Chapter 38 #2
Eventually, when I was about halfway through the checklist of “ways this could go horribly wrong” that my brain had handed me without being asked, Oliver and Jaz came out into the reception area.
There were a couple of officers with them, and they shared a few words with Oliver that I didn’t catch.
And then Jaz was getting her stuff back, such as it was, and a few moments after that we were being ushered out the door by a cluster of Dagenhamian cops who clearly regretted having ever met any of us.
Our car had been brought around from the lot they’d been storing it in, and it looked mostly fine. One taillight was out, but otherwise it seemed drivable. So we drove it.
Well, Oliver drove it. And we stayed pretty silent until we were out of Dagenham, because it felt really luck-pushy-fate-tempty to say, Hey, good job perverting the course of justice right in front of a police station.
“Did it go all right?” I asked.
Oliver seemed to be giving Jaz room to answer first, but when she didn’t, he stepped in.
“They concluded that the case wasn’t worth the Crown’s time to pursue.
Especially because we both maintained that Jaz thought I’d given her permission to take the vehicle.
” His lips twitched. “Twocking cannot exist if there is reasonable expectation of consent.”
“Yeah but…” I rubbed my eyes because I’d had barely any sleep and what I did get was on a sofa. “Would it have been simpler to just tell them we didn’t want to press charges or whatever?”
“On an American television show, yes. In real life in Britain, no.”
I groaned. “This is going to be one of those ‘That thing isn’t a thing’ things, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I’m sorry to inform you that that thing is, indeed, not a thing. Private citizens do not press criminal charges in this country. The Crown does. Technically speaking, had Jaz stolen our car, the crime wouldn’t have been against us; it would have been against the king.”
“Hang on,” I protested, “it’s a car, not a swan.”
“It’s the king’s law.”
“But it’s our car.”
“We’ll make a republican of you yet, Lucien.”
“Also,” Jaz added, only slightly sarcastically, “I didn’t steal it. I took it reasonably, believing myself to have consent.”
“Oi,” I said, parentally. “Don’t…”
“Don’t what?” asked Jaz.
“I’m not sure. But don’t do it.”
It was dark and I was facing the wrong way, but I could feel Jaz rolling her eyes at me. “Oh, I feel so secure and reformed now you’ve set these firm boundaries for me.”
And Oliver, the fucking traitor, laughed.
“Look.” It was rare for me to be the adult in the room, even if the room was an average-size car, but here I was.
“If you can both come down from the criminal high you’re on, isn’t this going to kind of fuck up the whole fostering situation?
It can’t reflect well on us that we apparently encouraged our kid to drive off in our car in the middle of the night. ”
“It’s certainly nonideal,” admitted Oliver.
My heart had taken something of a battering over the past couple of the days. So it tried to pound, failed, and just kind of flurped sadly. “How nonideal, nonideal? Like, ‘You’ve been bad parents, don’t do it again’ nonideal or ‘We no longer trust you with children or vehicles’ nonideal?”
“Honestly, it could be either.”
In the back seat, Jaz let out a single, explosive “Hah.” Then, when I pivoted to look at her, she said, “I fucking knew it. This is just you trying to get rid of me.”
I saw Oliver’s hands tense on the steering wheel.
“Jaz,” he said. “I am truly sorry for saying that we would send you away if your behaviour didn’t change.
But”—I could hear him searching for a less Olivery way to express himself, but in the end, he must have decided that Olivery was best, as long as it was the right sort of Olivery—“you’re an intelligent young woman, and you know the system better than Lucien or I do.
Do you really think if I wanted to get rid of you, I’d need to be…
economical with the truth to a police officer to do it? ”
As unwilling as Jaz was to accept that either of us could be right about anything, she couldn’t quite pretend that Oliver was wrong on that one.
“I say this,” he went on, “purely for information, and without in any way prejudging how you choose to feel about it. You were at serious risk of being charged with a crime. A petty crime, but it would have given you a record, put your biometrics into the system, and—while community service was more likely—could even have landed you in a young offender institution. My first priority was to protect you from that. If, as a result, Lucien and I are deemed inadequate parents and you’re sent to another family, that is…
” He was looking for words so, so carefully.
“That isn’t what I want, but it’s better than the alternative. ”
Jaz folded her arms and slumped back in the seat with intense sure-whatever energy. And I did my best not to flip the fuck out.
Because as much as I loved Oliver’s analytic streak, all my instincts said no, the version where we lost Jaz would be worse than any other version.
Even if—and it was the even if that put me and my instincts into a kind of uncomfortable conflict.
Because even if it was worse for her was clearly a selfish thing to think, but also I couldn’t stop thinking it and also it seemed selfish to not think it as well.
It occurred to me that this was a very tiny, very distant echo of what Jaz’s mum must have been feeling basically every day, for years. And it fucking sucked. If you love somebody, set them free was incredibly easy to say, but as words to live by, they were horrible.
Except that was the thing about Oliver. He didn’t pick his values by what was easy, or by what sounded good on a motivational poster. He actually lived them. Whatever the consequences.
Oh shit. Consequences.
“Hang on,” I said to him. “Isn’t this going to be incredibly bad for you? You know, with your job and everything.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that, while the thought had hit me like a custard pie in the face, Oliver had followed it through to its logical conclusion long before he’d opened his mouth at the police station.
“Being officially branded a bad parent doesn’t matter to the bar one way or another.
