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.

HarperElement

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First published by HarperElement 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Casey Watson 2020

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Cover image © Nicole Wells/Arcangel Images (posed by model)

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Casey Watson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008375577

Ebook Edition © May 2020 ISBN: 9780008375584

Version: 2020-03-20

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Contents

5  Dedication

6  Acknowledgements

7  Chapter 1

8 Chapter 2

9 Chapter 3

10 Chapter 4

11  Chapter 5

12  Chapter 6

13  Chapter 7

14  Chapter 8

15  Chapter 9

16  Chapter 10

17  Chapter 11

18  Chapter 12

19  Chapter 13

20  Chapter 14

21  Chapter 15

22  Chapter 16

23  Chapter 17

24  Chapter 18

25  Chapter 19

26  Chapter 20

27  Chapter 21

28  Chapter 22

29  Epilogue

30  A note on twenty-eight-day placements

31  Support

32  Also by Casey Watson

33  Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

34  About the Publisher

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Dedication

Dedicated to my wonderful, supportive family and to all of my fellow foster carers out there. To these earth angels I say, keep on keeping on, you’re doing a great job, and even in those darkest moments I know that you will find something to smile about.

Acknowledgements

As always I need to thank my fabulous agent, Andrew Lownie, and the wonderful team at HarperCollins. We have two team members now, too. Our lovely new editor, Kelly Ellis, who has been so patient with us and such joy to work with (even when work at the coal face got in the way of meeting deadlines, Kelly gave me the precious time I needed in my real life, so thank you ever so much) and Georgina Atsiaris, who has been equally patient, waiting for me to find moments to read the proofs. Again, thanks! And no thanks would be complete without my eternal gratitude to my friend and mentor, Lynne – who also has the patience of a saint!

Chapter 1

‘You okay, love?’ I asked Mike, as the motorway spooled out ahead of us. He’d been silent for some time now. A good twenty minutes. I knew why, too. He was feeling the same way as I was. It was something we’d come to learn was an inevitable part of fostering, and which we’d come over the years to refer to as ‘happy-sad’. Mostly sad, but at the same time knowing we should, and would, be happy; the strange, bittersweet feeling we both often got when we’d just said goodbye to a child. Sad that they had left us, but happy that they were moving on to a safe, loving home.

We were both happy-sad twice over in this case, our most recent placement having been a sibling one. We’d spent a month now looking after four-year-old twins called Annie and Oscar, who we had just dropped off exactly where they were meant to be. The best place. Back with their loving parents, in a new home.

Mike glanced across at me and smiled. ‘I will be. What about you? Bearing up?’

I smiled back at him. ‘I will be too. Though I’m going to miss them big time. I hope their mum keeps her promise and allows us the odd visit.’

‘As if she wouldn’t,’ Mike pointed out, and he was, I knew, right, because Annie and Oscar were obviously not our usual kind of placement, having not spent their early years suffering from any kind of abuse or neglect. And not usual because during the time they spent with us, we took them to visit their mum and dad almost every single day, in hospital, where both were patients, after a horrendous house fire that had been caused by an electrical fault. They’d rescued their children – both of them, miraculously, unharmed – but had both suffered severe and widespread burns. It was our proximity to a dedicated burns unit as much as the fact that we were between placements that made us so well suited to the job.

Which hadn’t really felt like any kind of job. Far from it. Yes, the little ones were distressed and bewildered in the beginning, obviously, but we’d soon settled them into a reassuring rhythm, anchored by those daily visits to see Mummy and Daddy, and the knowledge that soon they’d be properly reunited.

Needless to say, it wasn’t just ‘Aunty Casey’ and ‘Uncle Mike’ who’d become besotted with them, either. They were so easy to love, and the entire family duly did. My mum and dad, especially, as just after Annie and Oscar had come to us, Dad had suffered a nasty fall and been unable to drive, which meant me spending a lot of time shuttling back and forth between our houses, with the little ones in tow of necessity. Mum and Dad were usually sanguine about these kinds of partings – they were usually the ones always telling me to buck up – but this time it was me having to hand round the Kleenex, because the pair of them were crying like babies.

But say goodbye we must, and we were all buoyed by the uncomplicated ‘happy ending’ – which in our line of work was never a given. So I knew we’d shake the blues off in no time. In the meantime, Mike’s stomach was already moving on.

‘I’m starving,’ he declared. ‘And in need of a large coffee. Shall we pull into the next services and grab some lunch?’

It had been a long drive – the family came from an area many miles away from the specialist burns unit – and I too was desperate for a coffee. Mostly because I’d forgone a cup earlier in the interests of not further irritating a bladder that was irritable most of the time anyway these days. The menopause, I’d been finding out, had a lot to answer for. Hot flushes, cold sweats, and now logistics too; as soon as I arrived in any public place these days, the first thing I did was always scope out the loos.

So I headed straight into the ladies while Mike joined the queue at the café, and it was there – not the most professionally well-appointed of environments – that I saw a text come in from my rather grandly titled ‘supervising social worker’ or, in old money, my link worker, Christine Bolton.

She wanted me to call her as soon as I was able, so my obvious first thought was that we’d forgotten to pack something that belonged to the twins, but running through a mental checklist, I was sure that we hadn’t. The next thought – equally obvious – was that she had another child for us, but I brushed that aside too, because there was no way it would be that. It had only been hours, after all, since we’d signed off on Annie and Oscar. No supervising social worker could want that much blood out of a stone, could they? Plus, she knew we had a lot on the family plate anyway, with a new Watson grandchild on the way.

‘She’ll be just checking in,’ Mike suggested when I joined him in the queue and wondered aloud what she could want to speak to me about. ‘Asking how it all went, and so on. Tell you what, here’s a good idea, Case. Why don’t you phone and ask her?’

With no tea towel immediately to hand, I couldn’t flick him with one. ‘That’s exactly what I was about to do,’ I huffed, and duly did so.

Even Christine’s soft, relaxed Liverpool accent couldn’t disguise the urgency in her voice. ‘Casey, you’re going to have a few choice words for me,’ she guessed correctly. ‘I mean, I imagine you’ve not even had time to strip the beds yet, but—’

‘Seriously?’ I asked, re-visiting my thoughts on blood and stones. ‘We’re not even back home yet. You need us to take someone else? Like right now, tonight?’

Mike stared, open-mouthed, eyebrows arched up into his hairline.

‘I’m so, so sorry,’ Christine said, ‘and you know I would never ask if there had been absolutely anybody else.’ Hmm, I thought, where had I heard that before? Was the ghost of John Fulshaw (very much alive but no longer my colleague) wafting around somewhere in the motorway services? ‘But, Casey, we are stuck, and I must tell you that this is no ordinary request. It’s a definite twenty-eight-day placement.’

The emphasis was very much on the ‘definite’, I noted. I pursed my lips. I was becoming increasingly familiar with twenty-eight-day placements and I wasn’t at all sure that I agreed with the increasing regularity of them, almost as if they were a must-have fashion trend. There was a place for them of course, and they were ideal in certain situations, such as when parents phoned social services and demanded that their children be taken into care immediately, or they would be out on the streets. The twenty-eight-day placement gave the local authority the opportunity to look deeper into the dynamics of the family situation and then decide whether to seek a care order, or to put the children back with the family, opting for putting home-based support in place instead.

Because the option existed, however – and here was where the ‘increasing regularity’ part came in – it was very easy for some social workers, in our ever more financially strapped service, to ask a carer to accept a twenty-eight-day placement, for no other reason than that they were struggling to find the right foster family to take them and that precious month gave them an extra month of wriggle room. (Not that the term ‘wriggle room’ was ever used, obviously. You couldn’t have a term for something that ‘didn’t happen’, after all.)

