Chapter 15
“Fuck,” I said as I opened the door. Then I repeated “Fuck” as I yanked off my shoes in the hall and threw in a “Fuck, fuck, fuck” for good measure as I made my way to the front room. “I’m sorry I’m late,” I called out. “Traffic was murder. The social worker isn’t here yet, are th—”
“She is,” said a woman I assumed was the social worker, who was sitting beside Oliver on the sofa. She seemed…about as reassuring as somebody who was here to nitpick all your flaws could look. Younger than I’d expected, with a warm smile and a trace of a Nigerian accent.
“Hi!” I definitely actually did exclaim, sticking my hand out like I was doing the world’s weirdest martial art. “I’m Luc. And sorry about the—the fucks—and the smelling of manure. I don’t normally smell of manure. Or say fuck quite that much.”
She took my hand and shook it. “Hi, Luc. I’m Esther.” Then, when my arm barely moved, she added, “Please relax. Just a bit. I’m sure everybody has manure days.”
“I really don’t!” I kept exclaiming unrelaxedly. “I very rarely go near manure at all. Not to, like, a neurotic extent. I’m fine with manure. As in fine, like a normal person. Not, like, someone with a fetish or anything.”
There was a silence. Not a long silence but a noticeable silence.
“Lucien is very keen to make a good impression,” Oliver explained. “Which I admit might be hard to tell from the look of him.”
“And the smell,” I added.
“And the smell,” Oliver agreed.
Esther nodded a gentle, used-to-working-with-weirdoes nod. “I understand. It can be a bit worrying having somebody come into your house, look at all your things, and ask you a lot of questions. But remember this really is just a chat.”
A chat that would probably end with her writing a report about what a fuckup I was.
“I’m not here to judge you,” she went on. “Or any one-off manure-related incidents that you may or may not have been involved in.”
“Oh good,” I said, trying very hard to believe her.
For some reason best known to himself, Oliver—who had never in his life patted his knees—patted his knees and stood up. “Shall we do the tour first?” he asked, with a compensating-for-my-manure-covered-boyfriend brightness. “It’s not the biggest house, so it shouldn’t take long.”
“That sounds good.” Esther, sans knee pat, got up to join him.
“I mostly need to see the basics. Sitting room”—she made a slightly exaggerated show of looking around—“check. I’ll want to look at the kitchen, see the spare room, your room, any bathrooms, and, you know, make sure you don’t have a cellar full of dead bodies or anything. ”
“Ahahahaha,” I said and immediately hated myself. “No. We don’t. Do we, Oliver?”
Oliver did an incredible job of pretending I was behaving reasonably. “I think I’d have noticed. Also I’m pretty sure I’d have been disbarred.”
With an insightfulness that I felt boded extremely badly for me, Esther glanced at Oliver. “Oh, so you’re a lawyer.”
“Barrister,” he clarified.
“I bet if I said, ‘Great, mine’s a cappuccino,’ you’d have heard it before?” She flashed him a disarming smile that would have disarmed anybody who wasn’t already a paranoid ball of nerves and self-loathing.
“Just once or twice,” Oliver lied.
She turned back to me cheerfully. “So that means you’d be the primary caregiver?”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. “I suppose,” I managed, realising half a second too late that a primary caregiver should probably at least be comfortable saying that they were a primary caregiver.
“We both work full-time,” added Oliver, “but Lucien mostly works from home. He looks after Spud as well.”
“Ruff,” said Spud, who’d been sitting angelically by Oliver’s feet this whole time.
I silently sent him good-boy vibes as we led Esther into the hall and then showed her up to the spare room.
It was a good-size space—at least, I hoped it was a good-size space—with a single bed and a little desk.
We’d mostly used it for guests, and so it looked quite bare just then, which I pencilled in under my lateness, my swearing, my being covered in manure, and my inability to say what my role in the family would be on the list of things I’d somehow convinced myself she’d use against us.
“We wanted to give the child an opportunity to personalise it,” Oliver was saying. And, when he put it like that, it seemed marginally more likely that Esther would go back to the office and write “bedroom adequate” and not “couple expects kid to sleep in white box.”
“Yes,” I contributed helpfully.
“Lucien and I sleep down the hall. We have an en suite, so the main bathroom will be entirely free.”
Esther nodded and smiled and seemed to be making some notes but didn’t say anything immediately.
Which I told myself was fine. Didn’t mean anything. Wasn’t a sign of doom.
