‘… safe in cars.’

‘Ha.’ He grinned, and it was curiously pleasing to see him smile. ‘Yes. Quite. Oh, man, I do feel better.’ He ran a hand across the plastic-covered table and took a swig of coffee, sighing with apparent satisfaction. He finished the first round of toast, asked if there was any more going, then looked around the table. ‘Although, you know, I might feel even better if you weren’t all staring at me while I eat. I’m worried some other part of me is poking out.’

‘You’ll know,’ said Nicky. ‘Because we’ll all run screaming.’

‘Mum said you pretty much brought up an organ,’ said Tanzie. ‘I was wondering what it felt like.’

He glanced up at Jess and stirred his coffee. He didn’t shift his gaze until she had blushed. ‘Truthfully? Not so different from most of my Saturday nights, these days.’ He drank the rest and put down his cup. ‘Okay. I’m good. The rogue kebab is defeated. Let’s hit the road.’

The landscape altered by the mile as they drove through the afternoon, the hills growing steeper and less bucolic, the walls that banked them morphing from hedgerows into flinty grey stone. The skies opened, the light around them grew brighter and they passed the distant symbols of an industrial landscape: red-brick factories, huge power stations that belched mustard-coloured clouds. Jess watched surreptitiously as Mr Nicholls drove, at first wary that he would suddenly clutch his stomach, and then later with a vague satisfaction at the sight of normal colour returning to his face.

‘I don’t think we’re going to make Aberdeen today,’ he said, and there was a hint of apology in his voice.

‘Let’s just get as far as we can and do the last stretch early tomorrow morning.’

‘That’s exactly what I was going to suggest.’

‘Still loads of time.’

‘Loads.’

She let the miles roll by, dozed intermittently and tried not to worry about all the things she needed to worry about. She positioned her mirror surreptitiously so that she could watch Nicky in the back seat. His bruises had faded, even in the short time they had been away. He seemed to be talking more than he had been. But he was still closed to her. Sometimes Jess worried he would be like that for the rest of his life. It didn’t seem to make any difference how often she told him she loved him, or that they were his family. ‘You’re too late,’ her mother had said, when Jess had told her he was coming to live with them. ‘With a child that age, the damage has been done. I should know.’

As a schoolteacher, her mother could keep a class of thirty eight-year-olds in a narcoleptic silence, could steer them through tests like a shepherd streaming sheep through a pen. But Jess couldn’t remember her ever smiling at her with pleasure, the kind of pleasure you’re meant to get just from looking at someone you gave birth to.

She had been right about many things. She had told Jess on the day she started secondary school: ‘The choices you make now will determine the rest of your life.’ All Jess heard by then was someone telling her she should pin her whole self down, like a butterfly. That was the thing: when you put someone down all the time, eventually they stopped listening to the sensible stuff.

When Jess had had Tanzie, young and daft as she had been, she’d had enough wisdom to know she was going to tell her how much she loved her every day. She would hug her and wipe her tears and flop with her on the sofa with their legs entwined like spaghetti. She would cocoon her in love. When she was tiny Jess had slept with her in their bed, her arms wrapped around her, so that Marty would haul himself grumpily into the spare room, moaning that there wasn’t any room for him. She barely even heard him.

And when Nicky had turned up two years later, and everyone had told her she was mad to take on someone else’s child, a child who was already eight years old and from a troubled background – you know how boys like that turn out – she’d ignored them. Because she could see instantly in the wary little shadow who had stood a minimum twelve inches away from anyone, from his father even, a little of what she had felt. Because she knew that something happened to you when your mother didn’t hold you close, or tell you all the time that you were the best thing ever, or even notice when you were home: a little part of you sealed over. You didn’t need her. You didn’t need anyone. And, without even knowing you were doing it, you waited. You waited for anyone who got close to you to see something they didn’t like in you, something they hadn’t seen initially, and to grow cold and disappear, like so much sea mist, too. Because there had to be something wrong, didn’t there, if even your own mother didn’t really love you?

It was why she hadn’t been devastated when Marty left. Why would she be? He couldn’t hurt her. The only thing Jess really cared about was those two children, and letting them know they were okay by her. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved. Jess hadn’t done much to be proud of in her life, but the thing she was most proud of was that Tanzie knew it. Strange little bean that she was, Jess knew she knew it.

She was still working on Nicky.

‘Are you hungry?’ Mr Nicholls’s voice woke her from a half-doze.

She pushed herself upright. Her neck had calcified, as bent and stiff as a wire coat hanger. ‘Starving,’ she said, turning awkwardly towards him. ‘You want to stop somewhere for lunch?’