“Well I don’t fucking know, do I?” Jaz was sounding almost panicked now. “I just know it wasn’t fucking me, but you don’t fucking believe me. Nobody ever fucking believes me.”
And Oliver, my poor, sweet, honest Oliver, said, “It’s not about believing. It’s about the truth.”
Because, for him, it was. For a long while after I’d found out what Oliver did for a living, I’d not been able to understand how he could defend somebody if he didn’t think they were innocent. But after about the fourteenth time of him explaining it to me, I’d sort of got my head around it. In his line of work, you didn’t believe inthe person; you believed in the system—as shitty and broken and unfair as it was—and the ideasbehindthe system.
You didn’t defend your client because you thought they were a perfect angel who’d done no wrong, or even an imperfect human who’d done some wrong but not the particular wrong in question. You did it because a zealous legal defence was their right, no matter who they were or what they were accused of doing. Even if they were—as the slang apparently went—an experienced crim who rocked up and said, “Let’s call the crown to task.”
Everything had gone very quiet. Jaz looked up at Oliver, almost pleading, if you could plead in a really angry way. “I didn’t. Fucking. Do it.”
And because he couldn’t not, Oliver came back with, “Language.”
With a look that was perilously close to betrayal, Jaz stormed out. I ran after her into the hall but, at least this time, she stayed in the house. I heard her footsteps on the stairs, and the slam of her bedroom door.
When I was sure she hadn’t bolted into the wilds of Havering, I went back to the kitchen, where Oliver was standing pale and stock still, the rice he’d put on in my absence boiling over in the background. I looked at him. I looked at him and the greenhouse-murder-weapon he’d been clutching throughout the entire conversation. And I said, “That’s not Spud’s ball.”
Chapter 34
I understood why Oliver’s first instinct, when I pointed out the exonerating ball evidence, was to run to the stove and deal with the rice pan. Isort ofunderstood why his second instinct had been to take over sautéing the onions.
But I’d have thought the instinct to apologise to Jaz for not having her back would have occurred to him atsome point.
“Are you not going to say you’re sorry?” I asked.
“To Jasmine?” Oliver was still distracted by the onion pan. “I realise she was upset, but as I said, I wasn’t accusing her of anything.”
I tapped the cricket ball on the kitchen table distractedly. “Okay, but she clearlyfeltlike you were accusing her of something.”
Oliver half turned, and I got the strong feeling that Catty Oliver was about to enter the building. “So I should go to her and say, ‘I’m sorry you felt like I was accusing you’? That’s the kind of thing that ends YouTube careers.”
“You could say, ‘Sorry I didn’t believe you.’”
To his credit, Oliver seemed to consider this one. “I suppose I could, but she responded with hostility, and I’m concerned if we reinforce that, it will just lead to her acting out more and worse in the future.”
“Oliver, she’s a human being, not a naughty puppy.”
He seemed to consider this one too. “Even so, we can’t reward her for swearing at authority figures.”
I was about to protest that we weren’t only supposed tobeauthority figures. That our job had to include making her feel safe and cared for and supported and not just disciplined. But then I heard footsteps on the stairs and clammed up for fear of saying something out of context that would make everything worse.
With hindsight, she came into the kitchen almost uncharacteristically calmly. When she went to work putting together the fillings for the shish barak, I got an I-told-you-so-ish glance from Oliver. I was sure he was taking this as evidence that his firm but fair parenting stance was paying off, but I felt uneasy. Not so uneasy, mind you, that I wasn’t almost immediately distracted by the realisation that people who didn’t ordinarily live here were about to come into my house. Maybe it was a side effect of sharing the space with Oliver, maybe it was a consequence of hating myself less than I used to, but either way the moment we were officially Expecting Company—and Oliver’s dinner was nice enough and high-effort enough that it moved things definitively into the Company zone—even my normally slovenly brain got hyperfixated on every dusty surface, unswept corner, and un-put-away coffee mug.
Which meant when our guests arrived, I was giving the toilet a last-minute scrub.
“Hang on,” I yelled downstairs, “with you in a second.”
As quickly as I could manage, I flushed the loo, returned the brush to its holder, and pelted downstairs.
“Nice gloves,” said Peter when I opened the door with my Marigolds on. “But if this was a sex party, you should have told us in advance.”
I tugged ineffectually on one yellow finger. “No, absolutely not. Just a regular no-sex dinner party. Come in.”
Jennifer and Peter hung their coats in the hall and followedme through to the dining room, where Oliver met us still slightly rumpled and mid-cook.
“Hi, Oliver”—Jennifer gave a warm, friendly grin—“Luc was just telling us this was a fetish party.”
Oliver laughed. It was, I couldn’t help noticing, hisgood with peoplelaugh, which was a whole lot less sincere than theI have utterly failed to pretend I don’t find this funnylaugh I usually went for. “Lucien,” he said with mock severity, “it was supposed to be a surpr—” An alarm started beeping in the kitchen, and I thought I could smell something just a little bit burny. “One moment, make yourselves comfortable.”
“Not sex-comfortable,” I added, although honestly, my still only half-off rubber gloves weren’t selling it.
