Chapter 27
Turned out, it wasn’t a general question.
So we trooped back into the front room to eat rapidly congealing special curry.
It had gone tepid while we were looking for Jaz, but that hadn’t so much harmed the flavour as moved it sideways into a realm of parallel horribleness.
And, for a good five minutes, dealing with the grim reality of a turnip, rhubarb, and grapefruit curry was enough to keep us all distracted from the lingering awkwardness of my recent fuckups.
Eventually, though, tension started creeping back into the room.
And I wished I could have chased it back out again, but I had no idea how.
Like was this a “What have you been up to at school, Jaz?” type of situation?
Or was it a “Have you gone back to Drag Race yet, Mum?” type of situation?
Or even the moment for “So Oliver, lawyering, eh?” Except I kept thinking about all the ways all of them could go wrong and, in the end, said none of them.
“Anyway, Luc,” asked Mum conversationally, “how is everything with this…this SHITstock you are working on?”
“CRAPPstonbury,” I corrected her. “And…you know, okay.”
Judy glanced up from a forkful of flabby yet over-spiced rhubarb. “Is this the toilet festival?”
“It is not,” I said for the too-manyth time, “a toilet festival.”
“Really? You seemed to be asking that fellow for an awful lot of toilets.”
“Festivals need a lot of toilets.” I was sick of explaining this. “People have to stop acting like it’s weird to book toilets for a festival.”
To my at best partial relief, Mum was on my side.
“It’s true. Toilets at festivals are very important.
When I played Reading in ’82, things got so bad that your father pissed in a bucket and tipped it all over Lemmy from Motorhead.
” She looked that mix of melancholy, wistful, and resentful she always did when she spoke about Dad. “Still, the Enid were good that year.”
Jaz continued poking at the special curry, which she’d eaten a whole lot more of than I’d expected. “Toilets were bad when I went too,” she said.
“Aren’t you a little young for festivals?” asked Oliver.
We were getting back to normal, which in this case meant that Jaz had way more hostility for Oliver than for anybody else. “Not if they don’t check IDs properly.”
“If it isn’t a toilet festival”—Judy still seemed to be puzzling the whole situation out—“how are the non-toilet aspects going?”
“Ironically,” I said, “they’re going a bit toilet. It’s amazing how few international megastars want to play a charity gig for dung beetles where they’d have to be billed below a rich arsehole’s vanity band.”
Mum looked unbothered. “Really, aren’t most bands rich arseholes’ vanity bands?”
“Some of them are probably poor arseholes’ vanity bands,” Judy pointed out. “In my experience, the wealth of the arsehole makes very little difference.”
Taking the opportunity to set down his spoon, Oliver glanced at the rest of the adults. “Could we maybe say arsehole just slightly less in front of Jasmine?”
Walking up to the open goal and kicking the ball straight through it, Jaz looked Oliver square in the eye and said, “Don’t be an arsehole.”
“Jas.” Mum somehow managed to sound nonjudgemental without doing that thing I sometimes did where I gave away that I was secretly amused.
“That is a very bad thing to call Oliver. He is not being an arsehole. He is only being a prude. When you get to my age, you learn that they are very different, and arseholes are far worse.”
Jaz gave a half nod, then, by some weird miracle, said, “Sorry” again.
While Oliver and I were both adjusting to the shock, Jaz took another bite of special curry, then put her spoon firmly down and pushed the bowl away. “You…you do know this is shit, right?”
Oliver froze. I…I didn’t. I was pretty sure I knew how this was going to go.
“Of course I do,” Mum replied. “I do not have the Alzheimer’s.”
Most people, when confronted with Mum’s completely blasé attitude towards pretty much any criticism, gave up. Jaz, somehow, didn’t. “Have you tried making it not shit?”
Mum shook her head. “Non.”
The expression Jaz was directing at Mum in that moment could only be described as affectionate hatred. “Why?”
“Ah, well, you see I am terrified that people will reject me, so I try to push them away by forcing them to have unpleasant experiences.”
I couldn’t quite tell if that was truer than Mum would have readily admitted, or a pointed comment about Jaz, or a pointed comment about me.
“No, seriously,” Jaz pressed, “what’s the deal? This is weird. Like, it’s not normal. It’s weird.”
Mum continued to look utterly unbothered. “I am a star of the rock ’n’ roll. We are not meant to be normal.”
