Chapter 32
Banbury, by the way. I’d been in Banbury.
From a certain perspective, that had been pretty lucky because it meant there was actually a train station and so I could, eventually, at far too much expense and with far too many changes, get back to London, and from there onto a night bus, and from there home.
On the whole, though, I was pretty proud of myself for not going completely to pieces.
Not on the way back, and not the day after.
The day after I told Saint to fuck off and also that nobody liked him and also that he was boring.
I had a little cry on the train, but other than that I was extremely mature and sensible and goal-oriented.
The goals I was orienting in the immediate aftermath of the great Enbanburying were finding a new headliner for my hopeless rock festival, making sure I was home to pick up our Ocado delivery for dinner party supplies, taking Jaz to a meeting about the whole her-being-suspended thing, and then, straight afterwards, taking her to a guitar lesson in Surrey.
Finding a headliner for a music festival with no budget and no audience went about as well as could be expected.
The Ocado order went somewhat better than expected, which is to say they actually delivered what we ordered instead of random crap we couldn’t use which they would persist in calling “necessary substitutions.”
In the end, the school meeting wound up being the lowest-stress part of the day.
Jaz said all the things that she was supposed to say, and I felt I’d walked a better line between “advocating for her” and “undermining the process.” We’d still had to make some adjustments to her Personal Education Plan, and there was talk of the school counsellor getting involved so Jaz and Trish could take part in some nonjudgemental restorative discipline, but, at the end of the day, I thought we got off pretty lightly.
Although she did insist we stop at the supermarket on the way to Mum’s.
“Not having that fucking curry again,” she explained as she swiped a bottle of Thai fish sauce and a packet of chicken breasts through the self-checkout.
“The special curry,” I told her, “is a time-honoured tradition of the O’Donnell household.”
“It’s shit.”
“It’s a shit tradition.”
Jaz started bagging. “Starting a new tradition.”
The little piece of me that really wanted Jaz to accept she was part of the family melted slightly. Because this was good, right? If she felt she was able to start traditions? O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson traditions.
I pulled out my card to pay, and she looked at me with deep suspicion.
“I can get this,” she told me. “I’ve got money.”
“You’ve got pocket money,” I replied. “That I give you. To spend on, I don’t know”—I tried to think of things teenagers would buy that didn’t sound condescending—“stuff for yourself.”
“This is for myself. I don’t want to eat the curry.”
“I’m not letting you spend your own money on chicken breasts. Especially not when we’re both going to eat them. That’s like…that’s just fundamentally wrong parenting.”
Jaz looked at me like I’d spat in her face. Or—and I didn’t know but I was beginning to think this closer to the mark—like I’d insulted her mum.
“I just mean,” I said very quickly and very carefully, “that I’m here and I’ve already got my wallet out. It’s kind of you to offer, but—and it took me a long time to realise this myself, so I don’t blame you for not believing me—it’s okay to let other people do stuff for you.”
Jaz didn’t reply, but she did let me pay. Still, she was silent all the rest of the way to Pucklethroop-on-the-Wold.
When we arrived, Mum opened the door and two of Judy’s dogs bounced out to greet us—okay, to greet Jaz—but Mum was pleased to see me.
“Mon caneton.” She hugged me. “Chérie.” She hugged Jaz. “Why are you holding a packet of chicken?”
“Making dinner,” Jaz replied.
Mum looked crestfallen. Crucially, though, and credit to Jaz for playing this one right, the kind of performative crestfallen that didn’t actually mean she was in any way hurt or upset. “Oh, but the special curry!”
“It’s shit,” Jaz told her. “I’m making soup.”
“Might be nice for a change,” said Judy, who’d crept into the doorway to greet us. “Actually very partial to soup. Reminds me of my old grandfather.”
“Fond of it, was he?” I asked warily.
Judy shook her head. “No, but he once threw a tureen full of minestrone at the vicar. Can’t remember why now, but still every time I look at a pot of broth, I think of him.”
With a look of feigned betrayal, Mum threw her hands in the air.
“Fine, fine, reject the special curry, see if I care. Then one day when I am dead you will say to yourself, Luc, you will say to yourself, ‘Do you remember the days when Maman used to make for us the special curry?’ And you will reply, ‘I do, Luc, but now she is dead, and we will never have the special curry again.’”
