Copyright

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, names, identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed.

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First published by HarperElement 2014

FIRST EDITION

© Casey Watson 2014

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Cover photograph © Mohamad Itani/Trevillion Images

Casey Watson asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007543083

Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780008113100

Version 2014-10-06

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

A Note to the Reader

Exclusive sample chapter

Casey Watson

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About the Publisher

Dedication

Dedicated to all those in a position to help our children lead productive and fulfilling lives, and to those children who have lived through dark days and find the strength to make it.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my agent, the lovely Andrew Lownie, for continuing to believe in me; Carolyn and the wonderful team at HarperCollins for their dedicated and hard work; and as ever my very talented friend and mentor, Lynne, for always being there. A special mention this time to Vicky at HarperCollins, who is taking some special time out for a while. I wish her all the very best and look forward to hearing from her soon.

Chapter 1

It’s so easy to take your parents for granted, isn’t it? Not consciously, maybe, and not in the sense that you don’t value them. Just in that perhaps it goes with the territory that you try not to spend too much time thinking ahead to a time when they won’t be there, do you? But not today. Today I had no choice in the matter. So I was doing exactly that, and it was scary.

I was scared because I had just taken my father into hospital to have major surgery on his bowel. It would be straightforward, they told us, and we should try not to worry, but how can you not in that situation? Mum was terrified he might die under the anaesthetic – i.e. before they even started – and for all my reassurances and positivity, she had so many ‘what if?’ scenarios (all of them negative, obviously) that it had been a real job to try and keep her calm.

As it was, I’d left her there with her knitting – she was busy making a cot blanket for her newest great-grandchild – and the promise that I’d be back as soon as Dad was out of theatre, after which, assuming all was well, I’d bring her home.

And it had been fine. Well, at least until I walked back out through the double doors, when it was all I could do not to burst into tears, run back inside for a cuddle and have them both do what they always did whenever life got tough: say ‘Don’t worry love, it will all be okay.’

It had been seeing Dad in the hospital bed that had been the worst. Never a big man – it’s from him that I get my five-foot-nothing stature – now he looked painfully small. Not frail, exactly, but definitely diminished. Weakened, as you’d expect in a man in his seventies who’s been struggling with an illness for a long time.

Stop it, I told myself sternly, blowing my nose. Get into the car, take yourself home, go and see your daughter, drink coffee, but most of all stop it. He’ll be fine.

And I had very nearly talked myself into believing he would too, except perhaps not as completely as I’d kidded myself I had, because when my mobile phone rang, just as I was coming off the dual carriageway, my first thought was Oh, God, what’s happened?

Nothing, you stupid mare, I told myself as I took the first left turn and found a safe place to pull in. He’d barely even have had his bloods taken yet, would he? So perhaps it was Mum, with some last-minute anxiety-reducing request or other – like spare hankies or Dad’s second best set of pyjamas or the current week’s copy of The People’s Friend.

But it wasn’t Mum, and I found myself smiling as I read the display; it was a missed call from my fostering link worker, John Fulshaw. We’d not spoken for a while, as I’d been having a bit of downtime from fostering; we’d come out of a long placement, which had finished the previous summer, and with my daughter Riley pregnant, and Dad having been so poorly, we’d made a decision as a family to take a bit of a break. We’d only done a little respite care since.

But now it was late May – almost a year since our last child, Emma, had left us, and with Riley’s daughter Marley Mae having arrived safely in April, and Dad finally getting his date for surgery, I’d already spoken to my husband Mike about suggesting to John that, come summer, we’d be back in the game.

I touched the call button, thinking how mad it was he should call at that moment. What was he, psychic or something?

Possibly. ‘Ah, Casey!’ he greeted me, as if I’d just returned from Mars. ‘Thanks so much for getting back to me so quickly. I was worried you were on holiday –’

I laughed. ‘Chance would be a fine thing, John.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good. Well, not in that sense, of course, but good that you’re around. Are you free?’

‘Well, Mike and I were only recently saying …’

‘No, no. Now. I meant “now” as in are you free right this minute? Only we have a bit of a situation.’

