Little Prisoners (28 page)

But both kids, to my great joy, had behaved politely and well, and I couldn’t have been more pleased if they had been my own.

And Sandie had obviously been impressed too. ‘You must be so proud of them,’ she said, squeezing my arm as we were leaving. ‘From everything we’ve read, and, well, what you’ve told us – well, I can scarcely believe they are the same children, can you?’

And when I thought about it, I couldn’t.

Even so, the two days between the visit and Anna’s next call seemed interminable. Having glimpsed the life Olivia could have if Mick and Sandie agreed to have her, it was grim to contemplate the prospect of them deciding against.

My relief was huge, then, when Anna called and confirmed what I’d hoped for; that Mick and Sandie had agreed to become Olivia’s new carers, and even better, they wanted to keep her permanently. This was the best news imaginable and I was so thrilled I whooped, only to be brought down to earth moments later.

‘So I think it’s probably time for us to sit the children down and tell them what’s happening,’ Anna added. ‘Which I’ll be happy to come up and do, of course.’

Again, this was the usual protocol. When a child leaves a foster family, the normal course of action is for the social worker to be the one to break the news to them –
not
the current carers. This is because they need to support the child through the transition and this isn’t an easy thing to do if the child thinks their current foster family are a part of the decision-making process.
We love you
, in bald terms,
but not enough to want to keep you
. Better for a white lie to be deployed in this regard than to further damage a child’s sense of worth.

But, whoever was going to do the telling in this case, I felt strongly that now wasn’t the right time. And said so. ‘I just feel we should hold off for the moment,’ I explained to Anna. ‘As it stands, there’s a home for Olivia, but nowhere for Ashton, and all the while we can hold off, I think we should.’

‘But they need to know,’ Anna answered quietly but firmly. ‘So they can prepare themselves. I know it’s going to be tough, Casey, but we can’t hold off for ever. And it’ll be me doing the telling, so it’s not as if –’

‘It’s not about who
does
it. It’s about Ashton and what it might
do
to him. It’s going to be bad enough for him, knowing he’s going to be split up from his sister, let alone knowing she’s sorted but no-one wants to take him. I just think we should leave it till the last possible moment. Give it as long as possible. Please?’

Anna agreed, albeit grudgingly, because to her mind it was pointless. With nothing on the horizon till the next round of the panel, she felt it would be worse to keep things stringing along. Mick and Sandie were ready to take Olivia whenever we were and, to Anna’s mind, the sooner the kids knew what was happening, the longer they would have to prepare for it. But as it turned out, my plea for more time had been a sound one, because within the week she’d called back; there was finally good news. Another couple, Kerry and Ian, who were in their thirties and lived just ten miles away, had expressed interest in taking on Ashton.

It really was as if God had decided to answer my unspoken prayer. They’d been unavailable, as they’d been fostering a similarly aged boy long term, but, quite out of the blue, an aunt, previously working abroad, had returned to the UK and said she’d have him. It had been a lengthy process to arrange it and, until agreed, it hadn’t been
certain, hence no mention of them having been made up till now, in case the handover had all fallen through.

But it hadn’t, and they now had a boy-shaped hole in their lives. And like Mick and Sandie, they were very experienced carers.

So, once again, two weeks later, we were back on the road, visiting another foster family to ‘see their house’.

‘You know,’ observed Olivia, once again in the back with me, for another, albeit this time shorter, journey. ‘Don’t you fink you’re being a bit nosy? Mike, you should tell her –’ she looked at Mike now, through the rear-view mirror. ‘It’s rude to go snoopin’ around other people’s houses, jus’ so you can see what stuff they got there.’

Conscious of Ashton’s lack of engagement at Mick and Sandie’s, I made a big effort this time to get him interested and engage him, as did Ian, who kept dragging him off while we chatted, to get to know the dog, take a look at the garden and even to chat to the gaggle of young boys who had been out playing on the street when we’d arrived and who obviously knew the couple – and their previous lad – well.

And our intention obviously didn’t go unnoticed. ‘Mike,’ Ashton asked, as we made the short journey home, ‘those people want to foster us, don’t they?’

Mike’s eyes immediately met mine, again though the rear-view mirror, and within a second I watched them move to Olivia.

