Ghost Child (10 page)

However, I wouldn’t say, and it would not be correct to say, that Lauren, Hayley and Harley were
forcibly
separated from each other. The fact that they were raised apart was simply a product of the way the Department’s policies worked, and of the homes that were available at that time. It would not be correct to say that the Department discouraged contact between the siblings. There were occasions – at least one, possibly two occasions – when they met. The children could themselves have requested further contact, but apparently did not.

It is a matter of record that Harley’s placement with Mrs Porter endured to adulthood. That is something of which we can be proud.

As for Lauren and Hayley … well, I believe it would be wrong to say that the Department failed the Cashman children. As I said, Hayley was placed with a great-aunt because she was kin. It was a matter of deep regret to everybody, I’m sure, when that placement failed.

Hayley is now an adult. Her current circumstances are beyond the Department’s purview.

As for Lauren, well, it is true that the Department was never able to find a long-term solution to her housing problems. It is also true that a secure home should have been found. Whether a secure home
would
ever have been found, given the circumstances, I just don’t know. I remain of the view, therefore, that the Department acted at all times with Lauren’s best interests in mind.

We were driving in heavy traffic. Hayley was in the backseat. From memory, she was about seven years old. She said, ‘Mrs Mac?’ I had one eye on the traffic, but I looked at her in the rear-vision mirror and said, ‘Yes, Hayley?’

She said, ‘Mrs Mac, are uncles allowed to get into your bed and do things to you?’

I nearly ran into the car in front. Honestly, it was all I could do to swerve.

I parked the car and said, ‘What things, Hayley? What uncle? Has somebody done something to you?’ But she wouldn’t say anything further.

I was concerned. Of course I was concerned, and of course that’s what Hayley wanted: for me to be worried. As far as I knew, she didn’t
have
an uncle. She has
one female relative, a great-aunt, with whom she lived for a few years when she was a very young child. I can’t be sure that the great-aunt didn’t have a man around, a man that Hayley called ‘uncle’, but look, I doubt it. I doubt it because Hayley was forever making up stories. I’m not exaggerating when I say that most of what came out of that girl’s mouth was a lie.

Beyond that, Hayley Cashman was the most sexually aggressive child I’ve ever encountered. If I had to take her word against that of a man or a boy she claimed to have been molesting her, well, I would say it was probably the other way around! She simply had no idea how to behave, no idea what was appropriate. She pushed everybody’s buttons, including mine.

Hayley came into our care a few days before Christmas, 1986. The Department told us that she was five years old and she had been living with a family member – her great-aunt, the woman I’ve just mentioned – in a quite chaotic home for two years, waiting, apparently, to see what would happen to her mother in the courts. When her mother went to prison and the placement with her great-aunt fell apart, she came to us. A social worker from the Department drove up with her sitting in the back seat of the car. It was like looking at an orphan from
Oliver Twist
. She had silver curls, long curls that had been left to grow wild. It took me a week to get a comb through it. We took her inside, and so began the journey.

I can’t tell you the resources we poured into that child. Endless resources; and all for naught.

For background, I’m not the sort of foster parent who says, ‘Oh, I will love this child like my own.’ I have my own children, and I love them unconditionally, with a mother’s love. The foster children I’ve had over the years … it’s different, and I’m not ashamed to say so. I don’t know why it’s so hard for some foster parents to admit that they love the foster children differently. It’s like the big taboo. If you’ve had a child for six or seven or ten years, you have to say, ‘I love them like my own.’ It’s not been the case with me, and I don’t believe it’s the case with many foster parents. I know a bit about foster care. I’ve been a foster parent for more than twenty years. I have taken more than fifty foster children into my home, and I understand the role I’m supposed to play. You take care of them, you give them back. That is the way the system is supposed to work. They do not belong to you. They are not your children. They are somebody else’s children, and the goal is to get them back with their parents. But you can’t get people to admit it. I’ve heard people tell me, ‘I love all my children – my foster children, and my biological children – exactly the same way.’ I think to myself, ‘Oh yes? And if two of them – your child and the foster child – were hanging off the edge of a cliff, and you had one in each hand, and you could only save one of them, which would you save?’

You don’t have to tell me the answer. I know the answer.