I was rolling my eyes at this, but Jaz, who was basically an eye roll in jeans and an ill-fitting jumper, seemed to take it incredibly seriously. “I don’t have to.” Her voice wobbled slightly. “You can make the curry if you want.”
“Let.” This was Judy. “The girl. Cook.”
“I am letting the girl cook.” Gently shooing us aside, Mum sailed serenely into the house. “I am just also reminding her and my horrible son that one day I will be dead and then they will appreciate me and I will look up at them from the afterlife and I will say, ‘Serves you both right.’”
“Down,” I corrected her. “Look down at us.”
Mum gave a little laugh. “That is sweet of you, mon caneton, but there is a reason they say the devil has the best songs. Now”—she clapped her hands—“while I am still alive, you should both come in.”
I sighed. “Leave it out. You’ll outlive all of us.”
Jaz murmured something under her breath which I could have sworn was No, she won’t, but I let it go.
With two of the dogs—Eugenie and Camilla, now I had a better look—trailing after her, Jaz went into the kitchen, where I was ninety percent certain she couldn’t do any more harm than Mum or I would, and I went to settle down in the front room with the rest of the nominal adults.
“Sorry about the curry,” I told Mum, even though we both knew I wasn’t really. “But Jaz knows what she’s doing. She cooks for herself all the time at home.”
“Oh really?” Mum seemed at least mildly curious. “What sorts of things?”
“Soups? Stuff with rice, I think. It’s mostly while Oliver and I are asleep.”
Judy made a sound of nostalgic reverie. “Takes me back. I had a husband once, liked to cook while I was asleep.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “What did he cook?”
“Meth.”
I should have seen that one coming. “So”—I steered the conversation firmly away from hard drugs—“how is everybody?”
“Extremely upset about the murders.” Mum looked suddenly grave.
Okay. They weren’t doing this to me again. Despite the alarming death rate amongst Judy’s husbands, this was not going to be a real thing. I kept my tone very normal. “Murders?”
“Oh yes.” Mum sounded genuinely upset. “First there was that nice Aisha girl. Then the police lady. Then John, then Matt. We’re terrified about who will be next.”
“If anything happens to Andrea,” Judy confided, “frankly, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
I searched my mental list of shit my mum could be talking about. Fortunately, it was a fairly short list. “UK Traitors, season one?”
“I will tell you what.” Mum grew conspiratorial. “They are playing, as they say, a blinder. The Faithfuls do not seem to have a clue what is happening.”
Judy leaned back in her chair. “Next season,” she declared, “you and me, old girl. We’ll take ’em all out.”
“Please don’t,” I said. “One parent on reality TV is bad enough.”
“Did you see your father on the last Celebrity Bake Off?” asked Mum. “His savoury quiche was a disgrace.”
It was probably a measure of how far Mum and I had both come that Jon Fleming making a tit of himself on national television felt neither good nor bad.
It was just a slightly annoying fact of life, like the weather or Ed Sheeran.
“Between Strictly and the Celebrity Big Brother announcement, I must have missed that one.”
“You know, back in the day, your father used to have much more dignity than this. If he wanted to be on television, he’d just whip his dick out at the Grammys.”
I put my head in my hands. “Can we not? I don’t think I’m strong enough to talk about my dad’s dick right now.”
Always sensitive to my moods—even if I did have to express them through the language of dicks—Mum came and sat on the sofa with me. “Is something wrong, mon caneton?”
Being asked was like being pricked with a pin, if instead of a person I was a balloon full of jelly. I flobbered down into a pile of fuck. “Honestly,” I told her, “I’m not doing great.”
“Non?”
“I always knew CRAPPstonbury was going to be a reach. But the one thing it had going for it was that even if the event sucked goat arse, as long as Saint’s band was playing, it would probably be enough that he’d keep funding us.”
Mum gave me supportive mum face. “It was a good plan.”
“It was an okay plan,” I conceded. “But it had a tiny, tiny flaw.”
“Which was?” asked Judy, blunt as ever.
“That Saint’s a piece of shit who has systematically alienated everybody in his life.”
“I know a lot of men like that,” said Mum, with a shrug. “People still work with them.”
“I’m betting that’s because either the music was good or the money was good.” I sighed. “Here, the pitch I was making to two old men with quite busy, quite sorted lives was, ‘Do you want to play mediocre punk rock with someone you hate for free?’”
Judy nodded. “That does sound like a bit of a tough sell.”