One thing I did know, however, was that this wouldn’t be a case of that. I knew Christine felt the same way as I did about the way such orders were increasingly being ‘repurposed’. So, there would have to be a good reason and she quickly provided it. It turned out that a thirteen-year-old girl called Harley was, even as we spoke, waiting in the day room of a mental health facility, for someone – anyone, it seemed – to go and collect her, as her time there was done and her bed was sorely needed by someone else.

‘And she can’t go back to her family,’ Christine explained, ‘because they can’t keep her safe. And when I say “family”,’ she added, ‘I use the term loosely, as I’m not sure there’s much of one. Before Harley was sectioned under the mental health act, she’d been living with her mother, a Kayleigh Brown, who has problems of her own. There’s also an older sister, Millie, but she left home just under a year ago, and is no longer in contact. It appears her leaving was the catalyst for Harley’s emotional deterioration.’

‘So, she was sectioned?’ I asked. ‘What exactly did she do?’

‘From the paperwork I’ve been sent,’ Christine continued, ‘it seems that after a self-harming episode was discovered, she made several suicide attempts and had been told she could no longer attend school – they were worried for her safety and felt they couldn’t police her sufficiently there – and then six weeks ago a member of the public found her about to leap from a bridge above a busy motorway. Thankfully, they were able to grab her and restrain her until police arrived. That’s when she was sectioned. Because it was apparently a very genuine attempt; not just a “cry for help” type scenario. She’s been in the same hospital getting treatment ever since. Though I have to tell you,’ she added, in a tone that suggested she wished she could skim over it, ‘they say they have done all they can for her, as she doesn’t have a defined mental health issue.’

‘So they’re not saying she’s better?’

‘Not quite that, no. Maybe more that she’s bet-ter. Which I appreciate is not the same thing, ‘but they’ve obviously made progress. And now she’s coming out of an institution and able to see her mum again and so on, well, it sounds positive at least, doesn’t it? And I’m sure great strides can be made now …’

I could tell that Mike was frustrated hearing only one side of this two-way conversation but given the nature of the call, I could hardly put my phone on loudspeaker in the middle of a service station restaurant. Instead I told Christine I needed a little while to discuss it with him first. ‘As I said, we still have quite a drive before we even get home from dropping the twins off,’ I told her. ‘But I do see the urgency. Fifteen minutes, I promise. We’ll discuss it in the car.’

‘I am so, so, sorry,’ Christine said. ‘I feel terrible dumping all this on you two right now. But, look, please rest assured that I can promise you this. Whatever the decision, this isn’t one of those times where we would ask you to extend. It’s twenty-eight days and that’s that. End of. The mother is on board with it, and is happy to accept some intervention work during the time we have, and wants her daughter back home just as soon as she feels confident that she can keep her safe. Which is not how she feels right now, obviously.’

‘Twenty-eight days, fifteen minutes – this is beginning to sound like the plot of a disaster movie,’ Mike observed, as we finally sat down to eat our lunch.

He had a point too, because just as I was running through the details of what Christine had told me, so my mind was running through the plot of a different story altogether. What if the mother decided she couldn’t keep her daughter safe at the end of those twenty-eight days? Christine had already said that Harley was determined to end her life; that it wasn’t a cry for help. She had also hinted that the mother had her own difficulties of some kind, and I wished I’d asked her to elaborate on what they were. What if social services deemed her unfit to have her daughter back? There were a lot of uncertainties around this and I knew that at any minute Mike was going to point out something I was already acutely aware of.

‘What about Kieron and Lauren?’ he said. And there it was. Our daughter-in law, Lauren, was heavily pregnant with her and our son Kieron’s second child, and we had both agreed – no, promised – not to take a new child on around the time the baby was due to be born, even as an emergency measure. We were effectively ‘on annual leave’ for a couple of weeks and that had been tacitly agreed by everyone. We had an exact date too – Mother Nature notwithstanding – a booked-in Caesarean section, various risk factors having been taken into account.

Our help was non-negotiable too. Set in stone. As Lauren’s family lived too far away to be able to help out with the practicalities, I had promised that I would be around to look after Dee Dee (our beautiful granddaughter) for the first week or so and to be on hand while they settled into their new routine. And also because Kieron, although he was such a fabulous dad to Dee Dee, still had his challenges, related to his Asperger’s, which included his anxieties about change. And this was, of course, going to be a big change. Perhaps not as big as becoming parents to Dee Dee, but still, it was back to newborn-baby stage, which could challenge the most calm, relaxed and stoic of people, none of which my lovely son generally was.

‘I’ve thought about that,’ I said, because I had. Had counted it up even as I’d been speaking. ‘We’re okay on that score. The dates will work out. Twenty-eight days with this new girl, then we’ll have a couple of weeks’ break until the baby comes. Don’t worry about that, Mike,’ I said, even though my own doubts were already niggling. ‘I’ll just have to make it absolutely clear to Christine that it can’t be extended under any circumstances. That after the four weeks, we are no longer available. Nada. Non. Niet. Come hell or high water.’

‘What about on the other score, Case? The one where you say all that but when it comes to it …’ He looked at me pointedly. ‘Come on, you know what you’re like.’

‘And you know what you’re like as well,’ I pointed out. Because the bottom line was that someone had to take this poor kid on and to turn her down on the basis that we wouldn’t have sufficient about us to stick to our guns about the deadline would be, well, pretty pathetic. Plus, I knew if we said no we’d both feel pretty bad. Whether she was crying for it or otherwise, this girl clearly needed help.

‘Okay,’ Mike said, ‘and you say this poor thing is actually right now sitting in a waiting room, waiting to hear where she’s going next?’

I nodded sadly. ‘It’s bloody awful, isn’t it? The psychologists have obviously decided she doesn’t have a mental health issue and she’s all good to go. Just like that. She must be so scared, poor thing. Imagine being in hospital for six weeks, then being told you can’t go home to your mum because she isn’t ready for you. Can you imagine? Bloody awful.’

So that was us decided. Once we’d finished our sandwiches (cheese and pickle, also apparently well-travelled), we popped the lids back on our coffees and headed back outside to the car, so I could call Christine back in relative privacy.

Where, again, she made all the right noises. And I could tell she meant every word she said as she promised that she understood the non-negotiable nature of our commitment to Kieron and Lauren, and would have a plan B in place to be effective from day twenty-eight, just in case.

‘Much as I hate the idea,’ she added, ‘I will even have another twenty-eight-day placement set up to run on straight afterwards, just in case of a worst-case scenario – you know, if Mum doesn’t come through, or isn’t considered up to it. It will just give us a chance to do some more work with her if need be. I will be very clear with the looked-after children team that this will happen and the care plan will reflect this. If the mother says no to a return, or even if the girl refuses to return, you and Mike don’t have to worry about it. At all. I absolutely promise. I know how much it means to you both to take that time off with the newest member of the family, and that’s exactly what you’ll do, rest assured.’

‘You mentioned the mother having problems of her own, Christine,’ I prompted, ‘I don’t suppose you know what they are, do you? I mean, if it’s bad, then mightn’t it have contributed to the daughter’s problems?’

Christine was silent for a moment. ‘Sorry, I’m just scrolling back through my emails. There was definitely something about Mum. Ah – here it is. “Somewhat reliant on alcohol, though nothing diagnosed, and the possibility that she may have used drugs as a crutch at some point.” Again, no concrete evidence, just suspicions and reports from a neighbour. And that’s all there is, I’m afraid. But, as I say, you can rest assured about this,’ she said again. ‘Twenty-eight days, then it’s no longer your problem.’

