Chapter 41
When Esther had said that arranging for Jaz to see her mother wouldn’t make our lives easier, she wasn’t kidding. She wasn’t on the same street as kidding. She and kidding had met once at a party six years ago and then moved to separate continents.
It soon became clear Jaz’s mother, Maisie Johnson, had the kind of depression that, well, that gets your kids taken away by social services.
The first visit we’d arranged, at Esther’s suggestion, had been on relatively neutral ground close enough to Maisie’s house that it wasn’t an onerous distance for her to travel but not so close that we were concretely on her turf.
Just nailing down the details of the first meeting had taken over a month, which meant that whatever goodwill we—and especially Oliver—had earned for making the initial effort had evaporated in the interim.
Which, on one level, we understood was to be expected when you were dealing with somebody for whom a month was still a sizable fraction of their conscious life, but on the other hand was a bit of a pisser.
As we got closer to the actual day, Jaz got increasingly agitated. I’d love to be able to say she got increasingly excited, but agitated is definitely the right word. She got antsy, snappish, and surly. Which made the atmosphere in the O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson household honestly kind of unfun.
Not that we were doing this for fun, of course.
Which Oliver reminded me. Daily. He hadn’t quite hard-pivoted away from being Mr. Boundaries and Examples, but he seemed to have taken the lesson about being On Jaz’s Side to heart, which meant he was now On Her Side with the same unwavering intensity with which he was on the side of honesty, justice, veganism, and me.
Two days before our first scheduled meeting, there was a banging at the door.
Oliver and I answered it to find Next Door’s Kid, Next Door’s Kid’s Dad, and Next Door’s Kid’s Mum standing on our doorstep, looking irate.
Irate even by the standards of Next Door’s Kid’s Mum and Next Door’s Kid’s Dad, which was very, very irate indeed.
“Jacqueline,” said Oliver. “Richard.”
“Oliver,” said Next Door’s Kid’s Dad back. “Luke.” I could always, always tell when people put a ke on the end. “Your guest—”
“Foster daughter,” Oliver and I replied, simultaneously.
“Your foster daughter set a bloody dog on Colin.”
My first instinct was She would never. My second instinct was She might, actually. My third instinct was Good.
Oliver looked down at Next Door’s Kid. He was doing his serious face again, and for a heart-squashing, stomach-twisting moment, I thought we were right back where we’d been six weeks ago. “Tell me what happened, Colin,” he said.
Next Door’s Kid met Oliver’s gaze with tears glistening artfully in his eyes. He looked like a Dickensian orphan about to meekly ask for a second bowl of gruel. “Mr. Blackwood,” he began, lip all atremble, “I was in the park, feeding the ducks.”
“What with?” asked Oliver.
Next Door’s Kid looked momentarily confused, but only momentarily. “Bread.”
I had nothing like the skill set necessary to work out whether he was telling the truth or not. It’s not like he had a convenient bag of Hovis poking out of his pocket or crumbs all up his lapels. He did look wet, dirty, and extremely bloody around the knees, but that could have meant anything.
“You should be careful with that,” said Oliver, playing it completely straight. “Bread isn’t bad for ducks per se, but they benefit from a varied diet.”
“Oh,” said Next Door’s Kid, who seemed a touch concerned that things were going off-script.
“They like sweetcorn.”
This wasn’t going in the direction that Next Door’s Kid had been expecting, but he did his malicious best to get back on his bullshit.
“I was feeding the ducks,” he repeated, “just minding my own business, when the girl from next door pointed at me and was all, ‘Get him, boy,’ and the dog ran over and tried to bite me. And I was scared, so I tried to get away, so I fell in the lake.”
For a moment, Oliver said nothing.
“Well?” demanded Next Door’s Kid’s Dad.
Oliver raised an eyebrow. “I’m rather flattered you think Spud is so well trained.”
I honestly thought Next Door’s Kid’s Dad was going to have some kind of haemorrhage. “Oliver, this is serious.”
Oliver nodded. Then he looked back down at Next Door’s Kid and said, almost casually, “Do you know what I do for a living, Colin?”
“Banker?” offered Colin. I couldn’t help assuming he’d wanted to say a different -anker word but remembered at the last minute that he was currently mask-on.
“I’m a lawyer. People lie to me a lot. I don’t like it, but it’s usually very easy to spot.” He half smiled. “It’s not that I have any special technique, you understand. It’s simply that some things are just very, very obviously not true.”
“Are you calling my son a liar?” demanded Next Door’s Kid’s Dad, still looking like his blood vessels were in for a bad time.
“Just making conversation.” And now Oliver went from half smiling to full smiling.
Full, it-was-so-lovely-of-you-I-shall-be-sure-to-write-a-thank-you-letter, nicely-brought-up-middle-class-boy smiling.
“You see, the thing is, when people tell me these stories that are very, very obviously not true, I can never really blame them. People don’t start out bad, after all.
Sometimes they’re victims of circumstance, or they’ve been let down by the system.
” He looked at Next Door’s Kid’s Parents, still smiling.
“Or they just have bad parents. Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention, Richard, Jacqueline,” he said, nodding.
“You can rest assured I’ll give it the attention it deserves. ”
Before they could say anything, he shut the door in their faces.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m pretty sure that counts as using your powers for evil.”
“I’m trying extremely hard,” Oliver replied, “to avoid using either Jaz or Colin as playing pieces in petty games of status with our neighbours. But I suspect that in this context, the fastest way to end that particular game is to win it.”
