Little Prisoners (26 page)

‘Mum,’ said Riley finally. ‘What do you think she was doing to him? I mean, I know she wasn’t doing what she said she was. And so do you.’

I shook my head. ‘I know, love. What can I say? We just don’t
know
. But I don’t think for a minute that she meant to hurt him.’

‘Just have a quick fiddle, then, was that it?’ Riley’s accompanying look was withering.

This is how it starts
, I thought.
This is how it starts
. This would have been the sort of thing that happened to Olivia and all her siblings. Regularly. Unashamedly. Normalising everything. Making the unspeakable routine. Making a child’s private body parts public property within the family. So that as they grew they knew no different and so it carried on. And then, one day, those same children would hit puberty. Have sexual feelings. And by then, of course, the damage would have already long been done. It made me shudder.

Riley reached for her bag of baby paraphernalia, which was hanging from the handle of the pram. ‘I might as well change him now we’re here,’ she said, carefully unfastening his nappy. ‘Could you do me a favour and check on Levi for me, Mum?’ She looked up and smiled; a smile designed to make me feel better. ‘Just be sure poor old Bob is surviving under the stress?’

I nodded. ‘And I’ll pop up to Olivia as well,’ I said. ‘Strike, as they say, while the iron’s hot.’

What I didn’t say, as Riley hadn’t been privy to the extent of it, was that I was worried this episode could soon cause another. And another bout of self-abuse, not to mention scrawling on her walls and defecating in her rubbish bin, was exactly what none of us needed today.

But when I got upstairs, Olivia was merely in hiding. She was hiding in her bed, huddled in the corner by the wall, beneath the duvet. I pulled back the covers and sat down, noticing but not mentioning the large wet stain that had spread across both her jeans and the bottom sheet.

‘Sweetheart,’ I said gently, ‘I need you to tell me what it was that you were doing. Now I know that little girls sometimes need to know what their dollies – their baby dollies, especially – have in their nappies. They need to know that, so they can change them, if they’re wet. But
was
it that, love? I need you to tell me the truth. Were you
really
checking to see if Jackson had had a pee pee?’

I waited while she seemed to wrestle with her emotions. And then slowly, almost imperceptibly, she shook her head. She started to cry then, and I pulled her close to me, feeling an unexpected wave of tenderness for her, despite what had happened. It wasn’t her fault, for God’s sake; it was the fault of those bloody monsters. She didn’t know why she had done it, did she? How could she? If you asked her to explain, on pain of death, why she’d been rootling in his nappy, the poor mite wouldn’t be able to tell you in a million years. It was just what she’d seen and had done to
her all her life. It was normal. ‘Family’ life. It made my blood boil.

But there was hope too, I realised, in all this. She was beginning to realise it was
wrong
. That it was not at all normal. That it upset people.

‘Riley hates me now, don’t she?’ she mumbled into my jumper.

‘No, love,’ I said. ‘Not at all. She doesn’t hate you. But she’s a mummy, and you know what it’s like to be a mummy, don’t you? They get upset when they think someone might have harmed their baby.’

She pulled back so she could look at me, ‘I wasn’t hurting him! I
swear
! I was just ’aving a feel. Just a tickle, that’s all.’

It was at that moment when Riley herself appeared in the bedroom doorway, holding Jackson. ‘Olivia,’ she said, without anger or malice. ‘You are seven years old. A big girl now. And I know you’ve been told all about good touching and bad touching, haven’t you? And that was bad touching, wasn’t it? You know that. And that’s why you’re feeling so bad at this moment. Because you
know
.’ She let this sink in a moment, never taking her eyes off Olivia, then said, ‘So what I want you to promise me is that you will never do that again. Can you do that?’

Olivia looked stricken, unable to answer. Then pushed her face into the wool of my jumper once again, crying, ‘I’m sorry, Riley! I’ll kill myself if you want. I really will!’

‘Olivia,’ said Riley,’ that’s the
last
thing I want. All I want is for you to promise me, that’s all.’

I stroked Olivia’s hair. ‘You can do that, love, can’t you?’ I whispered.

