Since Mum had no interest in expanding on her self-comparison to a long-dead and probably fictional woman who, knowing my mum, had probably done some really serious murders, that led to the teeniest of lulls in the conversation. Which gave Mum exactly enough time to ask Jaz, “So whywereyou playing on my guitar?”
I hadn’t known Jaz that long, but I’d already had a lot of practice spotting her there’s-more-to-this-than-I-want-to-talk-about signs. She’d look away, then give a one-word answer she’d chosen with expert precision to avoid arguments with people she thought looked down on her.
“Bored,” she said.
“That is understandable,” agreed Mum. “It must be extremely boring visiting your foster father’s weird, not-normal maman.”
The use of the phrasefoster fathergot a noticeable wince from Jaz.
And then my mum got to her feet with a speed and a decisiveness that made her look more like the woman who had played the Reading Festival in 1982 than I’d seen in a long time. “Come, come,” she said, “let us do something less boring.”
I’d expected Jaz to keep up her mask of studied apathy until either she or Oliver and I were dead. But she was watching Mum now with something that still didn’t feel likeinterestbut looked quite a lot like caution. “What?” she asked.
“I am going to teach you to play the guitar.”
Jaz’s face set. “I can already play the guitar.”
Mum had a way, sometimes, of telling you she was through with your shit without telling you she was through with your shit. She was, in the nicest and most comforting way possible, through with Jaz’s shit. “Please remember, I am a legend of the rock ’n’ roll who has been in hiding in a tiny village in Surrey for longer than you have been alive. This is not an offer most little girls get.”
Little girlhad been calculated. I was sure of it. Because Jaz went at once to “I’m not a little girl” without objecting to anything else Mum had been saying.
“Jasmine,” said Mum, deploying the full-official-name bomb with surgical precision, “come and play the fucking guitar with me.”
And, while Oliver and I looked on in stunned silence, Jaz kinda …did?
* * *
“Goodbye, Odile,” Oliver said as we were leaving. “And thank you for a lovely evening.”
I went with a less formal “Bye, Mum,” and Jaz followed with an even less formal sound that might have been a good night.
We piled into the car, and Oliver took us out into the not-especially-wild Surrey night. “I actually thought,” he said, “that went rather well.”
Jaz didn’t have any comment, and right then neither did I. It wasn’t that I disagreed. More that I didn’t want to jinx it.
“And it was very generous of Odile,” added Oliver, “to lend you a guitar to practise on.”
Jaz was clinging on to Mum’s spare-spare-spare guitar like she was afraid somebody would…now I thought about it, like she was afraid somebody would do exactly what they’d been doing her whole life. Decide they’d get to keep it even though it had been given to her. Stick it in a black bin liner and then put her in handcuffs. Just generally be a prick to her about it.
“Seems like a nice one,” I added, trying to sound upbeat.
“Said she nicked it,” Jaz offered.
Unlike me, Oliver was really good at keeping his eyes on the road, but his jaw tensed. “I’m sure she didn’t.”
He’d met Mum. He’d heard her stories, and some of my dad’s stories, and a lot of Judy’s stories. I didn’t for one second believe he wasactuallysure she didn’t. He was just making a parenting call. And I, perhaps because I was tired and perhaps because I was still high on the evening not having been a total disaster, decided to make a different one. “Oh, I’m sure she did. Mum had a pretty intense youth.”
Oliver flicked me a look out of the corner of his eye that said,Please, Lucien.
“To be clear,” I said, “stealing is still bad. It’s just like…” Fuck, I’d started this with good being-honest-to-our-foster-kid intentions, and now I was going down a rabbit hole into a train wreck. “It’s just like that bit inLove Actually, you know?”
“What?” Jaz sounded genuinely confused. “She’s going to make creepy videos of some girl she’s obsessed with?”
I’d assumed she’d just not have heard of the movie, but they did put it on TV every Christmas. “No, I mean—”
“Trish says that’s stalking. She says that guy should be locked up for being a weirdo and a perv.”
Oliver said, “Trish might be overstating slightly, but she has a reasonable case” at the same time that I said—I thought more importantly—“Who’s Trish?”