Rest assured. Very easy to say, but not so easy in practice. As we turned out of the parking lot and re-set the sat nav for the hospital, we were both silently contemplating possibilities for the next twenty minutes of what looked like being a twenty-five-minute journey. I’d no idea what was going through Mike’s mind (same as what was going through mine no doubt – here we go again) but I was also once again questioning the validity of these types of placement. They gave no security to a child – not if there was no certainty that they would be going home at the end of it – but almost of equal importance was that it made normal life extremely difficult for a foster carer.

Respite and emergency placements aside, of course, when Mike and I took on a new child, during the early days and weeks we spent the time learning slowly about their personality and needs. We started with the basics. A list of rules, a mutually agreed list of expectations (bed making, teeth cleaning, language, etc.) and tackled all the smaller problems first (not least any recalcitrance when it came to rules and expectations). This set up a routine, a pattern and a rhythm to daily life that allowed the major things to reveal themselves over time and our subsequent goals for helping a child take back control of themselves. By then, hopefully, we had built up a sufficiently close relationship with the child that would better help us understand what made them tick and support them to work through their problems. This was key, because it was a system that gave us the opportunity to be ‘parents’ above all else. To create a nurturing environment, enabling the child to start to relax a little, and, crucially, hopefully, to place some trust in us. They would hopefully by then see that we were a safe place to be and that’s when the real work would begin.

A twenty-eight-day placement made almost all of this impossible. The carers were expected to do only very prescribed types of work with the child and it was made clear to the child from the outset that they were not making a home with you. Yes, you were expected to teach them about family dynamics, and house rules, and how they could best manage their behaviour so that they could operate effectively within their own home, but this was part of a package that was rather hands-off for the foster family and included visits by various professionals, on a twice-weekly or even daily basis, to do similar and/or complementary work with them. But whatever the actual work involved, the problem (at least to my mind) was the same – it was a structure that didn’t allow time to build trust, to nurture, or to explore the root of a child’s problems. To be perfectly honest, I hated it. It made me feel more like a B&B owner than a carer.

As the now more familiar scenery rolled on by again, I shared my thoughts with Mike. ‘Oh gawd,’ I said. ‘I’m wobbling a bit now. Have we just made a mistake?’

He grinned. ‘You are a case, Case,’ he told me. ‘All this thinking! This is a job we’ve agreed to do. And do in the way we’re supposed to do. Can’t you, just for once, just accept this as a piece of work with a child that’s going to last twenty-eight days? You know, we’ve only ourselves to blame if we make it more than it is.’

‘You mean more in time? No way, Mike! I’m firm about that.’

‘No, I don’t mean in time – I mean in emotional investment. I mean more in the sense that, when it comes to day twenty-eight, you’ve become so emotionally involved that if things don’t work out with the girl’s mum, you get so weighed down with guilt and your usual “only I can see this through” mania that you can’t give her up, and I have to speak very, very sternly to you.’

‘That’s a long speech.’

‘Remember it. We can’t be everything, to every child, every time. Best we keep in mind that we’re just a step on the journey.’

‘Your destination is ahead,’ said the sat nav.

Chapter 2

We arrived at the hospital just as the rush hour was starting, but you’d never have known it in this semi-rural, out-of-the-way place. At first glance, you’d never know it was a hospital, either. It looked more like a manor house, with an equally grand garden: all mature trees, dappled shade and designer flower beds.

I only knew differently because I’d been here before. Our second ever foster child, Sophia (who had a multitude of problems that we felt at a loss to help with), had come here when she’d left us and I remembered driving up to the entrance as if it had been yesterday, as it had been such an emotionally charged day. It also occurred to me that we were here to collect another equally troubled soul – same gender, similar age – but making the journey in the other direction. Were we right to take this girl on, or had we acted too hastily?

Head over heart, I reminded myself as we approached the entrance, just as I’d told Ty a few minutes earlier. Our long-term foster child Tyler had just had his eighteenth birthday. The time when, legally, if he was no longer in education, he would be expected to fly the nest. The very idea seemed unimaginable to all of us. Ty, who had come to us aged eleven, after being arrested for stabbing his stepmother, was our ‘foster’ son only in name. I don’t know why, among all the kids who we’d opened our homes and hearts to, but it was obvious early on that we would never let him go. In reality he was as much ‘one of ours’ now as our own kids.

As such, and as he was the only one of them at home now, I’d called him to fill him in straight away; this was an unusual set-up for us all, after all, and it was important that he was fully on-message.

‘It’s difficult to explain the twenty-eight-day thing,’ I’d told him, ‘but it’s very much a temporary set-up. So the idea is to just work with this girl on that basis, as caretakers – so it’s not about trying to form the usual bonds with her. Like I said, it’s difficult, but I’ll try to explain more tomorrow. For now, just be polite and welcoming when we get back with her.’

He’d laughed. ‘As opposed to what, Mum?’ he wanted to know. ‘Anyway, I won’t be here. I’m just about to head over to Denver’s. But, yeah, it’s all cool.’

Cool. That was the thing. To keep cool and detached. But as soon as we stepped inside the building I knew my heart would try its level best to rule my head. Not good.

The reception of the hospital was exactly as I remembered it. Tastefully decorated, subdued lighting, smart blue cubic seating. And at its centre, seated next to a uniformed nurse, a kind of sun: a beautiful smiling child who seemed to light the whole place up. Not the cowed, nervous wreck of a girl I’d half expected. No, in her place was a girl with a head of bouncing, blonde-coloured curls, who looked straight at me, from a pair of the palest blue eyes I’d ever seen, and then stood, without prompting, to greet us. She was around my height. Possibly an inch taller. Which I’m obviously used to but in this case only enhanced the impression that there was a maturity about this thirteen-year-old girl.

‘You must be Mr and Mrs Watson,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for agreeing to have me. I’m so grateful.’

I was taken aback even more, and not just by how articulate she was. She sounded so self-assured that I almost dropped into a curtsey.

‘Lovely to meet you, Harley,’ I said, recovering myself. ‘And please, call me Casey. And this is Mike,’ I added, turning to him. ‘No need for thanks, sweetheart, I’m just pleased we’re able to help.’

The nurse had stood up as well and now produced a large holdall from beside the seat. ‘All Harley’s things are here,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget your laptop is in the side pocket and sit on it,’ she added to Harley with a grin. Then, returning to us, ‘It’s been a pleasure looking after her. There are just some notes for you to take with you at the desk, but then that’s about it, I think. You all ready to go then, Harley?’

The girl smiled sweetly and, again, full of composure, she held out her hand to shake towards the nurse. ‘I’m all set,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for all you’ve done, and please tell Doctor Dave I said goodbye.’

‘Oh, come here,’ the nurse said, pulling Harley in for a hug. ‘Doctor Dave will miss you just as much as I will, but we definitely don’t want to see you back here. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, okay?’

It seemed she wasn’t alone. By the time we’d signed our lives away and collected the paperwork, there had been further heartfelt goodbyes, as more people – staff and fellow patients by the look of it – seemed to appear specifically with the intention to wish Harley well. She’d obviously already touched a few hearts here. Though I noticed a certain stiffness about her too. As if she was not entirely comfortable at being touched.

I noted that, and also that she was silent once we climbed into the car and set off again, immediately plugging herself, via a pair of earbuds, into a mobile phone. She obviously wasn’t up for mundane chit-chat with strangers either and I couldn’t blame her. It had been a very emotional time for her, clearly.

I was also thankful for our sakes. Better she be plugged into whatever she was listening to than us all have to endure the sort of award conversation that would have been fine for a short trip, but not so great on a long journey – especially given why we all knew she was coming home with us. A very big elephant to have travelling in the car with us.

