Chapter 23
I was honestly a bit surprised that Oliver didn’t object to me going after Jaz.
It was probably unfair, but I’d half expected him to be all, She’s just doing it for attention or She’ll be back in her own time or Something something or she’ll never learn.
But as it turned out, he didn’t want our fourteen-year-old foster daughter wandering the streets of Havering after dark any more than I did and, since one of us had to stay home in case she came back, we sort of agreed without directly saying so that it was probably best if I was the one who went after her and Oliver was the one who… stayed out of her face.
I wasn’t quite sure where Jaz would go, but she’d taken Spud with her rather than, say, a backpack full of clothes and twenty quid in cash or two silver candlesticks, so it seemed like the park was a decent bet.
It was closed at night, but the fence was low and Jaz didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d worry a huge amount about official opening hours.
Pinning, if I was honest, way too much hope on my ability to think myself into the mindset of an angry teenager, I dashed off in that direction.
A very, very short way into the dash I began wishing I’d stopped to grab my coat, because it was January and it was after sunset and I was fucking freezing.
I caught sight of a familiar figure with a familiar dog at its heels about half a street ahead of me, and I quickened my pace to try and catch up.
As I’d predicted—and I tried not to be too smug about predicting it—she scrambled over the gate into the park and waited a moment while Spud followed her through the railings.
Shit, this was going to be so bad for his training.
Since I was more than a foot taller than Jaz,, getting over the fence should have been way, way easier for me than it was for her.
But she was young and agile, and I was maybe two-thirds of one of those things.
Plus I was wearing impractically tight jeans.
So while she and Spud were happily vanishing into the gloom of the park, I was getting my balls snagged on an iron spike and once again wishing I’d made different calls about several of my recent choices.
It was at times like these I was really glad I wasn’t Oliver, because he’d have known real statistics about how many different ways a young girl, or, for that matter, a skinny dude with the muscle tone of a house cat, could get totally murdered to pieces in a situation like this.
Without those statistics, I just did my best to freak myself out with guesses.
About halfway across the park, my naturally longer stride started making a difference.
Enough of a difference that I had to ask some difficult questions about whether Jaz actually wanted to be caught up with (probably not), if she realised I was me and not some random murderer (hopefully so), and what I was going to say when I finally got to her (no fucking clue).
I tried to solve all three problems by yelling,, “Jaz, it’s me, Luc,” but she either ignored me or didn’t hear.
At last, she came to the lake and sat down on a little bench looking over the water.
Which solved the what-if-she-gets-away problem but didn’t do much for the how-do-I-deal-with-this problem.
Then again I was in loco parentis, so it’s not like going up to her was actually inappropriate.
It was just awkward. And they really should warn you about that more.
You hear so much about how parenting is challenging and stressful and expensive.
And very little about how you spend most of it faintly embarrassed.
As I got closer to the bench, Spud looked around at me and started yapping in a way I thought coded as Hello, Daddy Luc and not Get away from my human, you weird stranger.
And that, finally, got Jaz’s attention. She pulled out an earphone and looked up at me.
Even in the dark, I could see her doing the is-this-person-a-threat calculation and, to my relief, coming down on the side of “no.”
“You should probably come home,” I told her. But when I saw the look of revulsion that crossed her face at hearing home used to describe the place she was staying with me and Oliver, I corrected to, “Back to the house, I mean.”
“Or what?”
“I mean, it’s pretty cold.”
Spud made a rumbling noise and curled tighter onto Jaz’s lap, as if demonstrating his utility as a coldness-reducer.
Hoping she wouldn’t find it too intrusive, I sat down on the opposite end of the bench.
There was enough of a gap between us that she couldn’t really complain.
After all, it was a public park and so we had the same right to be there.
Which was technically no right at all, on account of how closed it was.
Very pointedly, Jaz put her earphone back in.
Hoping that the softly softly approach would work better than the storm-upstairs-and-demand-she-write-apology-letters approach, I just let her sit for a while with Spud on her lap.
In the winter-evening silence, I could just about hear the tinny music coming from her headphones, which probably meant it was unhealthily loud, which probably meant I had a parental obligation to tell her to turn it down for the good of her hearing.
