Mummy's Little Helper (24 page)

‘I think I’m going to second that,’ Sarah added. At which both of them laughed. And I did too. What did a flipping ‘record’ matter anyway? It was just words, stuffed away in a drawer, after all. This was a real-life happy ending, and
I’d
made it happen. Surely that was what mattered. Given a fair wind and a glass of wine with Mike later, I might even spare a few minutes to feel pretty damned proud of myself. It didn’t matter that it might have happened anyway, eventually; equally it might not have, so grabbing at least a slice of the credit felt only fair.

Not that there weren’t still a few hurdles to jump over. Though it seemed everything was moving in the right direction, Vicky still had a life of her own to live. But she seemed to have already spent time thinking that through. Her house, she explained, was already on the market. ‘Downsizing. Coincidence or destiny?’ She laughed. ‘I’ll take either. Seriously, I was at a crossroads –’ She turned to Sarah. ‘I’ll tell you later. And, one way or another,’ she said, turning back to me now, ‘I was going to make a change. So this has kind of crystallised my thinking, which is actually a big weight off my mind. I can stop bloody procrastinating now!’

Then I saw her glance at Abby, and didn’t really need to know any more. Her eyes shone with tears and her expression spoke volumes. There could be no better incentive for her, clearly.

As often happens when you foster – my kind of fostering, at any rate – decisions get made, and it feels like it’s all go, and then there’s this period of inertia. Which is right. Because where a child or children’s lives are concerned, no decision should ever be made in haste. So, confident as everyone was that this new plan would be workable (for Vicky, initially, to accompany Sarah home from hospital, once the necessary support arrangements were put in place), it was important that all the boxes were ticked.

Most of this was outside my remit. These were things that would be handled by the medical team, including Chelsea. She, along with Vicky, another physio, seemed to really know her way around the system, as did Andrew, Sarah’s social worker.

Vicky would also, meanwhile, be assessed by social services, so that when the time came – and this all rested on Sarah settling home again without difficulty – she would already be formally approved as Abby’s carer. This wouldn’t be a full check, such as was done on all potential foster carers, like Mike and me, but something less formal – what was known as a friends and family assessment, and which was less intrusive and only took a couple of weeks – less, perhaps, given the circumstances and everyone’s will to push things on.

The will was certainly there, and not least of all on my part. Abby duly attended her appointment with the child mental-health psychologist, and it was agreed that once Abby was settled more permanently somewhere she’d be referred to someone close by for a fuller assessment, at which point a plan of therapy would be agreed. In the meantime it was agreed that it would be useful for Vicky if she spent some time with me so I could discuss Abby’s needs in more depth.

We arranged it for the following Thursday. Abby, who’d now seen her aunt three times at the hospital, couldn’t wait to see her again. ‘Oh, I need to do her another painting,’ she gushed as I filled her in on Wednesday night that Vicky would already be at ours when she got home from school the next day. I’d arranged for Vicky to come to us mid-afternoon, so we could talk through the rituals and compulsions and so on, and how best she could manage them herself. She’d have professional input, of course, and very soon I’d be bowing out, but forewarned was forearmed and we were of a like mind regarding that.

‘That would be nice,’ I said.

‘So I’ll start it now, while I’m in bed, and then I’ll get up extra early so I can finish it off before school. But I’ll need glitter. Will I be able to get out your box and use your glitter? It’ll need to be extra early, and I wouldn’t want to wake you and Mike up. I know you need lots of sleep once you’re older.’

I laughed. ‘Tell you what, I’ll go down and get it out right now. That way it’ll be all ready for you in the morning.’

She smiled. ‘I’m going to make it a special “going home” picture. Ooh, I’m so excited. Do you think it will be long now?’

I didn’t know, so I couldn’t tell her. ‘Not too long,’ I reassured her anyway. Inwardly, even as I said it, I felt strange. Strange, yet at the same time the feeling was familiar. Much as I wanted a child to leave me in such happy circumstances, and get finally settled somewhere permanent, there was always a part of me – a selfish part – that wished they’d be slightly
less
happy at the prospect of saying goodbye and moving on.

We covered this in training, of course – children in care often had huge attachment issues, and, with a history of abuse or neglect, being able to move on was a key defence mechanism. If they allowed themselves to attach too easily, they were often storing up more heartache – being able to detach easily was not only a result of years of being unloved, it was also sometimes the only thing that kept them sane.

