‘Eduardo. Baby. I need to sort this with you.’

‘Lara –’

Before he could say anything more, Jess reached over and picked up the phone. ‘Hello, Lara,’ she said. ‘Jess here. I’m awfully sorry but he can’t pay for your roof, so there’s really no point in ringing him any more.’

A short silence. Then an explosive: ‘Who is this?’

‘I’m his new wife. Oh – and he’d like his Chairman Mao picture back. Perhaps just leave it with his lawyer. Okay? In your own time. Thanks so much.’

The resulting silence had the same quality as the few seconds before an atomic explosion. But before any of them could hear what happened next, Jess flipped the off button, and handed it back to him. He took it gingerly, and turned it off.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I think.’

‘You’re welcome.’ She didn’t look at him when she spoke.

Ed glanced into his rear-view mirror. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought Nicky was trying very hard not to laugh.

Somewhere between Edinburgh and Dundee, on a narrow, wooded lane, they slowed and stopped for a herd of cows in the road. The animals moved around the car, gazing in at its inhabitants with vague curiosity, a moving black sea, eyes rolling in woolly black heads. Norman stared back, his body rigid with silent, confused outrage. Tanzie took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, gazing back at them, half blind.

‘Aberdeen Angus,’ said Nicky.

Suddenly, without warning, Norman hurled his whole body, snarling and growling at the window. The car physically jolted to one side and his deafening bark bounced off the interior, amplified in the confined space. The back seat became a chaotic mass of arms and noise and writhing dog. Nicky and Jess fought to reach him.

‘Mum!’

‘Norman! Stop!’ The dog was on top of Tanzie, his face hard against the window. Ed could just make out her pink jacket, flailing underneath him.

Jess lunged over the seat at the dog, grabbing for his collar. They dragged Norman back down from the window. He whined, shrill and hysterical, straining at their grasp, great gobs of drool spraying across the interior.

‘Norman, you big idiot! What the hell –’

‘He’s never seen a cow before.’ Tanzie, struggling upright, always defending him.

‘Jesus, Norman.’

‘You okay, Tanze?’

‘I’m fine.’

The cows continued to part around the car, unmoved by the dog’s outburst. Through the now steamed-up windows they could just make out the farmer at the rear, walking slowly and impassively, with the same lumbering gait as his bovine charges. He gave the barest of nods as he passed, as if he had all the time in the world. Norman whined and pulled against his collar.

‘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.

The car screeched into a parking space in front of it, and everything stopped. Ed let out a long breath and glanced at the clock. It was six minutes to twelve.

‘This is it?’

‘This is it.’

Jess appeared suddenly paralysed, as if she couldn’t believe they were actually there. She undid her seatbelt and stared at the car park, at the boys strolling in as if they had all the time in the world, some reading off electronic devices, others accompanied by tense-looking parents. They were all wearing the uniforms of minor public schools. ‘I thought it would be … bigger,’ she said.

Nicky gazed out through the dank grey drizzle. ‘Yeah. Because advanced maths is such a crowd-puller.’

‘I can’t see anything,’ said Tanzie.

‘Look, you guys go in and register. I’ll get her some glasses.’

Jess turned to him. ‘But they won’t be the right prescription.’

‘I’ll sort it. Just go. GO.’

He could see her staring after him as he skidded out of the car park and headed back towards the city centre.

It took seven minutes and three attempts to find a chemist large enough to sell reading glasses. Ed screeched to a halt so dramatic that Norman shot forward and his great head collided with his shoulder. He resettled himself on the back seat, grumbling.

‘Stay here,’ Ed told him, and bolted inside.

The shop was empty, aside from an old woman with a basket and two assistants talking in lowered voices. He skidded around the shelves, past tampons and toothbrushes, corn plasters and reduced Christmas-gift sets, until he finally found the stand by the till. Dammit. Why the hell hadn’t he checked whether she was long- or short-sighted? He reached for his phone to ask, then remembered he didn’t have Jess’s number.

‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’ Ed stood there, trying to guess. Tanzie’s glasses looked as if they might be pretty strong. He had never seen her without them. Would that mean she was more likely to be short-sighted? Didn’t all children tend to be short-sighted? It was adults who held things away from them to see, surely. He hesitated for about ten seconds and then, after a moment’s indecision, he pulled them all from their rack, long- and short-sighted, mild and super-strength, and dumped them on the counter in a clear plastic-wrapped pile.

The girl broke off her conversation with the old woman. She looked down at them then up at him. Ed saw her clock the drool on his collar and tried to wipe it surreptitiously with his sleeve. This succeeded in smearing it across his lapel.

‘All of them. I’ll take all of them,’ he said. ‘But only if you can ring them up in less than thirty seconds.’

She looked over at her supervisor, who gave Ed a penetrating stare, then an imperceptible nod. Without a word, the girl began to ring them up, carefully positioning each pair in a bag. ‘No. No time. Just chuck them in,’ he said, reaching past her to thrust them into the plastic carrier.

‘Do you have a loyalty card?’

‘No. No loyalty card.’

‘We’re doing a special three for two offer on diet bars today. Would you like –’

Ed scrambled to pick up the glasses that had fallen from the counter. ‘No diet bars,’ he said. ‘No offers. Thank you.’

‘That’ll be a hundred and seventy-four pounds,’ she said finally. ‘Sir.’