Chapter 25
Once Oliver decided to make something happen, you could be really sure that thing would happen. Which was great in the bedroom and also great when it came to getting laptop-related justice for our foster daughter.
In practice, though, retrieving the computer that Bellefield had bought for itself with Jaz’s money became a bit of a mission.
It turned out Jaz had moved around a whole lot, and so her last school had been in Kent.
Which meant that one of us had to make an annoying late-in-the-day drive into the arse end of nowhere.
And since Oliver was the more confident driver and had been the one sending the I think you’ll find emails and casually dropping that he was a legal professional, it made more sense for him to be the one who went up nowhere’s arse and for me to be the one who stayed home giving primary care.
Last year, when we’d first started discussing the whole fostering thing, I’d been fucking terrified at the thought of being primary anything.
But while I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was nailing it, or even Blu Tacking it, I was kind of getting used to it.
At least as it applied to a relatively self-sufficient teenager who hadn’t needed much in the way of nappy changing or spoon-feeding.
Who, if I’m being honest, hadn’t needed much in the way of me being around her at all if she could possibly help it on account of me being old and crap.
Of course, so far my primary caregiving had also involved Oliver doing all the cooking because subjecting Jaz to my attempts at food would probably constitute child abuse.
But with him somewhere the wrong side of Maidstone, that wasn’t an option.
Which meant either we starved, I braved the kitchen, or I gave up and got pizza.
Jaz had just disappeared into the study with a couple of slices of American Hot when Oliver rang.
“Hi,” I said, very chill and with it. “Just doing the washing up after making dinner.”
Normally a pointed silence didn’t work over the phone, but Oliver and I had been together so long that we made it work.
“Just doing the washing up after ordering dinner,” I corrected.
Oliver continued to be pointedly silent.
“Just putting the bits of paper towel I was eating my pizza off into the bin after completely failing to provide food in a responsible way.”
“I hope you and Jasmine are having a wonderful time,” Oliver said at last, more amused than sarcastic but still a bit sarcastic.
Much as I loved Oliver, since he was both vegan and a proper grown-up, I had kind of missed eating pizza off a disposable crockery substitute in a room not designed for eating in. “We are,” I said, “or at least I am. She’s got history homework.”
“And you’re—”
“Yes, I’m sure she’s doing it. I mean, not right now—she’s eating pizza. But I went and checked before the pizza got here, and she’s writing a thing about the history of British democracy.”
“And you’ve—”
Oliver’s concern for Jaz’s education was touching.
His concern that I wouldn’t share that concern was unflattering.
Warranted but unflattering. “Yes, I’ve checked if she needs help.
I said ‘Do you need a hand?’ and she said, ‘What do you know about the Magna Carta and the emergence of Parliament?’ and I said ‘Nothing’ and she sort of stared at me like I was a total dickhead. ”
For a moment Oliver was silent again. Then he said, “Which one?”
“Which dick or which head?”
“Which Magna Carta?”
I half sat on our kitchen table, because I was a bit too restless to just use one of the chairs, but this conversation was getting complicated enough that I wanted at least a little bit of arse support. “How many are there?”
“Several. The first was in 1215, but there were multiple other versions of it throughout the thirteenth century.”
“See, this is why you should handle the homework stuff,” I told him.
There was a different flavour of silence. A slightly uncomfortable one. “Yes well. Unfortunately she takes my offers of assistance even more poorly than she does yours.”
She did. I was very aware she did. But neither of us really knew what to do about it because while I looked at Oliver’s slightly stuffy attempts to give Jaz pointers on maths or English or French—or, now I thought about it, on literally any school subject because he was infuriatingly competent like that—and saw a charming man making a sincere, if awkward, attempt to be helpful, she saw an arsehole trying to control her, make her feel bad, or control her by making her feel bad.
All of which made this feel like a good time to change the subject. And for reasons I can’t really explain to myself, I decided it was a good time to change the subject in an oldey-timey forties gangster accent. “So,” I said, “dids ya gets tha goods?”
There was a microscopic pause in which I think I heard Oliver deciding not to laugh in case it encouraged me. “Please never do that again.”
“I regretted it immediately. Did you get Jaz’s laptop?”
