Nowhere to Go (13 page)

‘Where’s your phone, Ty?’ Kieron remembered to ask him as we flanked him and herded him back to my car.

Tyler patted his trouser pocket – it felt so incongruous that he was still in school uniform – then pulled it out with a dreamy smile. ‘Always safe!’ he slurred.

‘Well, at least that’s
one
bit of good news,’ Kieron said.

Yes, I thought miserably. But only one.

And the day wasn’t done with being unkind to us yet. We were home 20 minutes later and I hurried Kieron back out, so he wouldn’t be too late for tea. I knew Lauren would understand but I still felt guilty to have landed all that on them both when they’d both had full days at work already.

Mike and I then put Tyler to bed. There was no point in even trying to talk to him, much less remonstrate with or lecture him. That would have to wait till he was sober and free of the effects of whatever he’d taken, something we didn’t as yet even know.

‘I suppose I could have asked Cameron,’ I said to Mike, once we were back downstairs clutching mugs of coffee, ‘but at the time it seemed the best thing was just to get him and
go
.’

‘I would have done the same, love, don’t worry,’ Mike said. ‘And would you have found out anyway? If they’re all stoned, would anyone have anything sensible to tell you? No, you did the right thing. And the best thing is for him to sleep it off now.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘Are you on first watch or am I?’

I laughed too – also without humour: what a night we had in store. I’d been around enough to know he was probably not in imminent danger, but you never knew. And, in any event, he might be sick. No, vigilance was all in these kinds of situations, which I thought was what must have been the cause of Mike’s heavy sigh. But apparently not. ‘Case,’ he said, ‘there’s something else.’

‘Something else?’ I said, conscious of his serious expression. ‘What sort of something else? End of the world something else?’

‘Not quite,’ he said. Then he shook his head. ‘No, not at all. It’s to do with your mum and dad –’

‘Oh, God,’ I said, frightened now. ‘What? Is Dad okay?’

He was quick to reassure me. ‘No, no, love – I just told you –
not
the end of the world. He’s absolutely fine. No, it’s about Tyler again.’

I was confused now. ‘In what way?’

‘Well, you know after you and Kieron left? Well, I had this brainwave. It was only an outside chance, admittedly, but it occurred to me that he might have gone round there. Silly, I know –’

‘That’s not silly.’

‘Well, it is a bit – they would have called you, wouldn’t they?’

‘Not necessarily. Not if they thought I already knew he was round there. Which he wasn’t, of course, but – sorry. Go on.’

‘Well, I was telling them what had happened – how you and Kieron had gone out to look for him and, you know – just saying that we were worried about him, how things have been since his birthday and so on, and your mum told me …’

He paused.

‘
What
?’

‘That your dad had seen him take a tenner out of your mum’s purse when he was round there last week, basically. She said they didn’t want to believe it, but they had no choice, apparently. Your dad was watering the window box under the kitchen window, and saw him doing it with his own eyes.’

He drained his coffee cup and stood up – headed to the kettle again, no doubt. It was going to be a long night, after all, bless him.

‘Did Tyler see him?’

‘Apparently not,’ Mike said. ‘And your dad decided not to say anything till he spoke to your mum. They were going to tell us about it at the weekend. Bless them – they felt awful about it, and really didn’t want to get him into more trouble …’

‘I think we’re past that point now, don’t you?’ I said, handing him my empty mug.

Great, I thought. Brilliant. I put a hand on Mike’s arm. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ I said. ‘You get off to bed. You’ve got work, haven’t you?’ I smiled again, grimly. What else could you do?

‘I’ll do first watch
and
second watch,’ I told him. I doubted I’d be sleeping a wink after all.

I hardly knew where to start. After a night during which I probably wore out a whole swathe of landing carpet with my to-ing and fro-ing, I fell into a deep sleep at around 6 a.m., only to be rudely awakened half an hour later by Mike having his shower.

I dragged myself up to a sitting position and fell gratefully upon the mug of coffee he’d left for me, the events of the previous evening clamouring for attention in my head. Where did I start? Who did I talk to first? What should be the plan?

With consciousness, however, came calm and clarity. I needed to speak to Tyler to get some more facts, finish writing the log that I’d begun the previous evening, then email it to John, and copy it to Will. I’d also hit upon another potentially helpful plan in the wee hours, but I needed to run it by Mike before discussing it – ideally before he headed off to work.

‘Tyler’s okay,’ was the first thing he said when he returned from the bathroom. ‘Awake, busy texting, contrite – oh – and grey.’ He shook his head as he dried himself. ‘Things we do, eh?’ he mused. ‘One minute, our lives are all quiet on the western front – well, comparatively – the next we’re in the middle of a bloody war zone.’

‘Did you get much sleep?’ I asked him, feeling guilty about the dark smudges under his eyes, even though I knew I had no reason to. It had been a joint decision to take on Tyler, after all. But, still …

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘More than you did, love, at any rate. Are we sending him into school? Because you look like you need to schedule a “power nap”, or whatever they’re called.’

