Chapter 33
Despite how it felt, getting to the point where the government would let us take full responsibility for the well-being of a vulnerable teenager had not, in fact, taken longer than getting ten adults with jobs to agree on a day when they could all be in the same room at the same time. But it had been pretty fucking close.
To say the day of the dinner party had been hectic would be…
well, it would be entirely accurate. Because it had been hectic.
It had started at the crack of dawn, when Oliver had got up and started removing the arils from a pomegranate.
Which I’d have offered to help with, except I didn’t know what an aril was or how to remove one.
Plus, it looked like one of those sharp-knife jobs, and the last thing any of us wanted was for us to be serving our guests a barley-and-Luc’s-finger-blood salad.
Instead, I’d tried to make myself useful in a more furniture-focused way.
Our dining table, which was lovely, hadn’t really been designed to take eleven, so we’d needed to borrow a spare from the James Royce-Royces.
That spare had been living under the stairs since we’d last tried to hold this damned party over a month ago, and I got to work shunting the two tables together, then covering them with the natural-look organic linen tablecloths that Oliver had bought from John Lewis’s when we’d first tried to hold this damned party the previous year.
“No, no, no,” he said from the doorway as I was smoothing down the wrinkles on table number one. His fingers were murderer-red from pomegranate. “Table protectors first.”
“Doesn’t the tablecloth protect the table?”
Sometimes when Oliver was being stressed, me being silly was helpful.
Sometimes, though, it was the opposite. And, sometimes, neither of us could tell which.
This was definitely the third kind of sometimes.
“The tablecloth,” said Oliver, with a slightly desperate smile, “makes things look neat and provides limited protection against stains. The table protector prevents heat damage and worse spillages.”
“Okay.” With the jury out, I gambled on playful. “So that’s a table protector to protect the table and the tablecloth to protect the table protector?”
“I’m aware that it’s fussy, but it does actually work.”
“So do we need something else to protect the tablecloth which protects the table protector which protects the table, or will the tablecloth be all right on their own?”
Oliver’s look was sliding from I am mostly enjoying the joke to I really hope you’re joking.
“The things that protect the tablecloth that protects the table are called…”
“Fuck. Place mats.”
The fact that I’d literally forgotten place mats existed put an end to my honestly pretty feeble tableware-based comedy routine. Once I’d grabbed them from the cupboard and laid them out, I followed Oliver into the kitchen.
“Remember,” I said very firmly, “this is something we’re doing with people we like because we enjoy it. It’s not a test we can fail or trap we can fall into. It’s just dinner.”
He used the back of his wrist to push a lock of hair away from his forehead, leaving a streak of scarlet pomegranate. “Rationally, I know that. But I haven’t done this level of cooking in quite a long time, and it’s harder than I remember it being.”
“I promise you,” I told him as confidently as I could manage, “this will be the best Levantine-themed meze selection thingummy any of us have ever had.” I thought for a moment. “Well, except James, probably. But he has a Michelin star, which is basically cheating.”
Somehow, that at least half worked. “I know. And you’re right. It’s just…this took a lot of organising, and I want it to go well.”
“And it will go well,” I said, in my calmest, most reassuring voice. “These are our friends. They’re just going to be happy to see us and each other. We’ve got this.”
Either convinced or making a show of being convinced for my benefit, Oliver nodded and hurried off to do whatever arcane cooking-related activity he needed to be doing next.
While I’d been forgetting place mats and trying to remind Oliver to have a sense of perspective, Jaz had been on Spud duty.
She’d done his feeds, and his walks, and by the time I was satisfied that the table was as presentable as I could get it, she’d come home, got Spud comfortable in his pen, washed her hands, and joined Oliver in the kitchen, where she was sautéing onions like a pro.
I wasn’t quite na?ve enough, or for that matter closet-Tory-voting enough, to assume this meant that being suspended had been good for her.
But I did hope that maybe now she’d had a chance to settle in, now she was getting guitar lessons off my mum, now Oliver and I had maybe managed to show we were on her side, she was starting to feel at least a little bit at home.
