And then, in the middle of a small café in Havering, Jaz replied, “She said I was the reason my mum tried to kill herself.”
And I, in an all-time great display of parenting skills, replied, “Fuck, I hope you punched her fucking lights out.”
Unblinking, matter-of-fact, Jaz said, “Smacked her head off a table.”
Okay, that might have been going a bit far.
For a minute or two we went back to sitting there in silence, with Jaz eating my chips even though she had her own. Then I said, “Look. Ignoring what I said about seventy seconds ago, I obviously don’t think beating another girl’s head on a table is a good thing.”
Jaz put her hands together as if in prayer. “Thank you, wise one, for teaching me right from wrong.”
“But also,” I went on, hoping that I was only fucking this most of the way up, “what she said was, like, properly not okay.”
“Is that you showing empathy?” Jaz’s voice was ninety-nine percent scorn and one percent…actually the one percent was probably just more scorn, but I was trying to be optimistic.
“It’s me saying that… I mean, I’m not you—”
“Well done. They should give you a prize.”
I ignored her. I was in a very literal sense the adult in the room. “When we were visiting my mum, and I thought you were messing with her stuff, you know how I kinda lost it?”
“Kinda,” Jaz confirmed.
“And I shouldn’t have. But I did because, you know—that’s my fucking mum, Jaz. I’m not making excuses for me and I’m not making excuses for you, but from when I was eight until when I met Oliver, my mum was basically all I had.”
For a moment, the teeniest, tiniest possible moment, I thought I saw something in Jaz’s eyes. A begrudging flicker of connection. Then she blinked it away like a bit of dust or a stray eyelash. “You’re right,” she said. “You’renotme.”
I shrugged. “Don’t have to be.”
“Still.” She sounded almost triumphant. “You’re stuck with me now.”
Okay, this was going to a button-pressing place again. “We’re not stuck with you.”
Jaz gave an exhalation that could just about have been called a laugh. “True. You can send me back whenever you want.”
“And we don’t want. To send you back.”
For the tiniest fraction of a second, Jaz looked like she straight-up hated me. “Oh, you fucking saints.”
That felt like a good thing to tactically ignore. If nothing else, I honestly didn’t think it was on Jaz to be grateful to me and Oliver for—to use the technically and legally correct term—looking afterher.
But the unfortunate thing about not giving Jaz the reaction she was probably looking for was that we lapsed into another silence and, this time, it didn’t break. We finished our meals without saying another word, and then we got back in the car, and I drove us home.
I stalled twice on the way.
Jaz didn’t say anything about that either.
* * *
“I still feel I should say something,” Oliver reiterated, once he’d got home that evening and I’d explained the situation.
“Say what?” I asked. “I don’t want to be all don’t-you-trust-me, but, like, do you think there’s some magic thing that you’ll say that I didn’t?”
Oliver looked sheepish. He liked to think of himself, I knew, as the sort of person who had a high opinion of others. Which meant that being confronted with the fact that his high opinion of others sometimes, justsometimes, came with an impliedbut not as good as me, obviouslywas a bit of a headfuck for him. “Of course not,” he half lied. “It’s just—”
“She knows she did a bad thing. She knows we don’t like that she did a bad thing. She’s been sent home from school because of the bad thing she did. What else is there?”
I got a nasty feeling that Oliver was suppressing a scowl. “It was averybad thing.”