‘I pwomise,’ she mumbled, between sobs.

For all that it pretty much put the lid on our carefree Saturday, when the evening came and I sat down to write up the incident, it occurred to me again there had been progress made here. For the first time I had a clear sense that not only did Olivia know she’d done something to make the grown-ups cross, but actually had a real sense of
why
. Riley’s words had been spot-on. It was the fact that Olivia knew she’d done wrong that had caused her so much upset and self-loathing. It was a horrible process for her to have to live through and learn from, but learn she must. Her whole psyche essentially had to be recalibrated; she had to reject the norms of her early childhood – already hard-wired into her – and replace them with the morals of the society in which we lived. Such a very big thing for such a very little girl. But it was necessary; the alternative prospect was so much worse. Abused children often only realise that they’re being abused once their own sex hormones, and greater knowledge of their abuser’s sick motivation, begin to kick in. And, as countless tragic testimonies prove, by that time the damage runs horribly deep.

Even so, it was frustrating when things like this happened. Why couldn’t progress with these kids be more linear? We’d make some, then just when I thought we were winning, there’d be a reminder that there was still such a long, long way to go. I was fretting more, with each passing
week, about their potential new placements. The kids needed to be seen as manageable prospects. We’d seen it all before, of course; our remit was to foster the ‘unfosterable’, but the vast majority of foster carers neither wanted, nor were experienced in handling, such challenging kids.

‘You’re wrong,’ said Mike, bringing me a welcome dose of caffeine. ‘The trouble is, you can’t see the wood for the trees. You’ve worked miracles. You’ve worked magic. You’re just too close to it to see it. You’ve taken two broken kids and you’re slowly but surely putting them back together. So stop beating yourself up, love, okay. You’re doing
brilliantly
.’

It didn’t feel that way to me, but as words went, they were pretty nice, and very timely ones. And that was all we
could
do, really. Just keep on doing what we were doing. Just teaching these poor mites how to live, basically, before we had to let them go, all the while crossing our fingers behind our backs.

Chapter 22

Just as had happened at Christmas, Easter passed almost unnoticed by the children. Though Mike and I did our usual mammoth Easter egg hunt – planting scores of brightly wrapped Easter eggs all around the garden – it was, perhaps predictably, only our big kids, plus little Levi, who fully engaged with the process.

‘I can’t believe it!’ I said to Mike as we stood in the conservatory doorway, watching our two grown-up children, plus little Levi, dashing from bush to bush, possessed. ‘Look at those two, will you? Twenty and twenty-two, going on eight or nine. And then those two –’ here I pointed towards Olivia and Ashton, who both had a look of faint bewilderment. ‘Doesn’t matter how much grim information we hear about the family from social services, I still can’t get my head round the fact that this is all so alien to them! I mean, surely they must have been in supermarkets
around Easter time. Surely they watched telly. Surely they made Easter cards at school!’

Mike shook his head. ‘You know, Case, the more I think about it, the more I think you were right in what you said the other day. Yes, they went to school, but as for the rest, I think that’s just it. I wonder if perhaps they really
were
prisoners in their own home. I mean, if you are systematically abusing all the children in the family, then the last thing you’d want is them out of your sight, mixing with other people, perhaps letting things slip. Far better to keep them in, I’d say, wouldn’t you?’

I watched Ashton and Olivia, trying their best to join in. Tragically, I suspected Mike was right.

But the past was done and dusted and as the summer term got under way, I felt the longer days and welcome sunshine helped me focus on the here and now, and when I received a call from Dr Shackleton, telling me he’d got the reports back from the psychiatrist, I felt a renewed sense of sleeves-up, can-do.

I made an appointment to go down and discuss them with them the following day and no sooner had I disconnected than the phone rang again. This time in was Anna, and she was about to rock my world.

‘Hi,’ she said brightly. ‘I’ve got some really great news!’

‘Well, that would certainly make a pleasant change,’ I said, wondering what it might be. ‘What is it?

‘We think we’ve found some carers to take Olivia!’