“And you’re sure I can’t help?” I asked, hovering in the doorway and sincerely hoping for a negative response.
If I hadn’t already worked out how much the whole dinner party thing was getting to Oliver, I’d have got the message when he replied, “Actually, there’s rice soaking over there that needs to be put on,” instead of “Oh dear God no.”
As it turned out, we were saved from discovering how badly I could fuck up the simple act of putting wet grains in hot water because the doorbell went.
And for the less than a minute it took to walk into the hall, I was grateful to whatever cosmic force had saved us from the pan of burning slush I would inevitably produce.
Then I actually opened the door and I remembered that since it was too early for guests and too late for post, that meant it could only have been bad news.
It was bad news in the shape of Next Door’s Kid’s Dad. He was wearing beige chinos and a blue polo shirt, holding a cricket ball, and looking furious. “Your guest—”
“Foster daughter,” I corrected him.
“Your foster daughter”—he put a whole lot of poison into the words—“has just fucking smashed our fucking greenhouse.”
I tried not to add have a greenhouse to the list of reasons I thought Next Door’s Kid’s Parents were wankers.
Objectively, I knew that greenhouses were perfectly normal things to have and probably some non-wankers had them.
But Next Door’s Kid’s Family had such an aura of wank that it seeped into everything I associated with them.
“When was this?” I asked, trying not to jump immediately to Are you sure it wasn’t your incredibly shitty child.
Next Door’s Kid’s Dad narrowed his eyes in a why-are-you-not-agreeing-with-everything-I-say kind of a way. “About an hour ago.”
Bollocks. The timeline checked out. About an hour ago, Jaz had been out with Spud, and unless we invented a dog-to-English translator ASAP, he wasn’t going to be much use as an alibi. “I’ll have a word with her,” I tried.
“You said that last time.” Next Door’s Kid’s Dad was raising his voice just slightly in a way that I didn’t like but also didn’t quite feel I could object to. “And look where that’s landed us.”
As preoccupied with cooking as Oliver was, his Spidey sense for social disapproval must have started tingling because he appeared, aproned, sweaty, and lightly dusted with cumin, beside me. “Hello, Richard.”
Ah yes, I’d forgotten that Next Door’s Kid’s Dad was an actual Dick.
Although not the kind I liked to get pictures of.
I mean yes, actually the kind I liked to get pictures of, in that me and Oliver had the whole pictures-of-men-named-Richard joke.
But I wouldn’t want a picture of him specifically. Because he was a dick.
“Hello, Oliver.” Next Door’s Kid’s Dad gave him a curt nod of recognition that made it way too clear he’d decided Oliver was the mature one in our relationship. “I was just telling your partner that something’s happened to our greenhouse.”
“He’s accusing Jaz of smashing it,” I clarified.
With the air of a person handing over a piece of damning evidence, Next Door’s Kid’s Dad handed Oliver the cricket ball. “Colin saw her throw this through one of the windows.”
“Oh, did he?” I said, and Oliver said, “Oh, did he?” but I think we both meant very different things by it.
“Thank you for drawing this to my attention,” Oliver continued. “I assure you it will be dealt with.”
“Make sure it is.” Next Door’s Kid’s Dad was talking to Oliver, but he made a point of looking at me.
Apparently, there was some kind of adulting rule I didn’t understand which made “Make sure it is” a perfectly acceptable way to end a conversation with a neighbour, because Next Door’s Kid’s Dad left it at that, and Oliver went straight back through to the kitchen, where Jaz had done a way better job than I would have done of not letting anything catch fire.
“We could leave this until after dinner,” I stage-whispered to Oliver. “No sense in letting it spoil our afternoon.”
But we couldn’t. Or at least Oliver couldn’t. It wasn’t in his nature. “Jasmine, I need to ask you about something.”
I could see Jaz going fight-or-flight pretty much instantly, but she managed to keep it together just long enough to say to a panful of onions, “Hang on, these are nearly done.”
“I need to talk to you now.”
I, I noticed, not we.
Jaz conscientiously turned the hob off and pivoted to face him. “What?”