We showed her our room, which I’d scrupulously tidied of pants and sex toys that morning, and the bathroom, before looping back downstairs to tick off the kitchen and my study.
“The pen is for Spud,” Oliver remarked. And because it was Oliver doing the remarking, not me, there was no implication of in case you think this is where we intend to keep our foster child.
“Is he new?” asked Esther.
Which was exactly the kind of question that the material we’d read—the material Oliver had read—told us we should have expected.
“Um,” I said, having apparently forgotten the most basic facts about my own life.
Oliver put a reassuring hand on my arm. “A few months, but he’s settled in very well. The pen’s probably not strictly necessary anymore, but it means he has a familiar space.”
“And he’s comfortable with strangers?”
Spud gave a cheery “Ruff” of confirmation, which Oliver capitalised on with an opportunistic “As you can see.”
Esther made another note. Which probably didn’t read The hot one is a bit too smug, but only probably.
Having run out of house, we returned to the sitting room, where I stood frozen by an uplighter and Oliver offered Esther a cup of tea.
“That’d be great,” she said, “two sugars.”
“I’ll get it!” I reverted to exclaiming.
I didn’t want to look like I was running away, but I’d long since learned you can’t always get what you want.
Safely in the kitchen, I took a moment to splash water on my face, which helped slightly with the stress but not with the manure.
Then I had a not-that-minor-actually freak-out over which mugs to use.
Because, on the surface, it seemed a pretty straightforward choice.
When Oliver and I had moved in together and consolidated our kitchens, he’d provided things like a whisk, frying pans that weren’t covered in a thin laminate of bacon grease and crockery that actually matched.
I’d provided an absinthe spoon, a Breville sandwich toaster with its nonstick coating flaking off, and a collection of mugs that I’d mostly stolen or been given by people with more irony than compassion.
This meant I could go with some nice Le Creuset stoneware mugs in assorted tasteful colours.
Or I could give the social worker who was going to decide if Oliver and I were the right sort of people to raise a vulnerable teenager the Unicorns Are Just Horny Ponies mug Priya had got me for my twenty-eighth birthday, the There It Goes, My Last Flying Fuck mug Priya had got me for my twenty-ninth birthday, the Cold, Smooth, and Tasty (Like Your Mum) mug Priya had got me for my thirtieth birthday, and the Any Text or Photo mug she’d got me as a moving-in present.
Again, the choice should have been obvious.
Except, if I took the nice stoneware mugs out, there was a very real chance Esther would think I was trying to trick her.
Because I was clearly not the kind of person who owned nice stoneware mugs, and then she’d probably wonder what else I was lying about.
Or she’d start to think that maybe I’d murdered the real Luc O’Donnell and Oliver Blackwood, who were the kind of people who owned nice stoneware mugs, and stuffed them under the floorboards.
Whereas if I gave her Massive Twat (Priya again, this time just to annoy me), she’d realise what an authentic, down-to-earth person with nothing to hide I was.
Or she’d think I was a misogynist with no sense of boundaries.
Oh.
It was that one, wasn’t it?
I went back out with a tray of nice stoneware mugs.
“Everything all right, Lucien?” asked Oliver, since I’d taken about six hours to make three cups of tea.
“Absolutely!” I exclaimed.
“I was just asking Oliver,” said Esther, politely ignoring my weird, weird behaviour and taking one of the mugs, “why you decided on fostering.”
My mind went blank. “Pardon?”
“I was just asking why you decided on fostering.”
“Well,” I began. And did not continue until the not-continuing became nonviable. “It just seemed… We sort of felt… We’re at a place in our life…”
“Adoption didn’t feel like it was right for us,” Oliver translated. “Not where we are now, especially not when there’s a national shortage of foster carers.”
I nodded like a dog on a dashboard.
Esther sipped her tea and leaned forwards.
Once again her body language was extremely open, and once again my lizard brain decided this would be a great time to run up the walls and lick its eyeballs.
“So”—her tone was effortlessly understanding—“one of the things we need to talk about is where the two of you are coming from, um, family-wise.”
Shit shit shit. I was fucked fucked fucked.
“It’s not intended to be intrusive or intimidating,” she went on, even though I was profoundly intimidated and at least a little bit intruded upon. “But it’ll really help me to build a good picture of you both.”
With the easy grace of, well, himself, Oliver started the ball rolling. “I’m afraid there’s not much to tell, at least where I’m concerned. I had quite a normal upbringing. I was always quite driven, and my parents were strict but fair.”