Chapter 29 #2
So, in the absence of any better ideas, I tried what I’d tried last time. I ordered a plate of chips and a Coke for Jaz and a full English and a coffee for me, and we sat down at a tiny, uncomfortable table, and I waited for her to decide that speaking to me would be less awful than staring at me.
It was, unfortunately, a plan that relied on me having more willpower than a fourteen-year-old. “Seriously,” I asked. “What happened with Trish?”
“She got in my face,” Jaz said, keeping that face well away from me by staring out the door, “and I’m bad at controlling my emotions, remember?”
“I don’t want to hear about your emotions,” I said. Then realised that sounded bad and back-pedalled: “I mean, if you want to talk about your emotions, that’s fine, but you don’t need to keep telling me how bad at controlling them you are.”
“It’s what people keep telling me.”
I gave a shrug. “They’re your emotions. Do you need other people to tell you about them?”
“Must do,” she said, completely deadpan. “Otherwise, why would they keep doing it? ’Specially when they’re all on my side and looking out for me.”
I did my best not to get angry, which I was finding harder than usual. I reckoned I was normally pretty chill with Jaz’s behaviour—too chill by far for Oliver—but when she got all laconic and self-loathing, it started pushing some highly specific buttons. “Can you just tell me what Trish did?”
“It’s not about what Trish did,” Jaz informed me piously. “I cannot control her actions, but I can control my response to—”
“Jaz, can you please cut it out with the mindfulness talk—you clearly think it’s bollocks.”
“You’re so shit at this.”
I clenched my jaw. “Jaz, please. Tell. Me. What. She. Did.”
And then, in the middle of a small café in Havering, Jaz replied, “She said I was the reason my mum tried to kill herself.”
And I, in an all-time great display of parenting skills, replied, “Fuck, I hope you punched her fucking lights out.”
Unblinking, matter-of-fact, Jaz said, “Smacked her head off a table.”
Okay, that might have been going a bit far.
For a minute or two we went back to sitting there in silence, with Jaz eating my chips even though she had her own. Then I said, “Look. Ignoring what I said about seventy seconds ago, I obviously don’t think beating another girl’s head on a table is a good thing.”
Jaz put her hands together as if in prayer. “Thank you, wise one, for teaching me right from wrong.”
“But also,” I went on, hoping that I was only fucking this most of the way up, “what she said was, like, properly not okay.”
“Is that you showing empathy?” Jaz’s voice was ninety-nine percent scorn and one percent…actually the one percent was probably just more scorn, but I was trying to be optimistic.
“It’s me saying that… I mean, I’m not you—”
“Well done. They should give you a prize.”
I ignored her. I was in a very literal sense the adult in the room. “When we were visiting my mum, and I thought you were messing with her stuff, you know how I kinda lost it?”
“Kinda,” Jaz confirmed.
“And I shouldn’t have. But I did because, you know—that’s my fucking mum, Jaz. I’m not making excuses for me and I’m not making excuses for you, but from when I was eight until when I met Oliver, my mum was basically all I had.”
For a moment, the teeniest, tiniest possible moment, I thought I saw something in Jaz’s eyes. A begrudging flicker of connection. Then she blinked it away like a bit of dust or a stray eyelash. “You’re right,” she said. “You’re not me.”
I shrugged. “Don’t have to be.”
“Still.” She sounded almost triumphant. “You’re stuck with me now.”
Okay, this was going to a button-pressing place again. “We’re not stuck with you.”
Jaz gave an exhalation that could just about have been called a laugh. “True. You can send me back whenever you want.”
“And we don’t want. To send you back.”
For the tiniest fraction of a second, Jaz looked like she straight-up hated me. “Oh, you fucking saints.”
That felt like a good thing to tactically ignore. If nothing else, I honestly didn’t think it was on Jaz to be grateful to me and Oliver for—to use the technically and legally correct term—looking after her.
But the unfortunate thing about not giving Jaz the reaction she was probably looking for was that we lapsed into another silence and, this time, it didn’t break. We finished our meals without saying another word, and then we got back in the car, and I drove us home.
I stalled twice on the way.
Jaz didn’t say anything about that either.
* * *
“I still feel I should say something,” Oliver reiterated, once he’d got home that evening and I’d explained the situation.
“Say what?” I asked. “I don’t want to be all don’t-you-trust-me, but, like, do you think there’s some magic thing that you’ll say that I didn’t?”
Oliver looked sheepish. He liked to think of himself, I knew, as the sort of person who had a high opinion of others.
