Chapter 37
I’ve always been a heavy sleeper. Probably because my sleep patterns—like most of my lifestyle—were extremely unhealthy. So when Oliver came down a few hours later, I didn’t wake up until he was physically shaking my arm.
I made totally dignified blurgling noises and swatted at something I might have been dreaming about but instantly forgot. “Wharaugh?”
“Do you really think you couldn’t raise children with me?”
“Wur?”
Oliver was sitting on the arm of the sofa wearing his stripiest pyjamas and his most serious, most introspective expression. “Do you really feel that if it doesn’t work out with Jasmine—”
That woke me straight up. “Hold on, don’t turn Jaz into some kind of…dry run.”
To my surprise, Oliver looked immediately apologetic. “Of course not. And you’re right. I just mean—do you think that…because of the way that things have gone with Jasmine. Because of—have the last few weeks really made you so convinced that I…that I can’t be a good father?”
Sometimes when somebody asks you a really horrible question, the best answer you can give them is the time it took you to think of one.
And I was beginning to suspect this was one of those situations.
Still, since I’d used the thinking time already, I did my best to use some actual words as well.
“It’s more—I don’t know if the kind of dad you’re trying to be and the kind of dad I’m trying to be are the kinds of dad who can dad together.
” Then I very quickly added, “Butthatdoesn’tmeanIwanttobreakuporanything. ”
“Are you sure?” asked Oliver. Which made me taste bile and possibly blood. “Because…because if I’m honest, I’m not sure I’d want to stay with me if I felt the way you said you feel.”
This was getting dangerous. Losing-things-you-loved dangerous. “How do you think I feel?”
“You’ve made that very clear, Lucien. You as good as said—no, you did say—I was turning into my father.”
Okay, there was that. “Yeah, but not all the time. Just, like…”
“Just when I’m around Jasmine?”
With the stakes being so high, it might have been a bad time to call him out, but this was kind of the whole problem. “Her name,” I told him, “is Jaz.”
I could see him mouthing out the word, rolling it around like a Werther’s Original. “I suppose that is rather indicative.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”
Oliver looked down at his hands. He was perched on the arm of the sofa only inches away from my head and he looked small. Really, really small. And then he went on, in the quietest voice I’d ever heard, “I don’t know what to do.”
That was so unexpected that I had no idea how to handle it. If it was good or bad or both or neither or anything. “About what? Jaz? Us? The leftover shish barak?”
He was breathing very deliberately now, like he was worried he might forget how. “I…I didn’t expect this to be easy.”
We’d just come off the worst and biggest argument we’d ever had, including some of the really big ones from back when his dad had been at his worst, so I didn’t want to escalate.
But I’d also noticed something. “Oliver,” I said as gently as I could manage.
“You said that in the pub too. Is it…is it at all possible that you’re saying it because deep down, there’s a little part of you that sort of… y’know. Did. Expect it to, I mean.”
Oliver blinked. “Credit me with some self-awareness.”
He could, on the whole, have had much worse reactions. “No, seriously, think about it. If you’re totally, completely, one hundred million percent honest with yourself—”
“Lucien”—he was trying to sound playful, but I could see I’d hit a nerve—“criticise my parenting all you like, but please never cite a percentage greater than a hundred.”
“If you’re totally honest with yourself, didn’t part of you think this would be…easier for you than it is for other people?”
“Because I have such an unbelievably high opinion of myself?”
“Because you’re really good at stuff. You’ve been really good at stuff your whole life. And I know you’ve always had your issues and there’s always been things you’ve struggled with, but it’s always been, like, internal stuff. Not stuff other people can see and judge you on.”
Oliver had gone very quiet, and I tried to pivot into a more positive direction.
“You did great at school, and at university, then went on to do a very cool job that you also do great at. You’re an amazing cook.
You’re good in social situations. Dogs love you.
Even Next Door’s Kid at least pretends not to think you’re a cock.
I’m not saying either of us have covered ourselves in glory over the last few months, but I think part of the reason I’ve handled things better is because I’m way more used to fucking up than you are. ”
For a little while, Oliver was silent, unable to manage more than a weak smile.
