The Boy No One Loved (19 page)

It was a Friday morning, just a week after Justin’s graduation ceremony, when the school rang.

‘Mrs Watson?’ I recognised the voice straight away. It was Richard Firth, Justin’s head of year from school.

‘Yes, it’s me,’ I said, already braced for the worst. You didn’t tend to get calls from the high school in the middle of the school day just to update you how well your child had done in Physics, after all. Plus this was Justin. I wondered what had happened.

‘We have concerns,’ Richard said, ‘so we thought we’d better get in touch. Sorry to land you with this now,’ he continued. ‘I know this is likely to be the last thing you want to deal with, what with the changeover of foster carers coming up. But there’ve been a couple of incidents that are causing concern, particularly during lessons when, I’m sorry to say, Justin’s becoming rather disruptive again.’

‘Oh, dear,’ I said. What else was there
to
say, after all? ‘What sort of things?’

‘Just generally disruptive behaviours. He’s been encouraging other pupils to misbehave; throw things and so on – and doing a lot of very silly shouting out. It’s also been brought to my attention that he’s not eating lunch. Apparently he’s been spending all his lunch money on sweets and fizzy drinks, and we’re concerned that it’s all part of a bigger overall picture of what seems to be attention-seeking behaviour.’

‘I suspect you’re right,’ I said, recalling John’s warning. ‘What would you like me to do? Speak to him?’

‘In the first instance, yes,’ Richard confirmed. ‘Perhaps just let him know that he’s still very much skating on thin ice, especially where the school governors are concerned. We really don’t want to take things further if we don’t have to, particularly since he’s been doing so well lately. So if we could nip it in the bud, so to speak, with a few words from you, then I’m sure we’d all feel a lot happier.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Riley, who was round for coffee at the time and had been able to hear my end of the conversation. ‘It’s like they said it would be, isn’t it? That’s so sad.’

I’d been filling Riley in about how John and Harrison had warned us to expect a bit of a nosedive in Justin’s behaviour now his time with us was coming to an end; it was, we’d been told, completely normal for this to happen; it was a how a fostered child tended to protect their feelings – they would try to make themselves unlovable so they could more readily break their emotional ties. But the reality was proving slightly more challenging than I’d imagined, not to mention the timing, which wasn’t perfect. Riley was now at her due date – quite literally – and she could, and well might, go into labour at any moment. Which meant I needed, at least when David was at work, to be on hand. So the last thing I either wanted or needed right now was to be called away to help firefight a whole clutch of new behavioural problems.

Because the truth was that it wasn’t just at school that there were concerns; things at home had become suddenly, inexplicably difficult, almost as soon as the graduation was over, and particularly after Justin’s last meeting with Harrison Green, in which the new placement had been properly discussed. He’d been told all about the family, and had been shown pictures of them. A nice couple, by all accounts, childless, with two dogs. But it didn’t really matter how nice they looked, did it? Going to them, however affable they were, meant leaving
us
.

But this was what we’d signed up for – this was what fostering was about: not slotting a child into convenient pockets of your life, but it
becoming
your life, more or less.

I sat back down with Riley and shook my head. ‘It’s panning out
exactly
how they told us it would,’ I said. ‘It’s like he’s got the textbook and we haven’t. I had a headache the other afternoon, a real thumping one, you know? And when he came in from school and put the TV on at full blast, I went in and asked him to turn it down – as you do – and you know what he said?’

Riley shook her head and sipped her decaf. ‘Go on, tell me.’

‘He gave me a right look, and said, “Good! I hope you have a stroke!”’ I picked up my own coffee and blew on it. ‘Charming, eh?’

Riley frowned, and then seemed to consider for a moment. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘He said something to me, too, actually. Me and David. On Monday. When he’d popped round while walking Bob. I wasn’t going to bother to mention it, because, well, because it wasn’t very nice, frankly, but –’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘What did he say?’

