Chapter 42
Oliver had followed up after the first, failed meeting to reschedule and to quietly check that Maisie was at least immediately safe.
The rescheduled meet-up had, unfortunately, been an almost complete repeat of the first, with an almost complete repeat of the fallout to go along with it.
Jaz managed to avoid getting suspended, only because she managed to avoid actually beating people’s heads against solid objects, but she got some pretty stern talkings-to, and her regular meetings had progressed through “concern” into “warning,” with an implication that “final warning” was on the horizon.
“How many times are we going to try this?” I asked Oliver very, very quietly when I was very, very sure that Jaz was out the house. “Because I’m beginning to think it might have been a really bad idea.”
He gave me one of his most determined looks. “I’m not going to say that we’ll keep trying until it works, because there may come a point where we’re doing more harm than good. But that point isn’t now.”
“Isn’t, like, the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and expecting different results?”
“Perhaps,” Oliver conceded. “Sometimes. But sometimes it’s the definition of not giving up on people.”
So the third try went ahead. We went back to the tearoom in the park in Dagenham, we bought two coffees and a muffin, and we waited.
We waited for two hours.
And then she showed up.
Maisie Johnson was a short woman, barely taller than Jaz, and carrying the kind of weight that was a common side effect of some antidepressants.
Her hair was the exact same shade of dirty blond as Jaz’s—or as Jaz’s had been before she’d dyed it—but that was the only similarity between them I could see.
And I looked. I looked for a good while.
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. From Jaz or from her.
But somehow I think I got it anyway. Because although I’d spent a whole lot of time telling myself—and Jaz had spent a whole lot of time telling me—that I’d been doing a terrible job of parenting her, I knew Jaz pretty well.
So I wasn’t at all surprised that she was more relaxed and more affectionate with her mum than she was with me and Oliver.
But I also wasn’t at all surprised that more relaxed and affectionate meant “actually gave her a hug but was still mostly quiet” and not “turned into a completely different person.”
The guidelines for this meeting had been quite specific. We could give them their space, but Jaz and her mum were on no account to be left alone together, and we were to firmly but politely challenge any attempts Maisie made to undermine the foster system.
Not that she did. Oliver and I sat at a nearby table doing our best to look like we weren’t listening in, even though everybody there knew that we were obliged under the terms of our placement to be listening in.
Not that there was much to be listening in to.
It would’ve been easy for me to put that down to Jaz’s perennial teenage uncommunicativeness, or to Maisie being out of practice talking to her daughter.
And sure, maybe those things were factors, but they weren’t the main point.
The main point was that some things were bigger than words.
So Maisie and Jaz sat opposite each other, Maisie drinking her tea and Jaz still picking at her muffin, and they said basically nothing to each other that wasn’t Fine or Y’know or The usual.
And then when we went home, Jaz brought the silence with her.
And she sat in her room with Spud the whole of Sunday.
Oliver made sandwiches and took them up to her.
To my surprise, she ate them.
We had a couple more Saturdays like that, and then the fourth—or sixth, if you counted the two when Maisie hadn’t been able to make it—was different.
It was full spring now, and the—I don’t know tulips or daffodils or whatever, the flowers you get around that time of year—were in full bloom.
It was also, it turned out, close to the anniversary of Jaz’s grandmother’s death.
Until we’d been making plans for meeting four-slash-six, it hadn’t really occurred to me how young Ms. Johnson Senior must have been when she went.
She couldn’t have been far north of sixty.
I hadn’t really known any of my own grandparents—I never met any of Dad’s relatives, Mum’s father wasn’t in the picture, and her mum was off somewhere in France, living what I assumed was her best life—but I’d always had a pretty clear idea in my head of what a gran looked like.
Somebody ancient and silver-haired, who talked about the blitz and rationing and when all this was nowt but fields.
Not somebody who’d spent her late twenties watching The Simpsons and listening to Nirvana.