“This has been so hard,” he said at last. “More than hard—terrifying. And not just the fostering, but all of it. You’ve probably already noticed this, Lucien, but we’re…
we are actually building a life together, and that’s—that’s probably the most difficult, most frightening thing I’ve ever done. ”
“Hey, I’m not that difficult to live with.”
It had been a joke, but Oliver was in a sincerity space, so it didn’t quite land. “Sorry. No,” he stumbled. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean we have so much to lose now. Not just the simple fact of each other. But everything we are together.”
That was, honestly, kind of meltingly romantic. But I wasn’t totally sure I wanted to let the romantic meltiness of it distract me from the fact that things were still in a kind of a fucky place, coparenting-wise. So I stayed silent, and let Oliver continue.
“I think…” he went on, far more uncertainly than I was used to him being, “I know you said that teenagers resent everyone, but I don’t think I was emotionally ready to be so consistently rejected.”
“Pretty sure teenagers reject everyone too.”
“She doesn’t reject you.”
I tried not to burst out laughing. “She does. Of course she fucking does. She’s constantly going on about how I’m a shit parent who can’t drive, and she obviously wants to go back to her mum.”
“With you,” Oliver insisted, “she’s coming around. With me, she isn’t. You called this a learning process, but where I’m concerned, she isn’t learning.”
Oh. Yeah. I’d dodged this last time because I didn’t want to make Oliver sad. Only now he was sadder. It was almost like emotional cowardice wasn’t a good idea, long term. “The thing is,” I said, “I didn’t actually mean a learning process for her; I meant a learning process for us.”
“And what am I supposed to learn?” he asked despairingly. “To put up with her insulting me—insulting us—and ignoring us and occasionally sabotaging us until she turns eighteen and leaves?”
It said some weird things about where I was emotionally, at least as far as Jaz was concerned, that even expressed in Oliver’s most cynical, most rational terms, it didn’t sound like the worst thing in the world. “Maybe? That’s basically what we’d do if she was our own kid.”
“If she was our own kid, we would have had fourteen years of setting positive examples, so she would hopefully be a lot more reasonable.”
“Okay,” I said. “Two things. Firstly”—apparently I could firstly with the best of them—“if you really think that, you’ll be in for a massive shock if we ever do adopt.
I’m pretty sure all kids are nightmares one way or another.
Secondly, this is about family, Oliver. Family isn’t about rules and boundaries and best practices.
Kids or no kids, you’re my family, and I’m not with you because you’re setting me positive examples. I’m with you because I love you.”
He looked over at me, conflicted in a way that made me feel conflicted, committing us both to one big confliction loop. “And I love you. But while William Morris might have had a point about romantic relationships, I don’t think even he would have applied the same principle to parenting.”
My face sagged. “You’re going to make me ask who William Morris is, aren’t you?”
“He wrote a poem called ‘Love Is Enough,’ which allegedly once received the three-word review ‘It is not.’”
“Okay, but it is, though, isn’t it?”
Oliver gazed at me. “For us, of course. But we’re grown men and largely responsible for our own well-being. Where a child is involved, there are—”
“Fuck me, Oliver.” I flopped my head against the sofa cushions in exasperation.
“Will you please wake up and smell the…the William Morris. I mean obviously when you’re looking after a kid you need to, like, make sure they don’t starve or join a gang or get hooked on smack or whatever.
And that shit is probably harder than it seems. But after that, love is, like—fucking hell, it’s not just enough, it’s everything. ”
“That’s a nice sentiment, but—”
“Do you think that I’ve gone from being a miserable twentysomething fuckup who hates himself and lives under a pile of abandoned pizza boxes to a very happy thirtysomething fuckup who you’re building a life with because you set me clear boundaries?”
His face grew just the tiniest bit pinched. “Well no, but—”
“You changed my world,” I told him, breathless and only partly from all the swearing, “because you loved me. Just loved me. For who I was, with all my weird bits and my shit bits and my socks all over the floor. I didn’t change because you tried to change me—”
“That would have been difficult to achieve and counterproductive.”
