The final resting place of Jaz’s grandparents was a pretty unremarkable bit of ground that, under the grey sky and in the generally grey surroundings of that not-quite-London-not-quite-Essex part of the world we were in, felt the drab kind of peaceful.
As we walked along paths I thought Jaz knew far better than a teenager should, we saw memorials going all the way back to the First World War. Whole families laid out together. Babies who died in the thirties. A German pilot shot down in 1940. Parents andgrandparents and way more children than I wanted to think about.
Fuck, I hated cemeteries. I think I might have hated them even more than parties.
Maisie was already waiting by the grave, holding an incongruously bright umbrella. I saygrave, but it wasgravesreally. Two of them side by side.Deborah Johnson, died 2020andSecond Lieutenant Mark Johnson, died 2004.
“Covid,” said Maisie, nodding at her mum, “and an IED.” She nodded at her dad. “Rotten fucking luck, right?”
Jaz walked calmly over to stand by her mother and, without saying anything, took her hand.
“Y’know”—Maisie gazed at her daughter with a cocktail of emotions so curdled that it almost gave me a headache—“I weren’t much older than you when he went. Looking back, I reckon it fucked me up more than I realised.”
“These things do,” said Oliver.
Things had been thawing between us and Ms. Johnson for a couple of weeks now, but that frosted them right back up again. “And what would you know about it?”
“Not a lot,” Oliver admitted. “I was nearly thirty when my father died, and while I’ve found that very difficult to process, I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through the same thing as a child.”
Maisie frowned. “Sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.”
For a while we just stood there and let ourselves get drizzled on. Then Maisie asked, “What was he like then, your old man?”
“He was a complicate—” Oliver stopped, looked at me, looked at Jaz, and then said, “Honestly. He was kind of an arsehole.”
“Oi.” Jaz glared at Oliver, seeming genuinely offended. “You can’t sayarseholein a graveyard.”
“He can, love,” Maisie told her. “Anyway, some people just are,and there’s no point pretending they weren’t. Your dad was a right piece of shit, and I’d say that anywhere. To anyone.”
And whether this was the right anywhere, or these the right anyones, Oliver continued. “He was… He was the kind of parent who mistook discipline for affection.” Oliver looked at Jaz very deliberately. “Actually that isn’t true. He was the kind of parent whopretendeddiscipline was affection, when he knew the difference perfectly well. He drummed the idea that his way was the right way into me and my brother so hard that I think we both grew up simultaneously terrified of turning into him and ofnotturning into him.”
“Grandad was a hero,” replied Jaz, a little defiant. And very confident about the life of a man who’d died years before she was born.
“That’s what Mum said,” Maisie clarified. “But he was just a soldier. Died in a war he shouldn’t have been fighting for a cause he didn’t believe in, is what I reckon. But I suppose he done it for us in a way.”
“Good pay being a squaddie,” Jaz added, sounding like it was something she’d been saying her whole life.
There were already fresh flowers on both graves, and I felt like a bit of a dick for not thinking to bring some ourselves, although I suspect Oliver would have had sustainability concerns. Still, for a moment we just stood with the drizzle beading on our hair while we stared at those two bright pops of colour against the parched grass and packed dirt of the Johnson family graves.
“She did her best,” Maisie continued after a while, “with me. Better than I did with her.” She half nodded towards Jaz.
Jaz gave her mother a look of not-quite betrayal. “Don’t say that.”
“I’m still your mother—you don’t get to tell me what to say. Mum looked after us both, and without her, I can barely look afterme. It’s shit, but it’s how it is.”
Despite our umbrellas, the damp was soaking its way in through my trousers. Which meant every silence was an exercise in clammy misery.
“I may be speaking out of turn,” Oliver said at last, “but I suspect that there might be support you’re entitled to that you aren’t currently taking advantage of.”
Maisie had that not-sure-if-I’m-meant-to-be-offended look people sometimes got around Oliver. “You what?”
“He always talks like that,” explained Jaz. “Don’t take it personal.”
“In my experience,” he went on, “it isn’t in the state’s interest to actually advertise the services it has available, because then people use them and that costs money. Which means a lot of people don’t claim support they’re entitled to. There are also charities who—”
“I’m not a fucking charity case,” snapped Jaz, “and neither’s Mum.”