No, I thought. Better to get her home, settle her in and take things as they came. In the meantime we could relax and all draw breath for a while.

It was to turn out to be a very short while indeed.

Mike had only been driving for ten minutes or so, but, despite the coffee, I could already feel myself dozing off. (It had been a long emotional day, after all.) Which was why, when Mike yelled ‘What the hell?’, it genuinely made me jump, and I turned my head, following the direction of his horrified gaze through the rear-view mirror, to see Harley, no longer plugged into her earbuds, but jumping – literally leaping – from the moving car.

It all happened so fast that I could still see the image on my retina – a single fluid movement of the door opening and Harley lunging, then tumbling, out. I’d never even heard the seat belt click open.

‘Oh my God!’ I cried. ‘Mike!’

‘What the hell?’ he said again. He slammed the brakes on, pressed the hazards and pulled the car over to the kerb, while I watched Harley bounce down the road, like a rag doll, behind us.

He unbuckled his seat belt, as did I. ‘I can’t believe that just happened,’ he said, as we both scrambled out of the car. ‘Jesus! Thank God I was slowing down for the junction!’

‘Thank God no one was coming the other way!’ I added, as we jogged back up the road to where Harley had come to rest. ‘Should we phone for an ambulance, you think?’

‘Let’s check her out first,’ Mike said, kneeling down as he got to her. She was trying to sit up, but looked stunned and confused. Had she done it in some sort of unconscious fugue? We were as lost for words as we had ever been in our fostering careers. And more than a little shaken up ourselves.

‘Lay still for a minute, love,’ Mike said, placing an arm on her upper back to support her.

She shrugged his hand off with a sharp twist of her back. I noted that too. ‘No, it’s fine. I’m okay,’ she answered. Though she clearly wasn’t; the whole right side of her face was badly grazed; smeared with dirt and bits of grit, and already weeping blood.

‘You’re far from okay, love,’ I said. ‘It’s just a good job there were no other cars behind us.’ And even as I said that, another vehicle had to swerve and slam on their brakes to avoid us all huddled in the middle of the road. The driver slowed and wound down his window.

‘You all okay?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Do you need me to phone for an ambulance?’

‘I’m fine,’ Harley said again, scrabbling onto all fours, then to her feet. With that, and our first aid training, it seemed fairly obvious that there’d be no need to take her to A&E.

‘It’s okay,’ Mike said just as I was about to. ‘Nothing appears broken and we’ve just left a hospital. I think we’ll get her back there to get checked out, but thank you.’

‘I’m fine,’ Harley said a third time as the man drove off. ‘Why can’t anyone just let me go ahead and kill myself? God!’

Something heavy settled in the pit of my stomach. A profound sense of foreboding, I imagined, which felt like a stone. I proffered a hand in case she felt unsteady on her feet, but she batted that away too. I could see that her leggings were torn and one side of her hoodie had been streaked with black, oily marks from the road surface. Go ahead and kill myself. Great.

But I knew better than to tell someone with mental health issues not to be silly, let alone a child we had only just met, so instead I focused on the mundane.

‘Oh dear, look at your lovely hoodie,’ I said, standing back to give her space. ‘I imagine that will need a couple of washes. And your face is all scratched. Ouch, it looks pretty painful! Or, at least it will be. Let’s get you into the car again and we’ll go back to see the nurses; see what they can do.’

Harley limped back to the car and clambered in, wincing. If nothing else, she’d be stiff and bruised tomorrow. And I’d wake up wondering if what had just happened could have possibly just happened. And what if there had been a car coming the other way? What had we just done in taking on this kid? ‘Yeah, they’ll most likely keep me there,’ she said as she clicked on her seat belt. I thought so too. They clearly couldn’t tell us she was fine, could they? She’d just tried to kill herself again! ‘So at least I won’t be a burden to you after all,’ she added, smiling sweetly.

I noticed Mike flick the tiny child-lock switch as she did so, then head round to do the other side too. But I decided I should go for belt and braces. ‘A burden? You absolutely are not a burden, sweetie, but it is best we get you checked out, and I’m sure you’ll understand why I’m going to get in the back with you this time. I can’t believe you did that, honestly.’

I climbed in and she looked across at me as if I were a bit dim. ‘Why can’t you believe that?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t they tell you I want to die?’

I didn’t want to answer that, but this was definitely not a time for small talk, so once I’d found a pack of tissues and suggested that she use them – fresh beads of bright red blood were still forming and trickling down her face – I was relieved when she picked up the phone and earbuds she’d abandoned to do her death-defying leap; it at least allowed me to sit and try and process what she’d just done. Not to mention think again just how wrong they clearly were about her mental state.

Ten minutes later, however, we were in for another shock. While Harley was whisked away to have the wound on her face cleaned and dressed, Mike and I, having explained to the receptionist what had happened, were asked to sit and wait. Five minutes later, we were shown into the manager’s office, which was occupied by a woman who introduced herself as Mrs Raine.

‘I’m the manager,’ she elaborated. ‘I’ve just come off the phone to Doctor Phelps. And you’ll be pleased to hear that, after assessing the situation, we’ve decided that we won’t be bringing Harley back as an inpatient. The discharge stands, and if the nurses uncover anything from the accident that needs further treatment, we’ll be suggesting you go to your local accident and emergency department.’

I was stunned. Pleased to hear? ‘But it wasn’t an accident,’ I pointed out, a little more shrilly than I intended. ‘We’ve already explained what happened and I imagine she has too. Harley opened the door of a moving vehicle and jumped out on purpose. So I really don’t understand why she isn’t getting readmitted. She clearly isn’t well yet. In fact,’ I continued, ‘she actually said that she was determined to kill herself. She must have duped everyone here into thinking she was safe and able to leave.’

Mrs Raine smiled at us both, albeit grimly. ‘Mrs Watson,’ she said, ‘Harley has never stopped threatening to kill herself. She says it daily. But the fact is that she has been through all the tests, had all the counselling, been seen by a full team of psychiatrists and psychologists, and she doesn’t have a diagnosable mental health problem. Her problems are environmental and care-seeking.’

Care-seeking, that old chestnut. I bristled at the term. Actually that new old chestnut, because it was a phrase I’d first encountered only recently, at a new course I’d been on; the new politically correct term for what we’d always known as ‘attention-seeking’, because, they explained to us, that term was now derogatory because it indicated that a child would do anything, good or bad, just to get recognition – to get attention. Giving it a new name, of course, also gave it a new PC explanation. Which we duly had explained to us. In the new landscape of care there was a shift in the use of language and in this case it was all about positivity. No behaviour a child displayed could be seen, henceforth, as negative, because no matter what a child did, it wasn’t to get attention – it was only because they ‘needed love and care’.

I wasn’t convinced at the meeting and I wasn’t convinced now. Yes, it was obviously a good thing to approach a child with positivity, but there was potentially a dangerous side to it too. Prolific self-harmers were practically given a green light to do what they did and nobody would be officially allowed to get angry or upset about it, because it was simply ‘care-seeking’ behaviour.

I had railed to Mike about it at the time, and at some length, the bottom line being that if a child is hurting themselves, I believe ‘angry’ and ‘upset’ are two emotions that anyone can justifiably feel. So, positive, right now, I was definitely not. In fact, I was very close to asking Mrs Raine how she managed to conclude that Harley didn’t have a mental health problem when within half an hour of us taking her she’d jumped, fully intentionally, out of a moving vehicle. Surely, common sense told her – as it was definitely telling me – that the fact that she did so meant she did have a mental health problem, at least as most normal people would describe it? It didn’t matter a jot, actually, whether they prefixed it with ‘attention’ or ‘care’ – she was either seeking help because she needed it, or she was genuinely trying to die. Either way, that surely meant the right ‘environment’ for her was here, where she was contained for her own safety.