And, as for any…misstatements I may have made to the Dagenham Constabulary, that’s not wonderful, but”—he shot me a sideways keeping-his-eyes-on-the-road look—“you can’t really believe this is the worst thing anybody has ever done and still practised law? ”
“So everything will be fine?” I asked, in my most hopeful voice.
“Almost certainly.”
The almost was doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
It might not have meant much to Jaz, but I knew what Oliver’s career meant to him, and being almost certain he wouldn’t fuck it all up wasn’t a position he’d put himself in lightly.
And on top of that, the one thing I knew he cared about more than his career—apart from, like, me—was his principles, and I was pretty sure they at least discouraged lying to law enforcement.
But when it mattered, when the choice had been Jaz’s future or Oliver’s ethics, he’d chosen Jaz’s future.
It wasn’t what Atticus Finch would have done, and I was really, really glad about that.
I gave Oliver a long, slightly soppy look. And then I looked past him and out of the window and into the night, and I noticed we were taking kind of a funny route. The trip from Havering to Dagenham was less than twenty minutes, but Oliver seemed to be building in a whole lot of meandering time.
“Jaz,” he began, as we turned into an obvious-if-you-were-looking-for-it detour. “Where were you going tonight?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t answer for a really long time. And Oliver just let her not answer until eventually it was like not answering got too much for her and she said, “Home.”
“To your mother’s?” Oliver clarified.
Jaz made a vaguely affirmative grunt.
For a while Oliver let that hang. Then, “But you didn’t ask the police to call her? You had a right to.”
He was playing this cagey, but I knew from experience that Jaz had a healthy mistrust of authority figures—and an unhealthy mistrust of everybody else, which made trying to get information out of her risky. “She’s got a lot on her plate,” she muttered.
“A lot in what way?” asked Oliver.
And once again there was silence, and once again Jaz finally broke the silence with half an answer. “She has bad days.”
Oliver just echoed her. “Bad days?”
“Got nobody to look after her. Not now.”
“And who…” I tried very carefully, hoping I wasn’t about to crack something fragile, “who used to look after her?”
“Me,” said Jaz, matter-of-factly. “My nan until a few years ago, but it got worse after she went.”
I did the maths in my head. Obviously a few wasn’t a specific number, but it was usually more than two.
Which tallied with what we’d been told in the pre-fostering briefings.
But the problem with briefings was that they were clean and impersonal.
Even when they had details, they were about times and dates and exactly when a particular woman had tried to kill herself.
They weren’t about what it all looked like from the viewpoint of her then-twelve-year-old daughter.
Oliver kept driving. He was taking us in circles now and seemed to be sticking to quiet streets.
“She didn’t want me to call the ambulance,” Jaz continued, after another, longer silence. “When I found her. Said they’d take me away.”
“You did the right thing,” Oliver replied exactly the right amount of immediately.
No hesitation, but not so fast it sounded rushed or like he was protesting too much.
And that’s how it was with him. He was so fucking rigid and ethical and forthright that when he said you’d done the right thing, you knew for an absolute fact that he meant it.
Even Jaz knew. “Still took me away, though, didn’t they?”
I froze in the front seat, knowing I needed to say something like Well, at least she’s not dead. Only much, much less crap. Except I didn’t know how and I was too scared to try.
But one of the things that made me and Oliver work, and keep working, was that his too-scared-to-try and my too-scared-to-try were in very different places. “They did. Which doesn’t change the fact that you probably saved her life.”
When we got home, Jaz went straight to Spud’s pen, picked him up, and took him to her room.
And, while it probably wasn’t best dog practice or best parent practice, I didn’t say anything, and neither did Oliver.
We just flopped straight into bed. Well, I flopped straight into bed.
Oliver, even post-crisis, took a moment to put his pyjamas back on.
“Fuck,” I said, rolling into his arms. “Fuck.”
“It’s okay.” He drew me closer. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
I breathed in the scent of fabric softener and Oliver. “You were, like, so cool today.”
“If you recall, I was deeply uncool for most of it.”
“I’m shallow, though. I get my head turned easily.”
“Well, as long as it keeps turning towards me.”
“Always,” I said embarrassingly. “Seriously, though, I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”
“Without me, Jasmine—Jaz—wouldn’t have run off in the first place.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m getting the impression we both have our distinct ways of fucking up parenting.”
I heard Oliver swallow hard in the dark. “I don’t want to be like my father.”
“You’re not. David Blackwood wouldn’t have done anything you did tonight.”
“No,” Oliver agreed. “He wouldn’t.” He sighed, his fingers drifting lazily down my spine.
“I keep wanting to find something…good…positive…meaningful in the way I was raised. To think that maybe it taught me discipline or built character or, in some unhelpfully nebulous way, made me the man I am today. But I think—” He broke off, self-consciously.
“I’m sorry, I should probably be saving this for my therapist.”
What I wanted to say was You can tell me anything and I’ll never judge you or let you down or reject you because I love you more than anything in the world. But I’m an emotionally cowardly arsehole, so what I said was, “Call it a dress rehearsal.”
And, hearing what I really meant, Oliver kissed me deeply for a long, long moment that became long, long moments. Finally, we broke apart, a little breathless, staring at each other through the grey light of what was now definitely Sunday morning.
“I’m going to do better, Lucien,” Oliver whispered.
If anyone else had said that to me—and many people had, Miles and my dad included—I’d have dismissed it as bullshit.
But this was Oliver. Perfect-imperfect Oliver Blackwood, my boyfriend-for-life, the best person I knew.
Who always sorted the recycling and kept his socks in ordered pairs.
Who saw the good in me I could never see in myself.
Which meant I’d always see the good in him back.