“How many times are we going to try this?” I asked Oliver very, very quietly when I was very, very sure that Jaz was out the house. “Because I’m beginning to think it might have been a really bad idea.”
He gave me one of his most determined looks. “I’m not going to say that we’ll keep trying until it works, because theremaycome a point where we’re doing more harm than good. But that point isn’t now.”
“Isn’t, like, the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and expecting different results?”
“Perhaps,” Oliver conceded. “Sometimes. But sometimes it’s the definition of not giving up on people.”
So the third try went ahead. We went back to the tearoom inthe park in Dagenham, we bought two coffees and a muffin, and we waited.
We waited for two hours.
And then she showed up.
Maisie Johnson was a short woman, barely taller than Jaz, and carrying the kind of weight that was a common side effect of some antidepressants. Her hair was the exact same shade of dirty blond as Jaz’s—or as Jaz’s had been before she’d dyed it—but that was the only similarity between them I could see. And I looked. I looked for a good while.
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. From Jaz or from her. But somehow I think I got it anyway. Because although I’d spent a whole lot of time telling myself—and Jaz had spent a whole lot of time telling me—that I’d been doing a terrible job of parenting her, I knew Jaz pretty well. So I wasn’t at all surprised that she was more relaxed and more affectionate with her mum than she was with me and Oliver. But I also wasn’t at all surprised thatmore relaxed and affectionatemeant “actually gave her a hug but was still mostly quiet” and not “turned into a completely different person.”
The guidelines for this meeting had been quite specific. We could give them their space, but Jaz and her mum were on no account to be left alone together, and we were to firmly but politely challenge any attempts Maisie made to undermine the foster system.
Not that she did. Oliver and I sat at a nearby table doing our best to look like we weren’t listening in, even though everybody there knew that we were obliged under the terms of our placement to be listening in.
Not that there was much to be listening into. It would’ve been easy for me to put that down to Jaz’s perennial teenage uncommunicativeness, or to Maisie being out of practice talking to her daughter. And sure, maybe those things were factors, but they weren’t the main point. The main point was that some things were bigger thanwords.
So Maisie and Jaz sat opposite each other, Maisie drinking her tea and Jaz still picking at her muffin, and they said basically nothing to each other that wasn’tFineorY’knoworThe usual. And then when we went home, Jaz brought the silence with her. And she sat in her room with Spud the whole of Sunday.
Oliver made sandwiches and took them up to her.
To my surprise, she ate them.
We had a couple more Saturdays like that, and then the fourth—or sixth, if you counted the two when Maisie hadn’t been able to make it—was different. It was full spring now, and the—I don’t know tulips or daffodils or whatever, the flowers you get around that time of year—were in full bloom. It was also, it turned out, close to the anniversary of Jaz’s grandmother’s death.
Until we’d been making plans for meeting four-slash-six, it hadn’t really occurred to me how young Ms. Johnson Senior must have been when she went. She couldn’t have been far north of sixty. I hadn’t really known any of my own grandparents—I never met any of Dad’s relatives, Mum’s father wasn’t in the picture, and her mum was off somewhere in France, living what I assumed was her best life—but I’d always had a pretty clear idea in my head of what a gran looked like. Somebody ancient and silver-haired, who talked about the blitz and rationing and when all this was nowt but fields. Not somebody who’d spent her late twenties watchingThe Simpsonsand listening to Nirvana.
As always on visit days, Jaz was subdued that morning. Only extra subdued because “We’re going to see your mum” was a way nicer pitch than “We’re going to see your mum in the cemetery where your grandparents are buried.”
“Are you not wearing a coat?” Oliver asked her as we gathered in the hall.
Jaz looked at him like she thought he was the third-worst humanbeing who had ever lived. “Not cold.”
“The weather might turn.”
Sullenly, Jaz pulled her coat off the peg and folded it over her arm. “If it gets nicked, you’re buying me a new one.”
Oliver gave her the kind of smile she still didn’t appreciate. “That is, indeed, one of our responsibilities.”
“Also,” I added, “who’d steal your coat from a cemetery?”
Jaz shrugged. “There’s some right scumbags about.”
I was very slightly proud of Oliver for not pointing out that it was unhelpful to think of people who stole as scumbags and that in fact, anybody who found themselves reduced to stealing clothing from graveyards had probably lived an extremely difficult life to that point.
We got into the car and set out for Dagenham. And I wasalsovery slightly proud of Oliver for not saying anything even resembling “I told you so” about the coat when—as you’d expect for Britain in spring—it started drizzling miserably while we were only halfway through Romford.
“What was your nan like?” I asked Jaz as the windscreen wipers made their first halfhearted swipes at the equally halfhearted rain.
Like always when questions started shading towards personal, Jaz let that sit for quite a while before finally saying, “Nice.”
After a not-too-long drive, we arrived at a little cemetery in the borough of Barking and Dagenham, and Oliver fished the umbrellas out of the boot. Jaz made no comment about putting her coat on.
