Unable to watch while my mum forced my boyfriend to be her kitchen accomplice, I slunk back into the living room, where I found Judy alone. Well, alone save for Michael of Kent, who had decided to stop following Jaz around and go sit with her mistress.
“Too many cooks, eh?” Judy observed.
“I think Mum might be too many cooks all by herself.”
Judy nodded sagely. “She has a fierce will, your mother.”
“A fierce will which she uses exclusively to force people to eat terrible curries?”
“There are far worse things to use a fierce will for.”
This was one of those unanswerable Judy statements you just had to nod at and move past, so I nodded and moved past it. “Any idea where Jaz is?”
Judy looked blissfully unconcerned. “Probably upstairs. I wouldn’t worry. Young things like that can mostly look after themselves in my experience.”
“In your experience?” I asked, only slightly terrified of the answer.
“I was young once, too, you know. She must be, what, fourteen?”
“That’s right.”
“Good age, fourteen. Young enough that the world still has wonder in it, old enough that you can actually go looking.”
I squirmed slightly. “Yeah, I think these days going looking for wonder in the world is just a recipe for getting online groomed.”
“Well, you know best,” said Judy with the air of a woman who firmly believed I did not, in fact, know best.
Still committed to Operation Give Jaz Her Space, and pretty sure that someone would have noticed if she’d climbed out of a window or otherwise vanished into the wilds of Surrey, I perched on the arm of the sofa.
After I’d spent half an hour navigating small talk with Judy, Mum emerged from the kitchen and announced, with misplaced pride, that the special curry was ready.
Oliver followed her through with five bowls on a tray. “Where’s Jasmine?” was his first comment and only question.
“Upstairs I guess?” TheI guesshad been a bad choice. Oliver didn’t see much room for guessing at the best of times, but especially not where Jaz was concerned.
He set the tray down on the coffee table. “If you’ll excuse me, Odile, I’ll go and get her.”
It would be fine. Probably it would be fine. Going-and-getting-Jaz duty fairly often got handled by whoever happened to be closest, and Iwassitting down and Oliverwasstanding up, and sayingAre you sure you won’t make a complete arse of this?wouldn’t demonstrate the commitment to trustful coparenting that Oliver and I had agreed on. Y’know, back before we’d tried to coparent. All of which meant there was no valid objection I could make to Oliver being the one who went to retrieve Jaz and me being the one who stayed behind eating spiced rhubarb and turnip.
“How is the special curry, mon caneton?” asked Mum cheerfully.
“It’s terrible, Mum. You know it’s terrible. I know it’s terrible. Even Oliver knows it’s terrible. In fact, I sometimes think you deliberately make it more and more terrible every time just to see how long it’ll take him to admit it.”
“And I sometimes think you are a very ungrateful son.”
Judy was tucking into her bowl with genuine gusto. Then again, Judy was practically made of gusto. “Tiny note”—she jabbed a finger at the bowl—“needs more turnip.”
“Does anything,” I protested, “everreallyneed more turnip?”
But I didn’t get an answer, because there was shouting again.
* * *
After leaving Mum and Judy to debate the optimal turnip-to-grapefruit level for a curry, I dashed upstairs to see what had happened with the going-and-getting-Jaz mission. As I got closer, I began to catch one side of a very repetitive conversation, which seemed to be going:
“Fuck off.”
Then.