‘Well, I was just heading home, actually.’ I explained about Dad.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Casey – this really isn’t a good time for you, is it? No, look, sorry – I’ll have to see if I can rustle up someone else.’

He sounded crestfallen. ‘No, no, John, go on. Tell me. What is the situation?’

‘Really, Casey? You really want to know?’

‘Really,’ I confirmed, conscious of the new tone in his voice, which, after our many years of association, I had already analysed as the verbal equivalent of him crossing both his fingers and his toes. ‘John, if I can help at all, I will. You know that. And to be honest, this is a good time because it’ll take my mind off things – I’d only be pacing up and down, fretting about Dad, wouldn’t I? So, go on – what is the situation?’

‘I’m at the police station,’ he told me.

‘The police station? So that’s what it is, is it? You want me to come and pay your bail?’

‘A get out of jail free card might be helpful,’ he mused. ‘But not for me. For a boy who’s here with me, name of Tyler. Eleven. Stabbed his stepmother. Nowhere to go.’

‘Oh, dear,’ I said, my brain already cranking into action. ‘That doesn’t sound too good.’

‘No, it doesn’t, does it? And it isn’t, hence the social worker getting me down here. He’s already been charged and processed and now they want shot. Only trouble is, to where?’

‘So you need respite?’

‘No. Well, I mean, yes, if needs be – someone’s on to that currently – but we mostly need you and Mike to take him on, because this is right up your street. I don’t think he’s the sort of lad we can just place, ahem, anywhere. But … look, you know, you really can say no to this, Casey, if you have a lot going on in your life right now …’

‘He’s that bad, is he?’

‘I’m not going to dress it up for you. He’s likely to be challenging, so …’

So that was precisely why he had called me. As opposed to someone else. ‘So shall I come down there?’ I said.

‘You sure?’

I laughed. ‘I’m not sure about anything right now, John. And even if I was, I’d obviously have to speak to Mike first. And there’s no way I could take him now this very minute because I obviously need to know my dad’s safely out of surgery first.’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ John said. ‘Not a problem at all. I completely understand.’

‘But in principle … Well, there’s no harm in me meeting the lad, is there?’

Well, yes, actually, there was, I thought to myself as I started the engine and pulled out into the road again, police station-bound. I knew how my mind worked and it was already working overtime. An 11-year-old boy, a stepmother, nowhere to go. I was drawn like a moth to a flame.

By the time I’d got to the police station, parked and made myself known to the desk sergeant, my mood had lifted considerably. Yes, Dad was still under the knife and it was major surgery, but he was also fit as a flea and it was a straightforward operation. And I trusted what we’d been told – that he’d be fine.

I plonked myself down on one of the two scuffed chairs in the reception area and pulled out my phone to text Riley and let her know I’d been held up. And by what? I wondered. What sort of kid was John going to introduce me to? A challenging one, definitely, because John had already spelled that out. A kid who’d be difficult to handle. As, of course, he would be, since that was the sort of child Mike and I had been trained to foster. Oh, we’d had the odd sweet, biddable child here and there – and one or two who, notably, had been absolute angels – but that wasn’t our real remit. We were specialist foster carers, and our job was to take on kids who’d run out of their nine lives – certainly those who were deemed too difficult for there to be much hope of a long-term foster home as things stood, usually because of the emotional damage they had suffered in their short lives and the nightmare behaviours they displayed as a consequence. Our job was therefore to put them on an intense behaviour management programme, so they could face up to their demons, learn to control their emotions better and, hopefully, build self-esteem. It was through this, ultimately, that they would become more ‘fosterable’ and, in the long term, better able to cope with life.

We’d been doing it for a few years now – ‘fostering the unfosterable’ as our fostering agency’s strapline had it – and though we’d seen a lot in that time, much of it saddening and deeply shocking, I was always prepared to be surprised anew. So, what sort of child would this boy be, I wondered?

A very angry one, it turned out. ‘Brace yourself,’ John warned, once he’d come out to find me and take me through to the interview room where they were still keeping him. ‘To paraphrase that advert, he’s a bit of an animal.’

