Chapter 22 #2
Either way, we were kind of committed now. And, since he’d said we’d be downstairs, that put us back at the kitchen table, talking in low voices, trying not to admit that neither of us knew what we were doing. Something Oliver was a lot better at than I was.
Fucking miserable didn’t even begin to describe it.
“You know,” I began, fully aware that this wasn’t really the time and wasn’t going to be helpful, but with a pressing need to be heard that had been building all evening without my quite noticing, “Next Door’s Kid actually is an absolute piece of shit.”
From his sharp intake of breath, I sensed Oliver didn’t like the direction I was going in but was doing his best to go with me anyway.
“Suppose we stipulate for a moment that Colin is indeed an extremely unpleasant child,” he said in his best lawyerese.
“Does that mean that Jasmine was correct to throw him into a wheelie bin?”
“Okay”—I put up one finger—“I know that the right answer here is ‘No, it doesn’t,’ but I really think you might be underestimating quite how much of an absolute piece of shit that kid can be.”
“I might,” Oliver conceded. “But that’s rather the heart of the issue. In reality there’s no level of piece-of-shit-ness that makes it acceptable to throw a child into a wheelie bin.”
Stressed-out-inadvisable-levity Luc took over my body for a few seconds. “I mean, it sets one hell of a clear boundary.”
“If an adult had done it”—Oliver’s eyes were their warmest kind of stern—“it would be clear child abuse.”
That was the problem with being a parent: Things kept getting all serious on you. It was hard to be inadvisably levitous when clear child abuse was on the table. “Okay, yes. It was wrong. We all agree it was wrong.” Funny as hell, though. “But I’m sure Jaz knows it was wrong too.”
“She might. Or she might think that kind of behaviour is acceptable if somebody is”—I could spot Oliver’s using my words against me tells a mile away—“enough of a piece of shit. If she knows it was wrong, our job is to help her to act on that knowledge. If she doesn’t, it’s our job to teach her.
Either way, she needs to understand that we won’t turn a blind eye to her acting out. ”
“And you think grounding her, taking her phone away, and making her write an apology letter, all at the same time, will help with that?” I really hoped I was keeping the what-are-you-on tone out of my voice, but hope isn’t the same as expectation.
“You’d rather we spent the rest of our lives living next door to people who harboured a deep resentment against us?”
Honestly, I thought that ship might have already sailed. “You realise Next Door’s Kid’s Mum—”
“Jacqueline,” Oliver reminded me.
“You realise she called Jaz a ‘chavvy termagant’?”
In Oliver’s eyes, I could see the war between his desire to have a positive relationship with the Next Door’s Kid’s Family and his need to call out classist language. “That was wrong of her, but I suspect she was very angry.”
“What even is a termagant?” I asked.
“A harsh-tempered or overbearing woman.”
I tried not to think in terms of points, or to see our family and next door as competing teams. But I gave points to our team. “So she was being sexist as well.”
“Using gendered terminology, certainly. But as I say, she was probably angry. Her son had just been thrown in a wheelie bin.”
Screw it. I was done being dispassionate. I was all in on Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson. “Says her,” I rebutted, super eloquently. “You never even got Jaz to tell us her version.”
“She didn’t deny it.”
I leaned back on the kitchen chair. “Oh, great lawyering. Is that what you say in court? ‘My client didn’t deny it the one time they got asked, so you should lock them up, Your Honour.’”
With, honestly, more calm than I might have deserved in that exact moment, Oliver raised an eyebrow.
“I think I’d make a slightly better case than that.
But in general, if one of my clients answered any question I can easily think of with the words ‘He had it coming,’ I would revise my expectation of winning that case downwards. Precipitously.”
“Okay but, like, you know you got really intense in there, don’t you?”
From the way Oliver looked at me, he did not, in fact, know he had got really intense in there. “It was a difficult situation that I dealt with as best I was able.”