‘It was about you and Dad. Like you say, it’s obviously part of the bigger picture, but I was just gobsmacked. We were talking about how when me and Kieron were little you got mad at us one time for putting dog leads on the rabbits and trying to take them for a walk down the street – remember that?’ I nodded. I did. ‘And then all of a sudden he comes out with, “Poor you. I feel sorry for you, being brought up my Mike and Casey.” And I’m like “
What???
” and then he says “because they’re crap parents” – something like that, anyway – and then “and I can’t wait till I leave, because I hate them”. Stuff like that. And I gave him what bloody for, as you can imagine! I was just
so
shocked to hear him say that, after everything, you know? I mean, yes, maybe six months ago, but
now
? I knew you wouldn’t take it personally if I did tell you, but I was really, really cross with him. It was just so out of the blue – so unwarranted.’

‘Except not,’ I reassured her. She looked so embarrassed to even have passed it on, and I felt for her. ‘It’s exactly what John and Harrison told us would happen, isn’t it? Which is all well and good, of course, and, no, of
course
I’m not going to take it personally, sweetheart. But what to do about it? That’s my real concern.’

And it was a concern I voiced to Harrison Green once Riley had left. I would have shared it with John, but then I realised there was no point. Once Justin left us John would have no further involvement in his life. It was Harrison who would be taking over Justin’s case once again, so I thought I had better pass on any potential future worries to him.

I also felt Mike and I needed some guidance. Did we rise to it? Discipline him? That certainly seemed to be the school’s choice, and the one thing I really didn’t want to end up happening was for him to get himself excluded again. Or did we just pretend it wasn’t happening? Simply ignore it? What
was
the best way to tackle it? I had no idea.

‘Respond to it, obviously,’ was Harrison’s advice. ‘Tell him it’s unacceptable, of course, but don’t react emotionally. Don’t give him any opportunity to escalate the conflict and get himself into more trouble with you or Mike. Just keep reassuring him you love him; that it’s just the
behaviour
that’s unacceptable. It’s all just part of the process, so try to keep calm.’

Which pretty much dovetailed with my own instincts about it: that we needed to act as you would with a toddler. Reinforce the good, keep a measured but consistent response to the bad. I wasn’t sure Harrison would have been my first port of call on the advice front, but he had a lot more experience of both kids in care and of Justin, and in this I knew he was probably spot on. I hated to hear it – I didn’t
want
Justin to sever his emotional ties with us – but everything Harrison said rang depressingly true.

‘I can’t bear the thought of that,’ I confided to Mike when we were in bed that evening. ‘I hate the whole idea of him thinking he must expunge us from his mind. I can see why he’d do that – why any child for whom everything is temporary would do that, but we can’t let that happen with him. We just
can’t
. If there’s one thing that absolutely must come out of this is that he knows there are people here who love him unconditionally, and that we will always be here for him.
Always.
’

‘He
will
know that,’ Mike reassured me. ‘If we just keep on doing what we’re doing. He might not be able to show it right now – might have to act out the opposite, like he’s doing. But deep down, he’ll know it. And that’s what matters. I know it’s hard, love, but he’s got to separate from us to some extent. He does have to leave us, after all.’

But there was one thing I didn’t confess to Mike – not right then. That I felt terrible about all of it. Not just because things were rocky once again. But because, actually, I didn’t want Justin to go. I wanted to keep him. It was as simple as that.

I suspected that Mike probably felt the same as I did about it all, but Mike being Mike – always far more practical and pragmatic than I was – whenever he saw me, as he’d put it, ‘thinking too much’, or looking sad, he would always respond by trying to ‘gee me up’, trying to get me excited about our next challenge, and its arrival, and would tell me how great I was doing. Which was great, and probably why we made such a good team, but, if I was honest, it did sometimes make me want to scream back at him, ‘
But I’m not doing well! I don’t want a new challenge! I want to keep the one I’ve already got!
’

I called John Fulshaw the next day, and told him exactly how I felt, and then asked him if we could meet up in person. I needed to be clear about the options there were before talking it through properly with Mike. Happily, John had a meeting to attend not too far from us, only the next day, so we arranged that we could get together over coffee.

