Chapter 25 #2
Jaz fell heavily back onto her bed, and Spud jumped onto her chest. “I like one Odile song. I’m not a fan. And I have to do homework. You’ve been on at me for a week to do more homework.”
“And you’ve made excellent progress,” Oliver positively reinforced, “but today you’re coming to visit Luc’s mother. She’s asked to meet you.”
A deep, aggressive shudder started at the crown of Jaz’s head and ended at her now-bright-purple toenails. “I’m not a zoo animal.”
“Well no,” I agreed. “Because zoo animals don’t get taken out of the zoo to visit the keepers’ mums.”
“I’m staying home to look after Spud,” Jaz declared.
“Spud will survive an evening on his own,” replied Oliver firmly. “He’s well past the stage where he struggles with separation.”
Still flat on her back, Jaz angled her head into an optimal glaring position. “How do you know? You asked him?”
Oliver—my poor, sweet, sometimes extremely unable-to-read-a-room Oliver—couldn’t quite resist responding to that with, “Effectively, yes. He’s my dog, Jaz—I actually know him quite well.”
“Our dog,” I corrected.
“Mruff,” added Spud, I thought a little ambiguously.
“You want me to stay home, don’t you?” Jaz asked Spud, and Spud ruffed , much less ambiguously, and licked her face.
“In my profession,” said Oliver archly, “we call that ‘leading the witness.’”
It wasn’t a joke Jaz appreciated.
“Come on,” I said. “Spud’ll be okay, and Mum and Judy are actually pretty cool people.”
“Oh well, if you think they’re cool,” Jaz replied so laconically I thought her heart had stopped.
Time for an alternative strategy. “Okay, how about this: Oliver and I aren’t going without you. So either you get your shoes on and come with us, or we just stand here. Like this.” I folded my arms and gave her a look that I’d been designing for maximum teenager-annoyance factor.
I was pleased to see Oliver doing the same. He also folded his arms and looked down at Jaz with an I’m not angry, I’m just concerned expression that I could never have equalled in a million years.
She ruffled Spud’s fur and pretended to ignore us.
We kept it up.
She kept up ruffling.
I was just beginning to worry that we’d picked the wrong teenager to get into a battle of wills with, but six ruffles later, Spud did us a solid by bouncing off onto the floor, at which point Jaz sat up and said, “Fine,” in a tone that suggested it was anything but.
We said goodbye to Spud, who definitely seemed like he’d miss Jaz more than me or Oliver, and got into the car with all the enthusiasm of two middle-aged gays and a teenager who hated them. Oliver, reverting to his role as natural driver, took us off in the direction of Pucklethroop-on-the-Wold.
“Your mum a lesbian then?” asked Jaz conversationally when we were far enough onto the motorway that talking to us became marginally less boring than ignoring us.
I twisted in the passenger seat so hard and so fast that I hurt my neck. “Sorry, what?”
“Well, she lives with another woman. Anyway, isn’t it genetic?”
“That’s complicated,” said Oliver at once. Nobody could deliver an authoritative That’s complicated quite like Oliver.
“Which?” asked Jaz.
“Both,” I replied. “Mum and Judy are sort of…they’re sort of really good friends?”
“So she is a lesbian.”
“No, I mean really, really good friends.” I realised that wasn’t helping. “I mean, it’s not a euphemism.”
From what I could see with my head still at a weird angle, Jaz was looking incredibly blank.
“It’s like…” I grasped for language she might understand. “It’s like they have a queerplatonic relationship, except they’re both straight.”
I’d thought it was a bit of a long shot, but Jaz came from an unprecedentedly queer-literate generation, so she just said, “Ohhhh,” and then, “why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
Conversation was mercifully light after that, partly because Oliver had put on the first season of In the Dark, one of the few true crime podcasts he was okay with, and even Jaz wasn’t quite willing to talk over an in-depth analysis of a historic child abduction.
When we pulled up on Old Post Office Road, Mum and Judy and Judy’s many, many dogs were already waiting for us. And I suddenly, and retroactively, agreed with Jaz that she should have stayed home because this was going to be unbearable.
“Luc, mon caneton!” Mum rushed down to the car to embrace me in a full-on French kiss-on-both-cheeks kind of way. “And Oliver, and you must be Yasmine.”
“Jasmine,” corrected Oliver.
“Jaz,” corrected me.
“Yeah,” said Jaz.
“Hullo,” called Judy from the doorway. “Would come down and press the flesh and so forth but thing is, can’t actually be buggered.”
Mum turned to look at her heteroplatonic life partner accusingly. “Judy, you could be buggered to come all the way to the door. Why not be buggered to come a few steps further and make our guests feel welcome?”
“What can I say, I’m feeling a very specific level of buggery today, and no amount of buggering about is going to make a buggering bit of difference.”
“Can you please,” I begged, “stop saying bugger and bugger variants. Jaz is going to think you’re incredibly weird.”
“I am sure Jas does not mind.” Mum pronounced Jaz’s name with a soft J at the front and an S at the end in a way that made it sound officially twelve percent cooler. “Do you, Jas?”
“I’m fine,” Jaz murmured. It was the kind of I’m fine that could mean anything from I am actually fine to I am six seconds away from a total fucking meltdown.