‘Thanks a bunch,’ I said. But then I nodded my agreement. ‘I feel about as powerful as a wet dishcloth right now,’ I agreed. ‘Plus I have some important conversations to have, don’t I? Yes,’ I said, ‘I think he
should
go to school. Christ, he went to bed at 9 p.m. and slept right through, so he can hardly claim he’s too tired, can he? And if he has a hangover, well, it’ll be a lesson learned, won’t it? One of several we have to start teaching him as a matter of some urgency.
God
,’ I said with feeling, yanking the duvet off and swinging my legs round. ‘I need a bacon and egg sandwich and I need it
now
.’

I felt much better once I was downstairs with my hands wrapped around another mug of coffee and my lovely husband doing his thing with the frying pan. I’d looked in on Tyler, of course, but had kept it brief and to the point. That we’d talk later, that he was going to school and that he needed to be downstairs for his breakfast in 40 minutes, all of which pronouncements were met with meek, whey-faced acceptance. In truth, I think he
wanted
to go to school – it was probably way preferable to spending the day with me lecturing him – and I was happy that, today, he
would
come straight back home again; that I didn’t need to baby him by insisting on picking him up. It was all about trust, and it mattered that he didn’t abuse mine. I figured that he knew what the consequences would be.

I had no idea why I felt so confident that Tyler wouldn’t abuse our faith in him, but, for some reason, despite the disappearing acts – of both him and that tenner – I did. Lack of sleep-induced mania? Perhaps. In any event, while he got showered and dressed upstairs, I quickly ran my half-plan by Mike, so that I could put it to John when I spoke to him later.

We had a friend called Bob, who was a policeman. We’d known him since our twenties, and though he’d moved away we’d kept in touch. And now, following a divorce, he was back in our area, and I knew he wouldn’t mind helping out. ‘So I was thinking that perhaps we could get in touch with him,’ I suggested to Mike. ‘See if he’ll maybe do some work with Tyler – you know, educating him about the dangers of drugs; the sort of horrible things they can lead to.’

Mike nodded. ‘Well, he’s certainly the one to do it,’ he agreed. ‘I doubt there’s much he
hasn’t
seen, don’t you?’

He was right. Bob had been on the drug squad for years, and, back in the day, would regale us with tales of dealers and addicts and situations that were invariably pretty shocking – tales that underlined that everything in the movie
Trainspotting
was true. But Tyler was an innocent still – well, comparatively – and although he already had good reason to fear drugs (that being how he lost his mother) I knew how easily a young boy could blank all the rational thinking that was required if you were going to keep saying ‘no’.

‘I think it would be so good for him,’ I said. ‘I know he might only have been smoking a bit of weed, but, God, he’s so
young
still …’

‘And weed isn’t weed any more, is it?’ Mike pointed out. ‘Not like the stuff that used to be around. It’s potent. And pretty scary. Could do all sorts of damage.’

‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘plus I’m hoping it will reassure John that he can leave us to handle things, rather than bringing in anyone else. Or running it by Mr Smart and probably making everything even worse. I mean, I know it’ll all have to go on his file, but I’m sure I can convince John we can handle it.’

‘I don’t doubt that for a minute,’ Mike said, chuckling as he plonked a mouth-watering-looking doorstep in front of me. ‘But right now, see how well you can handle that.’

The things we were currently dealing with – a kid smoking dope and stealing a tenner from a family member – were nothing we hadn’t dealt with before. And in the big scheme of behaviours we’d had to address as foster carers over the years this was relatively mild.

So once I’d got on the outside of my sandwich and topped up my reserves of positivity I was able to put things in the right kind of perspective, i.e. bad, but not heart-in-mouth bad. And when Tyler came down and I could see the remorse in his manner, I thought that, actually, there was much to be positive about. He knew he’d done wrong – he understood that he had let Mike and me down. It didn’t matter so much if he didn’t think his high-jinks with dope were that dangerous – I’d recruit Bob to address that particular childish misconception – but it did matter that he understood that he’d let us down personally, and felt bad. And in that I felt we did have a result.

‘Are you gonna ring social services and have them take me back now?’ was almost the first thing he said, once he’d told me he was sorry and he was absolutely ravenous. Which wasn’t surprising, since, though he hadn’t been sick at any point, he probably hadn’t eaten anything of substance since he’d left school the previous afternoon.

‘No, we’re not,’ I said mildly, while I stirred the porridge he’d requested. ‘Because that’s not the way me and Mike do things.’ I nearly added – instinctively – that ‘sending kids back’ wasn’t an option for parents, was it? And thank God my mouth wasn’t too far ahead of my brain, because that’s precisely what his own ‘parents’ had done. ‘The way I see it, Tyler, is that we took you in with a plan – a plan to teach you a bit more about life’s realities – how to approach it, how to behave, how to treat people …’ I glanced across at the fridge-freezer. ‘That’s what that chart there is for. So you can learn that the best way to live a useful and happy life is to behave well and treat people with respect.’

