Chapter 26
I say a scream. It had been two screams. Both, as far as I could tell, of frustration rather than fear or pain or even really anger.
“Tell this girl,” Mum said when Oliver and I burst into the kitchen to get our parent on, “that she is the worst sous chef I have ever had. No, wait, that anybody has ever had.”
“Jaz,” I said as deadpan as I could manage, “you’re the worst sous—”
“Tell this old lady,” Jaz replied, more to Mum than to me, “that she’s a fucking shitty cook.”
“Language,” said Oliver at roughly the same time that I said, “I think she already knows.”
“Shitty!” Mum sounded way more indignant than she had any right to feel, given that the shittiness of her cooking was a matter of extremely detailed public record. “Does this look shitty to you?”
She pointed at the carnage of vegetable matter strewn across her work surfaces. Unlike Oliver, I wasn’t an expert in the British legal system, but I had a feeling that evidence-wise, Mum’s case for slander was on a pretty shaky footing.
“Is that rhubarb?” I asked.
“Judy had a lot from her garden,” Mum explained, “and it’s really the same as celery.”
“And grapefruit?”
“Very healthy. A lot of vitamin C.”
“And turnips?”
Mum gave a Gallic shrug, which was, in its own way, just as expressive as one of Jaz’s. “Well, Oliver is vegan. I need to bulk it out with something.”
“I’m not eating a rhubarb, grapefruit, and turnip curry,” Jaz told me. And, honestly, I didn’t blame her.
Oliver, on the other hand, blamed her at least a little bit. “Jasmine, we are guests in Odile’s house.”
“Yeah, but that don’t mean she can fucking poison us.”
I made a doomed effort to play peacemaker. “If it helps, she’s not killed me yet, and now that she’s stopped putting meat in everything, we’re not even likely to get salmonella.”
“Luc.” Mum gave me a look of mostly play disapproval. “Do not talk about your mother as if she is not in the room.”
“You’re talking about my mother as if she is not in the room,” I pointed out. “And you are my mother.”
Mum folded her arms and looked haughty, smearing cinnamon up her sleeves as she did so. “Your mother can talk about herself however she wants. It’s her right as a reclusive eccentric older French lady.”
Of the many adjectives Mum had just applied to herself, I thought maybe half actually applied. “You’re doing this deliberately, aren’t you?”
With another scream, this time of “Why are you all so fucking weird,” Jaz retreated from the kitchen, looking like she couldn’t imagine anyone who could possibly be having a worse experience than the one she was having right at that moment.
“You know,” said Mum as the last of the dogs vanished into the hall in Jaz’s wake, “I think I like her very much.”
Despite this, Oliver still seemed to feel the need to say, “I’m sorry she was so aggressive.”
Mum made a bof gesture. “I’m not a fool, Oliver. I know that this is a very silly situation and that the special curry is something of an acquired taste.”
“It’s not an acquired taste, Mum,” I corrected. “It’s often literally inedible.”
That left Mum profoundly unimpressed. “I’m sure it is, with that attitude.”
“Either way”—Oliver circled back to his point with typical tenacity—“she didn’t respond appropriately. I’ll go and ask her to apologise.”
More than anything I wanted to say, Please don’t, but I didn’t quite have the courage.
Which meant I was super glad when Mum said, “Please don’t.”
“She was very rude,” Oliver reminded us all.
Mum shrugged again. “So was I. You’ve been having the sex with my son—”
“Mum, you could have put that any other way.”
“—for a very long time. Surely you’ve worked out that we’re quite a rude family.”
“I am not,” I protested. “I’m polite as balls when I’m around other people.”
Oliver gave me a look.
“When I’m at work,” I corrected.
Oliver continued to give me a look.
“When I’m at some bits of my work.”
Looks persisted and, indeed, spread.
“Sometimes,” I said very firmly, “I have to go and be polite to rich arseholes who I need to give us money, and when I’m doing that specific professional task I am, in my own estimation, as polite as balls.”
“The politeness or otherwise of the O’Donnells aside,” replied Oliver, refusing to be distracted, “Jasmine needs to learn to control her emotions, and she won’t if we keep ignoring this sort of behaviour.”
I tried a thing. It was a bit of a desperate thing in some ways, but it felt like it might make sense under the Oliverian parenting paradigm.
“Okay, but look at it this way—Mum is basically Jaz’s foster grandmother, and grandparents letting their grandkids get away with murder is a time-honoured tradition. ”
“In some families, perhaps.” There was an edge to Oliver’s voice I didn’t love as much as I could have. I might almost go so far as to say I didn’t like it. Didn’t like it at all. “But my grandparents never—”
As the only person in the room who had successfully parented for more than eight minutes at a stretch, Mum stepped in with infuriating effortlessness. “Now Jas has gone”—she deployed a sly and intensely weaponised smile—“it means I am in need of a kitchen helper.”
