Chapter 35
You know that bit in a horror movie where everybody realises that they’ve been eating human flesh this whole time and there’s this silence broken only by the clink of people putting down cutlery and everybody starts avoiding each other’s eyes?
This was that, only without the cannibalism.
“Do you have any idea,” Oliver began, and knowing what I did about Jaz, do you have any idea was quite possibly the worst opening he could possibly have picked, “how wrong”—okay wait, that was the worst opening—“what you just did is?”
“No,” said Jaz, “because I don’t know right from wrong, do I? I’m the girl that gets suspended and puts kids in bins and breaks windows and put meat in lentil stew on account of how my headcase mum fucked me up, remember?”
Jaz’s righteous indignation was slightly marred by the fact that she had, in fact, done three out of those four things.
“Jasmine.” Oliver’s voice was calm. “Go to your room. We’ll discuss this later.”
For a moment I thought Jaz was going to literally laugh in Oliver’s face instead of just metaphorically laughing in Oliver’s face. “Oh my God, are you sending me to bed without any supper? What will I do? You gonna take away my pony next?”
“Jasmine.” Why Oliver still believed that repeating Jaz’s full name over and over was on the same planet as a good idea, I couldn’t work out. “Go to your room. And leave your phone.”
I’d expected her to fight him on that one, but she’d gone too deep into not giving a shit. She yanked her phone out of her pocket and skidded it across the table at Oliver. “Right. Fine. Whatever.”
She made for the door, but Oliver somehow, somehow, wasn’t finished yet. “Jasmine, please don’t just say, ‘Right, fine, whatever,’ then walk away.”
“You told me to go to my room,” she said, half turning. “I’m going to my room.”
I reached out and rested a hand on Oliver’s arm. “Let her go,” I said. “Please. We’re having dinner.”
Perhaps it was the please that did it because Oliver never could resist a social nicety.
And also because he, like, cared about me and shit.
Either way, he said nothing else, and Jaz took the opportunity to slip away as discreetly as she could manage, given the apocalyptically massive scene she’d caused.
“Y’know,” said Brian, “if I could be sure my kid would turn out like that, I’d almost be willing to have one.”
“When it’s your fucking uterus,” replied Amanda, “be my guest.”
Under my hand, Oliver’s arm was trembling slightly. “Jasmine is wonderful in many ways,” he said carefully, “but fostering has not been without its challenges.”
“How about,” I suggested, “we just move on and… What do you want to do about food?”
Oliver was looking down at his contaminated mujadara. “Honestly, I think I’ll be fine. I can fix myself something later.”
The carnivores in the room went guiltily back to their shish barak.
And, for about as long as it took to eat a dumpling, we all sat in awkward silence until Bridge, as much to get the conversation moving as anything else, piped up with, “I don’t suppose I can bore people with baby pictures, can I?
It’s a bit”—she pulled a self-consciously embarrassed face—“new-mum stereotype, but, well, new mum.”
James Royce-Royce’s phone was already out. “Oh, if that’s what we’re doing, I also have some fabulous ones of Baby J I don’t think I’ve shown you.”
Brian and Amanda shared weary looks. “I suppose,” she said after a moment of silent couple telepathy, “it’s better than sitting here watching Oliver not eat rice.”
“I’m sorry, I’m being inconveniently vegan again.” He was trying to make it sound lighthearted, but between being tricked into eating meat and having a public blowup with his foster daughter, we could tell his heart wasn’t all that light actually, thank you.
Which was why Amanda felt the need to come back with a “That’s not what—” which she was unable to finish before she was drowned out by Bridge and James introducing their baby and toddler photos as if they were a plate of Levantine dumplings.
“And there he is on his tricycle again.”
“And there she is rolling over.”
“Here’s him standing on one foot—you know most children can’t do that until four.”
“He was holding him up,” James Royce-Royce clarified.
“Nothing in the books says you can’t be holding him up,” protested James Royce-Royce.