Only right now, parental responsibilities weren’t what I was thinking about, because the music was strangely, naggingly familiar.
And there aren’t many things in the world more distracting than a song you recognise played just quietly enough that you can’t recognise it.
“Is that…is that Welcome Ghosts?” I asked.
Jaz pulled her earphone out again, which made the music loud enough that I didn’t need her to answer anymore. “What?”
“Are you listening to Welcome Ghosts?”
She gave me one of her expected-by-now not-shrugs.
“Isn’t that a bit retro for you?”
Turning her head about an eighth of a degree, she said, “I can’t afford new music. Because I’m disadvantaged.”
“That doesn’t make sense. New music isn’t more expensive than old music.”
“Then I was born in the wrong decade.”
That also didn’t make sense, but it was the kind of not-sense-making thing that people actually said and actually meant, so I let it slide and carried on staring out at the lake.
I hadn’t been intending to use silence as a weapon—it was more that I really didn’t know what to say—but eventually she offered, “My mum likes it.”
I didn’t know much about Jaz’s mum, but since all I knew about her dad was that he wasn’t in the picture, that probably put her mum squarely in Welcome Ghosts’ target demographic.
“That’s cool,” I mumbled, more as filler than as a way of describing the specific coolness of any specific thing.
Then, fully aware I was about to come across as deeply tryhard and awful, added, “My mum, um, sort of wrote it.”
Jaz looked at me like she couldn’t imagine a universe where anything I’d said made sense. Which wasn’t that different from the way she usually looked at me and was slightly more positive than the way she usually looked at Oliver. “You what?”
“My mum’s Odile O’Donnell. I’m Luc O’Donnell. My dad is… Like, my mum wouldn’t want me to say he’s the guy the album is about, because, y’know, it’s hers, not his, but…she wrote it after my dad left.”
Sometimes, in either a good moment or a bad moment, depending on how you thought about it, I was beginning to kid myself that I could read Jaz, if not well, then at least not-completely-terribly.
And right now, I was reading conflict. As if she wanted to be interested but couldn’t because this whole conversation, from her perspective, was obviously a trap.
So she made a kind of noncommittal noise and started paying really close attention to scratching Spud behind the ears.
I let things simmer for a moment, partly because I was out of ideas again and partly because my phone had just buzzed. I looked down to see a text from Oliver: Are you all right? Where are you both?
I didn’t want Jaz to think I was blanking her, but she was from a generation who lived their whole lives on three screens at once so I figured I could at least reply without her feeling emotionally abandoned.
I sent back: In park everything fine give us a bit and then slipped the phone back into my pocket.
“What happened?” I asked the lake in the hope that Jaz would hear it. She tensed, and it took me a heartbeat or two to realise that since we’d just been talking about her mum, she’d probably thought I was asking about her homelife, so I clarified quickly, “With Next Door’s—with Colin, I mean.”
“Put him in a bin.”
In her defence, it was a completely truthful answer. “I got that much. Why?”
At some point over the course of her short life, Jaz had perfected the art of looking apathetic and defensive all at once. “‘I lashed out inappropriately,’” she recited, “‘because I need to develop more effective strategies for managing my emotions.’”
There were a lot of ways I could have responded to that. And the one I picked was probably a lot less mature than it could have been. “Oh cut it out, I’m trying to ask you a question here.”
“I have emotional trauma,” Jaz continued. “Because of my bad parents. Which is why I have to come and live with you and Oliver so you can save me.”
Fleetingly, I considered trying to claw my way back to a properly adult tone. Then I decided I couldn’t be fucked. “Do you actually think that’s what I want to hear, or are you just being a—”
“A what?” demanded Jaz, in a tone that echoed Next Door’s Kid more than either of us should have been comfortable with.
“A…nnoying?” I tried.
“Fuck off, Luc O’Donnell.”
Okay, I needed to parent that. I needed to be all stern and all Now, Jasmine, that isn’t the kind of language we use in this household, but the words stuck in my throat.
“Jaz,” I tried instead, “please don’t. I’m being serious.
