Chapter 2
In the end we started, as one usually does (and we hadn’t been able to as yet), with a round of introductions. I learned that the colleague of PC Matlock’s was a rather stressed-looking PC Harper, and that the social worker with the unfortunate name of Mr Burns was actually a duty social worker, called in to manage the emergency as best he could because Tyler’s regular social worker had gone on maternity leave. And, finally, they learned who I was and what I was there for, which was not really news to the adults in the room, obviously, but caused some consternation in Tyler. While the rest of us arranged chairs in a crude semi-circle around the table, he donned the parka-style jacket that had been attached to a wall hook and pulled the hood forwards to try and hide his face. He also pushed his chair back so he wasn’t part of the group. But he was watching me intently, even so.
‘So, moving on. The situation with Jenny,’ John said, referring to his tatty notepad, ‘is that she’s been involved with the family for just over a year now.’ He turned to me. ‘And I’ll let you have a copy of her notes in due course, Casey,’ he added, ‘but in the meantime Will Fisher is going to take over the case.’
I nodded. Another social worker whose name was familiar, though I wasn’t actually sure I’d ever met him. ‘Okay,’ I said, looking at Tyler and smiling. But as soon as we made eye contact, he put his head down.
‘So it’s really just a matter of finding a home for young master Broughton here,’ PC Matlock added, again, mostly to me. ‘As things stand at the moment, the parents can’t take him back.’
I noticed his diplomatic use of the word ‘can’t’, rather than ‘won’t’, which, from what John had already told me, was obviously the truth of it.
‘She’s not my fucking parent!’ Tyler yelled from his seat in the back row. ‘Never was and never will be! She’s a fucking witch who’s always hated me!’
Mr Burns swivelled in his seat. ‘All right, son. Calm down while we talk, please,’ he said.
Oops, I immediately thought, given Tyler’s previous comment. Don’t think I would have said that. And I was right.
‘An’ I’m not your fucking son, neither, dick brain!’ he snapped.
And off we went again. Ding, ding. Round two. Fortunately, by this time Tyler seemed to have run out of energy for physically railing against his captors, but over the next 20 minutes or so, while we continued to talk details, he peppered every contentious comment with his pithy take on things. So though I learned little more about the background (understandably, because there was only so much that could be discussed in front of him) one thing I did learn – and mostly via observation – was that this was a very angry, intensely troubled boy.
Mostly we were waiting, though – for a phone call to come through confirming that they had indeed found respite care for the next few days. And a knock on the door finally confirmed that perhaps it had.
‘All sorted,’ said the receptionist who’d been on the desk when I’d arrived. ‘Couple called Smith. Very nice. Said they’re happy to have Tyler – though only for a couple of days,’ she added, frowning slightly, ‘because they’re off on their summer holiday next week. I told them to come straight down. That okay?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ John said, nodding. ‘Perfect. Thanks very much. Good, so at least we have that bit sorted out.’ He turned to me, then. ‘So, Casey,’ he added, looking at me with a familiar ‘Well?’ sort of expression, ‘any chance I can put you on the spot?’
I looked over at Tyler, who, like John, had been watching my reaction, and, again, lowered his head when he caught my eye.
‘Hey, Bart Simpson,’ I said, forcing him to respond and meet my gaze again, ‘how do you fancy coming to stay with me for a while? I’ll have to speak to my husband – he’s called Mike, by the way – but I’m sure he’d love to have another boy around the house. So. How about it?’
Tyler had shrunk so far into his hood by this time that he looked like he was peeping out from behind a shrubbery. ‘Don’t care if I do, don’t care if I don’t,’ he said, seeming suddenly far less cocky than he had been up to now. My heart went out to him. He was 11 and he was sitting in an interview room in a police station, he was being discussed by strangers and, most of all, he wasn’t going home. Didn’t matter how much of a witch he had his stepmother pegged as, he wasn’t going home. And now the adrenalin had gone, it looked like that fact was beginning to sink in. No wonder he looked like he’d had the stuffing knocked out of him.
I smiled at him again, and smiled at John. ‘I’ll take that as a yes, then,’ I said. ‘Give me a call later then, John, yes? I’m sure we can sort something out.’
‘Thanks, Casey,’ John said, running his hand through his hair. He patted my arm then – a familiar unspoken gesture. I knew it meant he’d been all out of options and was grateful.
‘Right, then,’ I said, rising from my chair. ‘I’ll be off, then. See you soon, Tyler, yeah?’ I added, moving towards the door again. There was no response but as I turned before going through the doorway the movement of his hood told me he was watching me go.