And as soon as I saw him, I realised I’d been right to voice my fears. He looked very much like he had things to tell me too.

‘It wasn’t something I was going to bring up,’ he said, confirming it just as soon as we sat down. ‘If I’m being scrupulously honest, it wasn’t. Not least because I know this period’s a tricky and emotional one for
any
foster parent, let alone one who’s going through the process for the first time.’

‘Bring up what?’ I wanted to know. ‘What haven’t you told me? Don’t tell me there’s another grim secret lurking in the mix.’

I smiled as I said this, trying to keep the tone light. I didn’t want him thinking I’d morphed into some sort of flake. But he shook his head.

‘No more secrets. No, it’s just something else that’s happened. I had a call …’

‘A call from who?’

‘From Justin.’

‘From
Justin
? Why would Justin call
you
? He doesn’t even have your number, does he?’

Of course, as soon as I said this, I realised how stupid I was. Oh course he had access to John’s number. Plus lots of others. It was pinned up on the fridge along with all my other regular numbers. ‘And anyway,’ I finished, feeling silly, ‘he’d call Harrison, surely, if he had anything he wanted to discuss …’

‘I think he did some research of his own,’ John replied. ‘Might have even got my number
from
Harrison, I suppose.’

I shook my head. ‘No, he didn’t.’ I filled him in on my gaffe. Not that it mattered really. Why shouldn’t he call John? No, he wasn’t Justin’s link worker. He was mine. But perhaps that was exactly
why
he wanted to speak to John. ‘So what did he say?’ I went on, intrigued now.

‘In a nutshell? That he doesn’t agree that he’s actually “cured” yet. That he thinks he still needs your help to “sort himself out”. He’s basically asked if he can stay with you and do the programme again.’

Which put everything in the proper context, i.e. not the one we’d assumed. He wasn’t playing up in order to create emotional distance from our family before leaving. He was playing up because he saw it as a way to be able to stay with us. ‘Oh, my God …’

John sat back in his chair and shook his head. ‘I know. And this is a first for me, Casey, I must say,’ he admitted, echoing my own thoughts. ‘And something that I imagine will be peculiar to this programme. I mean, it’s not rocket science, is it? A kid in a stable placement is hardly likely to
want
to leave. And in the mainstream, then why on earth would they have to? They just wouldn’t. A child would only leave a working placement to be returned to their own family, wouldn’t they? So let’s just say this is new territory for both of us.’

I was poleaxed to hear this. And also quite distressed. It was hard to find words to describe how it made me feel. ‘Oh, John, that breaks my heart,’ I said. ‘To think that he actually
rang
you.’

‘I know,’ he said, nodding. ‘I know.’

It was something that I wrestled with for days. I told Mike that night, about how I felt we needed to keep Justin. About how, far from wanting to break bonds with us to make the parting easier, he was actively trying to stop it happening at all. Which was, even if it took me a little time to realise it, perhaps the strongest indication that he’d made real progress during his time with us; he wasn’t passively accepting things and wasn’t displaying disturbed ‘behaviours’ either. He was trying to fix things; practising self-determination. It seemed to me he was trying to take charge of his destiny in a straightforward way, rather than self-harming or just passively accepting the inevitable. In short, he was no longer playing the victim.

But it was that, in the end, John’s professional support notwithstanding, that most convinced me. We could drop out of the programme, and keep this one child right through till he was old enough to reach true independence, or we could do what we’d both trained to do, which was to support Justin through to his return to a mainstream foster placement, as had been the hope when he’d been placed at our ‘last chance saloon’. And, in doing so, we could make way for another child or children, and then another, and perhaps another, potentially helping any number, as had been
my
hope and ambition when I’d originally left the unit at the school. Because, as Mike pointed out, the Watson clan weren’t disappearing from Justin’s life – weren’t moving to Australia or anything, weren’t abandoning him. And, just as with our own kids,
any
child who joined our family really did join it – if that was what they wanted, and I fervently hoped Justin did – for life.