Chapter 21
After Esther’s little chat, I did wonder if I should try to do some damage control on the whole Personal Education Plan thing.
Like try to convince Jaz that I didn’t think it was bullshit.
Except while I understood rationally that the people who did this kind of thing for a living probably knew what they were about, I still didn’t think I could be enthusiastic about SMART goal-setting in a way that wouldn’t come across as incredibly fake and insincere.
So instead I went with a nice neutral, “You hungry?”
She didn’t answer.
“Okay, let’s try it a different way. I’m hungry, so I’m going to stop for something to eat, and I can’t leave you in a car because that would be illegal.”
From the look she gave me, she felt that was very much a me problem.
Fortunately, it wasn’t quite enough of a me problem that she’d actually refuse to get out.
So when I stopped outside a place that called itself the Cosy Café and went in to investigate their all-day breakfast and pie ’n’ mash offerings, I had a bitter teenager shadowing me.
The small café I’d stopped at was one of those places with a menu as long as your arm covering everything from a full English breakfast to a homemade curry, so I stood there for a moment looking at my options while Jaz stood beside me radiating misery.
“You want anything?” I tried.
Jaz made a noise that I thought translated as “I’m fine” but could have been anything.
I tried again. “If I got you some chips, would you eat them?”
The movement of her head was just close enough to a nod that I thought it was probably worth ordering the chips on spec.
I got her a tea as well because Oliver had looked up some research on adolescents and caffeine, and apparently we shouldn’t have been feeding her coffee.
And because I didn’t want to be all rules-for-thee-and-not-for-me, I got a tea for myself as well.
Once I’d paid at the counter, we sat down and waited for our food, not quite looking at each other until Jaz, in her best don’t-give-a-fuck-voice, said, “You forgot your receipt.”
It felt a bit out of nowhere, but at least she was talking. “I’d just lose it. Anyway, I’m not really a reconciling-my-bank-statements kind of guy.”
For no reason I could understand, a look of puzzlement settled over Jaz’s brow. “How you going to get the money back?”
Between Oliver talking law and ethics, and my colleagues talking nonsense, I had a lot of experience with having no fucking clue what people were on about. This felt closer to the Oliver end of the spectrum. “Get my money back for what?”
She waved her hand over the table and looked at me like I knew nothing about how the world worked. “This. It’s an expense, isn’t it?”
“Not that much of an expense. I think it was like fifteen quid?” Shit, I was bad with money.
Every word out of my mouth seemed to bring me a rung lower in her estimation, and I hadn’t been that high up to begin with.
“It’s an expense,” she said. “Like as in, you can expense it. Get your money back off the agency. Or the government or something. I don’t know how it works. You should, though.”
I probably should have. “Honestly,” I told her, putting my hands up in a too-defensive-for-talking-to-children gesture, “that’s exactly the sort of detail I tend to screw up.”
The puzzlement on Jaz’s brow only deepened. “So what’d you bring me for?”
“I told you, it’d be illegal to leave you in the car.”
I’d been joking, but she didn’t seem to quite get it. “You could’ve took me home first. Got a takeaway or something.”
“I guess I thought stopping at a café would be…nice?”
“Nice?” Coming from Jaz, the word sounded almost foreign.
“Well, I am meant to be looking after you.”
And that got a laugh. I wasn’t sure why. Or at least I wasn’t sure why until she said, “Oh yeah. That’s right. I’m a looked-after child, aren’t I. Sooo looked after.”
A friendly-looking waiter set down a plate of chips in front of Jaz and a full English in front of me.
A thought struck me. “Y’know, Oliver’s vegan so if you did want to eat something with meat in it, now would be a good chance. I can still order you a bacon sandwich or something.”
Staring me dead in the eye, Jaz reached down, grabbed one of my two sausages between thumb and forefinger, picked it up, and took a bite out of it.
“Hey, I said I could order you something.”
She set the remaining half sausage down on top of her chips. “I’m good.”
“I don’t care if you’re good, that’s my fuc—flipping sausage you’ve just stolen.”
“You know”—Jaz glared at me contemptuously—“I have heard the word fuck before.”
“Not from me you haven’t.”
All the scorn in the world was channelling itself through Jaz’s eyes and into my soul.
“Not intentionally.”
For some reason the scorn continued.
So with trademark Luc O’Donnell maturity, I reached across the table and stole one of her chips.
“Hey!” The amount of outrage she managed to pack into one syllable with such a small larynx was genuinely impressive.
“Don’t like it, do you?”
“You’ve got your own.”
“And I’d have got you your own sausages if you’d asked,” I replied, feeling almost like a real grown-up.
Well, as much like a real grown-up as I could feel when I was two steps away from getting into a food fight with a teenager.
“Anyway, technically this is all my own because I paid for it and we’ve established I’m not going to be able to claim the money back. ”
I’d meant it as lighthearted, but Jaz went silent at once and started staring intensely into her tea.
“Sorry.” I was probably apologising too much. It probably wasn’t parental to be apologising this much. In the hope of salvaging what I’d almost thought was a positive interaction, I pivoted to, “Do people really claim it back off tax or something every time they take you somewhere?”
Jaz nodded. “I cost a lot of money.”
