Chapter 18
Oliver and I were both painfully aware how bad an impression it would make to leave Esther and Jasmine—we knew the kid’s name from our rigorous pre-fostering briefings—waiting on the doorstep while we got our shit together, so we hustled Spud into his pen, gave each other silent This is it looks, and then dashed to the front door and threw it open wearing our warmest, most welcoming faces.
But it wasn’t Esther who greeted us. It was a man in a black polo shirt, short-sleeved despite the January weather, wanting to know if we were Luc O’Donnell and Oliver Blackwood.
“We are,” Oliver told him.
There was a van behind him—also black—and at a nod from Black Polo Shirt Guy Number One, some other Black Polo Shirt Guys opened the doors at the back and hauled out a young girl.
She was pale with that kind of dishwater-blond hair, and she was…
scrawny sounded mean. But there was a definite feral-cat vibe about her, like she was simultaneously hungry and wanted to kill you.
Although the wanting-to-kill-you thing might have been at least a little bit to do with the handcuffs.
“Excuse me,” I said, “what the actual fuck?”
“Hmm?” replied Black Polo Shirt Guy as if he neither knew nor cared which specific fuck I was questioning the actuality of.
Oliver translated. “Why was she restrained?”
“She got violent.”
“There are three of you,” Oliver pointed out, “and she’s fourteen.”
Black Polo Shirt Guy shrugged. “We’ve got a zero-tolerance policy.”
Two large men escorted the violent fourteen-year-old to our door and uncuffed her. Then they dropped her possessions beside her in a black bin liner, and she glared up at them with what I felt was pretty justified resentment.
Oliver half stooped towards her. “Hello, Jasmine,” he said in a tone I’d never quite heard him use before. Which was a little bit jarring because I thought I knew all of the Olivers.
“Jaz,” she replied.
“Hello, Jaz,” Oliver corrected himself. “I’m Oliver, this is Lucien—”
“Luc,” I said.
“We’ll be looking after you,” he went on, while I signed for Jaz like she was a Parcelforce delivery.
Jaz looked less impressed than I had ever seen anybody look about anything. And I’d gone to see the Maleficent movie with Priya.
Undaunted in the face of our new foster child’s visible contempt, Oliver kept robustly to the script. “If you’ve got all your things, maybe you’d like us to show you to your room?”
She barely even shrugged.
Before taking her inside, Oliver turned his attention to Black Polo Shirt Guy. “I’ll be making a complaint,” he told him.
“You do you, mate,” Black Polo Shirt Guy replied with the kind of apathy you had to really, really work at.
Then he and his co-polo-shirtists slouched back into their van, leaving me and Oliver officially in loco parentis. And, unofficially, completely out of our depth.
“Come on,” I said, hoping a less formal approach would fail less hard with our guest…child…oh fuck.
To my relief, Jaz grabbed her bin liner and followed us inside.
Once the front door was closed, it was safe to let Spud out, so I went through to the study and opened up his pen.
For which I got no gratitude whatsoever because there was a new human in the building and Spud apparently didn’t care about all the nights I’d spent sleeping on the floor with him.
“Ruff,” he declared, bounding into the hall and sniffing at Jaz’s knees, because Oliver had painstakingly trained him not to jump on people. “Ruff.”
Jaz looked down. “Hey.”
“That’s Spud,” I told her. “Spud, this is Jaz.”
“Ruff,” said Spud.
“Can I help you with your bag?” Oliver suggested.
That didn’t get a reply, but I saw Jaz’s grip tighten slightly on her bin liner.
“Are you hungry?” he tried.
Jaz shook her head.
“Would you like a drink?” I tried. And then, petrified I’d given the impression I was trying to ply her with alcohol: “Like water or Coke or something. Coke like the drink. Not like the stuff you put up your nose.”
She shook her head again.
Oliver gave her his best and gentlest smile, which was a smile that made me feel safer and more loved than anything else in the world, but which seemed to wash over Jaz like a fart over a rock. “You probably want to get settled in. We’ll show you your room.”
We took Jaz upstairs and showed her the featureless magnolia cube we’d accidentally prepared for her to sleep in.
“You can decorate it however you’d like,” Oliver told her, while I cringed at his side. “And there should be plenty of space for your things. If there isn’t, we can always invest in some storage solutions.”
Jaz had no strong reaction to that whatsoever.
To be fair, I wasn’t that interested in storage solutions at that age either.
