Chapter 36 #2
And it probably said something bad about where we’d got over the last couple of months that I assumed Oliver would shoot that down. When, instead, he seemed genuinely taken aback by the question. “I will admit, I hadn’t considered that in detail. But not like this.”
“Oh right. So thriving teenagers are like porn? You can’t say what they are, but you know them when you see them?”
Oliver fully scowled at me. “Don’t be cute, Lucien. This is important.”
I fully scowled back. “I know it’s fucking important and I wasn’t being cute. I was being pissed off. You’re not the only one who gets to have takes on important things.”
“Then”—one of his eyebrows twitched upwards—“what’s your take?”
And hearing my own words, repeated back to me in that superior tone, fucking broke me.
Until that exact moment, I’d never doubted that no matter how much I joked about Oliver being cooler and smarter and more successful and just generally better than I was, he truly did see me as an equal.
As a partner. As someone whose thoughts and beliefs and takes mattered.
“My take,” I said, shocked at how icy I could apparently sound, “is that she’s fine.
She’s not always happy, but why would she be?
She’s been taken from her family and shunted from stranger to stranger, school to school, since she was twelve.
My take is that now she’s here, she’s doing her homework, she’s cooking with us, she’s only got in one fight, she’s started learning guitar and is taking it seriously.
My take is that Mum and Spud both love her—”
“They both love anybody,” cut in Oliver.
“That’s not a fucking failing,” I yelled.
“I never said it was.”
“Fucking hell, Oliver. This is not a debate. I’m trying to tell you how I feel, and I want you to just…
I don’t know, fucking listen? Not cross-examine me.
And I’m sorry if you think the fact that Mum and Spud both love Jaz isn’t admissible in court.
But I love her too. And…” I broke off, discovering I was perilously close to tears and, while I was normally fine to cry in front of Oliver, now was not normally.
“And,” I finished, “I love you. And I want to spend my life with you and have a family with you. But how can I when…when…”
Oliver’s eyes went their coldest, most ruined grey. “When what?”
“When…” I felt trapped. I felt like I was trapped in a cold, dark place and slowly running out of air.
“When it’s like…God, saying ‘It’s like I don’t know you’ is such a fucking cliché, but…
you come home from court with these stories about your clients and how even though they’ve broken the rules, they’re still human beings and…
and I don’t get how you can have so much empathy for all those pickpockets and shoplifters and so little for our own fucking kid. ”
This was going to be a firstly situation. Oliver was going to say firstly and then list a bunch of reasons why I was wrong, and a tiny little piece of me was going to hate him for it.
“Firstly,” he said, “Jasmine isn’t our child.
She’s our foster child. She still has a mother who she should, if things go well, eventually be able to go back to.
Secondly, yes, all those pickpockets and shoplifters as you call them are indeed human beings.
My duty to them is to represent them at trial, and I do that. My duty to Jasmine is to…”
And for once in a lifetime of having an answer for everything, Oliver…didn’t.
“Is to what?” I demanded, trying not to sound triumphant.
In this case, though, the lapse had been only momentary. “Set a positive example and, with compassion, hold her to high standards.”
“Okay, but whose standards? Because when I signed up for this, I thought I was going to be doing it with you but”—don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it—“ever since Jaz arrived, there’s been times”—don’t say it—“I’ve felt like I’m living with your fucking dad.”
There was a frankly terrifying lack of visible reaction. “That seems needlessly hyperbolic.”
And I broke a little bit more. “Oh fuck off, Oliver. I’m not in a mood to think big words are sexy today. I mean it. You have been a judgemental, high-handed, closed-minded, borderline fucking heartless—”
“My, my,” he drawled, “how have you put up with me?”
“Stop being a dick. I’m fucking serious. I’m not saying you’ve been a monster—”
“You just called me borderline heartless.”
“Well,” I pointed out, “you did threaten to ship Jaz back to the pound.”
His eyes widened. “I did no such thing.”
“I was right there. I heard you.”
“No.” Oliver was beginning to fray, very slightly, around the edges. “She asked what the consequences would be if she continued to act inappropriately, and I explained.”
“You can’t explain to a child you’re going to send them away.”
“What was I supposed to say?”
“Literally anything else.” I threw my hands in the air.
“Look, I realise I’m not great at this, either, but if there is one thing I know about, it’s feeling like you have to reject people before they can reject you.
It’s so, so, so obvious that Jaz has been waiting for the day we say, ‘Sorry, you’re not worth it, here’s a bin liner. ’ And now we’ve said it—”
“We haven’t said it.”
“She feels like we’ve said it, and frankly, I feel like we’ve said it. And that’s the same fucking thing.”
“Then I’m sorry I misspoke. But perhaps I wouldn’t have if you’d had my back. Just once.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “I’ve had your back, Oliver.”
“You have sometimes refrained from actively undermining me. I wouldn’t call that having my back.”
“Well…well…your back has been doing shit I don’t agree with.”
“You mean disciplining our foster daughter?”
“I mean acting like that can only mean one thing.”
“It means quite a limited set of things.” Oliver ran a fraught hand through his hair. “None of which you seem to want to do. I didn’t ask to be the strict parent. You forced the role on me.”
“Bullshit,” I exploded. “You jumped into that role with both feet because that’s what you think parenting is. Because you were raised by arseholes, and for some reason I honestly can’t begin to understand, you’ve decided you want to follow in their arsehole footsteps.”
There was the sort of silence you got when you said something terrible to someone you really cared about. Of all the sorts of silence, it was the absolute suckiest.
“Oliver,” I tried, feeling sticky and messed up because part of me wanted to take back everything I’d said, but also…I didn’t? Because it was, like, true? Or close enough to true that I needed him to hear it.
And then, because I didn’t know how to get past the sorry-not-sorry-but-sorry of it all, the sucky silence continued until Oliver said “I see” in this quietly devastated voice. Followed by, “I…I’m not sure there’s anything more we should say to each other right now. I…I think I might go to bed.”
Once again, I was left in that dithery confused state because what I wanted more than anything was to go upstairs with Oliver and lie in his arms and pretend none of this had ever happened. Except it had. So I couldn’t.
“I…” The word hung there like a loose thread from a sleeve. “I might not?”
“Then…I’ll see you in the morning?” He sounded uncertain. The same way I felt uncertain. Like neither of us knew how badly we’d fucked this.
“Yeah,” I replied.
That was when I realised that this would be the first time I’d watched Oliver go to bed without me in…
maybe in ever. And I couldn’t bear it, so I followed him to the foot of the stairs, and then when he went up I went past and into my study, where I found Spud still curled up in his pen.
We should have let him out after the guests had gone, really, only we’d got distracted stabbing each other in the emotional liver.
“Well,” I said to him as he skipped up to me with oblivious puppyish happiness, “it’s just you and me again tonight.”
“Ruff,” said Spud.
And it turned out, that was exactly what I needed to hear.