“But is it normal to dump your entire personal history and all your childhood trauma and, thinking about it, your adult trauma on a complete stranger who’s good at nodding?”
“I think,” said Oliver carefully, “normalmight not be an applicable word in this context.”
“Um.” I stared at him. “Thanks?”
“I just mean that everything you said—we said—was pertinent information that Esther needed to know in order to make an assessment. But I suspect she’s used to it taking more work to get people there.”
“She threw me off guard by being nice and understanding.”
“Yes, that was dastardly of her.” He rose from his extremely ergonomic chair and rested his hands lightly on my hips. “Lucien, for the last time. It went well. Yes, we were nervous, but Esther said that we’d clearly been through our options. And that, while having a new dog was a slight concern—”
“Hey, what’s wrong with Spud?”
“As I said: that he’s new. That’s not a personal insult against Spud. It’s the reality of fostering with pets.”
“Okay”—I prodded Oliver in the chest—“because if she comes for Spud, I don’t care how nice and understanding she is. We will be enemies forever.”
“She specifically noted that Spud was clearly well behaved and unlikely to cause problems.”
“Good. Right. Good. But also, on a more general level, I’m still dealing with a whole lot ofwhathere.”
“I mean, I could go into more detail if you like. But the gist is, and stop me if you’ve heard this one,it went well.”
Why was it that repetition only made things easier to believe when those things were bad? “Was she in, like, a completely different room from me? Did you bribe her while I was making tea? Did she accidentally get our file mixed up with somebody else’s?” There were, as far as I could tell, no other possible explanations.
“Respectively.” Oliver, who had, over the years, developed his own ways of reassuring me, began counting on his fingers. “Only for a few minutes. No. And if she did, it was another gay couple with a dog called Spud and our exact personal histories.”
“Oh.” I tried to let this information sink in. “Well, in that case we should find out who they are because we’d probably get on.”
Oliver gave me a look that was about sixty percent loving and forty percent the exasperated kind of loving. “Lucien.”
“Okay. Okay. It’s just…I’m finding it hard to believe that she looked at me and was all, like, ‘That’s the one, the guy whose rock star father walked out on him and then showed up twenty years later with fake cancer—he’ll be a good role model.’”
For some reason, Oliver didn’t seem to find this idea as ludicrous as I did. “We discussed that.”
“What, you discussed what an emotional wreck I am?”
“No, Lucien. We discussed the fact that, in her experience, people with very sheltered backgrounds can sometimes find it harder to empathise with the difficulties looked-after children experience. Whereas people who’ve been through hard times themselves are often better able to relate.”
“It’s true,” I said. “If we get a kid who’s stressed out becausethey had to watch their absentee father dance a rumba to ‘Blackbird on the Wire’ with Dianne Buswell, I’ll be all over it.”
“I feel obliged to point out that you didn’thaveto watch that.”
“I still can’t fucking believe Craig gave him an eight.”
Oliver sighed with infinite patience. “What really matters here, according to Esther, is that we’re able to provide a strong, stable homelife. And she believes we can.”
“We can?”
“We can,” he said firmly. Then unfirmed. “Well, pending an enhanced DBS check.”
I looked blank.
“They need to look at court records and make sure we’ve never been investigated for anything…disqualifying.”
“Like what?”
He gave me a use-your-imagination look.