Or, for that matter, my current age. Which was probably why Oliver had a study you could find things in and I didn’t.
Letting her bin liner flop down on the floor like she could not possibly have given fewer shits about its contents, Jaz sat on the bed, staring at the walls as if she was in prison.
Still undeterred, Oliver pressed on. “Lucien and I will both be working from home today. He’ll be downstairs, I’ll be upstairs, so if you need either of us, that’s where to look. The bathroom is just along the corridor, and there’s spare bedding in the ottoman in the hall.”
Jaz looked like she was barely paying attention.
“Lucien and I will probably be breaking for lunch around one”—Oliver’s undeterred valour continued valiantly undeterred—“but if you want anything before then, do let us know. Or if you’re comfortable, we’re more than happy for you to look after yourself, if that’s what you prefer.
The kitchen’s downstairs and, well, I’m sure you can find it. ”
“Sure,” replied Jaz in a tone that said I know you want me to say something, and this is something.
“We’ll leave you to get settled in,” Oliver concluded, with studied cheerfulness. Then, as we slipped out the door, he stopped with his hand on the handle and added, “Open or shut?”
Jaz gave another of those not-even-a-shrugs.
Oliver left the door hanging ajar and we retreated downstairs. Behind us, we heard the decisive click of Jaz pulling it all the way closed.
And then we went and hid in the kitchen like grown-ups.
“Fuck,” I said as quietly as I could manage, because while I wasn’t too concerned about Jaz hearing me swear, I didn’t especially want her to realise quite how incredibly uncool and unconfident I was. “Are we going to be shit at this?”
Oliver reached across the kitchen table and took my hand. Then he said, very clearly, very calmly, and with far greater conviction than I could possibly imagine having, given how things had gone so far, “No.”
“Um, are you sure?”
“Yes.”
I cowered in my seat. “Why?”
“Well firstly,” he said, in a level tone that I hoped was aimed at reassuring me, not himself, “because ‘not shit at this’ is a fairly low standard to set for ourselves. And secondly, because we’re intelligent, well-intentioned, caring people who will do everything we can to make this work.”
“Is that enough, though?” I asked. “Because it kind of seems like she hates us.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t hate us.” He sounded like he meant it. Okay, he sounded about ninety percent like he meant it. Maybe eighty.
“She’s said six words since she stepped through the door. And two of those were to Spud.”
A slightly distant smile played across Oliver’s lips. “I don’t want to lean too hard into stereotypes, but I think that might just be because she’s a teenager.”
“You think?” I was kind of having a weird moment where I couldn’t tell if I wanted Oliver to be the rock beneath my wings or my partner in panic.
He was clearly steering hard into rock, which was comforting on one level.
But on another, sneakier level, it made me worried in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“I mean, I wasn’t expecting her to skip over the threshold in a gingham dress and do a musical number about how she has a home at last. I was just…
I suppose I don’t know what I was expecting. ”
“Remember, they brought her to us in handcuffs with her belongings in a bin liner,” said Oliver with a voice I recognised from when he talked about his more difficult clients. “It’s understandable that she has issues trusting authority.”
“Okay.” I tried not to squeak. “I understand that. I’m understanding it. I’m accepting its understandability. What the fuck do we do about it?”
Oliver’s face was getting barristerer by the second. “Well.” He put his hands over mine like he was telling me it was sepsis after all. “I think we do have to accept that we might not be able to do anything.”
“Oh wow.” This time I did squeak. “What fantastic foster parents we’re going to be.”
He’d gone full rock. Given how I was reacting, that, too, was probably understandable.
“That’s not what I’m saying. But, in my job, something you have to get used to is that there are some people who can’t be helped.
It’s still important to do your best for them, but sometimes it fails, and you can’t blame yourself. ”
“Jaz isn’t a job, Oliver. She’s a person.”
“All of my clients are people,” he replied, a little sharply. “And I assure you I never lose sight of that. What’s important here is to recognise that we have a very clear role in Jasmine’s life.”
“God, you make it sound so fulfilling.”
“This isn’t about us, Lucien. This is about Jasmine and what she needs.”
I stood up in a flail, even though it meant shaking off Oliver’s hand. “That’s the whole problem. I don’t know what she needs. She’s just sitting in a bare room looking hostile with bits of sad.”
“You do know what she needs,” Oliver said firmly. “We’ve received guidance on this. She needs stability and a warm, welcoming environment, and I honestly think we can provide that. Give her time to settle in, and everything will be fine.”