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?’