That was, I supposed, strictly true. “Well yeah. But that’s kind of what having a kid is like, isn’t it?”
“Your own kid,” Jaz half agreed. “But I’m not. I’m just some poor little looked-after girl. Who wants to pay for that?”
I knew from my many, many terrible life choices how awful it could feel to be pitied.
And I was whatever-the-opposite-of-oblivious-is enough to know that anybody who called themselves a poor little something on no account wanted to be thought of as a poor little anything.
But Jesus fucking Christ, she was an actual child.
Unfortunately, my stunned silence had given Jaz’s brain ample space to answer for me. “This is the bit where you tell me how different you are and how much better it’ll be this time.”
I really wanted to. Because I really thought we were and I really hoped it would. But it also felt like a huge trap. So I said, “Would you believe me?”
Jaz glared. “Would you?”
We didn’t really say much after that. We just sat in silence while Jaz ate her chips. And the rest of my sausage. And half my bacon.
* * *
“The actions,” Oliver was saying into the phone, “of your employees were unacceptable.”
Jaz was in her room. Spud was in her room with her. I was on the sofa watching Taskmaster with the sound off and the subtitles on. At the other end of the phone, somebody in an office was saying something evasive that I was very, very glad Oliver was dealing with instead of me.
“Contrary to what you may believe, ‘We have a zero-tolerance policy’ isn’t a blanket excuse for you to do whatever you like.”
Oliver stood stock still while the, I’m sure, extremely underpaid and underappreciated person at the other end of the line trotted out the next bit of whatever script they were working from.
“My tone is not combative.”
Okay, maybe they weren’t working precisely from a script.
“Your working practices contravene the recommendations of the Children’s Commissioner, the UN Committee Against Torture, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
A pause. Quite a short one.
“No, I’m simply stating the facts of the situation.”
Another pause.
“I’m aware of that.”
And another.
“I’m aware of that also.”
A final, extremely long pause.
“I understand. Thank you for your time.” He hung up and sat down next to me. “Well, that could have gone better.”
“Not interested?” I asked, pausing Taskmaster at just the right moment to catch Greg Davies with his mouth hanging open like an overheated Irish wolfhound.
“Oh no, they were absolutely delighted to have me calling them up to say that they needed to make massive changes to their working practice. There’s nothing that large institutions love more than change.”
I laid my head against his shoulder in a way that, in our private love language, said I’m here for you, even though to an outsider it might have looked more like I’m extremely sleepy. “So what now?”
To my…not surprise, really, but deep sadness, this was one of the few situations where Oliver didn’t have an answer.
I didn’t like Oliver not having an answer.
I didn’t like Oliver not having an answer almost as much as Oliver didn’t like Oliver not having an answer.
“Human rights law is more Jennifer’s area than mine, and Jennifer’s a little distracted at the moment, what with… what with everything.”
He had a point. Jennifer and Peter had a whole lot of everything going on right about then. “So are we just going to drop it?”
“They delivered a child to us in handcuffs,” Oliver replied. “Dropping it shouldn’t be an option.”
The shouldn’t be hung there like one of my socks on the back of a chair. It was, now I thought about it, the first time I’d really seen Oliver run up against something he couldn’t solve. That we couldn’t solve between us.
“Unfortunately,” he went on, “we might have no alternative. There’s already campaigns about this. MPs have brought it up in Parliament. We could possibly sue the security company, try to force a test case. Only…”
“Only I can’t imagine that being remotely what Jaz wants?” I said.
Oliver nodded and let himself slump against me so we made a sort of mismatched A shape on the sofa. “Probably I shouldn’t even have taken it this far.”
I took his hand and squeezed it. “No. No, you should have. What they did was fucked, and when something’s fucked, you can’t just sit around and not say, ‘That’s fucked.’ You have to stand up and, and…”
“And say, ‘That’s fucked’?”
“Yeah.”
Oliver squeezed my hand back. “Still, I’m not sure Jasmine would appreciate it.”
That felt like an understatement. “I don’t think it’s about being appreciated, though, is it?”
“No. No, I suppose not.” Beside me, Oliver shifted through tense into restless into active in the space of three heartbeats. He stood up, unnecessarily decisively. “I think I will email Jennifer. It can’t hurt and she might value the distraction.”
“If you think it’s best,” I said, not quite wanting to go full Don’t get your hopes up.
“Besides,” he added, “I’ve been meaning to chase her up about that dinner party.”
Oliver was still looking deeply dissatisfied. “If it helps,” I said, “I think it’s kind of hot that you tried.”
“To organise a dinner party? Lucien, I know you’re easily pleased but—”
“To help. To make things right.”
He gave me a weak, slightly self-recriminating smile. “I’m not sure I did either of those things. I think I just wasted a lot of people’s time.”
Leaning forward, I beckoned him towards me, and when he came over, I took him by the fingertips and drew him down into my lap.
I let my forehead rest against his so our eyes blurred together, Oliver’s this perfect silvery horizon.
“One of the many, many annoying things that you’ve taught me is that standing up for what you believe in is never a waste of time. ”
“I’ve taught you that?”
I gave an exaggerated shrug. “I mean, it was you, Disney movies, or motivational posters. But either way, it’s true.”
He laughed. And then when he was done laughing, he kissed me.