This had, however, played right into Mum’s hands. “You see. She is fine. She says she is fine. Judy can bugger all that she wants.”
“Good to know,” said Judy. “Now come on, let’s get inside. As my ex-husband used to say, it’s cold enough out here to freeze the tits off a cardboard nun.”
I was this close to demanding to know who the hell this husband had been and what exact context he’d said that in, but since it was probably cold enough to freeze the tits off a cardboard nun, I didn’t want to be hanging around outside any longer than was absolutely necessary.
Once we were inside, we settled down in the living room, where Jaz pointedly said hello to every member of the household with more than two legs. I think she’d probably meant it as an insult, but if that’d been the plan, she’d picked a terrible strategy, at least where Judy was concerned.
“Beautiful girls, aren’t they?” she said. It wasn’t really a question. “That one’s Eugenie. She’s soppy and dull as a post but an absolute love deep down.”
Jaz whispered a soft “Hey, Eugenie” to the dog but otherwise ignored everybody.
“So.” Mum clapped her hands, all business all of a sudden. “Who is hungry?”
“Oh no,” I tried, “we forgot you were cooking and we’ve just had our dinner.”
Oliver gave me behave face. “Lucien is teasing, Odile. I assume you’ve made the special curry again?”
“Of course I have.” Mum looked maliciously overjoyed. “I know how important it is to you both.”
“We’ve been looking forward to it all week,” said Oliver. The worst of it was he wasn’t even really lying. Well, he was lying about the we part. But Oliver had developed a masochistic fondness for Mum’s special curry. I think it made him feel like part of the family.
Still, I glared at him. “Oliver. We’ve been together for five years. You can stop pretending to like Mum’s special curry. It’s shit, and we all know it’s shit.”
Jaz looked up from the dogs. “How come he gets to talk like that and I don’t get to talk like that?”
“You do get to talk like that,” I reminded her. “You tell me I’m shit all the time.”
Oliver’s mouth drew into a thin little line. “Or equivalently, neither of you get to talk like that and we should all be polite and grateful to Odile for hosting us this evening.”
“Do not worry, Oliver,” Mum told him. “I know he loves my special curry really.”
“I really don’t.”
“Then why,” asked Mum with a pedantic triumph more appropriate to somebody about a tenth of her age, “do you always come over on special curry night?”
I was low-key aware that Jaz had been silent through all of this, but I tried not to second-guess what that meant. “Tradition. And intense self-loathing.”
“Well, whatever you may think, I am going to carry on making the special curry exactly the way I have always made it, although if anybody wishes to assist me in the kitchen, they will be most welcome.”
I passed. As did Oliver. It had taken him a couple of years, but he’d eventually managed to overcome his good-guest instincts and leave Mum to commit her gastronomic crimes alone. Which worked out better for all of us.
Jaz, though, did not pass. Which confused the fuck out of me.
While she cooked a fair bit at home, it was only ever for herself and usually at two in the morning, having refused to eat dinner with us.
So when she (and the dogs, who, like Spud, had found a new favourite, the fickle bastards) followed Mum out into the kitchen, I wasn’t sure how I was meant to react.
Whatever passed for my parental instincts were telling me that this was a Give her space moment, not a Keep an eye on her moment.
And, for once, I trusted them. Especially because I’d learned the hard way that Keep an eye on her moments often turned into Make her feel backed into a corner moments.
“So,” Judy said brightly. “How’s married life treating you?”
“We’re not married,” Oliver pointed out.
Judy waved a dismissive hand. “Pish posh. Civilly partnered life. Same thing.”
“Much as it always was,” said Oliver, “only now if one of us dies, the other one will actually have rights.”
“Very much my experience,” Judy agreed. “Last thing you want is for one of you to be found decapitated on a yacht in the Azores with ninety pounds of cocaine and a defrocked bishop and the other one not be able to do a damned thing about it.”
Oliver and I gave each other weary, knowing looks. “This is where we say, ‘Yes, but that isn’t likely to happen,’” I tried, “and you tell us it actually happened to one of your husbands, isn’t it?”
“Don’t be silly.” Judy looked almost affronted.
Still in visiting-the-in-laws mode, Oliver went full contrition mode. “I’m sorry, Judy, we shouldn’t have presumed.”
“We weren’t married,” Judy went on. “That’s sort of the point of the story. Made it very tricky with the authorities.”
“But the Azores-cocaine-bishop-decapitation thing…” I prompted.
“Back in ’74. Don’t remember much of it. Bit of a wild time, if I’m honest.”
I was about seventy percent certain that about seventy percent of Judy’s stories were made up on the spot, but if my maths was right, that made me four hundred and ninety percent certain that at least some of them were true.
“Well.” I gave a could-be-worse kind of a shrug.
“We’ve successfully dodged that bullet.”
Judy gave a nostalgic sigh. “Apparently so. If only poor Terry had.”
“I thought you said he was decapitated,” said Oliver with barristerial attention to detail. “Not shot.”
“Well yes, but they found his head eventually and—”
Tragically, and by tragically I mean thankfully, we never found out what had happened with Terry’s head, because we were interrupted by a scream from the kitchen.