No, you don’t love them all the same, and that’s why I don’t encourage the foster children in my care to call me Mum. I’m not Mum. I’m Mrs Mac. They have mums, most of them. That’s not to say that I didn’t develop a very strong bond with some of them, over the years. They might think I’m strict at the start, but I believe that children actually need boundaries, and many of them still come to visit me, still come through the door like it’s their own home, singing out, ‘Hey, Mrs Mac, it’s me!’ They give me a kiss, and that’s okay. I don’t mind that. But they are not my children. I understand that, and they understand that.

This is how I see my role: I provide foster children with nourishing food, and I put clean sheets on their bed at night. I enrol them in school, and I make sure they know the rules of the house. They must use their manners. They must eat with a knife and fork. They are not allowed to break things.

I get a small amount of money from the Department for each child, something like $300 a fortnight. It does not cover the cost of having the foster children in the house. I find myself buying things with my own money. In most cases, they need a school uniform. I send them all to the school nearest me. It makes no sense to be driving around to different schools. The Department might say, ‘Well, don’t get them a new uniform, they might
only be with you for a few weeks,’ but I say, ‘No, they will wear the uniform.’ They come with so few clothes of their own, what else are they going to wear? Some of them come with just the clothes on their backs. If you think they come with a small suitcase of summer and winter clothes and several pairs of shoes, you’d be very wrong indeed.

I have an arrangement with the local school. I can get second-hand uniforms at five dollars a piece. But it adds up. Five-dollar pants, five-dollar shirt, socks, shoes, hat, bag. It adds up. The school has excursions. I pay for that. I won’t have the children sitting at school while the other students go off on excursions. That’s not the way I operate. Most of the children I’ve had over the years have come only for respite care. They might have a disability, or their mother might have some kind of problem, and they come for a weekend or a week, a fortnight, or perhaps a few months, but still, I try to make sure they fit in, here at my home and at the school.

When Hayley came to me it was supposed to be temporary. She needed somewhere to go. I don’t generally take children long-term. One child – Ben – I’ve had for eight years. He has a learning disability. It would be difficult to find another place for him. He has the mind of a two-year-old. He cannot tie his shoes. He has stayed and stayed, and that’s fine. I didn’t want another child permanently. It’s not that I get attached – I don’t – but I believe the foster parent plays only a temporary role.
It’s a safe place to land. That’s how I see it. A safe place to land, and then back to Mum or, if that’s not possible, to a permanent family.

When the Department delivered Hayley, they told me, ‘The great-aunt can’t have her any more.’ They didn’t say why. They said, ‘It will be for a few months. We’re trying to find another relative.’

They did not find a relative. They had to move Hayley to the ‘permanent care’ list. It took a while. She was getting older. Her time with me was extended, and extended again, and before long a year had gone by, and then another. If I could have looked into the future and seen that I’d have Hayley until she was sixteen, I might have approached things differently. I might not have taken her at all. But I took her, thinking, ‘Let’s get through the holidays. Things always look better in the New Year.’ It was three days before Christmas. She was a child. She deserved a present and a nice meal, like every body else on Christmas Day. Then she was still here when the next Christmas came around. I bought another present. Then came autumn, and another spring. She outgrew the old uniform. I got her a new one. That’s the way we went on: one season to the next, playing it by ear.

From the start, Hayley was difficult. ‘Challenging’ is how they put it. But that was okay. I’d had that before. It wasn’t her behaviour. Not at first. That came later. At first, it was physical. Hayley had poor fine-motor
skills. She could not hold a pencil. She could not catch a ball. The Department sent her to an occupational therapist. She said Hayley had poor muscle development. She needed to play on the monkey bars. They had monkey bars at the local school. I told the staff to make sure she played on them.

She started to bite. I’ve had biters before. Mostly, it’s something they grow out of. They don’t know it’s wrong until you tell them. But Hayley was still biting when she was nine.

The Department wanted Hayley to stay in touch with her mother, in the prison. They want all children in state care to have a relationship with their parents. Mostly, I support that ethos. If a mum is having a bad time, if she’s been on the drugs and she goes into rehab, and she really proves she can do it, then of course, send the children back. That’s what everybody wants.

Now, Hayley was eighteen months old when her mother went to prison. There was a trial, an appeal, and then another appeal. During that time, Hayley lived first with a foster parent and then with her great-aunt. Then, when the placement with the great-aunt fell through, she came to me. In my view she should have been adopted. The Department disagreed. They wanted her to stay on the short-term list and to stay in touch with her mother, and for a while she did. At first, she would get letters. Her mother would write to her from prison, and the Department would pass on the letters. Initially, I agreed
to read those letters to Hayley, but they said the strangest things, these letters. They said, ‘I’ll be out soon and we’ll live together again.’ That wasn’t going to happen, not without a miracle. I said to the Department once, ‘Why do you bring these letters? They just upset Hayley. Her mother isn’t coming out to live with her.’

