Chapter 29
“The problem, you long Saxon prick,” Bronwyn was saying through Zoom into my computer and through that into my ears, “is that he’s impossible to work with.”
“I am not impossible to work with,” James Royce-Royce replied and then, because he was taking this call with Baby J on his knee, he added, “Daddy’s not impossible to work with, is he?”
James Royce-Royce’s habit of asking Baby J to back up his every statement had been annoying even before Baby J had got old enough to actually do it. “No?” said Baby J, not sounding super confident, if I was honest.
“He has no experience in site-specific catering.”
“Excuse me”—James Royce-Royce tried to restrain Baby J from doing something potentially destructive to his computer—“I’ve made a sausage plait for the queen.”
Bronwyn gesticulated at the screen. “See. I’ve had to deal with this all week.”
“See,” mirrored James Royce-Royce, “she has no respect for my experience.”
“You don’t want respect,” Bronwyn said over any intermediarying I might have been planning, “you want obedience.”
“Okay,” I tried at last, “perhaps we can all accept that both of you bring valuable and unique—”
“What she brings,” James Royce-Royce interrupted, “is seven different ways to make a mess with jackfruit.”
“Oh, get your head out your arse, arsehead.”
James Royce-Royce clapped his hands over Baby J’s ears. “Language. You see the kind of unprofessionalism—”
“Oh, because it’s the height of professional to bring a toddler to a work meeting, isn’t it?”
“He’s very precocious.”
“Please.” I don’t think I actually screamed.
I might have actually screamed. “I know you’re both doing me a massive favour here”—James Royce-Royce and Bronwyn opened their mouths—“and if either of you says that you’re doing me a favour but the other person is lucky to have the exposure, I will…
well, I won’t do anything on account of the whole doing-me-a-massive-favour thing, but you’ll have been really predictable and I hope you’ll feel bad about it. ”
Baby J said “Arsehead” happily into the silence.
And then my phone started ringing. I glanced down at my desk in the fervent hope that it would be somebody so important that I could cut this meeting short.
Then I realised that by fervently hoping that, I had massively jinxed myself. Because I did have to cut the meeting short. Because it was St. Jude’s Academy.
“Sorry.” I didn’t even bother to hide my apprehension. “You both make really good points, but I have to get this. It’s Jaz’s school.”
I de-headphoned and wheeled my chair away from the computer. “Hello?”
“Mr. O’Donnell?” It was Miss Collins. She sounded… I was going to go with studiedly professional. “I’m afraid you’ll need to come and pick up Jasmine.”
It was not picking-up-Jasmine time. It was not even close to picking-up-Jasmine time. “Can I ask why?”
There was a moment’s silence from the other end of the line, and then Miss Collins said, very calmly, “She’s been suspended.”
* * *
James Royce-Royce and Bronwyn had been very understanding about my need to bail immediately, and not entirely trusting myself to jump straight into the car from a standing start, I took a moment in my study to compose myself and message Oliver.
That took longer than I expected it to, because I wound up typing and deleting the same message six times over, working through different phrasings until I finally said fuck it and went with Jaz has been suspended.
While I was waiting with a nauseous knot in my stomach for him to reply, I also noticed a long chain of messages in the Are the Straights Okay (Dinner Party Remix) group.
CANT DO HTIS WEEKEND BABYSITTER HAS SCROFULA. This was Bridge.
Sorry, did you say scrofula? That was Peter.
I was unsurprised to notice that James Royce-Royce had followed up with We thought Baby J had scrofula once, but then James Royce-Royce had brought him down to earth with It was nappy rash.
Definitely scrofula? Peter again. Like the king’s evil scrofula.
DON’T KNOW ABOUT TAHT SHE DFEINITELY SAID SCROFULA
I refuse to believe your babysitter has scrofula. That was Priya.
YOUR NOT EVEN COMING TO THE DINNER PARTY SO YOU SHOULDN@T CARE.
I don’t care. I feel like Priya’s predictive text probably filled in I don’t care whenever she let it pick the first three words for her. But your babysitter can’t have scrofula.
Maybe it was scurvy? James Royce-Royce had suggested. A lot of people these days aren’t eating anything like enough fresh fruit and vegetables.
Do people still even get scrofula? Jennifer. In industrialised countries, I mean. I don’t want this to be a conversation about global health inequality.
You do a bit, don’t you? Peter.