Jaz carried on stabbing Mum with her eyes. “That’s not an answer.”
“I got to fifty,” said Mum laconically, “and I realised I was a terrible cook. So I decided I had to either learn or steer into it. I steered into it.”
I was used to Mum by now. And so was Oliver. Jaz was not. “That’s—that doesn’t make sense.”
“Makes sense to me,” replied Mum, giving Jaz a taste of her own medicine, shrug-wise.
Jaz looked like she was about to yell for the third time that evening. Instead, she just turned to me and asked accusingly, “Is she always like this?”
“Pretty much.”
She almost, almost, looked sympathetic. “No wonder you’re like that.”
“Honestly, some days I’m amazed I survived.”
Mum and Oliver were both giving me cut-it-out looks. Mum’s seemed playful. Oliver’s didn’t.
“Excuse me,” Mum fauxtested, “I think you will find I was one of the all-time great mothers. I am up there at the top of the list with Clytemnestra.”
To which Jaz asked, “Who?” and Oliver asked, “Are you sure that’s the one you mean?” and I didn’t ask anything because my lack of knowledge of Greek mythology was matched only by my lack of caring about my lack of knowledge of Greek mythology.
Since Mum had no interest in expanding on her self-comparison to a long-dead and probably fictional woman who, knowing my mum, had probably done some really serious murders, that led to the teeniest of lulls in the conversation.
Which gave Mum exactly enough time to ask Jaz, “So why were you playing on my guitar?”
I hadn’t known Jaz that long, but I’d already had a lot of practice spotting her there’s-more-to-this-than-I-want-to-talk-about signs. She’d look away, then give a one-word answer she’d chosen with expert precision to avoid arguments with people she thought looked down on her.
“Bored,” she said.
“That is understandable,” agreed Mum. “It must be extremely boring visiting your foster father’s weird, not-normal maman.”
The use of the phrase foster father got a noticeable wince from Jaz.
And then my mum got to her feet with a speed and a decisiveness that made her look more like the woman who had played the Reading Festival in 1982 than I’d seen in a long time. “Come, come,” she said, “let us do something less boring.”
I’d expected Jaz to keep up her mask of studied apathy until either she or Oliver and I were dead. But she was watching Mum now with something that still didn’t feel like interest but looked quite a lot like caution. “What?” she asked.
“I am going to teach you to play the guitar.”
Jaz’s face set. “I can already play the guitar.”
Mum had a way, sometimes, of telling you she was through with your shit without telling you she was through with your shit.
She was, in the nicest and most comforting way possible, through with Jaz’s shit.
“Please remember, I am a legend of the rock ’n’ roll who has been in hiding in a tiny village in Surrey for longer than you have been alive.
This is not an offer most little girls get. ”
Little girl had been calculated. I was sure of it. Because Jaz went at once to “I’m not a little girl” without objecting to anything else Mum had been saying.
“Jasmine,” said Mum, deploying the full-official-name bomb with surgical precision, “come and play the fucking guitar with me.”
And, while Oliver and I looked on in stunned silence, Jaz kinda …did?
* * *
“Goodbye, Odile,” Oliver said as we were leaving. “And thank you for a lovely evening.”
I went with a less formal “Bye, Mum,” and Jaz followed with an even less formal sound that might have been a good night.
We piled into the car, and Oliver took us out into the not-especially-wild Surrey night. “I actually thought,” he said, “that went rather well.”
Jaz didn’t have any comment, and right then neither did I. It wasn’t that I disagreed. More that I didn’t want to jinx it.
“And it was very generous of Odile,” added Oliver, “to lend you a guitar to practise on.”
Jaz was clinging on to Mum’s spare-spare-spare guitar like she was afraid somebody would…
now I thought about it, like she was afraid somebody would do exactly what they’d been doing her whole life.
Decide they’d get to keep it even though it had been given to her.
Stick it in a black bin liner and then put her in handcuffs.
Just generally be a prick to her about it.
“Seems like a nice one,” I added, trying to sound upbeat.
“Said she nicked it,” Jaz offered.
Unlike me, Oliver was really good at keeping his eyes on the road, but his jaw tensed. “I’m sure she didn’t.”
He’d met Mum. He’d heard her stories, and some of my dad’s stories, and a lot of Judy’s stories.
I didn’t for one second believe he was actually sure she didn’t.
He was just making a parenting call. And I, perhaps because I was tired and perhaps because I was still high on the evening not having been a total disaster, decided to make a different one.