I turned to face her. She looked stricken, and for a moment I was dumbstruck. Unprepared for the
conversation we were now obviously going to have. I took her hand, but at the same time, I mostly addressed Ashton. He’d turned around to face me now and his expression was questioning. ‘Well,’ I said carefully, ‘now, there’s a thought, actually. They
are
foster carers, and they don’t currently have kids in. Why?’ I added lightly. ‘Did you like them, Ashton?’

Ashton glanced at Olivia, who was clearly waiting for his answer. Then he shrugged. ‘Ian was pretty cool, I guess.’

I turned to Olivia, as Ashton swivelled back to face forwards. ‘Well, then,’ I said brightly, ‘we shall see, then.’

And that was how we left it, by what seemed like an unspoken contract. I didn’t mention it again, and neither did either of the children. It was almost as if they were two little frightened toddlers, all of a sudden. If they put their hands over their eyes, then they couldn’t see anything. And if you couldn’t see something, then, naturally, it didn’t exist.

The wait this time, happily, was equally short. Within just three days, Ian and Kerry had got in touch with social services and confirmed that they’d like to take on Ashton.

‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ I told Mike when he got home that evening. ‘All this time waiting and the two of them were there, perfect for Ashton, all along. Just needed to be free so they could take him, and now they are. It was all meant to be, don’t you think?’

I handed him a coffee. ‘Thanks, love. Who knows?’ he said, sipping it. ‘I’m just glad it’s not hanging over us any more.’ He frowned then. ‘But I’m guessing tonight’s the night, then, is it?’

I nodded. ‘Anna’s coming after tea. Around eight. I’m dreading it.’

He grimaced. ‘Me too, love. So what’s the plan? What’s she going to tell them, exactly? We’ll need to know if we’re going to go along with it, won’t we?’

‘There doesn’t seem to be much of one, to be honest,’ I told him. ‘She’s just going to tell them that’s how the rules work. I did ask her how she’d explain it – I mean, siblings do get fostered together all the time; that’s what I said to her. I mean, look at these two, and their younger siblings … But, now I’ve thought about it, I’m beginning to see the sense in it. After all, if you make up all sorts of nonsense to explain it, then you have to keep it up, justify it, don’t you? At least this way, we can just go in and present them with a
fait accompli
. Tell them it’s just the rules. We can’t change them. End of story.’

Mike was still frowning, his forehead etched with grooves you could hold a five pence piece in. ‘God, it’s just so bloody grim, though, so bloody wretched that it has to be this way.’

I knew how he felt. I’d spent so many hours lying awake wishing it could be different. But it couldn’t, and I think I finally understood that now. However much the sexual behaviour had diminished since we’d had them, keeping Ashton with Olivia, especially as they approached
adolescence, would be like locking a heroin addict in a room with a loaded syringe. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite as stark a scenario as that. But even so, it was definitely not in either child’s best interests. They clearly loved one another, and away from the world’s rules, who was to say that they wouldn’t find physical comfort in one another, and in a way that had seemed so normal as to be mundane for so long?

In the event, it was something of an anticlimax. Which I perhaps should have anticipated, now I knew the children as I did. They both knew they were moving on, so this was just the confirmation. And, as with Christmas and Easter, and anything else outside their experience, they simply responded by digesting it, then seemingly forgetting all about it. I knew this wasn’t all there was to it. That when the day came it would be
awful
. But once Anna left, they had only two questions.

‘So will we still see you an’ Mike and baby Levi, then?’ was Olivia’s.

‘Of course!’ I said, cuddling her tiny frame. ‘Definitely! Goodness me, I don’t think I could bear to part with you if you couldn’t both come back to visit us!’

Upon which she patted me, much as she patted her dollies. ‘Aww, Casey,’ she soothed. ‘You’ll be
fine
.’

Ashton’s was equally direct. ‘Together?’ he wanted to know, his face serious. ‘I mean, will we be allowed to see each other?’ he finished, taking in what I’d just said to his sister.

‘Yes, definitely,’ I said, before I could stop the words coming. Which for all I knew, and I cursed myself crossly for not checking, might have been the one thing I didn’t want to tell either of them. A lie.