A series of typing-dots came from Brian, followed by: Scrofula is actually tuberculosis of the throat.
It’s caused by the same bacteria that causes it in the lungs so it’s uncommon in this country because we vaccinate against TB anyway.
It still happens sometimes but most of the examples I can find are from the states.
Then he linked a couple of sources. Then he linked some truly disgusting images of an elderly woman with suppurating lesions on her neck.
OKAYN IT MIGHT NOT BE SCROFULA, Bridge admitted. IT MIGHT BE MUMPS.
Hoping to drag things back in a semi-productive direction, I sent: So next weekend then?
Next weekend as in this weekend coming, asked Jennifer, or next weekend the weekend after that?
Figuring the rest of the chat could work that out amongst themselves, I stood up unsteadily and went out to the car.
Once I was behind the wheel and making the best attempt I could to psych myself into effective-solving-problems-parent mode, as opposed to parent-who-has-blatantly-fucked-up mode, I checked my phone one last time.
Are the Straights Okay (Dinner Party Remix) had devolved into a conversation about the correct usage of “next weekend” that I found even less appealing than the scrofula discussion, and that probably did not bode well for the vibe if we ever finally got round a dinner table.
Less appealing still, Oliver had texted back. His message had been even shorter than mine. A clear, to the point: What happened?
I guess I’ll find out when I get there.
We’ll talk about how to handle this when I get home.
And I guess that was fair? Like at least it was a we statement. I’ll fill you in soon as I can.
Thank you. There was a pause and then a little three-dot moment and then: I love you.
I sent back an I love you to without even stopping to second-guess myself, which I thought really showed how far I’d come. Then I sent a *too which showed how far I hadn’t. Then I put my phone away like a responsible driver, pulled out into the road, and immediately stalled.
I definitely did not take that as a sign.
Jaz was waiting at the school gates clutching her bag and looking anywhere but at me. The sky behind her was as grey as the car park, and the wind kept blowing her hair across her face. She seemed to have got bored of pushing it out again.
“What happened?” I asked.
Silence.
I waited for her to get into the car and to my relief she did, but when I got back into the driver’s seat, she kept looking out the window at the drab, suburban streets of Havering.
“Miss Collins will tell me if you don’t,” I pointed out. Honestly, she’d probably already put the details in an email—these things had to have a paper trail because of accountability and shit. “But I’d like to hear your side of it.”
After a while Jaz just said, “Challenging behaviour.”
I tried to keep my tone…not light—I didn’t want to sound like I wasn’t taking this seriously—but nonjudgemental. “They wouldn’t have sent you home just for being challenging.”
“Challenging don’t mean challenging. It means challenging.”
I bit my lip and took in a short breath. “Jaz, don’t make me say something really wanky.”
“Bit late for that.”
“No, I mean really wanky. Like, ‘I’m trying to be on your side but you’re making it difficult.’”
“Fuck, that would be wanky.”
“Right? So can you just, like, tell me what happened?”
For a while, Jaz decided that no, telling me what happened was too much of an imposition on account of how I was the living incarnation of crap and so talking to me wouldn’t be worth the oxygen atoms she exhaled while doing it.
But eventually she gave up and just said, “Fighting.”
I didn’t say Did you win. Partly because even I have some parenting instincts and partly because I’d never really come from a winning-fights-is-good culture. “Who with?”
“Someone.”
As nonanswers went, it was almost beautiful. It did technically tell me that it had been an individual, rather than a group of people or, I don’t know, a dog or something. But it also made it very clear that she still didn’t think I was worth talking to. “This someone have a name?”
Silence.
“What happened to building more productive relationships with your peers and all that?”
A little more silence. Then, “Tried it. Didn’t work out.”
I let that rest and just drove us a little further, keeping my eyes on the road while also trying to be at least aware of Jaz in case she tried to wrench the door open and leap out while we were moving. And although I wouldn’t have called it a strategy, or even a ploy, it did sort of work.
“Trish,” she said, so out of nowhere that it took me a moment to piece the context together.
“Your friend Trish?”
Jaz still wasn’t looking at me, but I could imagine her look of contempt as clearly as if she’d been jamming it in my face.
“I mean, not now, I guess?” We’d come home the same way we had the first day I’d taken her in, so we were driving past the Cosy Café again. “Do you want some chips?”
Nothing.
“Do you want me to order some chips that you can then eat off my plate?”
Nothing.