As always on visit days, Jaz was subdued that morning. Only extra subdued because “We’re going to see your mum” was a way nicer pitch than “We’re going to see your mum in the cemetery where your grandparents are buried.”
“Are you not wearing a coat?” Oliver asked her as we gathered in the hall.
Jaz looked at him like she thought he was the third-worst human being who had ever lived. “Not cold.”
“The weather might turn.”
Sullenly, Jaz pulled her coat off the peg and folded it over her arm. “If it gets nicked, you’re buying me a new one.”
Oliver gave her the kind of smile she still didn’t appreciate. “That is, indeed, one of our responsibilities.”
“Also,” I added, “who’d steal your coat from a cemetery?”
Jaz shrugged. “There’s some right scumbags about.”
I was very slightly proud of Oliver for not pointing out that it was unhelpful to think of people who stole as scumbags and that in fact, anybody who found themselves reduced to stealing clothing from graveyards had probably lived an extremely difficult life to that point.
We got into the car and set out for Dagenham. And I was also very slightly proud of Oliver for not saying anything even resembling “I told you so” about the coat when—as you’d expect for Britain in spring—it started drizzling miserably while we were only halfway through Romford.
“What was your nan like?” I asked Jaz as the windscreen wipers made their first halfhearted swipes at the equally halfhearted rain.
Like always when questions started shading towards personal, Jaz let that sit for quite a while before finally saying, “Nice.”
After a not-too-long drive, we arrived at a little cemetery in the borough of Barking and Dagenham, and Oliver fished the umbrellas out of the boot. Jaz made no comment about putting her coat on.
The final resting place of Jaz’s grandparents was a pretty unremarkable bit of ground that, under the grey sky and in the generally grey surroundings of that not-quite-London-not-quite-Essex part of the world we were in, felt the drab kind of peaceful.
As we walked along paths I thought Jaz knew far better than a teenager should, we saw memorials going all the way back to the First World War.
Whole families laid out together. Babies who died in the thirties.
A German pilot shot down in 1940. Parents and grandparents and way more children than I wanted to think about.
Fuck, I hated cemeteries. I think I might have hated them even more than parties.
Maisie was already waiting by the grave, holding an incongruously bright umbrella. I say grave, but it was graves really. Two of them side by side. Deborah Johnson, died 2020 and Second Lieutenant Mark Johnson, died 2004.
“Covid,” said Maisie, nodding at her mum, “and an IED.” She nodded at her dad. “Rotten fucking luck, right?”
Jaz walked calmly over to stand by her mother and, without saying anything, took her hand.
“Y’know”—Maisie gazed at her daughter with a cocktail of emotions so curdled that it almost gave me a headache—“I weren’t much older than you when he went. Looking back, I reckon it fucked me up more than I realised.”
“These things do,” said Oliver.
Things had been thawing between us and Ms. Johnson for a couple of weeks now, but that frosted them right back up again. “And what would you know about it?”
“Not a lot,” Oliver admitted. “I was nearly thirty when my father died, and while I’ve found that very difficult to process, I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through the same thing as a child.”
Maisie frowned. “Sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.”
For a while we just stood there and let ourselves get drizzled on. Then Maisie asked, “What was he like then, your old man?”
“He was a complicate—” Oliver stopped, looked at me, looked at Jaz, and then said, “Honestly. He was kind of an arsehole.”
“Oi.” Jaz glared at Oliver, seeming genuinely offended. “You can’t say arsehole in a graveyard.”
“He can, love,” Maisie told her. “Anyway, some people just are, and there’s no point pretending they weren’t. Your dad was a right piece of shit, and I’d say that anywhere. To anyone.”
And whether this was the right anywhere, or these the right anyones, Oliver continued.
“He was… He was the kind of parent who mistook discipline for affection.” Oliver looked at Jaz very deliberately.
“Actually that isn’t true. He was the kind of parent who pretended discipline was affection, when he knew the difference perfectly well.