“Richard from next door says you smashed his greenhouse.” Oliver was doing his best to sound firm but not angry. I wasn’t sure it was helping.
“Didn’t.”
“He says Colin saw you.”
“Lying.”
Oliver looked at Jaz, and the way he looked at her made my stomach crawl.
When I was in school we’d done To Kill a Mockingbird, and there’s this bit, right at the end, where Atticus Finch nearly turns his own son in to the cops because he thinks he might have done a murder.
And okay, that’s probably good ethics and shit because murder is bad, and okay, he’s the guy who inspired basically every lawyer to want to be a lawyer.
But my takeaway from that book has always been that Atticus Finch was a fucking terrible dad.
I was getting strong Atticus Finch energy from Oliver right now.
“And why would he do that?” he asked.
“Kids do lie,” I pointed out. I’d been trying really hard not to say because he’s a piece of shit, which meant I was way more pleased than I should have been when Jaz answered, “Because he’s a piece of shit?”
“Jasmine,” Oliver Atticused. “That’s not helpful. We’re not angry with y—”
“You got nothing to be angry about.” Jaz was backed right up against the cooker now, and I thought I could see her hands shaking. “’Cause I ain’t fucking done nothing.”
Oliver, still holding the evidence ball, put his hands up very slowly. “I’m not saying you have.”
“You fucking are.”
In Oliver’s defence, from his perspective he honestly wasn’t. In Jaz’s defence, from her perspective he totally fucking was.
“Jasmine,” said Oliver because he was still stubbornly clinging to the belief that calling her by her full name made him sound authoritative instead of like he just didn’t care. “I’ve asked you before to try to moderate your language.”
I opened my mouth to try and say…something. I wasn’t sure what exactly. Just something gap-bridging or oil-water pouring, but even if I’d been able to think of the perfect, magic phrase that would make everything better, it wouldn’t have mattered. I’d never have got a word in.
“I didn’t fucking do nothing.” Jaz wasn’t exactly screaming, but she was very, very far from having effective strategies for managing her emotions. “What about fucking innocent until proven guilty?”
I was very slightly proud of Oliver for not going off on a tangent about burden of proof and how it related to evidentiary standards in the separate spheres of jurisprudence and law enforcement. But, honestly, it might have been better if he had. “I’m just trying to find out what happened.”
“Well I don’t fucking know, do I?” Jaz was sounding almost panicked now. “I just know it wasn’t fucking me, but you don’t fucking believe me. Nobody ever fucking believes me.”
And Oliver, my poor, sweet, honest Oliver, said, “It’s not about believing. It’s about the truth.”
Because, for him, it was. For a long while after I’d found out what Oliver did for a living, I’d not been able to understand how he could defend somebody if he didn’t think they were innocent.
But after about the fourteenth time of him explaining it to me, I’d sort of got my head around it.
In his line of work, you didn’t believe in the person; you believed in the system—as shitty and broken and unfair as it was—and the ideas behind the system.
You didn’t defend your client because you thought they were a perfect angel who’d done no wrong, or even an imperfect human who’d done some wrong but not the particular wrong in question.
You did it because a zealous legal defence was their right, no matter who they were or what they were accused of doing.
Even if they were—as the slang apparently went—an experienced crim who rocked up and said, “Let’s call the crown to task. ”
Everything had gone very quiet. Jaz looked up at Oliver, almost pleading, if you could plead in a really angry way. “I didn’t. Fucking. Do it.”
And because he couldn’t not, Oliver came back with, “Language.”
With a look that was perilously close to betrayal, Jaz stormed out. I ran after her into the hall but, at least this time, she stayed in the house. I heard her footsteps on the stairs, and the slam of her bedroom door.
When I was sure she hadn’t bolted into the wilds of Havering, I went back to the kitchen, where Oliver was standing pale and stock still, the rice he’d put on in my absence boiling over in the background.
I looked at him. I looked at him and the greenhouse-murder-weapon he’d been clutching throughout the entire conversation. And I said, “That’s not Spud’s ball.”