They said, ‘We believe that Hayley and her mother have a relationship that should be encouraged. It is Hayley’s
right
to have a relationship with her mother, whether or not she’s incarcerated.’

I said, ‘She doesn’t have
any
rights. She’s five years old.’

But they had their mantra. They said, ‘A child has a right to know her mother.’

I said, ‘But what if those letters are upsetting this little girl?’

They waved me away. ‘We’re the professionals,’ they said. ‘We’re skilled in social work. We make our decisions in the best interests of the child.’

I didn’t agree with them. I may not be a social worker but I’m not an imbecile. I didn’t need a degree to know that it wasn’t doing Hayley any good to get those letters. The Department wasn’t interested in that, however. They continued to deliver the letters. Then, a few years later, they also arranged for Hayley to speak to her mother on the telephone from the prison. It was my responsibility as the foster carer to take Hayley to the Department’s offices on the Barrett Estate to receive
a fifteen-minute telephone call from her mother once a month. On almost every occasion, the mother would either not be on the end of the telephone at all, or she would be late to the line, and the allotted time would be eaten away.

On one occasion, when the mother did come to the line, late, she said, ‘Sorry, I was having a durry.’

A durry! Her daughter was waiting on the line to speak to her, the only conversation they’d have that month, and she stepped out for a cigarette. Ten minutes of the fifteen minutes, gone.

After the phone calls came the visits. Once Hayley got to age six, we were told that she should visit her mother in prison, twice a year. It happened in February, and again in September. The first time, I was driving her to the Department’s offices – they were going to take her out to the prison; not just Hayley but other children whose parents were locked up – but she was so anxious, she got a stomach cramp in the car and threw up.

They travelled to the prison in a white minibus, these kids. Hayley never liked the bus. She called it ‘the spastic bus’.

‘You’re driving along, and kids in cars make faces at you.’ That’s what she told me. I thought it was wrong: a bus full of kids swinging into the prison, with the towers and the lights. They had to pass through security checks. Even the babies. The Department told me that some mothers got their children to smuggle in their
drugs. They got their friends, or their boyfriend, to tuck the drugs into pooey nappies, and they would change the nappy in prison and take out the drugs.

Hayley was too big for nappies, thank God.

Her mother shared a room with other women, other mothers. They had hair dryers and a TV and a kettle and a microwave. She had a microwave before we did!

After the visits, Hayley would get sick. She couldn’t go to school. I could never work out exactly what happened to her during those visits to prison, but I gather that the mother was not always there to see her, or else would be late … or else she would be ‘shitty’. That’s Hayley’s word.

‘She was shitty with me.’ That’s what she said.

The mother wouldn’t want to hear what Hayley had been doing. We took Hayley to Guides. She got to a certain level and she received a badge and she was proud of that badge. She wore it to show her mother on a prison visit, but when she came back it was no longer pinned to her blouse. She had put it in her pocket. She wouldn’t wear it again and she wouldn’t go to Guides again, either. I asked her why not. ‘Guides is for posh people,’ she told me, and I know where she would have got that from.

Her mother taught Hayley bad habits, and bad manners, and Hayley was impressionable. She took the lead from her mother. She copied her. It was a bad model to copy.

Hayley’s sexuality started to be a problem when she was about seven. We let her have a sleepover and she invented this game that involved getting the other girls to take their clothes off. We’d put mattresses down on the floor in the lounge room, so they could watch a video on the Betacord. I walked in from the kitchen. I’d been making the popcorn in a pot and I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on in the lounge room. I came in holding a bowl of popcorn and dropped it on the floor. They were all stark naked and one of them was crying.

‘What’s going on!’ I said. They were grabbing their sleeping bags and trying to get inside them. They said, ‘It was Hayley’s idea.’

I took her aside, into my room, and I said, ‘Hayley, what are you
doing
?’ And she said, ‘Strip Jack Naked.’

I said, ‘How do you know about Strip Jack Naked?’ She just shrugged at me. I told all the girls to get dressed and hurry and not to play that game any more, and got them on to Pass the Parcel – thank heavens I had one already made up. Then we played Pin the Tail on the Donkey and the little girls loved it – they just do! – but all the time I could see Hayley sort of looking at me, like I’d ruined her fun.