He drummed the idea that his way was the right way into me and my brother so hard that I think we both grew up simultaneously terrified of turning into him and of not turning into him. ”
“Grandad was a hero,” replied Jaz, a little defiant. And very confident about the life of a man who’d died years before she was born.
“That’s what Mum said,” Maisie clarified. “But he was just a soldier. Died in a war he shouldn’t have been fighting for a cause he didn’t believe in, is what I reckon. But I suppose he done it for us in a way.”
“Good pay being a squaddie,” Jaz added, sounding like it was something she’d been saying her whole life.
There were already fresh flowers on both graves, and I felt like a bit of a dick for not thinking to bring some ourselves, although I suspect Oliver would have had sustainability concerns.
Still, for a moment we just stood with the drizzle beading on our hair while we stared at those two bright pops of colour against the parched grass and packed dirt of the Johnson family graves.
“She did her best,” Maisie continued after a while, “with me. Better than I did with her.” She half nodded towards Jaz.
Jaz gave her mother a look of not-quite betrayal. “Don’t say that.”
“I’m still your mother—you don’t get to tell me what to say. Mum looked after us both, and without her, I can barely look after me. It’s shit, but it’s how it is.”
Despite our umbrellas, the damp was soaking its way in through my trousers. Which meant every silence was an exercise in clammy misery.
“I may be speaking out of turn,” Oliver said at last, “but I suspect that there might be support you’re entitled to that you aren’t currently taking advantage of.”
Maisie had that not-sure-if-I’m-meant-to-be-offended look people sometimes got around Oliver. “You what?”
“He always talks like that,” explained Jaz. “Don’t take it personal.”
“In my experience,” he went on, “it isn’t in the state’s interest to actually advertise the services it has available, because then people use them and that costs money. Which means a lot of people don’t claim support they’re entitled to. There are also charities who—”
“I’m not a fucking charity case,” snapped Jaz, “and neither’s Mum.”
I hoped now was the right time for Oliver to get all Well, technically, because he had that Well, technically vibe.
“Eton is a charity case,” he replied, and I silently congratulated myself for calling it.
“If it’s okay for a school full of rich men’s rich sons to accept help when it’s offered, it’s okay for you too. ”
Maisie looked deeply, deeply suspicious. “What’re you saying?”
“I’m saying”—Oliver spoke very carefully and very softly—“that the system could work better for you than it currently is. I don’t know exactly what you need to do to get Jaz back, but I know a lot of people who should know.
Several of my friends are family lawyers.
I don’t want to overstep, but…but I think I can help.
And I’d like to. If that’s what you want. ”
That was a lot. It was especially a lot because this wasn’t something we’d particularly talked about, and while it was probably the right thing to offer, I didn’t entirely like the idea of working towards a post-Jaz future, as inevitable as it was.
But, given the choice between an Oliver who was kind without consulting me and one who was an authoritarian dick without consulting me, I liked the first one way, way more.
Jaz and her mum just kind of stood there, not quite knowing how to respond.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have blamed either of them for telling Oliver to fuck off because while the system had put him and the Johnsons together, he was still near as damn it a stranger to Maisie.
And Jaz still, as far as I knew, thought he was a prick.
But the Fuck off never came.
Instead, Maisie, in the cagey tones of a woman who has been let down way too often, just said, “Keep talking.”
And Oliver did.
He was cautious, because of course he was cautious.
And he didn’t make any guarantees, because of course he didn’t make any guarantees.
But he cared. And I loved that he cared.
And I loved that he could show he cared through the highly specific language of being able to navigate the British legal system because, fuck me, was that useful sometimes.
And as I listened to him talking through the Children Act 1989 and evidence-informed frameworks for return home practice with the Johnsons, I was struck with a clear, bright-light certainty that this would work.
That I was watching the start of something that would, at some point, end with Jaz getting taken away from us.
I don’t think I ever really understood the word bittersweet until then.