“I mean, it’s pretty cold.”
Spud made a rumbling noise and curled tighter onto Jaz’s lap, as if demonstrating his utility as a coldness-reducer.
Hoping she wouldn’t find it too intrusive, I sat down on the opposite end of the bench. There was enough of a gap between us that she couldn’t really complain. After all, it was a public park and so we had the same right to be there. Which was technically no right at all, on account of how closed it was.
Very pointedly, Jaz put her earphone back in.
Hoping that the softly softly approach would work better than the storm-upstairs-and-demand-she-write-apology-letters approach, I just let her sit for a while with Spud on her lap. In the winter-evening silence, I could just about hear the tinny music coming from her headphones, which probably meant it was unhealthily loud, which probably meant I had a parental obligation to tell her to turn it down for the good of her hearing. Only right now, parental responsibilities weren’t what I was thinking about, because the music was strangely, naggingly familiar. And there aren’t many things in the world more distracting than a song you recognise played just quietly enough that you can’trecognise it.
“Is that…is thatWelcome Ghosts?” I asked.
Jaz pulled her earphone out again, which made the music loud enough that I didn’t need her to answer anymore. “What?”
“Are you listening toWelcome Ghosts?”
She gave me one of her expected-by-now not-shrugs.
“Isn’t that a bit retro for you?”
Turning her head about an eighth of a degree, she said, “I can’t afford new music. Because I’mdisadvantaged.”
“That doesn’t make sense. New music isn’t more expensive than old music.”
“Then I was born in the wrong decade.”
That also didn’t make sense, but it was the kind of not-sense-making thing that people actually said and actually meant, so I let it slide and carried on staring out at the lake.
I hadn’t been intending to use silence as a weapon—it was more that I really didn’t know what to say—but eventually she offered, “My mum likes it.”
I didn’t know much about Jaz’s mum, but since all I knew about her dad was that he wasn’t in the picture, that probably put her mum squarely inWelcome Ghosts’target demographic. “That’s cool,” I mumbled, more as filler than as a way of describing the specific coolness of any specific thing. Then, fully aware I was about to come across as deeply tryhard and awful, added, “My mum, um, sort of wrote it.”
Jaz looked at me like she couldn’t imagine a universe where anything I’d said made sense. Which wasn’t that different from the way she usually looked at me and was slightly more positive than the way she usually looked at Oliver. “You what?”
“My mum’s Odile O’Donnell. I’m Luc O’Donnell. My dad is… Like, my mum wouldn’t want me to say he’s the guy the album isabout, because, y’know, it’shers, nothis, but…she wrote it aftermy dad left.”
Sometimes, in either a good moment or a bad moment, depending on how you thought about it, I was beginning to kid myself that I could read Jaz, if not well, then at least not-completely-terribly. And right now, I was reading conflict. As if she wanted to be interested but couldn’t because this whole conversation, from her perspective, was obviously a trap. So she made a kind of noncommittal noise and started paying really close attention to scratching Spud behind the ears.
I let things simmer for a moment, partly because I was out of ideas again and partly because my phone had just buzzed. I looked down to see a text from Oliver:Are you all right? Where are you both?
I didn’t want Jaz to think I was blanking her, but she was from a generation who lived their whole lives on three screens at once so I figured I could at least reply without her feeling emotionally abandoned. I sent back:In park everything fine give us a bitand then slipped the phone back into my pocket.
“What happened?” I asked the lake in the hope that Jaz would hear it. She tensed, and it took me a heartbeat or two to realise that since we’d just been talking about her mum, she’d probably thought I was asking about her homelife, so I clarified quickly, “With Next Door’s—with Colin, I mean.”
“Put him in a bin.”
In her defence, it was a completely truthful answer. “I got that much.Why?”
At some point over the course of her short life, Jaz had perfected the art of looking apathetic and defensive all at once. “‘I lashed out inappropriately,’” she recited, “‘because I need to develop more effective strategies for managing my emotions.’”
There were a lot of ways I could have responded to that. And the one I picked was probably a lot less mature than it could havebeen. “Oh cut it out, I’m trying to ask you a question here.”
“I haveemotional trauma,” Jaz continued. “Because of mybad parents. Which is why I have to come and live with you and Oliver so you cansave me.”
Fleetingly, I considered trying to claw my way back to a properly adult tone. Then I decided I couldn’t be fucked. “Do youactuallythink that’s what I want to hear, or are you just being a—”
“Awhat?” demanded Jaz, in a tone that echoed Next Door’s Kid more than either of us should have been comfortable with.
“A…nnoying?” I tried.