Bridge, who had been leaning across the table to show me her own pictures, returned her arse to her seat. “Autumn’s just started blowing bubbles. It’s sooooo cute.”
James Royce-Royce nodded. “That’s a five-month development milestone. Although I’m sure Baby J started when he was only—”
“James.” Bridge seemed to be wincing with her whole body. “Could you maybe…not?”
“Not what?” asked James Royce-Royce, in such sincere innocence I almost felt bad.
“Not,” said Bridge hesitantly, “um. Not turn around every time I mention something about Autumn and tell me that Baby J did it better?”
Even James Royce-Royce, drama queen that he was, didn’t do the fingertips-to-chest-how-very-dare-you gesture often. He was doing it now. “Well, pardon me for being proud of my son.”
“It’s not about being proud of your son,” Bridge tried to explain.
“You just kind of take all the oxygen out of the room,” added Tom.
James Royce-Royce took an ironically deep breath. “All the oxygen out of the room.”
“This is new and exciting for us.” Bridge sounded slightly plaintive. “But it’s hard to be excited when you won’t give us a moment to…well. Be excited.”
The fingertips-to-chest-how-very-dare-you gesture was rare enough. James Royce-Royce kicked it up a notch to the palms-crossed-faux-mortification pose. “Oh no! There’s a space that isn’t totally dedicated to celebrating a straight couple’s biological child! Whatever shall we do?”
“First,” said Tom, way snappier than I’d ever heard him, even when he’d been dumping me, “not fucking straight.”
“And of course we want to celebrate Baby J too,” added Bridge, who was psychologically incapable of not seeing at least a little bit of the other person’s point of view. “But you can be a touch…” To my horror, Bridge was shooting a help me out look squarely in my direction. “A touch, you know…”
“Dominatey?” I suggested, trying to throw it out there like a tennis ball and realising only afterwards that it might have been a bit more like a stick of dynamite.
“Dominatey!” James Royce-Royce projected.
“Don’t want to be a dick, Luc,” James Royce-Royce added, “but that’s not even a real word.”
I shouldn’t have got involved, because it inevitably meant teams were going to form, and once teams formed it was all over.
“All Luc means,” Bridge said, making the teamification irreversible, “is that I’m not the only one who’s noticed and not the only one who’s been bothered.”
James Royce-Royce fixed me with a look of real betrayal. “Is that true, Luc?”
I did little bit fingers.
“Well, of all the—” For a moment, James Royce-Royce looked genuinely betrayed. “I’d expect that from her, but as a gay man, I’d have thought you’d understand.”
Aaaand now we were playing the bad gay card. Shit. “Hold on, that is not fair.”
“Also, once again”—Tom was fully glowering now—“feeling pretty fucking erased over here.”
“I just meant,” said James Royce-Royce—and if the teams hadn’t fucked everything, this would, because nothing good ever came after I just meant—“that you should see our perspective. Fostering is different, of course, but we’ve both had to go through a lot of intrusive poking and prodding and proving we’re worthy just to get something that straight”—he just about checked himself—“opposite-sex couples take for granted.”
The late-in-the-game change of terminology didn’t entirely placate Tom, but he retreated to the quiet kind of angry. Bridge, who hated the thought of making anyone feel bad in any way, was close to welling up with a mix of hurt and sympathy and just general sad.
Then there was Jennifer.
Jennifer was sitting very still, and Peter said, definitely on her behalf, “James, mate, believe me, not all straight people take having kids for granted.”
I liked to think that, had I been in James’s position, I’d have handled things better, but who was I kidding?
I’d have gone completely to pieces. Especially because, teams-wise, things seemed to be lining up into “James and James” and “everybody else.” So on the whole, he could probably have said something a lot worse than, “I’m sorry, Peter, but it’s simply not the same. ”
Okay. Maybe not a lot worse.
“Ex. Fucking. ’Scuse me,” said Jennifer in a voice so slow and so careful you could almost miss the rage and pain in it. “Do you want to talk about getting poked and prodded and made to fill out forms? Do you want to talk about being made to feel inadequate?”