I gave him a supportive nod. “Also. Fuck them.”
“And also that.”
One of the bad habits I’d picked up during the dark days of my mid-twenties was leaving off counting my chickens until they’d not only hatched but also grown up and been carried off by foxes.
And Oliver wasn’t the only one trying to do better, so I let myself believe that this really was Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson getting back together at last. “You’re hot when you’re laying the middle-class smackdown. ”
Oliver’s lips twitched. “You should see me in Waitrose.”
“Oh really?” I pushed him back against the wall. “Are you like, ‘These carrots aren’t even heritage.’”
His breath was coming a little more quickly as he struggled to strike a balance between bantering and letting me blow him in our hall. “Very much so. The last time I was there, the free coffee they gave me didn’t even have oat milk in it. I was livid.”
There was a clunk as I whipped off his belt and a zzzzp as his zipper came down.
“Lucien.” One of Oliver’s hands curled in my hair, half tender, half commanding, just the way I liked. “Is this a good idea?”
I was already on my knees. “It’s a great idea.”
“But—”
“She’s out with Spud. We’ve got at least ten minutes, and we know I can do this in five.”
“Does that reflect well on you or poorly on me?”
“I think,” I said, “it reflects the fact we’re often quite busy and I really want to suck you off.” I shot him a lovingly frustrated look. “Do you mind if I get on with it?”
“What if we get a delivery?”
“Then they can leave it with a friend or neighbour.”
“I’ve just made our neighbours hate us.”
I nipped at his still gym-honed thigh, well aware that, for some reason, raising prissy objections to getting off was a kind of Oliverian foreplay. “And, as you’ve pointed out, they’re too repressed to admit it.”
“Good point.” There was a tremor of laughter alongside the desire in Oliver’s voice. “Commence.”
So I commenced. I commenced the house down.
And, by the time Jaz came home with Spud, both her foster parents were sitting innocently on the living room sofa, like they totally hadn’t done it in the hallway.
“Just so you know,” said Oliver when Jaz stuck her head through the door to let us know she was back, “I think Colin was trying to get you in trouble again.”
Ever since Oliver had started working tirelessly to make something happen that Jaz really, really, really wanted to happen, she’d…been pretty much the same to him because at the end of the day she was still a teenager. “He’s a prick.”
“Not disputing. Just, if there was anything you wanted to tell us…”
There wasn’t. She went straight to her room, taking Spud with her.
But she went calmly. And we let her go out of trust rather than fear.
* * *
We’d arranged to meet Maisie at noon on Saturday. Between them, Jaz’s impatience and Oliver’s punctuality outvoted my general lethargy, and we made it to the tearoom for quarter to twelve and settled ourselves into a nice window seat to wait.
The first fifteen minutes passed quickly, me and Oliver sipping our coffee while Jaz picked listlessly at a muffin and stared out the window.
The next fifteen minutes passed slower. Honestly, I didn’t think any of us, even Jaz, had expected her mum to be there bang-on twelve, and so when the coffees ran out, we just ordered another two and carried on waiting.
After a half hour, I started surreptitiously checking the time. Oliver, having a sense of self-discipline, did better. But when it got to ten past one, he very gently pulled his phone out and said, “I’m just going to give Maisie a call to make sure everything is still going to plan.”
“She’ll be here,” replied Jaz. She’d eaten hardly any of her muffin, but she’d worried the rest of it into crumbs between her fingers.
Without comment, Oliver slipped outside. And while we waited, I tried to lighten the mood with casual conversation.
“Perhaps she’s stuck in traffic,” I suggested.
Jaz glared at me. “You actually think that?”
Lying to children was bad. Telling children you thought their mothers had flaked on them was worse. “I think there’s all kinds of reasons to be late.”
“You mean like maybe she’s tried to kill herself again.”
I didn’t want to touch that one with a barge pole. But I was probably going to have to. “I’m sure she hasn’t,” I said. I had no idea if that was true, but it seemed like the kind of thing Jaz might need to hear.
“Oh right. So she’s just”—Jaz gave a surprisingly expressive shrug—“ditching me for the fun of it. Because she’s a shit mum. Because she’s a shit mum who got her kid taken away by the socials.”
That was what Oliver would have called a false dichotomy. But That’s a false dichotomy seemed like a fucking awful response, so I hesitated.
Fortunately, by that point, Oliver had come back in, which meant he could take over. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I believe that your mother would be here if she could, but the reality of her situation is that she might not be able to. And that isn’t a reflection on her or on you.”
Unfortunately, Jaz wasn’t in the mood to be reassured, and I couldn’t exactly blame her. “What’d she say?” she asked.
Oliver was radiating calm in a way that Jaz still didn’t quite trust. “It went straight to voicemail. I can try again in a little while if you like, and we can wait as long as you want, but there’s a good chance your mother won’t make it. Not today, at least.”
Jaz just glared.
“If she doesn’t turn up,” Oliver went on, putting way more faith into that if than I’d have been able to, “we’ll reschedule.”
Jaz continued glaring.
She basically continued glaring for four straight hours, because we waited there, the three of us, until closing. All the way back she sat in silence and all Sunday she stayed in her room, not even letting Spud in, which I took as a really bad sign.
She was just as bad on Monday, and, on Tuesday, I was called into school for a meeting, because she’d been fighting again.