Chapter 40 #2
I was so relieved that we’d got away with the whole twocking incident that when Oliver said, “Actually, there is one more thing,” I thought I was having an auditory hallucination.
And from her expression, I got the impression Esther was feeling similarly. “Why do I get the feeling you’re about to push your luck?”
Oliver was sitting bolt upright with the kind of posture you saw in office diagrams about how to sit with good posture. “I think now is an appropriate time to talk about Jasmine visiting her mother.”
From the look on Esther’s face, she did not think now was an appropriate time. “You think directly after she stole—”
“Took with reasonable expectation of consent.”
I’d never seen somebody put quite as much grudging into an expression of grudging respect as Esther did. “—after she took your car with a reasonable expectation of consent is a good time to talk about changing the terms of her placement? Because in my professional opinion, this is guilt talking.”
In my have-been-with-him-for-five-years experience, she was exactly half right. Oliver clearly did feel incredibly guilty about how things had gone with Jaz, and not just the whole car-stealing thing. But he would also never, ever, ever suggest a course of action he didn’t sincerely believe in.
“Okay,” I said, “but I didn’t give her a reasonable expectation that we consented to her taking our car, so I don’t feel guilty. And I think it’d be a good idea for her to see her mum too.”
“Noted,” said Esther, “but you are an inveterate people pleaser.”
“She went to Dagenham last night,” Oliver went on, “which is where her mother’s flat is. Lucien tells me she was deeply upset when Ms. Johnson didn’t attend their first meeting at the school.”
“She was,” I confirmed. “And you know that because you were there.”
“I was there,” agreed Esther. “Ms. Johnson wasn’t. And, as you point out, Jasmine found that upsetting.”
“From everything I’ve seen,” Oliver continued, “her relationship with her mother is profoundly important to her. I think she’ll benefit from being able to maintain it.”
Esther didn’t say, Why does everybody think they’re a fucking expert, but she didn’t need to.
“Jasmine’s mother,” she said, “is highly resentful of the foster system and passes that resentment along to Jasmine when she’s allowed contact with her.
She has complex mental health needs which Jasmine is not emotionally equipped to deal with, and those needs, amongst other things, make her extremely unreliable, so on top of that she makes Jasmine feel abandoned when, like she did last time, she simply fails to appear. ”
“I mean,” I said, “that sounds like my dad, only he doesn’t have mental health as an excuse. He’s just a prick.”
Oliver, though, took a different tack. “Might I ask when contact was last tried?”
“When Jasmine was first put into care,” replied Esther.
“So two years ago? That’s a long time for a fourteen-year-old.”
Esther narrowed her eyes at Oliver. “I’m beginning to think you’re a very good lawyer.”
“I do my best.”
“If you think this will make things easier”—Esther’s voice was a low tone of warning—“I’ll tell you for free. It won’t.”
That made me shift uncomfortably in my seat, but Oliver just nodded his most I’m-completely-on-top-of-this nod. “I’m not concerned about making my life easier,” he said. “I’m concerned about making Jaz’s life better. I’m very aware that those are different propositions.”
Sometimes, all I really wanted to do was point at Oliver and say, Yeah, what he said. This was definitely one of those times. Although in the end I went with an even cleaner, even simpler, “Same.”
It was pretty clear that Esther still had Concerns. The kinds of Concerns where you could hear the capitalisation, but it was hard to say no to Oliver when he was in the mode where he said things like I’m very aware that those are different propositions.
And so she reluctantly agreed.
It felt good—really, really good—to be on the same page with Oliver again. I just hoped the page we were on didn’t have This is a gigantic fucking mistake scrawled over it. But, even if it did, it was our page and our gigantic fucking mistake, and we’d figure it out together.
* * *
Getting Esther on board with letting Jaz see her mother more often had been tough, but in a lot of ways it wasn’t the most important thing. The most important thing was making sure Jaz was on board with it.
After the meeting, I’d gently pointed out to Oliver that maybe we could have saved ourselves a lot of bother by asking Jaz first and then just dropping the whole thing if she hadn’t been cool with the idea.
But then he’d gently pointed out back that if Jaz had been in favour—and it seemed likely she would be—and then Esther had said it was impossible, it would have meant we’d got Jaz’s hopes up for no reason and would probably have been another mark on her long list of “reasons never to trust those two arseholes again.”
Okay. He didn’t use that exact language.
But however he’d expressed it, we remained as joyously same-page dwelling as ever, and that evening, when Jaz got home from school and, with teenage predictability, slunk into the kitchen to grab herself two slices of bread, we were waiting for her.
“Jaz,” said Oliver as casually as he could manage, which, honestly, wasn’t very, where Jaz was concerned. “We’ve—there’s something we’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
Jaz froze. She looked like she trusted Oliver about as much as the global community of beachgoers trusted sharks immediately after the first Jaws movie was released. “Is this about my hair?”
Now she mentioned it, her hair being half dyed, and badly half dyed at that, did make her look a bit like I’d put her head in the washing machine with a pair of my red silk boxers. “We can probably book you in at a salon,” I told her. “Or if you’d rather do it yourself, one of us can help you.”
Still wary, Jaz stood there eyeballing us with one hand lightly, and slightly self-consciously, resting on her head.
“But actually,” said Oliver, “we wanted to talk about something else. We had a meeting with Esther today about…about what happened, and we were wondering…”
Jaz was getting increasingly tense. Not stealing-the-car-and-driving-to-Dagenham tense, but quite possibly running-out-the-room tense.
“We can’t make any promises,” he went on, “because unforeseen problems do arise. But if you would like, Esther has said we can try to arrange for you to meet more regularly with your mother.”
We’d had Jaz too long to expect her to go all Little Orphan Annie, to leap in the air and be all, “Gee whiz, misters, would I?” During our discussion with Esther, we’d run a range of scenarios, and the one we got was close to our best case. Which was that she said, “Y’what?”
“We thought,” I chimed in, because this needed to be a both-of-us thing, “that if you were okay with it, we’d start seeing if we could arrange for you to visit your mum more often.”
She shrugged. “Whatever.”
Yeah, that had also been part of our best-case scenario.
“Right,” I said. “Thing is, we do actually need a bit more than that. I know you’re sick of everybody telling you how fucking child-centred they’re being, but we aren’t going to do this unless we’re really sure it’s what you want.
And that means you’re going to have to, um, tell us. ”
Jaz made a kind of shudder that suggested having a sincere opinion about anything Oliver or I suggested was unthinkable to her, unless that opinion was It’s shit and you’re both shit.
“Let’s try it this way,” said Oliver. “Lucien and I intend to reach out to Esther and your mother to start making arrangements first thing tomorrow morning. If you don’t want us to, just say literally anything that isn’t whatever.”
Jaz glared at Oliver like she was hoping she could spontaneously turn into the Ark of the Covenant and melt his face off, Indiana Jones–style.
And then she said, “Whatever.”
But when she said it, she smiled.