I put the porridge in front of him, then pulled out another chair and sat down on it. ‘Tyler,’ I said, ‘we’re cross you put us through so much nonsense last night, of course we are. Look at the bags under my eyes – I’ve got to go to Tesco looking like this. But mostly we’re worried about
you
. Yes, it’s your body and once you’re an adult you can choose to fill your body up with stupid drugs, but right now you’re a child and we’re here to keep you from harm. And now you’re almost a teenager, that’s not a case of keeping you physically contained, like you were a toddler. It’s a case of giving you the wherewithal to control your
own
behaviour; of you learning that if you’re hell bent on being irresponsible, that’s a choice – a choice
you
make – and that there will almost
always
be consequences.’

It was a little speech that would come back to haunt me, but right now I decided it was enough to be going on with. He needed to get to school and to reflect and then we’d talk again later. It was at the forefront of my mind that there was another important matter we still had to talk about – the business of the money he had purloined from my mum, presumably to give him the funds for last night’s bit of fun.

‘Dear me, there’s nothing new under the sun, is there, Casey?’ was John’s pronouncement once, having waved Tyler off, I’d sent him the email and he’d phoned for the low-down.

‘Tell me about it,’ I said, stifling my zillionth yawn of the morning. ‘I’m obviously going to tackle him about the money once he gets in from school, but I’m confident we can handle it if you are.’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ he said. ‘I have no worries on that score. And to be honest, I’m not surprised things have taken a bit of a slide. Given how blatantly the family have rejected him, it would really have been much more surprising if he
hadn’t
kicked off in some way. All that hurt and anger’s got to be expressed somehow, hasn’t it? And I suppose a bit of light pilfering and drug-dabbling behind the bus shelter – however bad – has got to be better than another episode of violence. Not that I’m condoning it, obviously.’

‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘But yes, you’re right. And his remorse feels genuine, too. Course, that’s not to say we won’t have some sort of rumpus
re
the money. I just hope he owns up to it, that’s all.’

Which he did. Immediately. As soon as I brought it up. He was home dead on time, just as I’d optimistically predicted, and I saw no point in putting off tackling him about it – the sooner it was out there, the sooner it could be dealt with. The only reason I’d not spoken to him about it that morning, really, was because I felt it was too much to risk a double-whammy of tellings-off; whatever I might have said to him, I knew it might just create enough anxiety in his mind that he contemplated a fall-back of running away to escape it.

But we were back in my kitchen – him with a glass of milk, me with a coffee – and I only had to say ‘Tyler, I’ve been talking to my dad …’ for tears to gather in his eyes.

Tyler being the age he was, I’d half-expected an immediate denial. So many kids – the kids we dealt with – practised the ‘I ain’t done nothing’ rule. Deny everything, so the logic went, unless the evidence was overwhelming. And then keep at it – just deny it some more. Or if not – some schtick about how he was only borrowing it, or some such. But here we were, with me not even having accused Tyler of anything, and there were already tears tracking down his cheeks. I remained silent for a few moments, while he sat there and squirmed, hands clasped in his lap, gaze directed at the table.

‘Tyler,’ I said eventually. ‘Is there something you need to tell me?’

Yes. There clearly was. And he did. Well, not in detail, since he didn’t really need to. He told me he’d nicked the tenner and that he just did it on the spur of the moment, and that as soon as he’d done it he wished he’d hadn’t and that he promised he’d pay it back.

I told him I knew. And that I believed him. And that, though he was rather light on points now, I would see that he did. And that the most important thing I had to say to him was the same as I’d said that morning: that it was all about treating people the way you’d want to be treated and that he must
never
do anything like that again.

And he just cried and cried, sitting at the table, head sitting on crossed forearms, and I left him to it, and pottered around the kitchen, knowing that he was crying because he felt bad about what he’d done, which by any yardstick was a very positive thing.

After a few minutes, when he finally raised his head, I was ready, passing him a wodge of kitchen roll so he could wipe his face.

‘There,’ I said. ‘Better?’

He nodded wanly as he blew his nose.

‘Come on,’ I said, holding a hand out. ‘Come here.’

He looked confused at first, anxious, unsure what was expected of him, and I thought angrily of the stepmother who’d knocked him about, and, when not hitting him, had been so cruel and cold.

‘What?’ Tyler asked, edging round the kitchen table.

I changed the hand to both arms to make things clearer. ‘I want a hug,’ I said, ‘and I think you could use one too, couldn’t you?’

He stepped into my arms then and I held him tight, kissing the top of his head, which, of course, made him start crying all over again.

But that was okay, I thought. That was just as it should be.