He also fleshed out a little of the background for me before we went in. Tyler had apparently brandished the knife – a regular carving one – during a heated argument with his stepmother and proceeded to threaten to kill her. She’d tried to get it from him, apparently telling him she’d batter him with it just as soon as she had disarmed him, which made him thrash about all the more and, according to him anyway, that was how he accidentally stabbed her in the arm.

‘Though her story is different, of course,’ John said. ‘According to her, he most definitely didn’t do it accidentally, and she’s definitely going to be pressing charges.’

‘And is she badly hurt?’ I asked.

‘No,’ John said. ‘Thank goodness. Just a flesh wound, which the paramedics cleaned up before taking her to hospital. Just a couple of butterfly stitches in it now, or so I’m told.’

‘So she went off to hospital and he was brought here by the police?’

John nodded. ‘And she’s saying that’s it, basically. She won’t have him in the house again. No way, no how.’

‘Is there a dad?’

‘Yes there is, and he’s apparently of the same mind. There’s also a half-brother. Bit younger. The stepmother’s boy.’

So there was a situation right there, I thought. We exchanged a look. Obviously John had had the same one.

Deciding to take on a new child should be a carefully thought out business. As a foster carer, you are opening not just yourself but your family and your home up to a stranger. A diminutive stranger, obviously – not a serial killer, or anything – but still a stranger about whom you start off knowing almost nothing, and what little you do know is often subjective. In this case, was the stabbing accidental or not? Without a witness, who were we supposed to believe?

So the normal course of events would usually be a multi-stage affair: an initial meeting, and, if that went okay, a formal pre-placement meeting, which would be attended by the potential foster parents, the link worker, the child in question’s social worker and, of course, the child themselves. Only then, assuming all parties felt comfortable with the arrangements, would the child move in and the relationship become official.

In practice, in my case, it rarely worked that way. Yes, in most cases, the steps happened, but rarely in the right order, and the truth was that, though I didn’t generally say so, I usually made up my mind about a child within minutes, not to say seconds, of making their acquaintance. And, so far, even when every warning bell had been clanging in my ears, I’d come up with the same decision. Yes.

Tyler was a beautiful boy. Inky hair flopping over deep brown and densely lashed eyes, clear olive skin, lean, sinewy build. Romany blood, I wondered? Greek? Perhaps Italian? Whatever his bloodline, he would be a heartbreaker when he was older, I decided. Might even be breaking hearts already. He was wearing a crumpled black T-shirt, low-slung combat trousers (ripped) and a pair of no doubt fashionable but very elderly trainers, all of which should have made him look like any other scruff-bag 11-year-old, but seemed to hang on his wiry frame almost stylishly.

Though there was nothing remotely stylish or, indeed, romantic about what was coming out of his mouth. ‘Get your fucking hands off me!’ he was railing, as John and I entered the interview room. ‘I don’t wanna fucking sit down, okay?!’

‘Sit down!’ the policeman closest to him barked, pressing him bodily back into the wooden chair on which he’d previously been sitting for his interview. He was one of three in the room, two of whom were obviously policemen – though only one was in uniform – with the third being the social worker, whose face I vaguely recognised, probably from a training session or social service gathering of some sort. He was middle-aged, slightly sweaty and looking harried.

‘Ah, John,’ said the nearer officer, who identified himself as PC Matlock and ushered us into the room. He closed the door firmly behind him. ‘And you’ll be Mrs Watson?’

I nodded. ‘Casey,’ I said, shaking the hand he extended.

I was about to add ‘Pleased to meet you,’ but the boy at the epicentre of this small earthquake beat me to it. ‘An’ who the fuck is she?’ he yelled, springing up from the chair again, causing it to crash back onto the floor.

‘Show some respect, lad!’ the same policeman snapped, as Tyler glared at me and John. ‘And pick that bloody chair up, as well!’ But this only seemed to inflame their young charge even further; instead of picking it up he decided to use it as a football, kicking it hard enough to send it skittering across the floor.

