Mum made abofgesture. “I’m not a fool, Oliver. I know that this is a very silly situation and that the special curry is something of an acquired taste.”
“It’s not an acquired taste, Mum,” I corrected. “It’s often literally inedible.”
That left Mum profoundly unimpressed. “I’m sure it is, with that attitude.”
“Either way”—Oliver circled back to his point with typical tenacity—“she didn’t respond appropriately. I’ll go and ask her to apologise.”
More than anything I wanted to say,Please don’t, but I didn’t quite have the courage.
Which meant I was super glad when Mum said, “Please don’t.”
“She was very rude,” Oliver reminded us all.
Mum shrugged again. “So was I. You’ve been having the sex with my son—”
“Mum, you could have put thatany other way.”
“—for a very long time. Surely you’ve worked out that we’re quite a rude family.”
“I amnot,” I protested. “I’m polite as balls when I’m around other people.”
Oliver gave me a look.
“When I’m at work,” I corrected.
Oliver continued to give me a look.
“When I’m at some bits of my work.”
Looks persisted and, indeed, spread.
“Sometimes,” I said very firmly, “I have to go and be polite to rich arseholes who I need to give us money, and when I’m doing that specific professional task I am, in my own estimation,as polite as balls.”
“The politeness or otherwise of the O’Donnells aside,” replied Oliver, refusing to be distracted, “Jasmine needs to learn tocontrol her emotions, and she won’t if we keep ignoring this sort of behaviour.”
I tried a thing. It was a bit of a desperate thing in some ways, but it felt like itmightmake sense under the Oliverian parenting paradigm. “Okay, but look at it this way—Mum is basically Jaz’s foster grandmother, and grandparents letting their grandkids get away with murder is a time-honoured tradition.”
“In some families, perhaps.” There was an edge to Oliver’s voice I didn’t love as much as I could have. I might almost go so far as to say I didn’t like it. Didn’t like it at all. “But my grandparents never—”
As the only person in the room who had successfully parented for more than eight minutes at a stretch, Mum stepped in with infuriating effortlessness. “Now Jas has gone”—she deployed a sly and intensely weaponised smile—“it means I am in need of a kitchen helper.”
The part of Oliver that believed people Jaz’s age should respect people Odile’s age was pitched into sudden conflict with the part of Oliver that believed people his age should respect people Odile’s age. The better of those two very similar parts won. “Of course, Odile,” he said. And then, once he’d rolled up his sleeves and grabbed a kitchen knife, he added as gently as he was able, “Are you absolutely sure about the rhubarb?”
One of Mum’s many superpowers was never being sure about anything while also being absolutely certain about everything. “It’s traditional.”
“I really don’t think it is,” I said ill-advisedly.
“Of course it is. That is why when the cockneys want a curry they say, ‘I am going for a rhubarb.’”
They say you wind up marrying your parents, but I was pretty sure I’d wound up working with mine, because this was the exact kind of conversation I had every day in the office. “I think that’s ‘a ruby.’”
Mum looked at me like I’d completely lost it. “Don’t be silly, Luc. You can’t put rubies in curry.”
Of all the things I could possibly have said in that moment, “Obviously they’re not literal rubies” was far from the worst. But that didn’t make it good.
“Well no,” Mum conceded. And then with a twist of parental genius I hoped I could one day emulate, she pivoted to, “It’s probably a metaphor for rhubarb.”
With no further comment, Mum dumped a whole fennel in front of Oliver, who dutifully sliced it.