Chapter 24

It was agreed that we’d say goodbye to the children in two stages. Ashton would go to Ian and Kerry’s on the Saturday and Olivia to Mick and Sandie’s on the Sunday; a weekend I would not be forgetting in a while.

The remaining four weeks passed in a blur. It had been agreed that the best thing, in terms of least disruption, would be for the children to see the academic year out in school. That way they could spend the summer holidays getting settled, before the upheaval of moving into new – and different – primary schools. And it was as if the initial shock and trauma now over with, we’d all, individually, made a decision to put the whole thing out of our minds. We sorted nothing, packed nothing, made no arrangements. And though both children had been on further visits, this time without us, we all just carried on – unbelievably – as if none of it was happening.

Well, almost. The children, shortly after being told, had been sent parcels. Both sets of new foster carers, just as we did for our kids, had put together portfolios, telling the children all about their families, so they could get to know them all a little better. They also spent time answering the questionnaires the new carers sent them. What did they most like doing? What did they not? Did they have any favourite foods? Things that made them go ‘yuk’?. Did they have any TV programmes they particularly liked watching? Were there any special toys they’d be bringing along?

The children seemed to enjoy this process greatly, and it occurred to me that all of us like answering questions about ourselves; it is a way of the telling the world who you are, that you are an individual. That you were special and – crucially – that you mattered.

We also spent time making memory boxes, Riley, as ever, deploying her talents in all matters cutting and sticking related.

‘Mine needs to be glittery,’ Olivia told her, one morning in July, a couple of weeks before the big day was happening. ‘Glittery and pink, like my bedroom. D’you fink Mick an’ Sandie will gimme a pink bedroom?’

Riley glanced at me. I nodded. ‘’Course they will,’ I said. ‘Because that’s what you asked for when you wrote to them, wasn’t it? In fact,’ I said, riffling through our big pile of craft paper. ‘I bet they’re painting it pink right this
minute
.’

Ashton, across the table, was similarly employed. Riley had found two robust boxes for the children, both from
shoe shops, and which had previously housed boots. We’d already covered his in a layer of denim-effect sticky-backed plastic, and he was busy finding things with which to decorate it.

‘What about you, Ash?’ Riley asked him. ‘What are you going to do with your one?’

He glanced up at her. He was filling out now; he’d be 11 in the autumn, and I could already see the features of a handsome young man. ‘I’m gonna make it like a pair of jeans, with badges on,’ he said, pulling pictures from the pile in front of him. I’d spent a good hour copying photographs for the kids to use as decoration, as well as giving them free rein with my over-stuffed arts and crafts box.

But it was what went in the boxes that was the primary concern. All children in care are encouraged to make memory boxes. With some poor kids moving several times over the period of their childhood, the aim of having a box of things to take with them was to give them a sense of childhood that otherwise might be lacking. A pictorial history of good times – it was relentlessly about good times – it would hopefully go some way towards balancing the bad times that were obviously a big part of these kids’ lives. Thinking about the box made by Justin could still bring a lump to my throat, even now. By the time he’d come to us, he’d been the veteran of twenty failed placements; he’d been from foster home to children’s home and back – a proper boomerang. By the time we saw it, the box – and its contents – looked every bit as travelled as if Phileas Fogg had done his romp around the world with it.

But for these two – their only experience of the care system with us – we had the privilege of creating their boxes alongside them. And these boxes (and I mentally kept crossing my fingers) would begin here and end their journey at Mick and Sandie’s, Ian and Kerry’s. No, it wasn’t certain – placements failed. It was a fact we had to live with. But if my positive mental attitude could have any influence over anything, I fervently hoped it was focussed on that.

It was the two boxes that first caught my eye on that Saturday morning. Once they’d been made, and had dried, we’d all set about filling them; a proper family occasion, on Sunday a couple of weeks back, after tea. I’d specifically asked the kids to come over and help us, so the dining-room table had been jam-packed. Kieron and Lauren had come over, as had Riley and David, and Levi and Jackson. Kieron had even dressed a very patient Bob up in some goofy outfits, just so he could take some mad photos of him, upload them on our laptop, then print out copies to go in the kids’ boxes then and there.