I know Colin is a prick. I just want to know what he did that made you shove him into a bin. ”
“He didn’t make me,” Jaz insisted. “‘I am responsible for my own behaviour. Nobody controls my actions except me.’”
“Okay, this whole bit”—I waved my hand at her—“officially stopped being cute three sarcastic buzzwords ago.”
In the dark, Jaz glared at me. But at least she’d stopped spouting institution-speak.
“I want to know,” I repeated, “what Next Door’s Kid did.”
“Why?”
Well fuck. I thought kids grew out of the why stage around three. Then again I suppose it didn’t count when it was a reasonable question. “Honestly? This is probably awful parenting, but mostly because I don’t like him and I’m hoping you’ll say something that reinforces my opinions.”
Jaz went back to focusing on Spud.
“Don’t get me wrong, you’re still totally grounded or whatever.”
At the other end of the bench, Jaz’s desire not to engage lost a brief battle with her desire to remind me how bad a job I was doing. “‘Grounded or whatever’? You really suck at this.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“Like, I don’t respect you at all.”
That was incredibly fair. I wasn’t an easy person to respect. “Tell you what, how about we stick a pin in that and you just answer my fu—flipping question.”
I wasn’t anywhere near confident enough to say that my strategy had worked or that I’d got through to her or that I’d worn her down, but Jaz did seem, for the moment, to have run out of ways to be hostile.
So instead she looked down at the little bundle of fur in her lap and said, “He took Spud’s ball. ”
The phrase “That little fucker” slipped out before I could remember to be parental, but I very smoothly glossed over it by saying “Go on” immediately afterwards in my best calm-and-listening voice.
“It went over the fence,” she explained.
She didn’t explain how it had gone over the fence, and it occurred to me that she maybe didn’t like to admit that she’d been doing something as wholesome and well adjusted as playing fetch.
“And I told him to give it back, and he said he wouldn’t, and I said he would or I’d make him. ”
I was really, really, really trying not to savour this. Okay, I was mostly, mostly, mostly trying not to savour this.
“Then he said, ‘How?’ and then he pulled out his phone to take a picture of me or something, so I grabbed it and took it around the front and chucked it in the bin, and then when he went around to get it, I tipped him in and shut the lid.”
I really, really, really tried not to laugh. Okay, I vaguely, vaguely, vaguely tried not to laugh. “That,” I said in a tone so forcedly solemn that it was basically parody, “was very wrong of you.”
“I know,” replied Jaz, seeming a bit confused about where I was going with this.
“Which is why you’re grounded and had to apologise and everything,” I added, hoping that if I reinforced the punishment bit, it would matter less that I was also reinforcing the throwing-Next-Door’s-Kid-in-a-bin bit.
“I know,” Jaz repeated.
I let out a long breath, not quite able to keep the elephant out of the room. “But he did have it coming.”
Jaz looked blank.
“All that shi—stuff about, like, controlling your emotions and appropriate responses and…and everything. That’s all, like, that’s all really important and true and you absolutely shouldn’t do this again. But, like…”
“Like what?” asked Jaz. It was the least porcupinish I’d ever seen her, possibly because I was doing such a bad job at this that she didn’t know how to react.
Sort of the parenting equivalent of that time that one guy beat a really awesome computer at Go by playing so incompetently it didn’t know how to counter him.
I tried to arrange my thoughts into something resembling a coherent life lesson.
“I guess just… You’re not… The thing is, wanting to slam Colin into a wheelie bin doesn’t make you a bad person.
And it doesn’t mean you’re damaged or whatever.
Everybody who knows what Colin is like wants to throw him in a wheelie bin. ”
“They just don’t have the balls to do it?” Jaz suggested, half smiling.
Fuck. “No. No, that makes it sound cool. Which it”—lie, Luc, lie like your foster placement depends on it—“absolutely wasn’t.
But it also wasn’t… I dunno. Look, sometimes these things happen, and we mess up, or we…
we react weirdly or pretend we can speak French or something.
And that doesn’t have to mean anything super deep if we don’t want it to. ”
Jaz gazed at me with adolescent contempt. Then she let her attention drift back to Spud, and then, as if she was talking to the park or the sky instead of to me, she said, “I reckon he’s tired.”
And without another word, we went home.