This wasn’t the case with Abby. She was going home to be with her mother. Her aunt as well – why on earth wouldn’t she want it to happen sooner rather than later? But it didn’t make it any easier. It was just plain old hard, this job, I thought. You did all you could to reassure the kids that they would be going home – and, at the time, you really meant it. But then, when it came to it, no matter how professional you tried to be, a little bit of you wanted them to be upset about leaving you. Not at all what a foster carer should be thinking, of course, but most definitely what the mummy inside of you always felt.

I leaned down and kissed the top of her head, then brushed the hair to one side to check her bald patch. Was it my imagination or did there seem to be a little new growth there? Wishful thinking, perhaps, but I didn’t care – I could see it. ‘Not too long,’ I said again. ‘Night, night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.’

Abby groaned, as she always did. And then she made me laugh out loud. ‘Casey, you know me. They wouldn’t
dare
to!’

When Thursday afternoon came around, however, I was to get a wonderful reminder that attachments can reveal themselves in other ways.

Vicky and I spent a productive hour running through things together, and the more I talked to her the more I liked her, and the more I felt confident that here was someone who’d come through on any promise. Nearer my own age than Sarah, and having followed a roll your sleeves up and get on with it career in the health sector, she really couldn’t be better placed to head up this little family – the little family she’d always wanted to take care of, however overwhelming her enthusiasm in the early days. Once again – this happened often – I reflected on family life, and that families really did come in all sorts of unlikely configurations – all different, some surprising, but so many of them perfectly functional. And this one – right down to Snowball the virtual puppy and youngest member – looked like it could function as well as any other.

Abby flew in from school just as excited as I’d expected. She even stopped to hug her aunt before flying into the toilet. That would mean nothing to anyone else, but it blew me away. For as long as I could remember now, this had never happened. This was a first. She also came home with plans, which she’d clearly been thinking about all day.

‘Casey,’ she wanted to know once she’d done her hand washing (which happened afterwards), ‘I was wondering, do you think we could take Aunt Vicky to the woods before we have tea? I want to show her the frogspawn.’

‘But the frogspawn’s here,’ I said, confused. ‘You can show it to her now.’

‘No, not that frogspawn,’ she said. ‘I want to show her the rest of it. Show her where we got it. I’m sure it’ll still be there. And if it’s not there’ll be tadpoles anyway. Pleeease?’

I couldn’t think of a single reason why not. It was a lovely spring afternoon, and we’d been sitting at the table for ages. If Vicky wasn’t in a hurry to rush off – which it seemed she wasn’t – then why not? It would be good to stretch our legs. Though a thought occurred to me. Did Abby really even need or want me there?

‘You know,’ I said, ‘you don’t need me to come with you. You can take Aunt Vicky on your own if you like, while I start on tea. You’re such a big girl now. And you know the way.’

Abby shook her head. ‘No, I want you to come too,’ she said firmly. ‘Please, Casey?’

‘Well, I guess tea can wait,’ I said. ‘Go on, then. Get upstairs and get that uniform off. I’ll write a note for Mike, so that if he comes in he’ll know where we’ve gone.’

It was lovely going back into ‘our little wood’ (as I liked to think of it) and see it so transformed by the spring. There were a few bluebells still out, and the pungent scent of wild garlic, and, a far cry from the dripping, gloomy place we’d first brought Abby, it was full of growth, bright and verdant, in the dappled afternoon sun.

You could hear the stream babbling even before you could see it.

‘Careful here,’ Abby warned, grabbing my hand as we walked down the bank. ‘It gets steep here,’ she explained to Vicky, ‘so you have to be very careful and watch your step.’ But it was clearly no longer her own step she was watching. It was mine. ‘You’ll be okay,’ she continued, to Vicky, ‘but Casey has to be careful because she’d older.’

‘Hey, cheeky!’ I protested. ‘Less of the older, please, missy. I’ll have you know that not so very long ago I used to go rock climbing – real rock climbing, not over these tiddlers. And caving, as well. And,’ I huffed, ‘lots more besides.’

Abby gave me the sort of look that made it obvious she doubted that
very
much, but then spotted something that made her stop and lift her arm. ‘Stop here!’ she demanded, and then turned to us dramatically. ‘Because we’re here. I want to show you a secret,’ she added. ‘Both of you.’

She let my hand go, then, and leaned down towards the jumble of stones, then reached down and – to my surprise; I wasn’t even sure if she had her hand gel – manoeuvred two large, moss-covered rocks out of the way. She then pointed. ‘Can you see?’ We both peered down to look closer. She’d revealed a third one beneath them – a flat rock which was embedded in the muddy bank. ‘That,’ she said proudly, ‘will be there
for ever
.’ She then leaned even closer to inspect it, and gestured that we should. She stepped back, to let us see better. ‘Can you see what it says?’