“Oh, I’m sure she did. Mum had a pretty intense youth. ”
Oliver flicked me a look out of the corner of his eye that said, Please, Lucien.
“To be clear,” I said, “stealing is still bad. It’s just like…” Fuck, I’d started this with good being-honest-to-our-foster-kid intentions, and now I was going down a rabbit hole into a train wreck. “It’s just like that bit in Love Actually, you know?”
“What?” Jaz sounded genuinely confused. “She’s going to make creepy videos of some girl she’s obsessed with?”
I’d assumed she’d just not have heard of the movie, but they did put it on TV every Christmas. “No, I mean—”
“Trish says that’s stalking. She says that guy should be locked up for being a weirdo and a perv.”
Oliver said, “Trish might be overstating slightly, but she has a reasonable case” at the same time that I said—I thought more importantly—“Who’s Trish?”
“Girl from school,” said Jaz, noncommittally.
“Friend?” I asked.
I took Jaz’s total silence as a yes.
“If you’d like to have her over for dinner one evening,” said Oliver, “she’d be more than welcome.”
“I’m not fucking six.”
I half turned in my seat again. “You know that adults have people over for dinner too. Oliver wasn’t saying we’d get jelly and Party Rings.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” put in Oliver, recalled to another of our adulting duties. “Jennifer and Peter can’t do first week of February.”
“We might have to just accept that not everybody can make it,” I told him. “Priya’s already told me she’s busy—and I quote—‘any weekend where you’re throwing the kind of party that has canapés.’”
With a perverse teenage will—the kind that felt the only thing worse than having to talk to adults was having adults talk to each other about things you weren’t interested in—Jaz said, “Brian.”
“What?” I asked, and Oliver asked, “Pardon?”
“Bloke she nicked it off.”
I didn’t think my mum knew any Brians. “Really?”
“Yeah. Said she nicked it off him at uni.”
I also didn’t think Mum had ever been to university. “When was this?”
“‘Oh seven,’” Jaz quoted directly. “Apparently, he’d taken a really long break for work, then gone back to finish his degree. Then there’d been a party to celebrate, and she’d nicked one of his guitars because she figured he wouldn’t need it anymore if he was going to be an astrophysicist.”
Okay, that was making more sense. “When you say ‘a really long break for work,’” I tried, “do you mean ‘he spent thirty-three years as lead guitarist of Queen’?”
I was still twisted around enough to see Jaz shrug.
“I think,” Oliver said gently, “before we got distracted, you were about to explain to Jaz that even if Odile stole her guitar, stealing is wrong in general.” He paused a moment. “Also, for some reason, you were doing it through the medium of Love Actually.”
I tried to spool my brain back to the state it had been in three minutes ago and, at best, partially succeeded. “Oh, right. I mean it’s like that bit where Bill Nighy is all, ‘Don’t buy drugs. Become a pop star, and they give you them for free.’”
Oliver groaned. “I really don’t think that was supposed to be good advice.”
“No, right, but I mean, like, some things are okay when you’re a rock star and not when you’re a normal person.”
Jaz didn’t seem to like that. “Not sure that’s fair.”
“It isn’t,” Oliver agreed. “Although I suppose you could argue that it’s indicative of a certain systemic hypocrisy at a societal level, so it’s probably to some extent realistic.”
“Is that just a fancy way of saying life isn’t fair?” asked Jaz, who’d honestly decoded that quicker than I had.
“And that therefore if you do want to get away with stealing,” Oliver continued, “you should make sure to become rich and successful first.” Then, remembering himself, he added, “Although you shouldn’t be stealing even if you’d get away with it.”
“Because it’s wrong,” I added, probably too helpfully. After a few minutes of silence, I craned around again to see Jaz cradling the guitar. “So”—I attempted to sound super casual—“you think you’ll go back for lessons?”
I should have known better than to ask a direct question.
Jaz, like always, interpreted it as a trap and clutched the guitar to her chest. It wasn’t until I’d turned back around and let her feel I was barely paying attention that she said, “She’s going to make me eat more of that shitty curry, isn’t she? ”
I flipped down the sunshade to look at her in the little vanity mirror. It saved my neck and saved her from direct eye contact. “Hard to tell. She mostly only makes it for people she likes.”
Jaz visibly relaxed. “Oh good.”
“Then again, I think she likes you.”