The Boy No One Loved (14 page)

‘Let him be, love,’ Mike counselled. ‘Come on, let’s get ourselves a drink, eh?’ He shook his head. ‘What a day, eh? What a day.’

And a day, it turned out, that wasn’t yet over.

Barely a minute had passed – I was still boiling the kettle – when we became aware of a racket going on above our heads. We exchanged a look, and moved as one out of the kitchen and up the stairs, Mike, ahead of me, taking the treads three at a time.

‘He’s barricaded the door,’ he said, trying and failing to enter Justin’s bedroom. The sounds, this close up, were much more obvious, as well as louder. He was smashing things up. Precisely what, we didn’t know. But there was stuff being thrown, being broken, being stamped on. And we couldn’t get in to calm him down.

‘Oh, God,’ I said. ‘Justin!
Justin
!’

Mike put a hand on my arm. ‘Let’s give it a second or two,’ he whispered, with his usual calm wisdom. ‘Let him get it out of his system. It’s only things, after all. Stuff. All replaceable. Let’s just give him a moment and let him get it out.’

I reflected miserably that maybe the next thing we bought him should be a punchbag. But, sure enough, within a minute, the noise completely ceased. But it was the briefest of respites, for less than another thirty seconds later. It was replaced by another, even more sickening sound.

It was immediately obviously what it was. ‘He’s banging his head against the wall, Mike,’ I whispered. Mike nodded. His face set in a grimace. ‘So now we
must
go in,’ he said. ‘Stand back a moment, love.’ Upon which he promptly shoulder barged the door.

Mike’s a big guy, and the door didn’t offer much resistance, the pile of stuff Justin had wedged against it tumbling away.

Justin himself seemed oblivious to us. He was crouched in the corner, and, as we’d guessed, was banging his head, really thumping it against the wall. Mike strode across the room and sat straight down beside him, but Justin immediately turned, his face streaked with dirty tears, and started pummelling Mike instead, going for it, really punching him.

Mike took a few blows, all the time trying to soothe him, whispering, ‘Okay, lad, it’s okay. Shhh. I know … it’s okay …’ but eventually he had to use his size and strength as well, pulling Justin close into him and pinning his arms, till the rage inside him began to lose intensity.

I could hardly bear watch – my own rage was too great. I had to leave this one to Mike, and go downstairs. I needed to calm
myself
down if I was going to be of any use.

How could
any
mother, however feckless, hurt her baby so?

I woke up the next morning with a really thick head – not because I’d spent the night before drowning my sorrows, but because I’d hardly been able to sleep a wink. Funny, I thought ruefully, snuggling up against Mike’s comfortable bulk – boy, was I glad it was Saturday – I’d never really thought about sleep deprivation in all this. That was for foster parents who looked after little babies, wasn’t it? Not strapping twelve-year-old boys.

I closed my eyes and tried hard to let sleep reclaim me for a bit – I had no plans for the day, bar, perhaps, catching up with Riley; though I saw plenty of her I was acutely aware that, in my head, at least, Justin seemed to be taking all my attention, when what I really craved was enough space and mental energy to enjoy the latter stages of my little girl’s first pregnancy; I wanted to be there for her, support her, not be so preoccupied and worried all the time.

Which brought me back, full circle, to the events of the previous day. How could a mother treat her own child with such breathtaking cruelty? It didn’t seem to matter how much I or anyone made excuses, it simply went against every maternal instinct in the world for Janice to behave as she had done.

I wasn’t naive. Wishing for some whimsical utopia was just silly. The fact was that this woman was unable, for whatever reason, to give her child a single iota of love. She obviously saw him as an adversary now as well; her words to him yesterday, screamed out as we were leaving, made it clear that there were only two reasons she’d asked to make contact: one was as a sop to social services about the adequacy of her ‘mothering’ and the other – entirely related to the first one – was to make it clear to him that potentially he’d made things precarious for her, by prompting them to investigate her and her other children further.

But my anxieties went deeper than my fury at Janice. I couldn’t help wondering what good we were doing. Whether, in the last stressful eight months of his life, we’d actually helped Justin much at all. Sure we’d given him a home and security and boundaries. And we’d certainly given him a healthy amount of good old-fashioned love. But I was full of self-doubt. Really – were we actually helping him? Was anything we did going to help him in the long run to become someone able to find peace within himself and in the world?

Or was it (as, in my exhausted state, seemed to be more the case) that in reality we were conducting not much more than a holding exercise? Providing a roof over his head, and little more? It certainly felt that way to me at the moment. That we were unearthing a whole Pandora’s box full of issues, none of which I felt we had the power to help resolve.

