Chapter 19
Oliver insisted that we follow her. Which I didn’t think was a great idea, but then my record when it came to evaluating idea-greatness was pretty damn spotty.
I mean, my main contribution to the fostering process so far had been showing up late to our first home visit and being mildly resentful our foster kid got on with our dog.
We stopped outside Jaz’s door, and Oliver knocked politely.
There was no answer.
He knocked again. “Jasmine?”
“Ruff.” Once again, not Jaz.
“Jasmine,” Oliver continued, “I understand that this is difficult for you and you’re upset—”
Finally, she spoke. “Fuck off.”
“Ruff.”
“You stay out of this,” I told Spud.
Oliver gave me a don’t-anthropomorphise-our-pet-in-serious-conversations look.
Which was a weirdly specific look to have, but he nailed it first time.
“Jasmine,” he repeated, “I understand you’re in a difficult situation, but I’m going to ask you to kindly moderate your language while you’re staying with us. ”
“Fuck off,” was Jaz’s predictable reply.
Oliver took a deep breath. “Once again,” he said, “I understand that you’re upset, but this is making me feel quite disrespected. I’m going to give you some space now, but when you’re feeling ready, I would very much like it if you apologised.”
Jaz didn’t even dignify that with a fuck off.
We crept back downstairs. Normally, I’d have said something glib about how Oliver looked as bad as I felt, and that was true in a way, except it was less as bad than as blank. Because, honestly, neither of us really knew how to react.
“She’ll come around,” Oliver said with a confidence that I’d have called unearned in anyone else and was getting a bit fifty-fifty on, even with Oliver.
“Will she?”
“Clear boundaries,” Oliver repeated as if it was some kind of mystical incantation, “and consistency.”
That made sense, but it made sense in a kind of well duh way that, if I were Oliver, I’d probably have had a fancy technical name for.
Like, obviously I wasn’t about to cheerlead for unclear boundaries and inconsistency; I just wasn’t sure this was the best boundary-drawing strategy we could possibly be using.
The problem was, I couldn’t really think of a better one.
I almost envied Spud. He could draw clear boundaries by pissing on lampposts, and right then that had an appealing simplicity to it.
Either way, neither of us wanted to go from feuding with Jaz to feuding with each other, so we sort of let it drop there and did our best to have a nice evening.
Which, and this will sound shit unless you’ve lived it, meant crashed out on the sofa together, with Oliver working on his laptop and me quietly watching one of the few reality shows my dad hadn’t been in yet.
Come bedtime, we slunk upstairs, calling out a good night to Jaz as we went.
We’d discussed whether to enforce a formal lights-out time for her and concluded that we probably should, except in that exact moment it didn’t feel like the right approach.
Besides, Oliver had read some research on how teenage brains are all weird with melatonin or something, so she could be expected to keep unusual hours.
Lying curled up in the dark, a terrible thought struck me.
“Oliver,” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“You know how…like…you know how a big part of why we had to be strict about Spud sleeping up here is because otherwise we’d never…”
Oliver rolled over to face me. “Are you asking if we can have sex with a child in the house?”
I made a sort of mm-hmm noise.
“As in right now, or as in would it be inappropriate in general?”
Much as I would have loved to be the horny little fuck bunny the newspapers apparently thought I was too old to still be, I’d mostly meant in general. “The second one.”
“Then no, it wouldn’t be inappropriate.”
I wriggled, partly from discomfort but partly because wriggling in bed next to Oliver was just nice. “Doesn’t it feel icky, though?”
In the dark, I couldn’t see the expression on Oliver’s face, but I also totally could. “Lucien, how do you think straight couples with more than one child get that way?”
“I don’t know. Judicious use of holidays? Sleepovers? Artificial insemination?”
“Parenting involves sacrifices. It doesn’t involve that many sacrifices or nobody would do it. We should restrict ourselves to our bedroom, but otherwise I can’t see there being any issues.”
That was a satisfying-ish answer for about three minutes. Then I found myself somewhat fatally asking, “But what if it’s, like, loud?”
“I have faith in your self-control.”
“I bloody well don’t.”
“Then”—Oliver bit me wickedly on the collarbone—“I shall buy you a ball gag.”
Okay, that had escalated quickly. “I wonder why they don’t put that in the parenting manuals.”
“Oh, they do. It’s usually in the chapter after clear boundaries and expectations.”
