‘I’ve never seen him like that before.’ Jess straightened her hair and blew out through her cheeks. ‘Perhaps he could smell beef.’

‘I didn’t know he had it in him,’ Ed said.

‘My glasses.’ Tanzie held up the twisted piece of metal. ‘Mum. Norman broke my glasses.’

It was a quarter past ten.

‘I can’t see anything without my glasses.’

Jess looked at Ed. Shit.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Grab a plastic bag. I’m going to have to put my foot down.’

They drove at speed, half frozen, the wind from the open windows a buffeting roar that thwarted conversation. The Scottish roads were wide and empty, and Ed drove so fast that the satnav had repeatedly to reassess its timing to their destination. Every minute they gained was an imaginary air punch in his head. Tanzie was sick twice. He refused to stop to allow her to vomit into the road.

‘She’s really ill.’

‘I’m fine,’ Tanzie kept saying, her face wedged into a plastic bag. ‘Really.’

‘You don’t want to stop, sweetheart? Just for a minute?’

‘No. Keep going. Bleurgh –’

There wasn’t time to stop. Not that this made the car journey any easier to bear. Nicky had turned away from his sister, his hand over his nose. Even Norman’s head was thrust as far out into the fresh air as he could get it.

Ed drove like someone in a luxury car advert, speeding through empty bends, along the winding base of ancient windswept hillsides. The car gripped the greasy roads as if it had been meant for this. He forgot he was cold, that his car interior was pretty much destroyed, his life a mess. There were moments, in that astonishing landscape, his whole being focused on driving as fast and as safely as he could, when it felt like an almost spiritual experience. A spiritual experience broken only by the occasional sound of a child gagging into a fresh plastic bag.

He would get them there. He knew this as surely as he knew anything. He felt filled with purpose in a way that he hadn’t done in months. And as Aberdeen finally loomed before them, its buildings vast and silver grey, the oddly modern high-rises thrusting into the distant sky, his mind raced ahead of them. He headed for the centre, watched as the roads narrowed and became cobbled streets. They came through the docks, the enormous tankers on their right, and that was where the traffic slowed, and slowly, unstoppably, his confidence began to unravel. They slowed and then sat in an increasingly anxious silence, Ed punching in alternative routes across Aberdeen that offered no time gain and often no sense. The satnav started to work against him, adding back the time it had subtracted. It was fifteen, nineteen, twenty-two minutes until they reached the university building. Twenty-five minutes. Too many.

‘What’s the delay?’ said Jess, to nobody in particular. She fiddled with the radio buttons, trying to find the traffic reports. ‘What’s the hold-up?’

‘It’s just sheer weight of traffic.’

‘That’s such a lame expression,’ said Nicky. ‘Of course a traffic jam is sheer weight of traffic. What else would it be down to?’

‘There could have been an accident,’ said Tanzie.

‘But the jam itself would still comprise the traffic. So the problem is still the sheer weight of traffic.’

‘No, the volume of traffic slowing itself down is something completely different.’

‘But it’s the same result.’

‘But then it’s an inaccurate description.’

Jess peered at the satnav. ‘Are we in the right place? I wouldn’t have thought the docks would be near the university.’

‘We have to get through the docks to get to the university.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure, Jess.’ Ed tried to suppress the tension in his voice. ‘Look at the satnav.’

There was a brief silence. In front of them the traffic-lights changed through two cycles without anybody moving. Jess, on the other hand, moved incessantly, fidgeting in her seat, peering around her to see if there was some clear route they might have missed. He couldn’t blame her. He felt the same.

‘I don’t think we’ve got time to get new glasses,’ he murmured to Jess, when they’d sat through the fourth cycle.

‘But she can’t see without them.’

‘If we look for a chemist we’re not going to make it there for midday.’

She bit her lip, then turned round in her seat. ‘Tanze? Is there any way you can see through the unbroken lens? Any way at all?’

A pale green face emerged from the plastic bag. ‘I’ll try,’ it said.

Traffic stopped and stalled. They grew silent, the tension within the car ratcheting up. When Norman whined, they growled, ‘Shut up, Norman!’ as one. Ed felt his blood pressure rising, even as the weight of responsibility for getting them there seemed to grow heavier. Why hadn’t they left half an hour earlier? Why hadn’t he worked this out better? What would happen if they missed it? He glanced sideways to where Jess was tapping her knee nervously and guessed that she was probably thinking the same thing. And then finally, inexplicably, as if the gods had been toying with them, the traffic cleared.

He flung the car through the cobbled streets, Jess yelling, ‘GO! GO!’ leaning forwards on the dashboard as if she were a coachman driving a horse. He skidded the car around the bends, almost too fast for the satnav, which actually started to burble, and entered the university campus on two wheels, following the small printed signs that had been placed haphazardly on random poles, until they found the Downes Building, an unlovely 1970s office block in the same grey granite as everything else.