It was as if I’d had a stone dropped from a great height, into my stomach. I was gutted. And what’s more, I felt shocked that I was so gutted. All this time I’d spent badgering social services about placements, and now Anna had come good, it had hit me so hard. I was silent for some seconds. It was actually hard to catch my breath.

‘Are you sure?’ I said eventually. Was I hoping she’d say, ‘Actually, no, it was just a joke’?

‘Well, obviously not quite sure,’ she chattered on happily. ‘Nothing will be concrete till they’ve met her, as you know. And of course first I’ll have to visit you, so I can tell you all about them, and then Olivia will have to meet them, and … Casey, is something wrong? You don’t sound very happy. I thought you’d be jumping for joy!’

I’d grown quite fond of Anna, as it happened. Our professional relationship should have lasted only a few weeks, but as things had worked out, almost nine months had passed now, and in that time, though it was sometimes exasperating dealing with social services, I’d come to trust that she was as committed to these little ones as we were; that they weren’t just one caseload in a file among many. That she was emotionally engaged with Olivia and Ashton. And that she understood just how much I was. So her breezy comment brought me up short. Like it was really that simple? That I could simply disengage? Just like that?

But that was unfair of me. Anna’s job was wholly different to mine and Mike’s one. Her job was to remain detached – well, to a fair degree, anyway. Her job was to objectively
assess the circumstances of the families she came into contact with, then take action in the best interests of the child or children. Her job was then to place them. Not to live with them or to care for them. Just move them along the care system; every bit as important a job as mine or any other foster carer’s. And she was young. Not yet a parent. How could she possibly understand that depth of maternal feeling? How could she appreciate the love you can’t help but feel?

No, it wasn’t fair to judge her. She sounded happy because she was happy and, in time, I would be too. The best interests of the children involved them being placed in secure settled homes, far away from the ravages of their former childhoods.

‘Yes, of course I’m pleased,’ I said. ‘It’s just knocked me for six a bit. You know, all this time waiting and now it’s finally happened, all I can think about is how much I’ll miss her and all her funny little ways.’

‘Oh, bless,’ Anna said, soothingly. ‘It must be hard, letting them go. I don’t know how you do it, I really don’t.’

Which seemed the right place to draw a line under that particular conversation. We let them go because that’s what we’d chosen to do. I’d been here before, with Justin, and had spent many, many sleepless nights wondering if we should keep him. But that had never been my intention when I’d signed up to become a specialist carer. I’d signed up because I believed passionately that I could help
lots
of children. Take the older kids, the kids who were the most deeply troubled and unloved, and then send them on their
way, hopefully fixed up sufficiently that they had had a chance of a happy adult life.

I said to myself out loud: ‘Casey, get a grip on yourself. You should have expected to feel like this at this point, you silly woman.’

It’s one thing to tell yourself you’re being silly, of course, but quite another to stop the feelings coming. And I knew it was a time thing. If Ashton and Olivia had been placed within the few weeks we’d been promised, of course I wouldn’t be in bits like this. At that point, it was fair to say, I would have been relieved. They had been a nightmare to live with in the early days, by anyone’s yardstick, and it was only our sense of professional responsibility (and, let’s face it, who else would have them?) that had stopped Mike and I demanding they be moved.

But these kids had been a huge part of my life for almost a year now. We’d barely been parted. It was like when my own two were that age – you live kids and breathe kids, mould your lifestyle around them, and though they weren’t my kids I had truly grown to love them. So, yes, this was going to be hard.

‘C’mon, love, pipe down,’ Mike whispered in the early hours of the next morning, after I’d lain awake sobbing, unable to find sleep. I’d fixated on another heartbreaking thought, as the day had gone on. Ashton. Poor, poor Ashton. How was he going to cope seeing his sister taken away, and with the realisation that no-one wanted him? Because Anna had been clear. There was nothing on the
horizon. Always the way. He was older, which just made everything that bit harder, and he was also a boy, which made it harder still. Prejudice against boys – the idea that they were generally much more challenging to look after than girls – never really seemed to go away.

And we hadn’t even told the kids they were to be separated yet. The thought of doing that – even though I knew it was the right thing – filled me with something approaching dread.