And, by the time Jaz came home with Spud, both her foster parents were sitting innocently on the living room sofa, like they totally hadn’t done it in the hallway.
“Just so you know,” said Oliver when Jaz stuck her head through the door to let us know she was back, “I think Colin was trying to get you in trouble again.”
Ever since Oliver had started working tirelessly to make something happen that Jaz really, really, really wanted to happen, she’d…been pretty much the same to him because at the end of the day she was still a teenager. “He’s a prick.”
“Not disputing. Just, if there was anything you wanted to tell us…”
There wasn’t. She went straight to her room, taking Spud with her.
But she went calmly. And we let her go out of trust rather than fear.
* * *
We’d arranged to meet Maisie at noon on Saturday. Between them, Jaz’s impatience and Oliver’s punctuality outvoted my general lethargy, and we made it to the tearoom for quarter to twelve and settled ourselves into a nice window seat to wait.
The first fifteen minutes passed quickly, me and Oliver sipping our coffee while Jaz picked listlessly at a muffin and stared out the window.
The next fifteen minutes passed slower. Honestly, I didn’t think any of us, even Jaz, had expected her mum to be there bang-on twelve, and so when the coffees ran out, we just ordered another two and carried on waiting.
After a half hour, I started surreptitiously checking the time. Oliver, having a sense of self-discipline, did better. But when it got to ten past one, he very gently pulled his phone out and said, “I’mjust going to give Maisie a call to make sure everything is still going to plan.”
“She’ll be here,” replied Jaz. She’d eaten hardly any of her muffin, but she’d worried the rest of it into crumbs between her fingers.
Without comment, Oliver slipped outside. And while we waited, I tried to lighten the mood with casual conversation.
“Perhaps she’s stuck in traffic,” I suggested.
Jaz glared at me. “You actually think that?”
Lying to children was bad. Telling children you thought their mothers had flaked on them was worse. “I think there’s all kinds of reasons to be late.”
“You mean like maybe she’s tried to kill herself again.”
I didn’t want to touch that one with a barge pole. But I was probably going to have to. “I’m sure she hasn’t,” I said. I had no idea if that was true, but it seemed like the kind of thing Jaz might need to hear.
“Oh right. So she’s just”—Jaz gave a surprisingly expressive shrug—“ditching me for the fun of it. Because she’s a shit mum. Because she’s a shit mum who got her kid taken away by the socials.”
That was what Oliver would have called a false dichotomy. ButThat’s a false dichotomyseemed like a fucking awful response, so I hesitated.
Fortunately, by that point, Oliver had come back in, which meant he could take over. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I believe that your mother would be here if she could, but the reality of her situation is that she might not be able to. And that isn’t a reflection on her or on you.”
Unfortunately, Jaz wasn’t in the mood to be reassured, and I couldn’t exactly blame her. “What’d she say?” she asked.
Oliver was radiating calm in a way that Jaz still didn’t quite trust. “It went straight to voicemail. I can try again in a little whileif you like, and we can wait as long as you want, but there’s a good chance your mother won’t make it. Not today, at least.”
Jaz just glared.
“If she doesn’t turn up,” Oliver went on, putting way more faith into thatifthan I’d have been able to, “we’ll reschedule.”
Jaz continued glaring.
She basically continued glaring for four straight hours, because we waited there, the three of us, until closing. All the way back she sat in silence and all Sunday she stayed in her room, not even letting Spud in, which I took as a really bad sign.
She was just as bad on Monday, and, on Tuesday, I was called into school for a meeting, because she’d been fighting again.
Chapter 42
Oliver had followed up after the first, failed meeting to reschedule and to quietly check that Maisie was at least immediately safe. The rescheduled meet-up had, unfortunately, been an almost complete repeat of the first, with an almost complete repeat of the fallout to go along with it. Jaz managed to avoid getting suspended, only because she managed to avoid actually beating people’s heads against solid objects, but she got some pretty stern talkings-to, and her regular meetings had progressed through “concern” into “warning,” with an implication that “final warning” was on the horizon.
