Chapter 26 #2
After leaving Mum and Judy to debate the optimal turnip-to-grapefruit level for a curry, I dashed upstairs to see what had happened with the going-and-getting-Jaz mission. As I got closer, I began to catch one side of a very repetitive conversation, which seemed to be going:
“Fuck off.”
Then.
“No. Fuck off.”
Then.
“Fuck off.”
Finally, I could hear Oliver. “Odile is serving dinner. You’re being rude.”
“Just give me it back.”
I had no idea what the it Oliver wasn’t giving back was.
I did, however, take some small comfort from the fact he didn’t reply, “Give it back to me,” which his mother certainly would have.
His actual reply, “It isn’t yours,” was at least an inarguable fact.
Which made it harder for Jaz to argue. Harder but not impossible.
“Everything okay?” I asked, poking my head around the door into my mum’s bedroom.
At first I was so focused on my boyfriend arguing with our foster kid that I didn’t have much attention to spare for anything else, but as I progressed from head-poking to whole-self poking, I was sort of kicked in the face by a boot made of feels.
It’s not that I’d never been in my mum’s bedroom before.
I’d spent all the bits of childhood I could remember in this house, and there’d been nights I was ill or couldn’t sleep or just liked the idea of a bigger bed.
But I hadn’t properly been in there as an adult.
As somebody who could see my mum as, on some level at least, a human being with her own shit going on.
And I hadn’t been prepared for how different that would be.
For a moment or two, I wasn’t able to…do or…
think much. Mostly I just stood there, looking around.
Really looking for the first time. At the discs on the wall—a few gold from before my dad, one platinum from Welcome Ghosts—at the pictures on the sideboard, all from her younger days.
All with the light and the crowds and the music.
All, and wasn’t this a headfuck and a half, from when she was younger than me.
Like, way younger than me. Like, before-I-met-Oliver younger than me.
And that was when I realised: This wasn’t my mum’s room at all. It was Odile’s. It was where Odile O’Donnell had gone so that Luc O’Donnell could have something that almost looked like a normal life.
Then I also realised that this was the place Jaz had gone without asking. And that the thing she was demanding Oliver give back to her was my fucking mum’s fucking guitar.
“Excuse me,” I said, “the fuck?”
The look in Oliver’s eyes was giving me 10/10 for sentiment and 2/10 for execution.
Jaz glared up at me with a bitterness she normally reserved for Oliver. Which felt two different kinds of bad. Then a third kind of bad that came from feeling guilty about one of the first two kinds of bad. “I was just having a go,” she muttered.
I glared back, distantly aware I wasn’t handling this well but having no idea how to make myself handle it better. “You don’t just ‘have a go’ with my mum’s stuff.”
Jaz didn’t even look at me, and it felt incredibly pointed that she didn’t even look at me. “All right sorry.”
“Don’t ‘all right sorry’ me,” I snapped. “I know what ‘all right sorry’ means.”
“Jasmine,” said Oliver, levelly. “We’re not—”
But he didn’t get to finish the thought because with a final, somehow ever more expressive “Fuck,” Jaz left my mum’s room and stormed downstairs.
Oliver and I followed her, Oliver first laying my mum’s guitar gently down on the bed. When we caught up with her by the front door, it was clear that Jaz’d been planning to leave the house entirely but had been intercepted by Mum and Judy.
“Where are you going, chérie?” Mum was asking.
Jaz answered with the all-purpose shrug.
“Wherever it is,” Judy added, “lot of perverts around this time of night. Take a dog. Maybe also a gun.”
It was probably my imagination, but I swear I saw Jaz perk up at the suggestion.
“Judy,” said Oliver in his best grown-up-in-the-room voice. “Please don’t try to arm our foster daughter.”
“Also,” I said, still way closer to authoritarian mode than I was comfortable being, “you’re not going anywhere.”
Jaz’s hand was on the door.
“Has something happened?” asked Mum. It wasn’t really a question. Or rather it was, but the question wasn’t if something had happened; it was what.
“We found Jasmine in your bedroom,” Oliver explained.
“With your guitar,” I added. For some reason, this was the bit that was most offending me.
Mum looked at Jaz in a way I remembered her looking at me so many, many times down the years. It was a look that said, You fucked up, we both know you fucked up, but we’re also all the other person has, so I’m going to love you anyway no matter what. “Is that true, Jas?”
Jaz looked down. “Yeah,” she said. And then, completely without provocation, she added a sincere-sounding, “Sorry.”
I was almost hurt. She never apologised to me or Oliver that quickly. At least not if she meant it.
“You know,” Mum added, “if you had asked, I would have said it was okay.”
Jaz mumbled another apology.
“Was she any good?” she asked me and Oliver, and then, when neither of us had anything resembling an answer, she asked Jaz, “Are you any good?”
Even by Jaz’s standards, her response was noncommittal. A sort of slow twitch and a half shake of the head and a barely audible sound that somebody who was extremely dedicated to charitably interpreting teenage noises might understand as “dunno.”
“Well then,” announced Mum as if that solved everything and we no longer had any problems to discuss whatsoever, “the special curry is waiting. Come, everybody.”
“Hang on,” I said, “you can’t just come everybody this under the rug.
She was…she was in your room. With your stuff.
It was—” I was going to have a really hard time saying what it was without using emotion words, and I hated using emotion words.
“It was…intrusive. And personal…and that’s… like, that’s your space and—”
“Yes,” said Mum, looking at me almost sternly now and nodding in a this-nod-has-a-double-meaning kind of way. “It is my space. Not yours. And this is my house, and when I say something is over, it is over.”
“But—”
“Ah.” Mum raised a finger. “Over.”
Jaz was still looking kind of on edge, and I was still feeling kind of on edge, and that was especially shitty because I didn’t want to be in my thirties and feeling shitty because things weren’t cool between me and a fourteen-year-old.
“You must forgive Luc,” Mum said to Jaz. “He is very protective of his old maman.”
Jaz didn’t seem particularly forgiving, but she was visibly less tense than she had been, which hopefully meant she’d be a lot less likely to straight up bolt.
Because that would have been twice in under a week, and twice regardless of timeframe seemed like a bad number of times for us to trigger a teenager’s fight-or-flight reflex.
“Alors.” Mum was still talking to Jaz. “Do you want to run out into the night, or do you want to come into the front room and eat the special curry?”
I raised a hand. “If that’s a general question, I’ll take running into the night, please.”