And that finally got us to the heart of the problem. “Right,” I tried, wanting to be decisive for once, rather than nervously okay-butting my way through the whole conversation. “Only the thing is, was this really a you thing? Like, shouldn’t it have been more of an us thing?”
Oliver nodded, but I didn’t think it was a good kind of nod. “It should, but you apparently didn’t want to back me up.”
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. That really wasn’t where I’d been going with this. “How could I back you up when I had no idea what you were planning to do?”
From the way he was looking at me, Oliver literally could not comprehend what my problem was. “It should have been obvious. Jasmine had done something wrong, so we needed to—”
“I swear if you say ‘Set boundaries,’ I’m going to throw a banana at you.”
Oliver’s lips tightened just fractionally. “We needed to discipline her. We needed to do it in a compassionate way, which we did—”
“Did we?”
“Yes.”
I put my head in my hands. I really didn’t like getting into putting-my-head-in-my-hands-level arguments.
Especially not with my actual life partner.
“Oliver,” I pleaded, “can you just sort of…can you listen to yourself here, because you’re sounding a bit…
” I was this close to saying Like your dad, but we were in too small a space for me to be throwing grenades. So I said, “Fifties patriarch.”
“Ah yes.” Oliver’s fine line in weaponised sarcasm zinged into the room. “Because fifties patriarchs were renowned for their hands-on, child-centric approach to parenting.”
“Is making a kid write a longhand apology letter and then confiscating their phone when they don’t like the idea really a ‘hands-on, child-centric approach’?”
“Ye—”
“And don’t just say yes like you’re this…
” I didn’t have words. Oliver always had words and I never did, which was what made this so difficult.
“Like you’re the one who gets to decide.
You know what a rhetorical question is. You know the reason I said ‘Is it?’ is because I think ‘It’s not,’ and you can’t gaslight me into thinking you’ve got a monopoly on right answers here. ”
My brilliant, beautiful, barrister boyfriend took so many things so seriously and held himself to such high standards. Accusing him of gaslighting me wasn’t just a jab; it was a knife in the ribs. “Lucien, I—”
And for once he had nothing. Which I thought meant maybe I’d…I’d what. Won? This wasn’t a winners-and-losers thing. This was a shitty little argument about something shitty that our foster daughter had done to next door’s shitty child, probably because he’d done something shitty.
“I—” he repeated.
And before he could finish the sentence, or even make another attempt at starting it, Jaz appeared in the kitchen door holding a neatly folded piece of paper that she must have ripped out of one of her schoolbooks.
“Here,” she said. “Now can I have my phone? Please.”
Oliver rose and took the letter. Then, because he was no fool, he actually read it to make sure it didn’t say “Screw you, sucker,” and when he was satisfied that it actually was the thing he’d asked for, he drew Jaz’s phone from his breast pocket and handed it back to her.
“There,” he said. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it? ”
Jaz said nothing. She just turned and slipped away upstairs.
Oliver passed me the note, and I skimmed it out of curiosity. Jaz’s handwriting was…well, it was better than mine, but that wasn’t saying much. The letter itself said:
Dear neighbours. I am very sorry for my behaviour. I have emotional difficulties and do not always practice practise good coping strategies. I am trying to be better. Apologies. Jasmine.
Having been with her in her first school meeting, I read the whole thing in that flat, going-along-with-it monotone I’d heard when she was setting her goals for the coming term.
I didn’t think she meant a word of it. At least not in a healthy way.
I was beginning to suspect that I don’t practise good coping strategies was her I’m a fuckup who eats pizza in my pants.
Oliver, though, seemed pleased. Worse, he seemed vindicated.
“You see,” he told me. “All we needed to do was be firm and set clear boundaries.”
I should have been glad he was right. Because we were both on the same team. All three of us were on the same team—Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson—and if Oliver acting like the dad from a mid-century sitcom actually worked for us, then more power to him.
Then we heard a familiar paws-and-feet combo coming downstairs.
And a click and a vanishing ruff and the bang of the door slamming as Jaz and Spud disappeared into the night.