‘Absolute nonsense! Not true!’ said John Fulshaw, with feeling, when I finally got hold of him a couple of hours later. I smiled at that; he was echoing what Mike had remarked earlier, when, whey-faced and gloomy, I’d taken him up a cup of tea. I’d also looked in on Justin, who’d been sleeping like a baby. He’d looked exhausted, and would probably sleep till noon, if we let him. Just looking down at his sleeping form made my blood really boil. For all that had happened, I knew he would forgive his mother
anything
, if she would just make some small gesture towards allowing him to believe that somewhere deep down she loved him and wanted him.

‘I really appreciate your confidence,’ I told John now, having run through the sickening events of the previous day and evening. ‘But that’s really not how it feels to me. But the main thing is Janice. I feel really strongly about this, John. Seeing her is not helping him at all. It really isn’t. Whatever she tells Harrison Green, I have seen the results. And trust me, if he had, he’d desist from this whole idea that the contact, in the current situation, is useful. Trust me, if he’d been there watching Justin banging his head against the wall last night, he’d think twice. The only reason she really had Justin there was to warn him off and punish him, whatever soft-soaping clap-trap she told social services. Honestly, John, if you saw her you’d see what I mean. It was like she was a twelve-year-old herself – not a mother. Just some hysterical pubescent girl ranting at him. All visiting her is doing is reinforcing his feelings of being a bad person, unloved because he’s unlovable, full stop. Can you imagine what it’s like to be constantly told by your own mother that you’re evil and that nobody wants you? I’d have thought he’d already learned that message enough. Twenty times too many, in fact.’

John sighed. ‘I’m so sorry, Casey. It’s not right to put you and Mike through all this either. We’re going to have to rethink the whole contact situation, aren’t we? That blasted woman just can’t keep on doing this.’

I smiled wryly to myself again at his polite choice of words for Janice. I could think of lots of them, right now, and, non-PC though it might be, the word ‘blasted’ didn’t feature on my list.

‘Tell you what I’m going to do,’ he said. ‘I’m going to call Harrison Green right now and suggest – no, insist – that our own team’s birth-family therapist gets involved with the case.’

‘And you’ll suspend contact for the time being?’

‘Yes, I think that’s the way forward, depressing an option though that is, for all concerned. But the right decision, I think. Linda – that’s her – can go and do some home visits with her. Make a thorough assessment, maybe even insist Janice goes to parenting classes –’

‘She’d do that, you think?’

‘She’s not really in a position to argue, is she? So let’s let Linda assess things and then give us feedback on what she feels is the best way forward. That work for you?’

‘Yes, it does. It’s definitely better that way, I think. Though, of course, Justin will want to see his mother again eventually – not right now, perhaps; he’s much too angry with her, obviously – but how do we play it if and when he starts asking if he can?’

‘We tell him straight,’ said John. ‘She’s lied to him enough. So we won’t. We’ll just have to make it clear that she’s got some emotional issues that we feel are best sorted before they have contact again. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.’

‘Agreed. And if it becomes an issue, I guess we can rethink as and when. But …’

‘Yup?’

‘In the meantime, I think we need more support here. I know you’re pushed, but I’ve been thinking lots about it lately, and I feel the lines just keep blurring too much. We’re supposed to be
in loco parentis
, Mike and I, but I feel I’m increasingly playing the role of counsellor with him, which makes it difficult for all of us to provide a stable, relaxed home. It’s one thing him and I having our chats over hot chocolate – that’s good and normal and reassuring for him, obviously – but once I’m trying to ‘counsel’ him I feel it’s in danger of becoming counter-productive. It’s not right for him to start coming home feeling he might be due a ‘therapy session before tea’ – you know? – whether he feels like it or not. Home should feel a place where he doesn’t have those pressures, shouldn’t it?’

It was funny; we’d learned all about this in training, all the different roles various professionals needed to play in the life of a child stuck in the care system. It had felt complex – most of it like gobbledegook, really, and Mike and I had often raised our eyebrows at all the jargon that was contained in the many handouts we got given to take home.

But, suddenly, once you’re doing it in real life, all that changes. You start dealing with real children, and it starts making sense. So we just sort of picked it up, along the way, as we went. Fostering is many things, but it’s never, ever boring. It’s always a work in progress, there’s always something new to learn.

‘Absolutely, Casey,’ John agreed now. ‘You’re spot on. And I’ve been thinking about that anyway, as it happens, in preparation for him going back to school next month. We have an excellent anger-management counsellor on the programme – name of Simon Cole – and I was thinking that, if we – well, ahem,
you
, I guess! – could persuade Justin to go for it, that we might fix up some sessions with him. Does that sound okay?’ It sounded to me more like the title of that American film, with Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler, but if John thought it would work, I was that last person who’d disagree. ‘And look,’ he added, ‘I know I’ve said it already, but it really bears repeating. You and Mike are doing a
fantastic
job, you really are. I know it’s difficult for you to see yourselves, because you’re with him 24/7, but all of us have noticed massive changes in Justin. I’m not just saying that, either. We all have. You know, you should feel really proud of the way you’ve been handling all these challenges. You were born to do this, both of you, and we feel really lucky to have you on the programme.’