Oliver sighed.
“Is that a no?”
“It’s a yes, but I don’t feel good about it.”
I made a sympathetic sound. “Were they wankers?”
“They were…” He broke off with another sigh.
“There’s a saying that you should never underestimate how hard it will be to get somebody to understand something if their job depends on them not understanding it.
They were like that, only rather than ‘job’ it was, well, ‘access to quite an expensive laptop.’”
I felt a sordid mix of guilty and excited that we’d just got a free thing. “Is it very expensive then?”
“By the standards of a barrister and the son of a successful recording artist? No. By the standards of a British state school? Yes.”
I felt even more sordid. “Oh.”
“Quite. Essentially, they tried very hard to pretend that they didn’t know that anything they bought with Jasmine’s Pupil Premium Plus money was Jasmine’s property, and I had to remind them rather more tenaciously than I would have liked that they did know and, more importantly, so did I.”
“So they were wankers?” I asked.
“I think this is one of those situations where wank is very much in the eye of the beholder.”
“That’s a bad place for wank to be.”
“Isn’t it just? But, no, they weren’t being wankers. They were trying to retain resources for their own students at the expense of a former student. And I can’t entirely blame them.”
“I can,” I said cheerfully. “They stole our kid’s laptop. To give to other kids who aren’t our kid. Fuck ’em.”
“Lucien, I’ve spent the last three hours arguing with some very tired, very underpaid educational professionals. This is sadly not a fuck ’em situation.”
Oh God. It didn’t feel fair that Oliver could feel so bad about doing a fundamentally good thing.
But that was who he was. While everybody else was celebrating a win, he’d always be there empathising with the people he’d beaten.
If I didn’t love him so much, I’d have found it spectacularly annoying.
As it was, I just wanted to make him feel better.
“Still,” I tried. “It was a point of principle. You really like points of principle.”
“I try to be principled. You’re making it sound like I have some kind of ethics fetish.”
“You basically do.”
“You have an ethics fetish. I just have ethics.”
I thought about that. “Okay. Fair. And I guess you’re right. It does feel a bit…grubby, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
I squirmed and levered myself out another slice of pizza. “I mean, we could give the laptop back?”
“No,” Oliver said very firmly. “It’s rightfully Jasmine’s property. She gets to decide what to do with it.”
I agreed. I probably agreed too quickly because, despite all the complex feels, the likes-free-stuff part of my brain took over with uncomfortable speed. “You going to be home soon?” I asked.
“A bit under an hour, I think—I’m at a service station on the M20.”
Naively, I’d assumed he’d just be calling from the car, but of course Oliver would never use a mobile phone while driving, not even hands-free.
It still constitutes a distraction, he’d say, looking all noble and shit, and has been shown to contribute to accidents.
So I let him go, and we said our goodbyes and our I love yous and our goodbyes again.
Then he texted me a picture of the front cover of a children’s book about a pig, and it took me about twenty minutes of Googling before I could send back Dick King Smith, right?
He didn’t reply for an hour, of course, because if he wouldn’t talk on a hands-free kit while driving, he certainly wouldn’t text while driving.
And when I did get back a Well deduced it was timed to coincide exactly with the door swinging open and Oliver coming home, laptop under his arm, the recyclable carton from his service station dinner in hand.
He presented the laptop to Jaz without ceremony, and she took it much the same way. She managed a thanks, but it was the thanks of somebody who suspected that not saying thanks would be a whole conversation that she couldn’t be fucked to have.
Still, she did say it. And while it wasn’t likely she and Oliver would become best friends overnight, it felt like a tiny pebble on the scales of her maybe thinking he wasn’t always a complete dick who only existed to make life difficult for her personally.
* * *
As we discovered two days later, it was a very tiny pebble.
“I can’t go,” Jaz was yelling at Oliver on Sunday. “I’m grounded. You can’t say I’m grounded, then make me go places.”
Oliver didn’t pinch the bridge of his nose, but he gave strong pinching-the-bridge-of-his-nose energy. “I think you’ll find I can.”
“Don’t think of it as being dragged out to visit your boring foster carers’ boring family,” I suggested in my best helpful voice. “Think of it as a rare chance to meet a reclusive famous person.”