Two large men escorted the violent fourteen-year-old to our door and uncuffed her. Then they dropped her possessions beside her in a black bin liner, and she glared up at them with what I felt was pretty justified resentment.
Oliver half stooped towards her. “Hello, Jasmine,” he said in a tone I’d never quite heard him use before. Which was a little bit jarring because I thought I knew all of the Olivers.
“Jaz,” she replied.
“Hello, Jaz,” Oliver corrected himself. “I’m Oliver, this is Lucien—”
“Luc,” I said.
“We’ll be looking after you,” he went on, while I signed for Jaz like she was a Parcelforce delivery.
Jaz looked less impressed than I had ever seen anybody look about anything. And I’d gone to see theMaleficentmovie with Priya.
Undaunted in the face of our new foster child’s visible contempt, Oliver kept robustly to the script. “If you’ve got all your things, maybe you’d like us to show you to your room?”
She barely even shrugged.
Before taking her inside, Oliver turned his attention to Black Polo Shirt Guy. “I’ll be making a complaint,” he told him.
“You do you, mate,” Black Polo Shirt Guy replied with the kind of apathy you had to really, really work at.
Then he and his co-polo-shirtists slouched back into their van, leaving me and Oliver officially in loco parentis. And, unofficially, completely out of our depth.
“Come on,” I said, hoping a less formal approach would failless hard with our guest…child…oh fuck.
To my relief, Jaz grabbed her bin liner and followed us inside. Once the front door was closed, it was safe to let Spud out, so I went through to the study and opened up his pen. For which I got no gratitude whatsoever because there was a new human in the building and Spud apparently didn’t care about all the nights I’d spent sleeping on the floor with him.
“Ruff,” he declared, bounding into the hall and sniffing at Jaz’s knees, because Oliver had painstakingly trained him not to jump on people. “Ruff.”
Jaz looked down. “Hey.”
“That’s Spud,” I told her. “Spud, this is Jaz.”
“Ruff,” said Spud.
“Can I help you with your bag?” Oliver suggested.
That didn’t get a reply, but I saw Jaz’s grip tighten slightly on her bin liner.
“Are you hungry?” he tried.
Jaz shook her head.
“Would you like a drink?”Itried. And then, petrified I’d given the impression I was trying to ply her with alcohol: “Like water or Coke or something. Coke like the drink. Not like the stuff you put up your nose.”
She shook her head again.
Oliver gave her his best and gentlest smile, which was a smile that mademefeel safer and more loved than anything else in the world, but which seemed to wash over Jaz like a fart over a rock. “You probably want to get settled in. We’ll show you your room.”
We took Jaz upstairs and showed her the featureless magnolia cube we’d accidentally prepared for her to sleep in.
“You can decorate it however you’d like,” Oliver told her, while I cringed at his side. “And there should be plenty of space for your things. If there isn’t, we can always invest in some storagesolutions.”
Jaz had no strong reaction to that whatsoever. To be fair, I wasn’t that interested in storage solutions at that age either. Or, for that matter, my current age. Which was probably why Oliver had a study you could find things in and I didn’t. Letting her bin liner flop down on the floor like she could not possibly have given fewer shits about its contents, Jaz sat on the bed, staring at the walls as if she was in prison.
Still undeterred, Oliver pressed on. “Lucien and I will both be working from home today. He’ll be downstairs, I’ll be upstairs, so if you need either of us, that’s where to look. The bathroom is just along the corridor, and there’s spare bedding in the ottoman in the hall.”
Jaz looked like she was barely paying attention.