I didn’t trust myself to speak without ranting, however, so was glad when Mike stepped in instead.

‘Environmental, care-seeking or otherwise,’ he said firmly, ‘this girl just threw herself out of our car on a busy road. It’s only pure luck that she wasn’t seriously injured, or worse. Surely she must need some form of continuing professional help? And in a secure environment, for that matter, too.’

‘Ah, but was it pure luck?’ Mrs Raine asked, seeming to warm to her subject. ‘In our experience, Harley can be very manipulative and she’s very clever. It’s not the first time she’s done something extremely dramatic and luckily – there but for the grace of God, etc., etc. – she hasn’t been seriously injured. You will have noticed that she jumped out only when the car was moving slowly. If she’d been serious about wanting to kill herself or sustain very serious injuries, she would have timed it so it happened at speed, wouldn’t she? Perhaps on the motorway. Perhaps waiting till she saw a vehicle approaching from the other direction.’

We were both open-mouthed, wondering how to answer that, as she ploughed on. ‘The thing is, Mrs and Mrs Watson,’ – at this point she leaned forward – ‘our beds are in high demand for some very sick children. Children who’ve been diagnosed with severe mental health issues which we can treat, and I’m sorry, obviously, because I wish her only well, but I’m afraid Harley doesn’t fit the criteria.’

So much for all those hugs and fond farewells, I thought miserably. ‘But she’s clearly sick,’ I began, but Mrs Raine shook her head. ‘We’ve done all we can do in the six weeks she’s been here and to stay here any longer won’t be good for her. We have no diagnosis, which means it’s very hard to help her, and the truth is that she is – was – at risk of becoming institutionalised, adopting behaviours that she was picking up from other patients, none of which is going to help her in the longer term. I’m sorry, but this isn’t the place for her.’

Yet we were? Frustrated as I was, I understood the point she was making. Without a professional diagnosis, there could be no treatment plan. And though help was clearly needed, were they best placed to provide it? Any hint that they weren’t and it was really pretty obvious that their beds, which were precious, should be freed up for someone else who they felt more positive about treating. Passing on the problem, yes, but perhaps giving another child a better chance. And this child to a foster family. Us. Who must apparently take children leaping out of moving vehicles in their stride.

It seemed insane on the face of it, but resources were scarce. Short of refusing to take Harley – walking out, right then and there – we were all out of options bar accepting the problem and duly taking her home with us.

So, another ten minutes later, that was exactly what we had no choice but to do.

There was no trace now of her bright, polite greeting of an hour back (an hour and a lifetime back, it felt like) and though I opted to sit in the back again with her, Harley put her earbuds back in and said precisely nothing in response to my conversational gambits bar the odd ‘right’ or ‘okay’. Mike tried too – as keen as I was to punch a hole in the oppressive silence.

‘So, Harley? Let me guess,’ he tried, as the motorway flashed past and I gave thanks for child locks, ‘one of your parents was like me, perhaps? A Harley-Davidson fan?’

Mike loved absolutely everything about the iconic motorbike. Even if he didn’t have the actual bike – for him to ever own one would be a divorcing matter, frankly – he was still a long-term devotee. He had the T-shirts and branded coffee mug to prove it.

The response from Harley, this time, was immediate. And unimpressed. ‘Well, duh,’ came the reply, followed by a slow, sarcastic hand clap. And that was it. No follow-up, no explanation, no further wish to engage.

We gave up then and the rest of the journey was made in silence. I couldn’t even communicate to Mike via gestures, as I was on the wrong side for him to even make eye contact in the mirror. So it was that I was left to my own, troubled, thoughts.

I started to wonder about the family that this child had come from. I recalled Christine saying that the mother was widowed. So perhaps it was the dad, then, that had been the Harley-Davidson fan. Perhaps he’d even died in a tragic road accident? But there was nothing to be gained by weaving stories out of nothing. I’d find out the real story soon enough, I imagined. More important right now was to think about what we’d taken on and how we’d get through the next month. Not to mention the quiet night in we’d imagined. It already seemed like forever ago that little Annie and Oscar had gone. And here we were, plunged straight back into the deep end. Which was the nature of the job, so nothing out of the ordinary. But with a deep end that already felt substantially deeper and darker than it had a mere hour or so ago.

To pass the time as much as anything, I decided to text Tyler. Forewarned, after all, usually meant forearmed, and, in the circumstances, that seemed to make sense.

Hi, sweetie, I texted, just to give you a heads-up, this girl looks like being more complicated than we thought. Just to warn you, she jumped from the car a while ago and is a bit bruised up. The plan is the same – she stays with us for twenty-eight days – but please try to ignore how she looks when we get home. I’ll explain fully later on. xxx

My phone beeped back within seconds.

OMG! Okay, Mum. I’ll stick around at Denver’s then, okay? Makes sense, right?

Which it did, though it saddened me and once again, I wondered if we’d just made a massive mistake, especially with the new baby coming too. I glanced across at Harley’s battered, bruised and now swollen face and couldn’t escape the feeling that we had. But it was too late for that now, I told myself sternly, and at least it was finite. That twenty-eighth day would come round soon enough, however dark the journey might be to get there.

Chapter 3

I tried to brighten my mood as we finally walked through the front door. We’d taken Harley on, and now we were home, it was a case of rolling up our sleeves and getting on with it. It seemed quiet though, without Tyler there, and specially in contrast to having the two little ones running around. Quiet and gloomy now the sky was growing dark as well.

‘Right then,’ I said brightly, as Harley followed into the hallway. ‘Mike, why don’t you head up with Harley’s holdall?’ I turned to her then and smiled. ‘While I give you a quick downstairs tour so you can get your bearings first, yes? Then I’ll help you sort your things out.’

She shook her head. ‘If it’s okay, I really just want to go to sleep. If you don’t mind, that is,’ she added, already turning and following Mike up. ‘And I’ll sort my things out in the morning. I’m really tired.’

‘Oh, of course,’ I agreed. ‘You’re bound to be tired. In fact, that might even be better actually, because your room’s been in use – two little ones who only left us earlier today. So there’s a fair bit of sorting out to be done in there – toys all over the place, and the put-you-up bed still up, and clothes and bits and bobs still in all the drawers. I’ll just come up and quickly change your bed for you at least, if that’s okay.’

Harley turned around and nodded, but I could see irritation on her face. Presumably at the thought of having to spend yet more time with us – me rambling on about her room (I was already aware that I was) and fussing about sorting beds out when she really did just want to be alone. We got up to the landing and Mike dropped the bag in the doorway. ‘I’ll leave you girls to it, then,’ he said. ‘Put the kettle on. Give me a shout if you need anything moving or whatever.’

By now I could have killed for a restorative mug of coffee, so I wasted no time in grabbing a clean duvet set from the airing cupboard; one more suited than what was on there for our unexpected guest. ‘Butterflies!’ I announced, ‘much better than Peppa Pig and George and his dinosaur.’

Again, I got a nod and a flicker of a forced smile and then, unexpectedly, ‘Little ones? As in tiny children? Did their mum not want them either, then? That’s awful.’

It was the first bit of normal conversation I’d heard from Harley yet. She looked genuinely engaged, too, all of a sudden, looking down at the beds.

My turn to shake my head now. ‘Not in this case, I’m glad to say. Not in most cases, actually – it’s rare that a mum doesn’t want a child, more often than not it’s that they can’t cope, for one reason or other,’ I added, mindful of her own mother. ‘But, no, in this case, we were just looking after the little ones while their parents were in hospital. They’d been hurt in a fire, and didn’t have family close by to take care of them, so we said we’d look after them till they were well enough to come home.’

