“I’ve had a lot of first days.”
“And I need to be there for a meeting anyway.”
She made an infinitesimally tiny gesture which eloquently told me that she didn’t give a shit what I needed to be there for.
“Look.” It was time for me to put my foot down. Which I could do because I was an adult and she wasn’t and this was my job and holy fucking piss balls I hated it. “I’m driving you. That’s…that’s it.”
“Whatever.”
There was no more argument. Which I suppose…score one for clear boundaries maybe? Then again it didn’t seem like she’d ever cared one way or the other. And so ten minutes later—after a certain amount of faffing around getting Spud into his pen because apparently having a new person in the house had made him excitable and he was giving intense I-will-bolt-out-the-door-and-get-run-over-if-I-have-a-chance energy—we were in the car and I was backing us carefully out of the driveway.
In some ways, I’d been dreading the drive as much as the meeting. Because, while I had learned how to car shortly after we’d moved to Havering, in practice driving had remained very much Oliver’s domain. It fed slightly into his control freak tendencies but, since I liked to fall asleep even on short journeys, it was probably safest all round.
Half into the road, I stalled. Which I suspected wouldn’t do much for my image as a forceful authority figure, or a reliable caregiver, or as remotely competent.
“Sorry.” I probably shouldn’t have said that. After a bit of fiddling, I restarted the engine, backed us approximately two inches further, then stalled again. “Shit.” Idefinitelyshouldn’t have said that. “I mean…sugar.”
Jaz gave me a look of such withering contempt that I regretted every single decision that had brought me to that point. Individually. In chronological order.
Attempt number three saw me getting us neatly out of the drive, into the road, and then stopping dead at an awkward angle across two lanes. “Fu…pity’s sake.”
Then, just when I thought things couldn’t get more humiliating, Jaz said, “Do you want me to drive?”
“Do you know how?” It was the wrong answer for six different reasons.
“Do you?”
“Yes.” It was my protesting-too-much tone. Everybody could pick up on my protesting-too-much tone, even people who were technically children. “I’ve just… I’m a bit out of practice.”
To my relief—and it said a lot about how low my bar for relief was right then—Jaz was so fundamentally uninterested in me that she didn’t even want to revel in my misery and embarrassment. She just turned and stared out of the window.
After a couple of deep breaths and a moment to remind myself that I could do this, that I was a grown-up, and that I did, in fact, more or less know how cars worked, I drove us away.
Jaz’s new school wasn’t that far from our house, so the trip was only about ten minutes, but ten minutes became an unbelievably long time when you were in a car with a teenage girl who had known you for a day, seen ample evidence you were shit at pretty much all life stuff, and saw no reason to say words in your presence.
After about three of the ten impending minutes, I was finding the whole vibe so unbearable that I heard myself say, “Sorry we upset you last night,” just to break the silence.
To my surprise, it actually worked. A bit. “I’m not traumatised.” Jaz didn’t even look away from the window.
“I mean…” This probably wasn’t the right way to go. It probably wasn’t setting clear expectations or anything. “Everybody is a bit, aren’t they?”
At the very least, I’d got her attention. She whipped around and glared at me. “Oh right, because that’s what he meant, wasn’t it? ‘She’s extremely traumatised but only in the exact same way everybody else is because shit is hard for everyone and I’m not making any assumptions about her mum or her life or anything.’”
Oliver would have wanted me to pick her up on sayingshit, but while my parenting instincts weren’t stellar, now seemed like a terrible time to do that. “No,” I admitted, “he probably didn’tmean that.”
“Just because I’mlooked after.” She said the words with a mix of disgust and sarcasm I recognised better than I liked to admit.
“Youdidget delivered to us in handcuffs,” I pointed out.
Her face said that this wasn’t a big deal, but her thumb traced unconsciously at a line around her wrist.
“How did that… What went on there?” I asked.
“Like they said, I got violent.”
This was going to places I was not at all qualified to go, which, thinking about it, was a huge fucking problem because going there was kind of my job now. “Violent how?”
“Spat at one of them.”
