Chapter 36
The guests stayed in the dining room, presumably still tearing each other apart over things that were mostly the fault of fate, society, or nobody. Oliver and I hurried upstairs to see what had happened this time.
The noise had come from the bathroom, and while normally we’d be extremely cautious about bursting in on anybody—especially Jaz—in that context, the door was ajar and the crash had been loud enough that it sounded like a real emergency.
And for a moment, it looked like one. A proper call-an-ambulance emergency, because the bathroom was spattered red like we were in the intro sequence to an episode of CSI: Havering.
But Jaz didn’t look hurt. Shocked, yes. Quite wet, yes. But not hurt. Also her hair was clipped back and about two-thirds damp and brightly coloured, so even without the skills of a crime scene specialist, I had a pretty clear idea of what had happened.
Which didn’t stop Oliver asking, in his most authoritative tone, “What do you think you’re doing?”
I just thanked the parenting gods he hadn’t ended with young lady.
“Roasting a chicken,” replied Jaz. “What’s it look like I’m doing?”
Honestly, what it looked like Jaz was doing was impromptu redecorating.
It wasn’t just that there was red hair dye on the walls, floor, and sink; it was that our marble bathroom organiser had somehow fallen into the toilet, where, on account of being marble, it had cracked the bowl, meaning ominous beads of slightly reddish water were now forming on the outside of our recently cleaned loo and there were little chips of white stuff all over the place that could have come from the bowl, the lid, or the bathroom organiser itself.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “it ha—”
Trouble was, Oliver wasn’t in a ‘Don’t worry, it ha—’ mood. “What possessed you to try dyeing your hair without asking us, without supervision, using our bathroom supplies, in the middle of a dinner party?”
I’d expected Jaz to shrug, but she didn’t. And honestly, that slightly scared me. “Fancied a change.”
“Look”—Oliver was giving real rubbing-the-puppy’s-nose-in-it energy—“at the damage you’ve caused.”
Jaz looked at it. “Get a plumber.”
“Is that all you can say?”
I’d seen malicious compliance faces before, but Jaz’s was practised to the point of exceptional. “Get a plumber. Please.”
Oliver opened his mouth. Then Oliver closed his mouth. Then Oliver opened his mouth.
“Going to send me to my room again?”
Oliver said nothing.
“Already grounded, so you can’t do that.”
I could see Oliver taking deep, steadying breaths.
“You gonna hit me?” Jaz smiled, although whether that was because she knew it was off the table or because she didn’t, I wasn’t sure.
“Certainly not,” said Oliver very firmly. “But you are going to clean all of this up. By yourself.”
Jaz looked at Oliver like she could not imagine hating anybody more. “Course I fucking am. I know how to fucking clean up after myself.”
“Language, Jasmine.”
“You forgotten that I’ve heard how your friends talk?”
“What’s appropriate for adults isn’t appropriate for children.”
Without even bothering to reply, Jaz pushed past him and into the corridor.
“Jasmine, come back here.”
She turned. “Getting the cleaning things, aren’t I? Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“You will not”—Oliver was setting a personal record for tense—“walk away from me while I am talking to you. You will not speak back to me. You will not do anything like”—he gestured at the bathroom floor—“like this ever again. Or else—”
I knew I wasn’t a great parent. Jaz had told me multiple times that I wasn’t a great parent.
Okay, she’d told me that I was an actively shit parent.
But if there was one thing I knew for certain, it was that you never dropped an or else unless you had something to back it up.
Because you were definitely, definitely going to get…
“Or else what?”
“Or else,” said Oliver with the fakest calm I’d ever heard him fake, “I will be forced to contact the agency and tell them that unfortunately, while Lucien and I have tried to be supportive of your needs, we are unable to provide you with the care you require.”
And in Jaz’s eyes, I saw something. A look I recognised far too well. The self-destructive comfort that came from proving that you’d lived down to somebody’s expectations. And then she walked into her room and slammed the door behind her.
* * *
“That was fucked, Oliver,” I stage-whispered as I followed him into the hall. With Jaz upstairs and guests downstairs, there was kind of nowhere we could safely have a row, but a row was coming whether I liked it or not. “You do not get to make decisions like that without consulting me.”
Oliver stopped by the front door and looked at me in genuine confusion. “Decisions like what?”
“Like what?” I was still keeping my voice low, but I felt like it was mostly making me raspy rather than stealthy. “Like ‘threatening to send Jaz back into the system’ is like what.”