The social worker flinched. ‘Tyler, stop it!’ he entreated. ‘Behave yourself! You are just making things worse for yourself, now, aren’t you?’

To which accurate observation Tyler duly responded – by kicking the chair a second time. And then, as if pleased with the effect he was having, he drew his leg back and kicked it a third time for good measure.

The as yet unnamed policeman – this was clearly no time for introductions, much less an exchange of pleasantries – snatched the chair up. Then in one reckless action, narrowly missing the social worker, he swung it round and righted it back beside the interview table.

‘That is enough!’ he bellowed, grabbing the boy’s arm and yanking him towards him, but for an 11-year-old Tyler seemed blessed with an impressive amount of strength, and had soon twisted out of his grasp. He was also still kicking out – though aiming for shins now, rather than chair legs – and with a quick ‘Excuse me’ PC Matlock went round both me and the table, in order to help his colleague restrain their captive raging bull sufficiently that he could be guided back into place.

‘Fuck you!’ Tyler yelled to the first one, as he was pressed back yet again onto the chair. ‘And fuck you an’ all,’ he added to the other policeman. Then, as even John stepped in to try and help the social worker contain him, he used a string of words I’d not heard in a child that age in a long time, finishing with a spit, which again only narrowly missed the social worker, and a heartfelt ‘And fuck you, Mr Burns!’

My response to all this was, to be fair, a bit eccentric. Yes, I was well aware that it was a very serious matter, but there was something so ‘Keystone Cops’ about it all, too – what with the two police officers darting back and forth trying to chase him round the table, while the social worker flapped his hands so ineffectually – that, without consciously realising it, much less wanting to do it, I found myself laughing out loud.

If I was surprised by what had come out of my mouth (where on earth had that come from?) the effect on Tyler was little short of electrifying. I didn’t know what had made me suddenly feel the urge to giggle – perhaps the release of all that stress with Dad’s op? I didn’t know – but it certainly seemed to do the trick.

Because so transfixed was Tyler by this deranged woman they’d brought in to meet him that he stopped thrashing around and let them put him back on his chair. ‘Who the fuck is she?’ he said again.

Robert De Niro, I thought. Yes, he was like a very young Robert De Niro. That was why he’d put me in mind of a raging bull. Though right now this child put me in mind of another character too. A fictional one. I just couldn’t seem to help it.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, trying not to grin too much, and make him cross again. ‘I’m Casey, by the way. But you know, you just reminded me so much of Bart Simpson for a minute there. You know, when you said “Fuck you, Mr Burns!” Sorry,’ I said again. ‘It just made me laugh.’

I glanced at the two policemen then, who, along with the hapless social worker, were looking at me with expressions of incredulity. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled a third time, ‘I don’t know why I did that.’

Tyler by this time was staring up at me intently. ‘Yeah, that’s because he’s a knobhead,’ he observed, matter of factly.

‘So!’ said John. ‘Where shall we start?’

Chapter 2

In the end we started, as one usually does (and we hadn’t been able to as yet), with a round of introductions. I learned that the colleague of PC Matlock’s was a rather stressed-looking PC Harper, and that the social worker with the unfortunate name of Mr Burns was actually a duty social worker, called in to manage the emergency as best he could because Tyler’s regular social worker had gone on maternity leave. And, finally, they learned who I was and what I was there for, which was not really news to the adults in the room, obviously, but caused some consternation in Tyler. While the rest of us arranged chairs in a crude semi-circle around the table, he donned the parka-style jacket that had been attached to a wall hook and pulled the hood forwards to try and hide his face. He also pushed his chair back so he wasn’t part of the group. But he was watching me intently, even so.

‘So, moving on. The situation with Jenny,’ John said, referring to his tatty notepad, ‘is that she’s been involved with the family for just over a year now.’ He turned to me. ‘And I’ll let you have a copy of her notes in due course, Casey,’ he added, ‘but in the meantime Will Fisher is going to take over the case.’

I nodded. Another social worker whose name was familiar, though I wasn’t actually sure I’d ever met him. ‘Okay,’ I said, looking at Tyler and smiling. But as soon as we made eye contact, he put his head down.