Vicky and I shuffled closer to the edge and duly looked. Etched into the rock, in black marker pen, were some words. I read them aloud. ‘Kieron and Abby woz here. BFF.’

I then turned to Vicky. ‘As in Kieron, my son.’

Abby quickly replaced the rocks and put a finger to her lips. ‘But it’s a secret. We’re not really supposed to write on rocks. It was just a wild and crazy scheme of bonkersness, Casey.’

I laughed out loud, but she shushed me again, and then added, as an afterthought, ‘Oh, and if you don’t know what BFF means,’ she said proudly, ‘it actually means “best friends forever”.’

It was tricky balancing on the rocks by the stream that afternoon, but not half as hard as wrestling with my emotions. There were just too many of them, all at once, and in such a confined space. Thoughts about Abby, this poor isolated, different sort of child. This child who couldn’t connect with her peers in any way. This self-professed child who didn’t have friends, and now did, and it meant so much to her that she’d brought us here to prove it. Then there was Kieron, who also found it so hard sometimes to understand people, and for whom such an unlikely bond had been formed with this odd little girl. And who would miss her. Who was sad that she’d be gone. And about me, and what I’d said to him only the other day. Yet another mum-mantra, a few words to get him to feel positive instead of gloomy. And which actually – coincidentally – had turned out to be the right ones. This proved it. Endings
aren’t
always necessarily endings.

For Abby, Donna’s call came completely out of the blue. For us it was anything but.

It was two weekends later – the end of two frenetic weeks. A date had been arranged for Sarah’s discharge from hospital. The trial now finished, and with a comprehensive care package now in place, she would be returning home, with Vicky, the following weekend. She would have a full team of therapists allocated to her, as well as a nurse and a physiotherapist, both of whom, initially anyway, would visit her on a daily basis. Both Andy and Chelsea – and everyone else – had moved mountains; Chelsea in particular, Vicky told me, had spent literally hours with her – and Vicky too, so she knew how best to support her.

And that mattered. Sarah was so used to hiding her condition that it was almost a reflex to pretend all was well when it wasn’t. And it was important that she accept how things were, rather than how she wished them; as Chelsea had said, that’s what would keep her out of hospital.

Abby herself was scheduled to return a week later, to give her mum and aunt time to properly settle back in. The house needed to be cleaned from top to bottom, and specialist equipment installed, such as hoists, a stair lift and a whole range of small adaptations, not to mention a state-of-the-art wheelchair. Most importantly, however, it needed to be stripped of the accoutrements that had been put in place so that Abby could run things. That, to my mind, was the most important thing. It was time for Abby to reclaim her childhood.

And if we needed evidence of that importance, we were about to get it.

‘Hmm,’ she huffed, shaking her head after speaking to Donna. I’d called her specially to let her know the call was meant for her. ‘She wants me to go into work this afternoon. Just like that!’ She was actually quite cross. ‘Doesn’t she realise that I’m busy with my packing to go home?’ She put her hands on her hips, and I had to cover my mouth so she couldn’t see it. ‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘she’s got to get used to not having me around. She can’t rely on me all the time – I’ll be too busy!’

I kept my hand over my mouth till she was back upstairs, gone to fetch her pinny. Only then did I properly dare breathe out. Mike rolled his eyes. ‘And there goes the little madam that we’ve grown to know and love, eh? Do you think we’ve created a monster?’

I laughed, though quite quietly, just in case she was listening. ‘Just call me Dr Frankenstein …’ I said to Mike.

As indignant as our little master chef was about being ‘put upon’, her face when we arrived at the café was a picture – marching into the café, pinafore tied neatly around her waist, hair tied too – in her regulation plaits. She stopped dead in her tracks as she tried to take it in, blinking, stunned, as the whole family shouted ‘Surprise!’

And not just our family – behind the cakes and balloons and ‘Good Luck Abby!’ banners, there was her mother, in her wheelchair, hair all done, make-up on, looking lovely. Taking our lead from Sarah, then Abby, then Vicky, then Donna, we all caved in and allowed ourselves to cry.

It was a wonderful afternoon, obviously, but also tinged with sadness. I knew Kieron was working hard to hold it all together, and it was sweet to see the way Abby clung on to her BFF, holding his hand, patting him and asking if he was okay. She was still a little mum – even if it was to a six foot two ‘boy’. And it wasn’t just Kieron’s welfare that she was concerned for, it seemed. That night, as I tucked her in, she pulled my ear close to her lips. ‘Casey,’ she said, ‘you’ll be okay when I’m gone, won’t you?’ And I could barely speak enough to reassure her that, yes, I would.