The look in Oliver’s eyes was infuriatingly, almost hideously, calm. “I was just stating the facts as I saw them. We won’t be able to keep Jasmine if she doesn’t learn to—”
“You know what,” I interrupted, “I feel like this is going to be a long conversation, and we still have a dining room full of Millennials who used to like each other. How about we stick to one crisis at a time?”
At least Oliver didn’t say, Well, you’re the one who brought it up, although I was pretty sure I heard him think it. He nodded, and we went back through to see what we could salvage from the remains of the dinner party.
It turned out that there wasn’t much. Brian and Amanda had gone, as had the James Royce-Royces, leaving Peter and Jennifer in the front room waiting for a cab and Bridge and Tom in the dining room waiting for us.
I was barely through the door before Bridge was on her feet and hugging me.
“I’m sorry I ruined dinner,” she told me with such sincerity that I felt like a shithead.
“You didn’t ruin dinner,” said Tom for what I strongly suspected wasn’t the first time or the fifth. “James did.”
I tried to make a conciliatory face over Bridge’s shoulder. “I don’t think anyone did, really.”
“Although Jasmine’s antics didn’t help,” added Oliver, with a sourness I really disliked.
“Can you lay off Jaz. Please,” I pissy-begged, peeling myself out of Bridge’s arms.
“I fear laying off her is what brought us to this situation in the first place.”
For a conversation we were going to be having later, this seemed a lot like now. “Oliver, stop it. Seriously. I know you’re stressed, but…but…” Utterly but-less, I ran out of steam.
Bridge glanced between us with the kind of concern you didn’t want your friends to be showing you. “Is everything okay? Is Jaz okay?”
Oliver and I eyed each other in a how-big-a-lie-do-we-tell-here way.
“Yeah,” I said, finally. “She was trying to dye her hair and managed to knock a bunch of shit over.”
“It does happen when you’re that age. When I was fourteen I tried to dye my hair pink because I thought it would make Andy Whitwell like me. But I didn’t read the instructions properly, so it came out snot green and ruined my parents’ best towels.”
We stood there for a little while, nobody quite able to say, How about we never do anything like this ever again, and then Peter stuck his head through the door.
“Our taxi’s outside.” He paused, and I recognised the sort of cognitive dissonance a certain kind of nicely brought up middle-class person got when they were socially obliged to be grateful for something that had made their life objectively worse. “Thanks for dinner.”
“Actually,” said Tom, “can we split the ride with you?”
Peter made sure noises, and Bridge and Tom, with another round of goodbye hugs and a heartfelt “I love you” from Bridge that I was, just then, not quite in a place to reciprocate, followed them out the front door into the waiting cab.
Which left me and Oliver alone in our house. Just me, him, a conversation we needed to have, and a lot of uneaten shish barak. With a despairing look at what was left of the food, Oliver slumped into a chair and put his head in his hands.
“This,” he said, “was a terrible evening.”
And my feeling-bad-ness didn’t know where to go because here was Oliver, the man I loved, clearly falling apart at the seams. But also everything that had been low-key bothering me pretty much since Jaz had arrived had now gone beyond high-key bothering me into actual fucking crisis.
And, you know, maybe that was my fault. Maybe I should have said something more or differently or better.
Only, chump that I was, I’d kind of been working on the assumption that, with time and patience and support and encouragement, Oliver would keep on acting like the man I loved.
Not like a man who would throw a vulnerable teenager out of his house for doing teenage stuff.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry to do this now. Because, you’re right, this was a terrible evening. We’ve had a terrible evening. This is a terrible time to do anything. But…but I really need to know, did you mean what you said to Jaz?”
Except then I realised this wasn’t going to help anything. Because if he didn’t mean it, then it had just been an unbelievably cruel thing to say, and if he did…
Who was I kidding? Oliver always meant everything.
He looked up, all hollow and tormented. “She clearly has complex needs. We aren’t necessarily best placed to meet those needs.”
“And who is?”
“I don’t know,” he conceded. “Possibly she needs to be in a specialist home.”
“Because she’s traumatised?” I wasn’t sure when I’d picked up Jaz’s habit of weaponising her labels.
Oliver nodded. “Ultimately, yes. It isn’t a kindness to keep her in an environment she won’t thrive in.”
This was twisting my heart even more than I’d expected it to. “She’s not a fucking corgi, Oliver. Besides, what would her thriving actually look like?”