Which meant that being confronted with the fact that his high opinion of others sometimes, just sometimes, came with an implied but not as good as me, obviously was a bit of a headfuck for him.
“Of course not,” he half lied. “It’s just—”
“She knows she did a bad thing. She knows we don’t like that she did a bad thing. She’s been sent home from school because of the bad thing she did. What else is there?”
I got a nasty feeling that Oliver was suppressing a scowl. “It was a very bad thing.”
“She hit someone. And she was extremely provoked.”
“From what you’ve said,” Oliver reminded me, “she beat another girl’s head on a table. That isn’t teenage hijinks. That’s a disturbing level of violence.”
I propped my hips on the kitchen counter and leaned. “Okay, but what do you want to say about that? ‘Hi, Jasmine, I just want to tell you that I’m concerned you might be a danger to yourself and others’?”
“Perhaps we could”—Oliver’s mouth seemed to be getting dry—“invite her to see things from Trish’s perspective?”
“Trish said it was Jaz’s fault her mother tried to kill herself,” I pointed out. “What perspective could she possibly have to make that okay?”
“The perspective where it led to her head being bounced off of a table?” suggested Oliver, mildly. “I’m not saying we make this about blame. I’m suggesting we take a restorative approach.”
I felt my own lips tighten. “Will the restorative approach involve writing any kind of letter?”
“That’s not funny.”
“How about,” I tried, “whatever we decide, we decide on it later. The school will want to be involved anyway, and it’s probably best for”—I gritted my inner teeth and used the mature parenting name—“Jasmine if we work with them instead of…you know, like…not against them but not with them?”
“Orthogonally from them?” suggested Oliver.
“Yeah, that.”
Oliver gave me a You have made a sound argument and I acknowledge it nod. “Very well, we’ll revisit the matter once we’ve had a chance to confer with the school.”
“We have a meeting on Monday,” I told him. Jaz had warned me that there’d be a lot of meetings. I hadn’t expected the next one quite this quickly.
“Good.” Oliver nodded again. “Just as long as Jasmine understands that this is a punishment, not a holiday.”
I gave him a helpless look. And not the sexy kind of helpless or even the romantic kind of helpless. “Oliver, I am absolutely certain that she doesn’t think staying with us is a holiday.”
“What does that mean?” he asked, a touch sharply.
“It means,” I said, “that she just really misses her mum.”
“Her mother was neglectful.”
That was…strictly true. And considering the space Oliver was in right now, strictly true was all he’d listen to.
But this wasn’t a strictly true kind of situation.
It was a messy, complex, stabs-you-in-the-heart-fucks-you-in-the-head, family-matters-but-also-hurts-you-but-also-still-matters situation.
I could see that; I could see it so clearly.
And Oliver couldn’t. Or wouldn’t let himself.
Even though deep down, I knew he understood as well as I did.
Which meant I was going to have to remind him.
Which meant I was having to go there.
Not all the way there. But more of the way there than I really wanted.
I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and said as calmly and not-trying-to-start something-ly as I could possibly manage, “I suppose you don’t miss your dad then?”
Oliver stiffened. “That’s a completely different situation. I know my parents weren’t perfect, but things never got so bad that the state had to intervene.”
“No,” I admitted, partly out of fear of escalation and partly because he was technically correct on that one. “But they got so bad that when David died, you dropped a truth-nuke on his funeral, so… I mean. You must understand that it’s possible to have complicated feelings about a parent.”
I could see Oliver breathing. He wasn’t like me when it came to emotions.
They didn’t scare him in the same way. But he did have very particular ideas about what you should feel and when and about who, and he didn’t like deviating from them.
“I suppose,” he said, very carefully and very slowly, “that you raise a valid point.”
“I do,” I said, trying not to sound actively triumphant. “I raise as fuck a point that is valid as shit.”
“You’re also extremely mature.”
“Mature as shit,” I agreed.
Oliver arched an eyebrow.
“Okay, I’ll stop it now.”
“Please do.” Oliver’s face had softened, and I privately gave myself exactly one relationship point for us navigating a potentially tense conversation with something almost approaching grace. “Are you going to be okay?” he continued. “We hadn’t planned on Jasmine being home all day.”
I nodded. “I’ll be fine. Work’s going pretty smoothly, so I’ll just be at home sending emails and having meetings.”
Oliver looked concerned. “You’re sure? Because I can probably arrange to work from home as well if it’s a problem.”
“I’m sure. I’ve double- and triple-checked my calendar. Unless something goes incredibly wrong, it’s plain sailing until the end of the week.”