Harley nodded and said, ‘Oh, I see’, then went to look out of the bedroom window, where she remained while I stripped and re-made the bed, her question about the former residents clearly all she had to say. I didn’t press her. She was obviously tired – both physically and mentally.

‘There,’ I said eventually, ‘all done and ready. I’ll sort the trundle bed out in the morning. Get it out of your way. But for now I’ll say goodnight and let you get some sleep.’

‘Thank you, I really am so tired,’ she said and I could tell that she meant it. ‘It was horrible trying to sleep in that hospital,’ she added with a shudder. ‘What with all the screaming and howling every night.’

I tried to imagine it. Screaming and howling in ‘asylums’ was the stock in trade of movies. But what was life on a long-term mental health ward really like? Just like that, I imagined, at least some of the time, anyway. It wasn’t as if they could soundproof every wall. It might have looked serene to us, or any other passing visitor, but we’d only seen the grounds and reception area, hadn’t we? Perhaps she was better off out of that place after all. But if she’d been keen to leave, then why risk being returned to them? It made no sense.

‘Of course, sweetie,’ I said. ‘We’ll sort everything out tomorrow. And in the meantime you get your head down and get some rest. What about something to eat though? Are you hungry at all? Or shall I bring you up a drink?’

‘No, thank you,’ she said politely. ‘I’m not eating at the moment. And I’d just like to be on my own now.’

And with that, and a glance towards the door, I was dismissed. I just hoped she wasn’t going to do anything like jump out of the window. Instinct told me, however, that today’s bolt was shot; and perhaps Mrs Raine was right about Harley only ‘trying’ to kill herself, in any case. I had to hope so. Short of locking her in a padded cell, there was little else I could do. And what did she mean about ‘not eating at the moment’? Did she mean as in now? Or today? Or for the foreseeable future? Had she put herself on hunger strike? So many unanswered questions. What a situation to suddenly find ourselves in.

Which was why, coffee on board, and Mike in front of the telly, I wasted no time in calling Christine Bolton. She had already texted on our way home to tell me to call her when I could. Even if it’s late, she’d added. I’ll leave my mobile switched on.

I guess she thought it was the least she could do. Though I knew she’d be unprepared for what I told her.

‘Oh my God, Casey!’ was her first reaction, echoing Tyler’s earlier. ‘I just can’t believe it! I genuinely do not know what to say to you.’

‘Well, you couldn’t have known,’ I said. ‘Any more than we could. I mean, it’s not something you really prepare for, is it? A kid leaping from the back of a moving car. So, there’s nothing you or anyone could have done about it.’

There were a few moments of what I assumed was a guilty silence. ‘But if I’d known the girl was still like this, I would have absolutely point-blank refused to take responsibility for her. I feel I’ve been sold down the swanny, frankly. God, I’m so sorry, Casey. Looks like this Harley has fooled us all – the professionals, too.’

‘Not according to the manager,’ I told her. ‘She talked about Harley’s threats to kill herself – and attempts to – as if it were all just, I don’t know, business as usual. And according to the psychologist, there isn’t anything diagnosable wrong with her. It’s all just “environmental”, whatever that means.’

Christine huffed just as I had. ‘I presume what it means is that they’ve washed their hands of her.’

‘Quite. But the fact remains, ill or not, this girl clearly intends to harm herself and I don’t know how we manage that. It certainly doesn’t seem the ideal starting point for trying to work with her to be able to get back home to her mother, does it?’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Christine said, but then, more firmly, ‘Look, we were told that there was no longer any significant risk with Harley. That’s obviously wrong – she’s already proved that – but all you and Mike can do is your job. Do the obvious, like locking away medicines, keeping an eye on your knives, razors, etc., but if she leaves the house, you can’t forcibly stop her, as you know. Just do as you would with any other child, okay? Always give her a coming-home time and if she isn’t back by then, phone the emergency duty team and the police, and report her as missing and vulnerable. She has a mobile, I’m assuming?’

‘Oh yes. And it’s her best friend by the looks of it. So no worries there.’

‘Good. Make sure she gives you the number as soon as possible.’

‘Oh, you can be sure I shall be doing that.’ I grimaced at the thought of what we might have to deal with, but at the same time I knew it was absolutely my job. ‘And what if she leaves the house having first told us she intends to do herself harm?’ I asked.

‘Same answer,’ Christine said. ‘You must let her leave if she insists. Remember that case a few years ago when a foster carer dragged a child back from an upstairs window they intended to jump from?’

I did. The child reported it and the foster carers, ridiculously, in my book, had to fight an assault charge. ‘I do indeed,’ I said. ‘But I understand, I get it. Follow protocol with the police, EDT (the Emergency Duty Team) and my own reporting procedures to you, and then just keep my fingers and toes crossed that nothing awful happens.’

‘Exactly. As will I,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’d better leave you to it. I’m not sure of her name, but I imagine you’ll hear from Harley’s social worker sometime tomorrow. Let’s ride this out and see what we can do to help, yes? And in the meantime, please just try to see this for what it is, Casey. And remember, you and Mike can only do what you can do. Keep that uppermost in your minds at all times.’

Christine was right. I had no choice in the matter, did I? We’d do our best to keep her safe – at least make things as safe as we could for her – and once I was off the phone to Christine, Mike and I discussed how we’d do that.

‘Like we said before though, Case,’ Mike pointed out, ‘this is very short-term, and at the end of it we have Kieron and Lauren and the baby to think about, so let’s just get together with the social worker, knock up a risk assessment, or whatever it is they call them these days, and get on with it.’

I laughed at that. Mike wasn’t one for paperwork, at least not my kind of paperwork. He was a whizz at stocktaking and numbers, but the pen and paper stayed at work as far as he was concerned. I glanced up towards the bedroom above us and sighed. ‘For all the hiding of knives, sharps, and pills, the way things are going the poor thing might die of bloody starvation or dehydration if she doesn’t accept any food or drink,’ I said. ‘If she wasn’t hungry, she would surely have just said she wasn’t hungry. Not eating “at the moment” sounds more like she’s deliberately starving herself. Or she feels she doesn’t need to because she knows she’s not long for this world. Seriously, Mike,’ I added. ‘This isn’t funny!’

For he was smiling. ‘Oh, love, you’re so dramatic!’ he said. ‘It’s been what? Three hours or so since we met her? I hardly think she’ll be wasting away already. If you’re that worried, go take her something up. Leave it outside her door for her.’

I did exactly that. A glass of fruit squash and a plateful of snacks. I then knocked. ‘Harley, love,’ I whispered, ‘I know you weren’t hungry, but I’ve left you a few bits out here for you to take in, in case you get peckish or thirsty through the night.’

There was no reply so I knocked again. ‘Harley, did you hear me, love?’

‘Thank you,’ she said finally, ‘I’ll get them in a minute.’

And when I checked, an hour later, she’d duly taken them in. Which at least gave me some cause for relief. Perhaps I was being overly dramatic. Perhaps the psychologist was right. Perhaps she had absolutely no intention of killing herself. Perhaps it was all about being separated from her mother – ‘care-seeking’ as they put it – and perhaps, after the rejection of being forcibly discharged, her leap from the car was just her way of letting us know that she still needed care, that she needed our help. Like putting down a marker. Or a line in the sand. If so, I thought gamely, bring it on.

Chapter 4

‘Mum, where’s the pickle gone?’

It was late morning on Wednesday – day three of Harley’s placement – and while I was busy knocking up a cheese sandwich for her, Tyler was speed-assembling a packed lunch for himself. ‘Seriously,’ he added, shunting bottles and jars around the bottom of the fridge. ‘I need it. I have to be out the door by twelve or I’m going to be late!’