‘So it’s really just a matter of finding a home for young master Broughton here,’ PC Matlock added, again, mostly to me. ‘As things stand at the moment, the parents can’t take him back.’

I noticed his diplomatic use of the word ‘can’t’, rather than ‘won’t’, which, from what John had already told me, was obviously the truth of it.

‘She’s not my fucking parent!’ Tyler yelled from his seat in the back row. ‘Never was and never will be! She’s a fucking witch who’s always hated me!’

Mr Burns swivelled in his seat. ‘All right, son. Calm down while we talk, please,’ he said.

Oops, I immediately thought, given Tyler’s previous comment. Don’t think I would have said that. And I was right.

‘An’ I’m not your fucking son, neither, dick brain!’ he snapped.

And off we went again. Ding, ding. Round two. Fortunately, by this time Tyler seemed to have run out of energy for physically railing against his captors, but over the next 20 minutes or so, while we continued to talk details, he peppered every contentious comment with his pithy take on things. So though I learned little more about the background (understandably, because there was only so much that could be discussed in front of him) one thing I did learn – and mostly via observation – was that this was a very angry, intensely troubled boy.

Mostly we were waiting, though – for a phone call to come through confirming that they had indeed found respite care for the next few days. And a knock on the door finally confirmed that perhaps it had.

‘All sorted,’ said the receptionist who’d been on the desk when I’d arrived. ‘Couple called Smith. Very nice. Said they’re happy to have Tyler – though only for a couple of days,’ she added, frowning slightly, ‘because they’re off on their summer holiday next week. I told them to come straight down. That okay?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ John said, nodding. ‘Perfect. Thanks very much. Good, so at least we have that bit sorted out.’ He turned to me, then. ‘So, Casey,’ he added, looking at me with a familiar ‘Well?’ sort of expression, ‘any chance I can put you on the spot?’

I looked over at Tyler, who, like John, had been watching my reaction, and, again, lowered his head when he caught my eye.

‘Hey, Bart Simpson,’ I said, forcing him to respond and meet my gaze again, ‘how do you fancy coming to stay with me for a while? I’ll have to speak to my husband – he’s called Mike, by the way – but I’m sure he’d love to have another boy around the house. So. How about it?’

Tyler had shrunk so far into his hood by this time that he looked like he was peeping out from behind a shrubbery. ‘Don’t care if I do, don’t care if I don’t,’ he said, seeming suddenly far less cocky than he had been up to now. My heart went out to him. He was 11 and he was sitting in an interview room in a police station, he was being discussed by strangers and, most of all, he wasn’t going home. Didn’t matter how much of a witch he had his stepmother pegged as, he wasn’t going home. And now the adrenalin had gone, it looked like that fact was beginning to sink in. No wonder he looked like he’d had the stuffing knocked out of him.

I smiled at him again, and smiled at John. ‘I’ll take that as a yes, then,’ I said. ‘Give me a call later then, John, yes? I’m sure we can sort something out.’

‘Thanks, Casey,’ John said, running his hand through his hair. He patted my arm then – a familiar unspoken gesture. I knew it meant he’d been all out of options and was grateful.

‘Right, then,’ I said, rising from my chair. ‘I’ll be off, then. See you soon, Tyler, yeah?’ I added, moving towards the door again. There was no response but as I turned before going through the doorway the movement of his hood told me he was watching me go.

And what was he thinking? I wondered. About his ‘witch’ of a stepmother? And about me? Something about frying pans and fires? I would certainly figure. I did have long black hair, after all.

‘Erm, so what happened to the “Oh, it’s great having all this time to spend with the grandkids” malarkey?’ Mike wanted to know four short hours later, after I’d recounted the details of my strange day.

Strange, but also curiously uplifting, all things considered. Because by now, it had to be said, I was buzzing. Dad had come round and was doing great, apparently, Mum had stopped worrying and was looking after him (well, getting under the nurses’ feet, more likely, bless her) and the prospect of taking on the lad I’d met earlier had gone from being a possibility to a probability to a cast iron certainty – well, in my head, at least. I still had to convince Mike.