‘Okay, okay, enough!’ I felt compelled to say, blushing. ‘And thanks. It doesn’t feel that way to me right at this moment, but I really do appreciate what you’re saying.’

‘As you
should
,’ John replied. ‘As I keep saying, and will keep saying –’

But I had to call a halt to all the praises he was singing, reassuring though they were. I could hear Justin coming out of his bedroom. Time to end the call and go and create some of that all-important ‘normality’. If there was nothing else I could do, at least I could do that.

‘Bacon and egg sarnie, love?’ I called up the stairs, brightly. He was hurting a great deal and Mike and I were both worried about further attempts at self-harming; we had been all night and had checked on him constantly.

Pecker up, Casey, I told myself firmly. It was likely to be a long weekend.

The more I thought about the anger-management idea, the better I liked it. I knew it was more about addressing the symptoms than the root of the problem, but, as one of the tools in our armoury, it felt like a positive one. Of course it would be hard for Justin to come to terms with all the terrible things that had destroyed his self-worth and self-esteem – perhaps many, many years of support and regular therapy – but while there was nothing much anyone could do about his mother’s rejection, learning to control his emotions in the here and now was a wholly positive thing to do. It would benefit his self-esteem enormously if he could learn to take better control of himself and so stop having even more opprobrium heaped on his young head, such as had happened at school during the last week of the summer term.

Despite my positive feelings, however, it was exactly the long – and tough – old weekend I’d predicted. We both felt we were only just keeping Justin together. That he was teetering on the brink of complete abject despair. He looked, almost physically, like a scared, wounded animal, who wanted nothing more than to run away from the world for all time; to go to sleep and never wake up again.

Riley came over later that day, anxious, as was ever her caring way, bless her, to hear how the second visit to his mother had gone. When I told her, she was horrified, almost speechless with shock.

‘God, how
could
she?’ she said, her hand moving in big, gentle arcs over her swollen tummy. I wasn’t even sure it was a conscious thing she did, but to me it spoke volumes, as it echoed my own feelings. We were both mothers now, I realised, and the feeling was universal. To see another mother going against that most fundamental of instincts was stunning her just as much as it had me.

‘I’d like to kill her,’ she decided. ‘Well, not
kill
her, Mum, obviously. But for two pins I’d be up there giving her a piece of my mind about exactly what she’s doing to her own child. That poor kid. Makes you wonder how he gets through each day. It really does. Poor, poor Justin.’

But it was to be a couple more days before Justin himself wanted to talk about what had happened with his mother.

It was a midweek afternoon and we were sitting together on the sofa, watching some silly slapstick movie. I had loads of chores to do, but I knew better than to do them. The dust and mess could wait for once, even for a stickler like me. He might not want to talk but he needed to know I was close to him.

Justin loved those kinds of movies in particular and would normally sit beside me laughing hysterically and fairly constantly. But today he was quiet and still.

‘You okay, babes?’ I asked him.

‘I’m alright,’ he replied. ‘I was just thinking about this Simon bloke. What’ll happen?’

We’d fixed up the first of Justin’s anger-management sessions a couple of days before. Simon was due to be collecting him in the morning, and though, when I’d explained about it, he’d seemed quite receptive, it must obviously have been playing on his mind.

Must be difficult, I thought, to be just twelve years old, and to have complete strangers sit and ask you personal questions all the time. I thought back to Kieron when he was a young boy. He’d go scarlet if a stranger said
anything
to him, even something as innocuous as ‘Good morning’.

‘Oh, I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,’ I reassured Justin now. ‘I don’t think you’ll have to do anything complicated. He’ll probably just want to start to get to know you.’

‘Yeah, but
why
?’ He had obviously been thinking things through. ‘I don’t see how he can help me. What can he do?’

I shrugged. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said truthfully. ‘I don’t know that much about it. But it could be really useful, you chatting to him about stuff. You just don’t know unless you try, do you? I think it’s all about trying to look at which things make you angry, and then finding ways to deal with the anger when it comes. You know, like when people get cross about something and say they are going to count to ten instead of shouting. You heard of that?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘So it’s sort of like that. Like counting to ten only in more detail. Better than shouting and ranting …’

‘I suppose …’

‘And better,’ I said, ‘
much
better than hurting your
self
. People do that too, don’t they? Like you did on Friday. You get mad and then end up doing damage to yourself. Which is no good, now, is it?’