‘You need it?’ I asked, grinning at him. ‘Why don’t you just grab some ketchup instead? Time was when a glug of that would have been fine with anything. We don’t have any pickle, love. Dad finished up the last of it and I haven’t been able to do my shop yet, have I?’ Something I was hoping to be able to do later on – at least if Mike managed to get away from work on time, like he’d promised.

Tyler sighed dramatically as he pulled out some mustard. ‘Hello – there are computers? And time was, Mummy dear, when you’d have made my packed lunch for me.’ He sighed again. ‘Where, oh where, have those golden days gone?’

I laughed as I grabbed another couple of slices of bread and began buttering them for him. ‘Those days, my darling boy, have suffered the same fate as the jar of pickle. They no longer exist, they have ceased to be.’

Tyler grinned and nodded towards the pile of cheese I’d grated. ‘So I noticed,’ he said. ‘My loving mother has now been replaced by a chambermaid, slash waitress, slash carer – of an invisible child. Have you Harry Pottered her into a cupboard under the stairs or something? Seriously, I’m beginning to wonder if she even exists.’

He had a point. Over the last sixty-odd hours, I’d taken food upstairs at least half a dozen times, depositing it outside Harley’s bedroom door every time as if an offering for a vengeful god. Yet of Harley herself, I had seen very little. She had twice opened the door enough for me to see her, if little more, and such visits as she’d made to the bathroom had been mostly conducted when no one else was around. It really was as if she was treating our home like she were in some fancy hotel, a feeling that – worryingly – I was struggling to shake off, because middle-aged women moaning about kids treating their homes ‘like hotels’ was a look I really didn’t want to be accused of liking. I kept having to remind myself that she was a vulnerable, suicidal teen and not simply a ‘problem’ that had been ‘dumped’ on us.

Tyler, who had yet to clap eyes on her, obviously, clearly had no such internal wrangles.

‘Well, what else am I meant to do, Ty?’ I asked, frustrated with myself. ‘I need to make sure she eats, even if she does refuse to leave her room.’

Tyler shrugged as he wrapped his lunch in a square of foil. ‘I dunno, Mum, but you aren’t really making sure she eats, are you? You’re making sure you provide food, but how do you know she’s eating it? She could be flinging it out of the window into next door’s garden, for all you know. Anyway, I’m out of here. Don’t forget the pickle!’

I was still staring at the tray full of food after Tyler had kissed my cheek and left. He was right. I had no idea if Harley had eaten any of the stuff I’d left for her. I had simply relied on the information available to me: the empty plates being put back outside her bedroom door. In fact, I’d only seen her once outside her room since she’d come to us, scurrying across the landing to the bathroom, in satin pyjamas, at 5 a.m. this morning, with her mobile phone clutched in her hand. Not entirely out of the ordinary – teenagers never seemed to go anywhere without their phones these days, the loo included – but it was clear this situation needed nipping in the bud; it would be impossible to help her if I never actually interacted with her, and two days seemed more than enough for her to re-orient herself and engage with us. Tyler was right: I needed to get in there and start making some ground rules.

‘Harley!’ I called, as I knocked at her door, the tray balanced carefully on my free hand. ‘I’m sorry, sweetie, I know you’re still feeling a bit rubbish, but I have to come in, love, okay?’

‘Hang on!’ I heard back, followed by a scramble and then the door opening. ‘What is it?’ she asked, her face squeezing through around four inches of opening.

I smiled at the absurdity. It was as if I were a pestering cold caller, turning up on her doorstep unannounced to try and sell her something, and who she was absolutely not going to let in. Well, I wasn’t a cold caller. This was my house, I had been asked to take care of her, and she wasn’t going to stop me, ill or not.

‘I don’t want to push my way in, sweetheart, but I do need to come in,’ I told her. ‘Only for a moment or two. I need to just have a quick look at your scratches and to make sure everything is alright in here. And get your mobile phone number.’

Those cold blue eyes looked at me with new suspicion. ‘Why do you need to have my number? That’s private.’

‘I’m not suggesting I invade your privacy, love,’ I said nicely. ‘But we need to exchange mobile numbers because that’s one of the rules.’

‘Why?’

‘So if you go out we can keep in touch with one another. I’m not asking for your phone, or even to see it, just your number so I can text you if you’re out and I need to. It’s not the Spanish Inquisition. Just part of my job, I’m afraid, so can you open the door, please? Then we can get it over with.’

Harley scowled, then pulled the door open and turned away from me in one single movement, marching across to the bed and standing in front of it, arms folded across her chest. ‘Oh my God,’ she said dramatically, ‘it’s as bad as being back at the hospital, this is. Why can’t I simply be left alone?’

I placed the tray on the bedside table as my eyes scanned the room. ‘You know why,’ I said as I made a point of checking out the side of her face. ‘Did you clean your grazes and put more of the antiseptic cream on?’

‘Yes, of course I did,’ she said petulantly. ‘And why? Why can’t you leave me alone? What difference does it make? Do you seriously think you can stop me from killing myself if I wanted to?’

She was disarmingly articulate – a very different prospect from most of the children we took care of. And also poised, very beautiful and seemingly in control – all very much at odds with the question she’d just asked me, which made it difficult to know how best to respond to it.

‘No, love, I don’t suppose I could,’ I plumped for finally. ‘I don’t suppose anyone could, but I’m really hoping that you don’t decide to do that. I can’t pretend to know how you’re feeling, but what I do know is that no matter how bad things seem, they can always get better.’

She rolled her eyes at this. ‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ she answered, stepping across to the chest of drawers and calmly opening the top one. ‘And here, before you search my room, here’s the food you’ve been leaving me. I don’t want to eat, because I don’t want to live. So, since you’re here, you might as well have it back.’

She started lobbing bits of fruit, packets of crisps and empty side plates onto the bed. Of the sandwiches I’d previously made her there was no sign, but, as if reading my mind, just as I began asking, ‘Where’s all the—’ she nodded towards the window. ‘It’s important to feed the birds at this time of year,’ she said archly.

It wasn’t, actually, I thought. There were berries ripening absolutely everywhere. But blow me, Tyler had been right. ‘I did drink the juice,’ she continued, ‘and I got water from the bathroom so don’t worry, I’m not going to die on you just yet.’

She was mocking me, and the temptation to become irritable was immense, but I reminded myself that she was a deeply damaged soul and that deeply damaged youngsters often did their level best to inspire everyone around them to dislike them. I also looked at the food now laid out for my inspection and decided it could stay just where it was.

‘I’m so sorry that you’re feeling like this, I really am,’ I told her. ‘And I know you don’t know me, but I’m here for you, okay? Here to talk. Here to listen. Here in any way you need me to be here for you, okay? Oh, and one other thing, love,’ I added, as she thumped the drawer shut again. ‘Your social worker is going to be here later on today. I’m sure you’ll want to talk to her at least, won’t you?’

‘Tessa?’ she said, eyes wide with disbelief. ‘Why on earth would I want to talk to her?’

I had no answer to that. ‘I don’t know, Harley, do I? I know nothing about you. So tell me. Why don’t you want to talk to her? I’m guessing from your reaction that you have a pretty good reason.’

‘Because she doesn’t listen,’ she said. ‘She just thinks I’m “playing games”.’ She lifted her arms and put the words into two-finger quote marks. ‘Would you want to speak to someone who said that about you? And to your face? So, no, I don’t want to speak to her, thank you.’

‘Well, that’s your choice, love,’ I told her. ‘I can’t make you see her, but, you know, at some point you are going to have to come out and join the real world. Now,’ I said, pulling my own phone from my pocket, ‘can I take your number down, love?’