Who was still on the same track. ‘And what happened to the “Let’s take a few months out from fostering” for that matter? You have a very short memory, my dear …’

It was true. I had said all of that. And when I’d said it, I’d truly meant it. But the very fact that Mike was teasing me about it was a Very Good Sign Indeed. If he’d been set against it, he wouldn’t be teasing. He’d be frowning. As it was I knew I wouldn’t have to work too hard to convince him.

‘Oh, shut up!’ I said, throwing a cushion in his general direction for good measure. ‘And, anyway, it’s been almost a year now. If we leave it much longer we’ll probably have to do retraining. And we don’t want to have to go through the faff of all that, do we?’

I didn’t actually know if we would have to retrain – but it seemed a fair bet we would in some way, shape or form. At the very least in some aspect of health and safety. You couldn’t turn around for new health and safety initiatives, after all, could you? So it was less ‘little white lie’ and more ‘overemphasising the negative’ because I knew it was something that would get him. And I’d been right – a look of horror began spreading across his face. Big and assertive and managerial as he was, my husband was cringingly shy when it came to things involving group participation. And that was something the fostering training process had had in spade loads: lots of role play with fellow trainees and lots of speaking in public. It would be his worst nightmare to have to do it all again.

He dried his hands – he’d been just finishing off the last of the drying up – and now came to join me on the sofa.

‘Okay, so what’s this kid like, then?’ he asked. ‘The real, unvarnished truth, mind. And when were you thinking of him moving in?’

I took a moment to try and think how best to convey my first impressions, and though I could think of lots of ways to couch ‘stabbed his stepmum’ in such a manner that it would sugar the pill slightly, I realised it was probably best to prepare for the worst and then work upwards. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, love,’ I said. ‘He looks like he might be a proper little handful, to be honest. He swears like a trooper and had a bit of a temper on him, too. One that …’ To say or not to say? Yes, say, Casey. ‘Well, remember when Justin first came to us?’

Mike nodded. Slowly. ‘Oh dear.’

‘Well, yes, you say that,’ I countered, turning to face him on the sofa and swinging my legs up beneath me. ‘I mean, he turned out to be such a lovely kid, didn’t he? And look at him now! Imagine if we hadn’t given him that chance? And, well, was it so difficult, really, looking back?’

Mike gave me what my mum would call an old-fashioned look, and perhaps not without very good reason. Justin had been our first ever foster child and his horrendous background (and, boy, it had been a grim one) had caused him to not only build a wall right around him but also the mental equivalent of a roll of barbed wire – he had a tendency to lash out at anyone who tried to help him. His behaviour had been so bad that one previous carer had been moved to point out that he was ‘a newspaper headline just waiting to happen’ – and not one about the Queen’s Jubilee.

For almost a year Justin had turned our lives upside down – and not just Mike and my lives either; the whole family had been involved, particularly our youngest, Kieron, then still in his teens. But it had worked out okay. We eventually got to the root of everything. And Justin had turned out to be like any other kid; hurting and sad and abandoned and alone, and, once he had some love and stability, he responded positively. He blossomed before our eyes, and he grew.

And Justin, fully grown now, was still in our lives, testament to the fact that love and stability had a lot to be said for it. Love and stability, in most cases, worked.

And we could offer that to this lad, though I sensed I didn’t need to bang on about it.

‘You’re right, I suppose,’ Mike agreed – though he might still have had half a mind on ‘Pretend you’re the foster dad and that Mrs Potter is this young girl who is coming on to you …’ Either way, I could tell we were on. ‘And if it turns out to get a bit lively, well, I suppose it keeps us on our toes, doesn’t it?’ he added. ‘Keeps us young.’

I laughed at that, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. ‘Young’ was one thing we weren’t. I was 47 now and Mike was a year older. And though that didn’t make us old, it did make me rational. There were lots of ways of defining the word ‘lively’, after all. And given the sort of kids we had tended to foster so far, I reckoned our definition probably wasn’t the same as most …

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