“With your guitar,” I added. For some reason, this was the bit that was most offending me.
Mum looked at Jaz in a way I remembered her looking at me so many, many times down the years. It was a look that said,You fucked up, we both know you fucked up, but we’re also all the otherperson has, so I’m going to love you anyway no matter what. “Is that true, Jas?”
Jaz looked down. “Yeah,” she said. And then, completely without provocation, she added a sincere-sounding, “Sorry.”
I was almost hurt. She never apologised to me or Oliver that quickly. At least not if she meant it.
“You know,” Mum added, “if you had asked, I would have said it was okay.”
Jaz mumbled another apology.
“Was she any good?” she asked me and Oliver, and then, when neither of us had anything resembling an answer, she asked Jaz, “Are you any good?”
Even by Jaz’s standards, her response was noncommittal. A sort of slow twitch and a half shake of the head and a barely audible sound that somebody who was extremely dedicated to charitably interpreting teenage noises might understand as “dunno.”
“Well then,” announced Mum as if that solved everything and we no longer had any problems to discuss whatsoever, “the special curry is waiting. Come, everybody.”
“Hang on,” I said, “you can’t justcome everybodythis under the rug. She was…she was in your room. With your stuff. It was—” I was going to have a really hard time saying what it was without using emotion words, and I hated using emotion words. “It was…intrusive. And personal…and that’s…like, that’syourspace and—”
“Yes,” said Mum, looking at me almost sternly now and nodding in a this-nod-has-a-double-meaning kind of way. “It ismyspace. Not yours. And this is my house, and when I say something is over, it is over.”
“But—”
“Ah.” Mum raised a finger. “Over.”
Jaz was still looking kind of on edge, and I was stillfeelingkind of on edge, and that was especially shitty because I didn’t want to bein my thirties and feeling shitty because things weren’t cool between me and a fourteen-year-old.
“You must forgive Luc,” Mum said to Jaz. “He is very protective of his old maman.”
Jaz didn’t seem particularly forgiving, but she was visibly less tense than she had been, which hopefully meant she’d be a lot less likely to straight up bolt. Because that would have been twice in under a week, and twice regardless of timeframe seemed like a bad number of times for us to trigger a teenager’s fight-or-flight reflex.
“Alors.” Mum was still talking to Jaz. “Do you want to run out into the night, or do you want to come into the front room and eat the special curry?”
I raised a hand. “If that’s a general question, I’ll take running into the night, please.”
Chapter 27
Turned out, it wasn’t a general question. So we trooped back into the front room to eat rapidly congealing special curry. It had gone tepid while we were looking for Jaz, but that hadn’t so much harmed the flavour as moved it sideways into a realm of parallel horribleness. And, for a good five minutes, dealing with the grim reality of a turnip, rhubarb, and grapefruit curry was enough to keep us all distracted from the lingering awkwardness of my recent fuckups.
Eventually, though, tension started creeping back into the room. And I wished I could have chased it back out again, but I had no idea how. Like was this a “What have you been up to at school, Jaz?” type of situation? Or was it a “Have you gone back toDrag Raceyet, Mum?” type of situation? Or even the moment for “So Oliver, lawyering, eh?” Except I kept thinking about all the ways all of them could go wrong and, in the end, said none of them.
“Anyway, Luc,” asked Mum conversationally, “how is everything with this…this SHITstock you are working on?”
“CRAPPstonbury,” I corrected her. “And…you know, okay.”
Judy glanced up from a forkful of flabby yet over-spiced rhubarb. “Is this the toilet festival?”
“It is not,” I said for the too-manyth time, “a toilet festival.”
“Really? You seemed to be asking that fellow for an awful lot of toilets.”
“Festivalsneeda lot of toilets.” I was sick of explaining this. “People have to stop acting like it’s weird to book toilets for a festival.”
To my at best partial relief, Mum was on my side. “It’s true. Toilets at festivals are very important. When I played Reading in ’82, things got so bad that your father pissed in a bucket and tipped it all over Lemmy from Motörhead.” She looked that mix of melancholy, wistful, and resentful she always did when she spoke about Dad. “Still, the Enid were good that year.”
Jaz continued poking at the special curry, which she’d eaten a whole lot more of than I’d expected. “Toilets were bad when I went too,” she said.
“Aren’t you a little young for festivals?” asked Oliver.