The part of Oliver that believed people Jaz’s age should respect people Odile’s age was pitched into sudden conflict with the part of Oliver that believed people his age should respect people Odile’s age.
The better of those two very similar parts won.
“Of course, Odile,” he said. And then, once he’d rolled up his sleeves and grabbed a kitchen knife, he added as gently as he was able, “Are you absolutely sure about the rhubarb?”
One of Mum’s many superpowers was never being sure about anything while also being absolutely certain about everything. “It’s traditional.”
“I really don’t think it is,” I said ill-advisedly.
“Of course it is. That is why when the cockneys want a curry they say, ‘I am going for a rhubarb.’”
They say you wind up marrying your parents, but I was pretty sure I’d wound up working with mine, because this was the exact kind of conversation I had every day in the office. “I think that’s ‘a ruby.’”
Mum looked at me like I’d completely lost it. “Don’t be silly, Luc. You can’t put rubies in curry.”
Of all the things I could possibly have said in that moment, “Obviously they’re not literal rubies” was far from the worst. But that didn’t make it good.
“Well no,” Mum conceded. And then with a twist of parental genius I hoped I could one day emulate, she pivoted to, “It’s probably a metaphor for rhubarb.”
With no further comment, Mum dumped a whole fennel in front of Oliver, who dutifully sliced it.
Unable to watch while my mum forced my boyfriend to be her kitchen accomplice, I slunk back into the living room, where I found Judy alone. Well, alone save for Michael of Kent, who had decided to stop following Jaz around and go sit with her mistress.
“Too many cooks, eh?” Judy observed.
“I think Mum might be too many cooks all by herself.”
Judy nodded sagely. “She has a fierce will, your mother.”
“A fierce will which she uses exclusively to force people to eat terrible curries?”
“There are far worse things to use a fierce will for.”
This was one of those unanswerable Judy statements you just had to nod at and move past, so I nodded and moved past it. “Any idea where Jaz is?”
Judy looked blissfully unconcerned. “Probably upstairs. I wouldn’t worry. Young things like that can mostly look after themselves in my experience.”
“In your experience?” I asked, only slightly terrified of the answer.
“I was young once, too, you know. She must be, what, fourteen?”
“That’s right.”
“Good age, fourteen. Young enough that the world still has wonder in it, old enough that you can actually go looking.”
I squirmed slightly. “Yeah, I think these days going looking for wonder in the world is just a recipe for getting online groomed.”
“Well, you know best,” said Judy with the air of a woman who firmly believed I did not, in fact, know best.
Still committed to Operation Give Jaz Her Space, and pretty sure that someone would have noticed if she’d climbed out of a window or otherwise vanished into the wilds of Surrey, I perched on the arm of the sofa.
After I’d spent half an hour navigating small talk with Judy, Mum emerged from the kitchen and announced, with misplaced pride, that the special curry was ready.
Oliver followed her through with five bowls on a tray. “Where’s Jasmine?” was his first comment and only question.
“Upstairs I guess?” The I guess had been a bad choice. Oliver didn’t see much room for guessing at the best of times, but especially not where Jaz was concerned.
He set the tray down on the coffee table. “If you’ll excuse me, Odile, I’ll go and get her.”
It would be fine. Probably it would be fine.
Going-and-getting-Jaz duty fairly often got handled by whoever happened to be closest, and I was sitting down and Oliver was standing up, and saying Are you sure you won’t make a complete arse of this?
wouldn’t demonstrate the commitment to trustful coparenting that Oliver and I had agreed on.
Y’know, back before we’d tried to coparent.
All of which meant there was no valid objection I could make to Oliver being the one who went to retrieve Jaz and me being the one who stayed behind eating spiced rhubarb and turnip.
“How is the special curry, mon caneton?” asked Mum cheerfully.
“It’s terrible, Mum. You know it’s terrible. I know it’s terrible. Even Oliver knows it’s terrible. In fact, I sometimes think you deliberately make it more and more terrible every time just to see how long it’ll take him to admit it.”
“And I sometimes think you are a very ungrateful son.”
Judy was tucking into her bowl with genuine gusto. Then again, Judy was practically made of gusto. “Tiny note”—she jabbed a finger at the bowl—“needs more turnip.”
“Does anything,” I protested, “ever really need more turnip?”
But I didn’t get an answer, because there was shouting again.
* * *