She shook her head.

‘No.’ His face fell a bit. ‘Oh, well.’

He caught sight of the back seat then and blinked. A couple of chocolate buttons had melted into the cream leather seats, and although Tanzie had picked away at them as best she could there was definitely a brown mark. The footwell was covered with mud and leaves from where they had been walking around the woods. Norman’s drool had traced snail trails everywhere. At home she could wipe his jowls with a cloth, but trying to do it in the car made her feel sick. Mr Nicholls saw her looking and gave a half-smile, like it really didn’t matter, even though you could tell that it probably did, and turned back to the wheel.

‘Okay then,’ he said, and started the engine.

Everyone was silent for about an hour, while Mr Nicholls listened to something on Radio 4 about technology. Mum read one of her books. Since the library had closed, she’d bought two paperbacks a week from the charity shop but only ever had time to read one. Sometimes, if Mum was doing extra shifts, Tanzie would find her in the morning lying there with her mouth open and a book propped on her pillow. Because she was not very good at understanding simple equations, their whole house was now full of tattered paperbacks that she swore she was about to read.

The afternoon stretched and sagged, and the rain came down in thick, glassy sheets. They drove past endless rolling green fields, through village after village, moving restlessly in their seats and pulling rucked shirts from the small of their backs. All the villages had started to look pretty much the same after Coventry. Tanzie gazed out of the window and tried to do maths problems in her head but it was hard to focus when she couldn’t do workings out on a pad. It was about six o’clock when Nicky began shifting around, like he couldn’t get comfortable.

‘When are we next stopping?’

Mum had nodded off briefly. She pushed herself upright abruptly, pretending she hadn’t, and peered at the clock.

‘Ten past six,’ Mr Nicholls said.

‘Could we stop for some food?’ said Tanzie.

‘I really need to walk around. My ribs are starting to hurt.’ Nicky’s legs were too long for even this car. His knees were folded up against Mr Nicholls’s seat, and he looked like he was being squashed into the corner by Norman, who lay across him, his big pink tongue lolling out through his teeth.

‘Let’s find somewhere to eat. We could divert into Leicester for a curry.’

‘We’ll be fine with sandwiches.’

Nicky groaned quietly.

‘Do you guys eat nothing but sandwiches?’

‘Of course not. But sandwiches are convenient. And we don’t have time to sit down and eat a curry.’

‘I love curry,’ Nicky said mournfully.

‘Well, perhaps we’ll have one in Aberdeen.’

‘If I win.’

‘You’d better, small fry,’ said Nicky, quietly. ‘If I eat another stale cheese sandwich I’m going to start curling up at the edges.’

Mr Nicholls drove through a small town, then another, and followed the signs to a retail park. It had begun to get dark. The roads were thick with Saturday-evening traffic and beeping cars filled with football supporters, celebrating a match involving teams nobody had ever heard of, their faces joyous, pressed against the windows. The Audi crawled through it all, its windscreen wipers beating a dull, insistent tattoo, then finally stopped outside a supermarket and Mum climbed out with a loud sigh and ran in. They could see her through the rain-lashed window, standing in front of the chiller cabinets, picking things up and putting them down again.

‘Why doesn’t she just buy the ready-made sandwiches?’ muttered Mr Nicholls, looking at his watch. ‘She’d be back out in two minutes.’

‘Too expensive,’ said Nicky.

‘And you don’t know whose fingers have been in them.’

‘Jess did three weeks making sandwiches for a supermarket last year. She said that the woman next to her picked her nose in between shredding the chicken for the chicken Caesar wraps.’

‘And none of them wore gloves.’

Mr Nicholls went a bit quiet.

Jess emerged several minutes later with a small shopping bag, holding it over her head as she ran the short distance to the edge of the kerb.

‘Five to one it’s own-brand ham,’ said Nicky, watching. ‘Plus apples. She always buys apples.’

‘Own-brand ham is two to one,’ Tanzie said.

‘Five to two it’s rubber bread. On special.’

‘I’m going to go right out there and say sliced cheese,’ said Mr Nicholls. ‘What odds will you give me on sliced cheese?’

‘Not specific enough,’ said Nicky. ‘You have to go for Dairylea or cheaper own-brand orange-coloured slices. Probably with a made-up name.’

‘Pleasant Valley Cheese.’

‘Udderly Lovely Cheddar.’

‘That sounds disgusting.’

‘Grumpy Cow Slices.’

‘Oh, come on now, she’s not that bad.’

Tanzie and Nicky started laughing.

Mum opened the door, and held up her carrier bag. ‘Right,’ she said brightly. ‘They had tuna paste on special. Who wants a sandwich?’

‘You never want our sandwiches,’ Mum said, as Mr Nicholls drove through the town.

Mr Nicholls indicated, and pulled out onto the open road. ‘I don’t like sandwiches. They remind me of being at school.’

‘So what do you eat?’ Mum was tucking in. It had taken only a matter of minutes for the whole car to smell of fish. Tanzie thought Mr Nicholls was too polite to say so.

‘In London? Toast for breakfast. Maybe some sushi or noodles for lunch. I have a takeout place I order from in the evening.’

‘You have a takeaway? Every night?’

‘If I’m not going out.’

‘How often do you go out?’

‘Right now? Never.’

Mum gave him a hard look.

‘Well, okay, unless I’m getting drunk in your pub.’

‘You seriously eat the same thing every day?’

Mr Nicholls seemed a bit embarrassed now. ‘You can get different curries.’

‘That must cost a fortune. So what do you eat when you’re at Beachfront?’

‘I get a takeaway.’

‘From the Raj?’

‘Yeah. You know it?’

‘Oh, I know it.’

The car fell silent.

‘What?’ said Mr Nicholls. ‘You don’t go there? What is it? Too expensive? You’re going to tell me it’s easy to cook a jacket potato, right? Well, I don’t like jacket potato. I don’t like sandwiches. And I don’t like cooking.’ It might have been because he was hungry, but he was suddenly quite grumpy.

Tanzie leant forwards through the seats. ‘Nathalie once found a hair in her chicken Jalfrezi.’

Mr Nicholls opened his mouth to say something, just as she added, ‘And it wasn’t from someone’s head.’

Twenty-three lampposts went by.

‘You can worry too much about these things,’ Mr Nicholls said.

Somewhere after Nuneaton Tanzie started sneaking bits of her sandwich to Norman because the tuna paste didn’t really taste like tuna, and the bread kept sticking to the roof of her mouth. Mr Nicholls pulled into a petrol station that squatted by the side of the road, a UFO that had just landed.

‘Their sandwiches will be awful,’ said Mum, gazing inside the kiosk. ‘They’ll have been there for weeks.’

‘I’m not buying a sandwich.’

‘Do they do pasties?’ said Nicky, peering inside, and his voice was full of longing. ‘I love pasties.’

‘They’re even worse. They’re probably full of dog.’

Tanzie put her hands over Norman’s ears.

Mum glanced at Nicky and sighed.

‘Are you going in?’ she said to Mr Nicholls, rummaging around in her purse. ‘Will you get these two some chocolate? Special treat.’

‘Crunchie, please,’ said Nicky, who had cheered up.

‘Aero. Mint, please,’ Tanzie said. ‘Can I have a big one?’

Mum was holding out her hand. But Mr Nicholls was staring off to his right. ‘Can you get them? I’m just going to pop across the road,’ he said.

‘Where are you going?’

He patted his stomach and he suddenly looked really cheerful. ‘There.’