He was so close to getting it I was practically furious. “Right. So why would Jaz be any different?”
“Because she’s a child.”
“She’s a person. And she needs the same thing I need, the same thing you need, if you’d just fucking admit it. She needs to know we care about her no matter what, that we’re here for her no matter what. That we’re on her side, even if she really did murder an evil racist.”
Oliver might have been with me up until that last one. “Murder a what?”
“Sorry. Book thing. Very out of character for me, I know.”
“Are you talking about To Kill a Mockingbird?”
“We did it at school. Leave me alone. The point is that she needs to know we’ve got her back.
Even if she wrecked the bathroom. Even if she put meat in your lentils.
Even if she smashed next door’s greenhouse, which by the way she definitely didn’t.
That doesn’t mean we can’t do boundaries and whatever.
It means”—I was running out of words and feels at about the same time—“it means we just have to love her, Oliver. You can do it for me. Do it for her.”
For a moment, Oliver just sat there, processing. And then in a small, quiet voice, he said, “What if I can’t?”
“You can.”
“I don’t think that’s an answer.”
Crossing my legs, I swivelled around on the sofa to face him. “If you can’t, you keep trying.”
Oliver’s breathing was getting slower and more deliberate again. He moistened his lips and said, still quiet and still small, “It’s not that simple.”
“William Morris, Oliver. Remember William fucking Morris.”
“I’m not sure he’s an authority.”
Reaching out, I took hold of both his hands. “This is as simple as we make it. It’s as complicated as we make it. Just try, Oliver. Basic, primary-school-level, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other try.”
Oliver was blinking back tears. “I’ll—saying you’ll try to try seems facile, but it might be the best I can do in the moment.”
“You know what?” I said. “I’ll fucking take it.”
“Ruff,” agreed Spud, who had scampered back into the living room at some point while me and Oliver were spattering our hearts all over the floor. Maybe he thought they were dog treats.
I scooped him up onto my lap. “Hello, boy. You know Daddy Luc is right about this, don’t you?”
“Ruff,” he replied. But he was squirmier than he normally was when he got lap time, and he jumped back onto the floor. “Ruff. Ruff.”
This was my fault. I’d messed up his cirwhateverian rhythms, and now he thought it was walkies time, which was why he was dashing back and forth between the sofa and the front door like little Timmy had fallen down the well.
Only the well was in our front drive and Timmy was, like, his need to wee or something.
“Should I take him out?” I asked Oliver.
With what I suspected was a conscious effort to respect my skills as a dog owner, Oliver replied, “If you think he needs it.”
Rising with the grace of a man who had slept on a sofa, I did the dog-summoning thigh pat. “C’mon, boy, let’s go into the garden.”
Normally that would have worked. But instead of bounding over to be rewarded for a bowel movement, Spud plonked his arse in front of the front door and said, “Ruff,” and then, “Mruff?” and then, “Aroou?”
“Sorry,” I called through to Oliver. “He seems a bit…off rhythm? I might need to take him to the park or something.”
“I’m sure he’ll calm down,” Oliver called back. “But it really is up to you.”
Partly from guilt, partly because sometimes a late-night walk could be nice, especially if your head needed clearing, I hooked Spud up to his lead and took him out into the street, hoping he’d stop acting weird after he’d been able to run around for a bit.
He kept acting weird. He yanked the lead taut running to the end of the drive, then sat down. Then ran back. Then did it all over again, yapping as he went.
Still pyjamaed and weary, Oliver appeared on the front porch. “Is everything okay?”
I looked down at Spud. He didn’t seem okay. He seemed agitated. And not just Daddy-Luc-used-me-as-an-emotional-support-animal agitated.
And while I was puzzling over that, Oliver asked, “Lucien, what’s happened to the car?”
I looked at the car. Or rather, I looked at Spud, who was sitting where the car should have been, his tail hammering on the floor as if to say, Why are you humans so dense. And I was suddenly, horribly certain that I knew exactly what he’d been trying to tell us.
“Fuck the car,” I said. “Where’s Jaz?”