scholarship would not leave her head. It had lodged in there like toothache, and Jess worried away at it, trying every possible way to build financial mountains out of molehills. She sold her belongings. She ran through mental lists of every single person she might be able to borrow money from and who wouldn’t mind if it took time to pay it back. She considered the most likely, and the most unlikely people – her mother, her aunt Nell in Dorset, the retired teacher she used to clean for who always said he could see that Tanzie was a bright girl – but while she might have been able to beg fifty pounds here and there, there was nobody who would lend ten times that much. Nobody she knew even had it.

The only people likely to offer Jess money were the sharks who circled the estate with their hidden four-figure interest rates. She had seen neighbours who had borrowed from friendly reps who turned gimlet-eyed, hanging over them like financial vultures. And again and again she came back to Marty’s words. Was McArthur’s comp really so bad? Some children did well there. There was no reason why Tanzie shouldn’t be one of them, if she kept out of the way of the troublemakers.

The hard truth of it was there like a brick wall. Jess was going to have to tell her daughter that she couldn’t make it add up. Jess Thomas, the woman who always found a way through, who spent her life telling the two of them that it would All Work Out, couldn’t make it work out.

She finished the dining room in which no dining had ever taken place, and observed with some distant part of her that the loud talking had stopped. Mr Nicholls must finally be off the phone. She hauled the vacuum cleaner down the hallway, wincing as it bumped against her shin, and knocked on the door to see if he wanted his office cleaned. There was silence, and as she knocked again he yelled suddenly, ‘Yes, I’m well aware of that, Sidney. You’ve said so fifteen times, but it doesn’t mean –’

It was too late: she had pushed the door half open. Jess began to apologize, but with barely a glance the man held up a palm, like she was some kind of a dog – stay – then leaned forwards and slammed the door in her face. The sound reverberated around the house.