I pulled a face which I was quite glad Oliver couldn’t see. “You’re just exploiting the fact that you’ve read books and I haven’t.”
“There is a simple solution to that,” Oliver pointed out.
“But that would involve reading,” I said with what I hoped was a playful whine. “I hate reading.”
“You read that book about dogs.”
“Only to prove you wrong.”
I could feel Oliver’s smile next to me. “I think that tells us some very important things about your personality. Now, we should probably go to sleep. It’s a school night.”
I’d got so used to school night being used as a general term for night where you have to get up at a sensible time in the morning that it took me a second to realise he meant it literally.
Jaz would be starting her new school tomorrow, and, as primary caregiver, I had some care to primarily give.
In this case, dropping her off, attending a meeting with something called a virtual school, and picking her up again at the end of the day.
“Oliver,” I whispered again as I felt myself drifting off.
“Yes?”
“Do I need to know what Pupil Premium Plus is?”
He gave me the gentlest of squeezes and kissed me on the back of the head. “I’m afraid so.”
* * *
The following morning, I discovered to my cost that dressing like a grown-up and dressing like an adult were two different things, and I’d spent most of my life doing the second one.
I was pretty sure my skintight fuck-me jeans and my skintight fuck-me T-shirts—crap, I had a lot of skintight fuck-me clothes—weren’t the kind of thing you wore to take your foster kid to school.
At the other end of the scale, I had suits I wore to meet our richer, more arseholey donors, but, at a West London comprehensive, those were going to scream tryhard wanker.
And people would probably scream tryhard wanker directly at me.
Or, I don’t know, whatever the youngs were yelling at the olds these days.
Rizzless skibidi or something. In the end, I pulled out the most appropriate bits of the smart-casual-ish ensembles I used with mid-level donors.
So, sensibly cut jeans, with no obvious rips, and a shirt that didn’t show my nipples.
Downstairs, Oliver was already mid-bircher. He hadn’t put a jar out for me, but that was less from a lack of thought than from having thought enough to know that even with an early start, I’d avoid the bircher out of the fear I’d die from a health overdose.
“You can probably give Jasmine a little longer if you think she needs it,” he said. “At her age, sleep cycles can be complicated.”
“She prefers Jaz,” I reminded him.
“I’m sure she does. But we’re not here to be her friends, we’re here to be her foster parents, and I think it’s useful to remind ourselves of that.”
This was another one of those situations where I saw his point, wasn’t sure I agreed, but hadn’t done enough research to disagree effectively.
I was actually nervous enough that I didn’t feel like breakfast, but I knew if I didn’t have something, I’d wind up in a very important meeting with my stomach making weird noises and my brain constantly jabbing me with examples of things I could be eating.
I was just in the process of making myself a couple of slices of toast from the thick white bread that Oliver bought under sufferance and didn’t eat, and which I let go mouldy three times out of five, when I noticed a bowl in the drying rack.
I never put things in the drying rack. I’d sometimes put them in the dishwasher if I was feeling extraordinarily virtuous.
I pointed the renegade bowl out to Oliver, who didn’t seem surprised.
“I assume Jasmine got up in the night and had some stew,” he said. “Which I think is a good sign.”
“It’s a good sign that she’s ‘Be Our Guesting’ us?”
Oliver gave me a quizzical look.
“Refusing to come to shared mealtimes and then feeding herself at midnight, possibly with the help of an animated candlestick.”
“It’s a good sign that she already feels comfortable treating the kitchen as her own.”
That was way glass-half-fuller than I was personally capable of, but that was probably the morning talking. And the fact I had to go to school. In my thirties.
I whacked two slices of bread in the toaster. And then, when they came up far too pale, whacked them immediately down again.
“You know,” Oliver told me, “you could just turn the dial up.”
“Then they get burned.”
“Don’t they get burned this way as well?”
I slammed the cancel button, and two perfectly browned slices of toast popped up. “Not if I’m quick.”
“And you couldn’t be just as quick on a higher setting because…”
I gave Oliver a playfully grumpy look. “I’ve got a system and the system works.”
“I think those are, at best, each half true.”
Before I could defend my extremely sensible toast preparation scheme, we heard rapid footsteps coming downstairs and Jaz, wearing most of a school uniform, appeared in the kitchen, grabbed a slice of bread from the same packet I’d made my toast from, rolled it up, and started eating it butterless.
“Good morning,” said Oliver.
I followed up with a, “Hey, Jaz.”