Little Prisoners (23 page)

‘But we
were
,’ she persisted.

‘No we weren’t! You’re a liar!’ With which he threw down the string of lights and marched angrily from the room.

‘We
were
,’ Olivia whispered defiantly, once he was out of earshot. ‘He just doesn’t member it, Casey. Cos he’s a
boy
.’

But as the new year got under way, my anxiety about the children began to shift again, in intensity, towards Olivia. For all the comedy evident sometimes in her eccentric little ways, I knew I must never forget that they were, in part, manifestations of repeated sexual abuse. And she’d always been a particularly imaginative child, too, living a rich and varied life in her head.

I didn’t know if it was just another manifestation of her becoming more settled with Mike and me, or the fact that there was one soon to be born into our family, but her fondness of all things pregnancy and baby related was becoming so intense as to begin to feel like an obsession.

And it wasn’t Riley’s impending baby, either. Out of the blue, Olivia started carrying on as if she truly believed she was pregnant too. She took to walking round the house with a football up her jumper, arching her back and moaning about her various aches and pains. It was amusing at first, particularly for Kieron – it was his football – when he was roundly told off for ‘being cheeky, young man!’ when he asked her if he could have his ball back. He was also in stitches, he told me, when he overheard her telling her assembled dolls that ‘Mummy will feel like playing again, once this bloomin’ baby is borned. Just a few more weeks, sweetheart.’ She would also rush to the toilet, making vomiting noises and complaining about her ‘bloomin’ morning sickness’.

But it was her need for ‘some exercise’ that capped everything. She’d asked me if she could ‘go out the front’ one afternoon, after school, because she needed ‘exercise,
so I don’t get too many stretch marks’. I agreed to this, on condition that, though she could certainly take the football, she wasn’t allowed to wear it under her clothing.

She’d been out there half an hour or so – lots of the kids played out the front before tea – when I was alarmed to respond to a ring on the doorbell and find a police constable standing on the front step. Casting anxiously around for Olivia, and wondering what on earth had happened, I was relieved to see her sitting on next door’s wall, clutching the football and looking bored. ‘I just thought you should know,’ the young policeman said, once we’d established I was her guardian, ‘that I brought her home because she’s behaving, well, let’s say, a little bit oddly, and I just wanted to be sure she was all right.’

He went on to explain that he’d come across her around the corner, not joining in with the other children’s games, but squatting on all fours on the pavement, wailing and groaning theatrically.

When he’d ask if she was okay she had apparently replied, ‘No, I’m six months gone and my bloody waters have broke!’ He’d naturally responded that that was a silly thing to say, and her response to that was to bark back, ‘Oh, silly, is it? I’m bloody knackered! I’ve been up all night breastfeeding the twins!’

Trying hard to suppress the smile that kept threatening to overwhelm me, I assured him she was fine and that I’d bring her inside and have a word with her – though what he expected me to do (tick her off for frightening young constables?) I really didn’t know. And I did call her in, and
while I explained to her, for the umpteenth time, that grown-ups became concerned when she did her ‘having a baby’ acting, it occurred to me that my life had become quite surreal.

Not that it stopped her, in any case, because it was only a day later when she came down to breakfast sporting two big wet patches on her pyjama top. When Mike asked her what had happened she told him she’d been ‘leakin’ from me breasts’, rubbing her ‘sore titties’ and groaning for good measure.

‘It’s not nice this, you know!’ she said, seeing me staring. ‘Can’t you jus’ gimme a tablet or somefink, Casey? Gawd, I’ll be glad when this one’s on the bottle an’ can leave my poor titties alone!’

But for all my relief that her pregnancy obsession ended almost as abruptly as it started, it was replaced by one that felt much more sinister. Where we’d been amused by her antics as ‘Mummy Olivia’ her new obsession was no laughing matter. She developed a distinctly unsettling thing about fire.

Looking back, it had always been there in a mild form. She’d always been fascinated by the gas flames on my hob when I was cooking, seemingly mesmerised, talking about how beautiful they were, and how they almost looked like they were dancing. I’d always thought it strange, but, bar a sensible observance of safety, I had never let it bother me. I was also aware of what the kids had told me about the family car being torched. But out of the blue, or so it
seemed, this had gone a stage further; watching one of the soaps one night, following a scene where a building had caught fire, she was rapt, watching the family trapped in an upstairs bedroom. ‘Rewind it, Mike! Please! Can you play it again?’ she pleaded. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the screen.

