“Luc is confused,” Mum explained, “because I have offered to kick off my new tour at his festival, and he thinks I am old and have gone past it.”
“I don’t think you’ve gone past it,” I said at once. “I just thought…I don’t know, that you’d put it behind you.”
“Well, I have. But lots of things are behind me. I still sometimes turn around and look at them.”
Jaz sat down on the arm of the sofa next to Mum, with a familiarity that felt strange to me. At once right and the tiniest bit jealous-making. “So where you going?”
“Going?” asked Mum, now at least joining me in Confusedville.
“On tour.”
“I hadn’t really thought about it.” Mum looked momentarily contemplative. “The usual places, I expect. Unless they also think I am old and have gone past it.”
“Mum.” I was sounding the teeniest bit exasperated now. “Nobody thinks you’ve gone past it.”
“Bon.” Mum clapped her hands. “Then it is decided. I will launch a comeback tour, and it will begin at Luc’s festival and it will be called”—she glanced at Judy for inspiration—“what do you think, something that says, ‘Here I am, I am now in a different stage of my life to the one I was in before, but that stage is still important and so I have come to share it with you.’”
“Eras?” suggested Judy.
Mum nodded. “Parfait. It will be called the Eras tour.”
“Ithinkthat one’s taken,” I told her.
Mum’s face screwed up in older French lady displeasure. “Surely not.”
“Taylor Swift did it.”
“Oh well, that is very unfair of her. How many Eras can she have? She’s only twenty-two.”
“I think she’s substantially older than twenty-two,” I pointed out.
“No, she’s not. She has a song about it.”
“That song came out more than a decade ago.”
“Nooo,” declared Mum, looking suddenly distressed. “That is impossible.”
Before Mum could vanish down the where-has-the-time-gone rabbit hole I’d been trying very hard to stay away from since my thirtieth birthday, Jaz brought us back to practicalities. “Are you seriously going to start your big comeback athisfestival?” She pointed a spoon at me.
“I’m sure Luc knows what he’s doing,” said Mum with mummian conviction.
“I think we’ve actually established pretty well that I don’t,” I replied.
Jaz nodded unsupportively. “That.”
And Mum made the loosest, most no-fucks-givenest shrug I’d ever seen, and I’d seen a lot of no-fucks-given shrugs. “Well. Then I’m sureIknow whatI’mdoing.”
In a perfect world where I was a perfect son, my faith in my mother would have been as unshakeable and irrational as her faith in me. But it wasn’t a perfect world and I was so far from perfect that if you looked up the wordperfectin a dictionary, you’d read the definition of the wordperfectand then think,On an unrelated note, that Luc guy is a bellend. “But the festival’s in six months. You can’t throw a tour together in six months.”
Mum just smiled. “Mon caneton,” she said, “you are forgetting. I may be old. I may live on a street called after a post office that isn’t there in a village with a very silly name, but deep down…deep down I am a motherfucking force of nature.” She finished the last of her soup and stood up. “Now, Jas, it is time for your guitar lesson. And after that, I am going to make some calls.”
Chapter 33
Despite how it felt, getting to the point where the government would let us take full responsibility for the well-being of a vulnerable teenager had not, in fact, taken longer than getting ten adults with jobs to agree on a day when they could all be in the same room at the same time. But it had been pretty fucking close.
To say the day of the dinner party had been hectic would be…well, it would be entirely accurate. Because it had been hectic. It had started at the crack of dawn, when Oliver had got up and started removing the arils from a pomegranate. Which I’d have offered to help with, except I didn’t know what an aril was or how to remove one. Plus, it looked like one of those sharp-knife jobs, and the last thing any of us wanted was for us to be serving our guests a barley-and-Luc’s-finger-blood salad.
Instead, I’d tried to make myself useful in a more furniture-focused way. Our dining table, which was lovely, hadn’t really been designed to take eleven, so we’d needed to borrow a spare from the James Royce-Royces. That spare had been living under the stairs since we’dlasttried to hold this damned party over a month ago, and I got to work shunting the two tables together, then covering them with the natural-look organic linen tablecloths that Oliver had bought from John Lewis’s when we’dfirsttried to hold this damned party the previous year.