And what was he thinking? I wondered. About his ‘witch’ of a stepmother? And about me? Something about frying pans and fires? I would certainly figure. I did have long black hair, after all.
‘Erm, so what happened to the “Oh, it’s great having all this time to spend with the grandkids” malarkey?’ Mike wanted to know four short hours later, after I’d recounted the details of my strange day.
Strange, but also curiously uplifting, all things considered. Because by now, it had to be said, I was buzzing. Dad had come round and was doing great, apparently, Mum had stopped worrying and was looking after him (well, getting under the nurses’ feet, more likely, bless her) and the prospect of taking on the lad I’d met earlier had gone from being a possibility to a probability to a cast iron certainty – well, in my head, at least. I still had to convince Mike.
Who was still on the same track. ‘And what happened to the “Let’s take a few months out from fostering” for that matter? You have a very short memory, my dear …’
It was true. I had said all of that. And when I’d said it, I’d truly meant it. But the very fact that Mike was teasing me about it was a Very Good Sign Indeed. If he’d been set against it, he wouldn’t be teasing. He’d be frowning. As it was I knew I wouldn’t have to work too hard to convince him.
‘Oh, shut up!’ I said, throwing a cushion in his general direction for good measure. ‘And, anyway, it’s been almost a year now. If we leave it much longer we’ll probably have to do retraining. And we don’t want to have to go through the faff of all that, do we?’
I didn’t actually know if we would have to retrain – but it seemed a fair bet we would in some way, shape or form. At the very least in some aspect of health and safety. You couldn’t turn around for new health and safety initiatives, after all, could you? So it was less ‘little white lie’ and more ‘overemphasising the negative’ because I knew it was something that would get him. And I’d been right – a look of horror began spreading across his face. Big and assertive and managerial as he was, my husband was cringingly shy when it came to things involving group participation. And that was something the fostering training process had had in spade loads: lots of role play with fellow trainees and lots of speaking in public. It would be his worst nightmare to have to do it all again.
He dried his hands – he’d been just finishing off the last of the drying up – and now came to join me on the sofa.
‘Okay, so what’s this kid like, then?’ he asked. ‘The real, unvarnished truth, mind. And when were you thinking of him moving in?’
I took a moment to try and think how best to convey my first impressions, and though I could think of lots of ways to couch ‘stabbed his stepmum’ in such a manner that it would sugar the pill slightly, I realised it was probably best to prepare for the worst and then work upwards. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, love,’ I said. ‘He looks like he might be a proper little handful, to be honest. He swears like a trooper and had a bit of a temper on him, too. One that …’ To say or not to say? Yes, say, Casey. ‘Well, remember when Justin first came to us?’
Mike nodded. Slowly. ‘Oh dear.’
‘Well, yes, you say that,’ I countered, turning to face him on the sofa and swinging my legs up beneath me. ‘I mean, he turned out to be such a lovely kid, didn’t he? And look at him now! Imagine if we hadn’t given him that chance? And, well, was it so difficult, really, looking back?’
Mike gave me what my mum would call an old-fashioned look, and perhaps not without very good reason. Justin had been our first ever foster child and his horrendous background (and, boy, it had been a grim one) had caused him to not only build a wall right around him but also the mental equivalent of a roll of barbed wire – he had a tendency to lash out at anyone who tried to help him. His behaviour had been so bad that one previous carer had been moved to point out that he was ‘a newspaper headline just waiting to happen’ – and not one about the Queen’s Jubilee.
For almost a year Justin had turned our lives upside down – and not just Mike and my lives either; the whole family had been involved, particularly our youngest, Kieron, then still in his teens. But it had worked out okay. We eventually got to the root of everything. And Justin had turned out to be like any other kid; hurting and sad and abandoned and alone, and, once he had some love and stability, he responded positively. He blossomed before our eyes, and he grew.
And Justin, fully grown now, was still in our lives, testament to the fact that love and stability had a lot to be said for it. Love and stability, in most cases, worked.
And we could offer that to this lad, though I sensed I didn’t need to bang on about it.
‘You’re right, I suppose,’ Mike agreed – though he might still have had half a mind on ‘Pretend you’re the foster dad and that Mrs Potter is this young girl who is coming on to you …’ Either way, I could tell we were on. ‘And if it turns out to get a bit lively, well, I suppose it keeps us on our toes, doesn’t it?’ he added. ‘Keeps us young.’
I laughed at that, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. ‘Young’ was one thing we weren’t. I was 47 now and Mike was a year older. And though that didn’t make us old, it did make me rational. There were lots of ways of defining the word ‘lively’, after all. And given the sort of kids we had tended to foster so far, I reckoned our definition probably wasn’t the same as most …