‘Rewind what?’ Mike asked, not having really taken in what she was on about.

‘The fire,’ she explained. ‘The bit where they all burn to death!’

‘No-one’s burned to death,’ he said mildly, ‘they’re just trapped.’ He grinned. ‘We won’t know if they burn to death till tomorrow now.’

‘They will, though,’ she said seriously. ‘Oh, please. Go on, rewind it. There might be a clue we all missed. They’ll all be dead, though, I think,’ she added, matter of factly.

‘Well, as I said,’ Mike answered, looking at me now, his expression puzzled, ‘we’ll find out tomorrow, okay?’

‘Enough telly anyway,’ I said, anxious to get her off such a morbid subject.

‘Okay,’ she said brightly, jumping down off the sofa. ‘Can I go on the computer instead?’

Ashton was playing in his bedroom at the time so, unusually, a laptop was free. I’d let Kieron borrow the other one to use at Lauren’s. ‘Course you can,’ I said. ‘Come on. Into the kitchen with me, then.’

She trotted happily behind me and I set up the laptop on the kitchen table, and she settled down happily, humming to herself, while I made a start on washing up the tea things.
‘What’re you playing?’ I asked, as I glanced across the kitchen a minute later. Her little face was screwed up in concentration.

‘Oh, just some-fing,’ she said. ‘Casey, d’you have earphones I could borrow?’

‘I’m not sure where they are,’ I said, drying my hands and going over. ‘But you can just use the volume control anyway. Here, I’ll show you …’

I stopped as I realised what she was watching. Not porn. This time. No chance. Our security settings saw to that. No, it was an episode of something like
The Bill
in which, once again, there was a building burning down. The was a body bag on a stretcher being carried out by two firemen. What a strange thing for a little girl to want to watch. Particularly since she’d been so traumatised by fireworks. But then, I reasoned, that might have been more about the noise. This seemed to be more about the visual.

‘You shouldn’t be watching things like this, love,’ I told her, reaching out to the track pad. ‘It’ll give you nightmares.’

‘But it’s my favourite bit!’ she said. ‘Oh, Casey, please don’t turn it off!’

‘It’s not suitable,’ I persisted.

‘Can I watch
Casualty
instead, then?’

Another programme full of pain and death. Lovely. ‘What’s this fascination you’ve got with fires, love?’ I asked her.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just like ’em. You know, fires and stuff and all that.’ She looked at me with one of
her old-fashioned expressions. ‘People got to die, Casey, y’know. It’s just one o’ them things.’

So not just the sight of the pretty flames, then. She seemed fixated on the idea of violent death. I was beginning to be so troubled by all this that I phoned John Fulshaw the next morning and asked him what he thought. He’d dealt with scores of troubled kids over the years but was as clueless as I was. He did, however, try to reassure me. ‘Probably just a phase,’ he said. ‘Working through her demons, I expect. I don’t think you should draw too much attention to it; just monitor. Just encourage discussion generally. See if you can draw her out. It might disappear of its own accord. Probably will. As I said, just observe. Try not to worry.’

But I couldn’t help
but
worry. It was as strange as it was gruesome, and as the days went by, showed no sign of letting up.

A few days later, in fact, it even seemed to be getting worse, when I made a pretty unsettling discovery in her bedroom, which seemed to confirm what I’d already thought. I’d gone up to strip and change the bed, and as I pulled the old bottom sheet out, I found a small pile of newspaper and magazine cuttings under the mattress. I could hardly credit it, but this seven-year-old who could barely concentrate for even a minute on her school reading book had secretly amassed a little cache of news items, every one of them about death and dying. One was about the soap we’d watched – from one of my magazines, no doubt – another was about a local businessman who’d
dropped dead from a heart attack and another about a house fire that had claimed a whole family.

On this occasion I felt I must tackle her about it. Not confrontationally; just couched in the terms of a pleasant chat, about why she had created her small collection.

‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘I just like cutting stuff out, and that.’ And that was the only explanation I got out of her.

Further light was, however, shed just a day or so later, when I heard her asking Ashton how to spell ‘disaster’. She was on the laptop at the time, painstakingly typing it into the search box as he called out the letters. ‘Olivia!’ I couldn’t help saying. ‘You have to stop this! It’s unhealthy. Why on earth are you searching the word ‘disaster’?’

She turned to me. ‘Casey,’ she said solemnly, ‘you just never know. You never know when him upstairs is about to release his wrath. But he does, see, just you mark my words.’

Where the hell –
no
, I thought, not
where
, more like
who
? – had this little girl learned all this
from
?

Chapter 19

Only a couple of weeks after the birth of Olivia’s ‘baby’, a new member of the Watson clan entered the world. The spitting image of his big brother, he was absolutely delightful, and lucky me, once again, got to be one of Riley’s birth partners, helping welcome my new grandson into the world.

And Jackson was as obliging as he was gorgeous. I know most new mums would rather their babies came along at reasonably civilised hours, but getting the call from Riley at two in the morning was a godsend. It meant I could creep out of bed quietly and leave Mike and the kids sleeping; so much better for everyone than if it had happened in the middle of a busy day, with the kids needing babysitting and Mike off at work.

The labour, as is often the case with second ones, was quick. So by dawn, after an uncomplicated three hours, it was all over, and I was busy doing the traditional nanna
thing at such moments, bawling my eyes out and congratulating my clever daughter. It was then that my phone bleeped. It was a text message from Mike, wanting to know how things were going, so, handing Jackson to his adoring daddy, I popped outside to call him.

‘Oh, he’s just gorgeous!’ I gushed. ‘Looks exactly like Levi! And Riley’s positively glowing, and … well, it’s just perfect. Anyway, love. All okay at home?’

‘It’s been better,’ he admitted, adding a little laugh, for good measure. But I knew my husband well. He was trying not to puncture my happy mood. ‘It’s been better’ meant things weren’t good at all.

‘What’s happened, love?’ I asked him, my mind immediately back-pedalling to Olivia’s recent obsessions with fire and death.

‘Nothing specific. They’re both just being absolute nightmares. Don’t know what’s got into them! Well, I do. You not being there when they woke up, and why. Olivia, especially. Had to move mountains to get her pill down her. She’s decided you don’t want the pair of them anymore.’

‘Oh, love. You poor thing. And you need to get off to work, don’t you? Don’t worry. Quick ciggie, then I’m on my way home, okay?’

‘Appreciate it, love,’ he said wearily.

After hanging up and having my quick fix inside the warmth of my car, I hurried back inside to say a quick farewell, and have a final cuddle with my new grandchild. It was only natural, I guessed, the kids kicking off, when you thought about it. A new baby was a time of change and
upheaval in any family, but these two in particular must have found it particularly traumatic. A new baby, in their former lives, would almost certainly have meant an even greater degree of neglect – if that were possible. And, grim as it was to contemplate, an even more preoccupied and useless mother, leaving them prey to the kind of attention we knew they
did
get.

I stopped off at the supermarket on the way home, both to get a teddy bear for Jackson, and also to pick up two carefully chosen jigsaws and two big bars of chocolate as presents to give to Ashton and Olivia. It was all about making sure they were included in the happy event, so they didn’t feel they were now being pushed away. That would be happening sooner rather than later in any case, I knew. But the physical parting would be managed so much better if their faith in our love for them, when they did leave, was secure.

But, jigsaws and chocolate and cuddles notwithstanding, it turned out I’d been horribly optimistic. Within minutes of arriving home I could see from their whole demeanour, that the arrival of this baby – and not even into the same household – had had a profound psychological effect. The whole of that week was a total nightmare. At a stroke, they seemed to have forgotten all the skills we’d so painstakingly taught them. They reverted back to their sloppy eating habits, their incessant inappropriate touching of one another and their toileting issues, always a bit rocky still with Olivia, just nosedived straight back down to the dark days. Every single day that week we had
to deal with the aftermath, scrubbing underclothes or bedding or both.