“You shouldn’t feel inadequate because you’re not using your body as an incubator,” cut in Amanda.
Which I think she’d intended to be supportive, but it didn’t land that way with Jennifer. “Well, I do anyway.”
“Well, that’s fucked in the head.”
Charitably, Amanda meant that it was fucked in the head on a societal level, but, once again, it didn’t land that way with Jennifer. “Oh, sorry, Amanda,” she snapped. “I forgot that feeling sad because I might never have children of my own makes me a bad feminist.”
“And what does ‘children of my own’ mean?” demanded James Royce-Royce.
Oliver, who for this whole conversation had just been staring into his bowl of rice, lentils, and malicious lamb, took a measured breath. “I think that these are complex topics, and clearly we’re very—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” half bellowed Brian, “can’t you have a fucking opinion for once in your fucking life?”
Okay, this was past teams and into an all-against-all knife fight. I got as far as “Hey” before Brian barrelled on.
“We came out here,” he said, “to have dinner. Not to have baby shit rammed down our throats.”
The softer spoken of the James Royce-Royces raised a pale eyebrow. “Choice of words?”
“You’re our friend,” pleaded Bridge, now properly crying. “You should care about our baby shit because we care about it.”
“Please”—Amanda stood up in a decisive kind of way—“carry on telling me what I should care about. That’s exactly what I want from a dinner party.”
Jennifer, having spoken her piece, had gone deadly quiet, but Peter—one arm around her shoulder—still had voice left in him. “It doesn’t matter to me what you do or don’t care about, but if you could go five minutes without pissing on everybody else’s life choices, that would be fab, actually.”
“Particularly,” added James Royce-Royce, “when those life choices have come at such immense personal cost.”
Brian was on his feet as well. “Right, of course. Because we’re the ones who are doing it wrong, aren’t we? Because we didn’t hit thirty and suddenly decide to change our entire personalities overnight.”
“Our personalities didn’t change overnight,” Bridge protested. “It’s just…well—it’s hard to explain.”
Amanda folded her arms. “Yeah, yeah. Brian and I wouldn’t understand, would we? Because being a parent is so magical and transformative and we’re denying ourselves the wonders of life if we don’t shackle ourselves with a hungry squealing money sink for the next twenty years.”
“I mean, I think they stop squealing eventually,” I tried, which earned me an I love you but that didn’t help look from Oliver.
“Well, I’m sorry.” James Royce-Royce had joined the standing crowd, and James Royce-Royce was sitting beside him trying desperately to tell him not to through eye movements.
“But the real simple truth is that ever since Baby J came into our lives—even though he’s not our own child”—he glared at Jennifer, who in the interim had also started crying, albeit with barristerial reserve.
“James,” she managed, “I really didn’t mean—”
“I have never,” James Royce-Royce continued, “experienced such joy or such pride as I have with Baby J. Especially—”
In our immediate circle, nobody could do a face like thunder quite as well as Brian.
I think it was the beard, which made him look a bit like a friendlier version of Thor.
Well, normally friendlier. “Especially what? Especially compared to selfish pricks like me and Amanda who waste our time and energy on crap the rest of you have grown out of?”
“You do play a lot of video games,” said Tom, whose catty streak I’d almost forgotten in the decade since we dated.
“Especially,” James Royce-Royce finished, “because Baby J will be under a microscope his whole life because, unless things get radically better in the next twenty years, nobody will ever let him forget that he’s the adopted son of two gay men.”
“Pretty sure Autumn won’t forget she’s biracial in a hurry either,” replied Tom, who had abandoned anger in favour of withering sarcasm. “But somehow I still manage to avoid treating her like she’s the second coming of Jesus, Elvis, and Einstein all at once.”
There were some fires that Oliver would always put his hand back into. “I think,” he said, “we’re clearly all feeling things very strongly right now and—”
But before Brian could tell him to shut up again, we were interrupted by an almighty crash from upstairs.