Harley shook her head, but this time it seemed to be in sadness rather than defiance. And I knew what she was thinking as she grumpily ran through all the digits – that I really didn’t get it. That the real world was exactly what she was trying to escape.

And who was I to argue with her reasoning, either? I really didn’t know the first thing about her, let alone the complexity of the situation that had brought her to my door. But at least I’d know more on the arrival of her social worker, who, according to the brief call she’d made to me yesterday, would be arriving, and hopefully filling me in a bit, at two, even if the girl in her charge didn’t want to see her.

Tessa Halliday, in fact, arrived at more like twenty past, and as I watched her walk down the path, glasses bouncing off her chest from a glinting silver chain, instinct told me that the stressed-out expression on her face was not so much related to the fact that she was running late as a more or less permanent state – something I saw a lot more these days than I used to. She looked hot, too, three-quarter-length trousers clinging to her shins, and had the air of someone who regularly found herself thinking that she’d probably made the wrong career choice. Perhaps she had – the enormous neon-striped raffia tote bag on her shoulder looked as if it would be more at home on a Spanish beach. Perhaps it had been until only recently. Perhaps she carried it as a talisman, a reminder of happier times.

I opened the door before she got to it and beamed brightly at her – negative vibes could be horribly contagious. ‘I’m Casey,’ I chirruped. ‘Come on in, kettle’s on.’

‘Thanks,’ she puffed, as if she’d jogged rather than driven. ‘So muggy today, isn’t it? I’m roasting! So I’ll just have a glass of water, if that’s okay.’

‘Water it is, then,’ I said. And, gesturing, I added, ‘Go on into the living room. Make yourself at home while I just go and fetch it. Though I’ve squash, if you’d prefer that? Or juice?’

‘No, really,’ she said. ‘Just water will be fine,’ and, rightly or wrongly, I got the impression that just being here was a pain for her, let alone being plied with exotic drink choices.

It was an impression that didn’t change when I returned to the living room to find her manhandling a buff folder out of the incongruous beach bag with a scowl on her face – it kept snagging on various frayed bits and refusing to come out.

‘So,’ she said, as she finally liberated what I presumed was Harley’s file, ‘I gather Madam isn’t gracing us with her presence?’

That ‘Madam’, I thought. It didn’t sit well with me – sounded loaded. But I reminded myself that I was in no position to judge just what kind of load Tessa Halliday carried. I shook my head, reserved judgement. ‘Not right now.’

She hooked up her glasses, took out some paperwork and placed it in front of her. ‘Not that I thought she would, to be honest,’ she said. ‘She hates me, the world and all who reside in it, at the moment.’

‘Sounds as if you know Harley quite well then,’ I proffered.

Tessa nodded. ‘Been about eighteen months since I got involved with the family,’ she explained. ‘Maybe a little longer. Harley had suffered at the hands of some quite nasty bullies. Both at school and online, this was. We got called in by the school one day after she’d refused to get changed for a sports lesson and it had come out that she’d been cutting herself. Seriously enough for them to report it to us – no doubt you’ll see for yourself soon enough – and all over, everywhere. Arms, legs and torso. I’d bet there’s not two inches of skin – of the skin she can get to – that hasn’t been mutilated in some way.’

Something about the matter-of-fact way she described this disturbed me. It was as if she were relating a news report to me, not speaking about the fragile young girl who was lying in her room only six feet above our heads. I had seen the results of self-harm many times before but it was always shocking enough to ensure that I’d never become desensitised to it; no less sad seeing perfect young skin being so scarred. Sadly, it sounded as though Tessa had. I wondered what else she’d seen during her own years at the coalface.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘well, as I said when we spoke, she changed into pyjamas when she got here – long sleeves and legs – so as yet I’ve seen nothing. In fact, I’ve seen very little of her at all. I know very little about her and what makes her tick, which is why I’m very keen to hear about her background. So, initially you were just working with the family then? What did that look like? Anything you can tell me will be really helpful.’

‘Well, as I said, the cutting was very serious – potentially life-threatening in some cases, so much so that her mother apparently had to call an ambulance quite a few times to get Harley rushed into hospital for urgent treatment. My remit was to try to work with them to get to the root cause and to help Harley find less invasive ways of dealing with her problems. However, things escalated when Millie left home. She—’

‘I’m sorry, who?’ I interrupted. ‘Millie, you say?’

‘Millie as in Harley’s older sister. There are just the two of them. Six-year age gap but they were apparently very close. Since the death of their father – Harley would have been around three when that happened—’

‘How did he die?’

‘In a motorcycle accident. He was a biker apparently. All very sad and so on,’ she added, not looking sad at all. ‘And it seems Millie was very much the glue that held this fractured family together, because the mother was, and still is, I suspect, addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol – it seems she never really recovered from the shock of her husband’s death – so it was Millie who dressed Harley each morning and took her to school, made sure she had something to take for her lunch and had a cooked meal when she got home. But, as would be expected, Millie fell in love and eventually moved out. You can’t blame the girl,’ she added, even though I wasn’t about to. ‘It was far too much responsibility for her at such a young age.’

I let out a big breath and leaned back in my seat. There was definitely a lot more going on here than just a child being bullied at school, bad enough though that was. ‘So the serious cutting – the hospital treatment – this happened after Millie left?’

‘Actually, no,’ Tessa replied, ‘she’d already been doing that, and it really upset her sister, obviously, but after she left, Harley upped her game. That’s when she was first rescued from a bridge over a motorway. Personally, I thought it was a ploy to get Millie to come home – the witness didn’t think she was actually going to jump – but—’ she spread her hands – ‘I just don’t know anymore. She seems dead set on harming herself – she’s proven that over and over – but whether or not she actually intends to kill herself, I’m not so sure.’

‘It seems the nurses and psychiatrists agree with you on that score,’ I said, ‘I think everybody assumes that Harley is attention-seeking, and yes, I know that’s not PC to say these days, but that’s the top and bottom of it. That’s what it amounts to.’

Tessa’s expression told me she thought I’d hit the nail on the head. ‘Well, we can’t argue with the professionals, can we?’ she said. ‘They must see thousands of kids presenting like Harley, so they’ll know what they’re looking at. Well, in theory. What can I say?’

Nothing I wanted to hear, that was for sure. In fact, the more I heard, the more despondent I felt. It was no wonder the mother felt at her wits’ end. And as Tessa outlined the family situation in more detail it became clear that the perfect storm that had brought Harley to us had been brewing for some time. Her poor mother had suffered a terrible loss when her husband had died in that road accident and had consequently gone down a suffocating spiral of drink and drugs. Her eldest daughter, whom she relied on for everything, had now gone, and, crucially, it seemed, taking her boyfriend with her.

Because it seemed it wasn’t just Millie who’d held the family together – her boyfriend Zar had apparently also been something of a rock for the family. In the last few months before he and Millie had left to set up home together, he’d even moved in with them, providing much-needed help with their always-behind rent, as well as contributing more than his fair share for all the bills and doing odd jobs around the house. ‘I met him a couple of times,’ Tessa told me. ‘Lovely, lovely lad. He genuinely wanted to help support them, but, again, it was too big a job, not least because Mum didn’t ever really acknowledge that she needed any help.’ She tutted. ‘Well, till she realised she did.’

‘And I guess by then it was too late,’ I said. I had a thought then. I knew Millie was still a teenager, so was her boyfriend as well? It seemed odd that he’d be in a position to help with the rent. ‘Is Zar older than Millie?’ I asked Tessa.

Tessa nodded. ‘Mid-twenties. And mature, by all accounts. He certainly seemed that way to me. In fact, when they were first visited by social services, the on-duty social worker thought he was with the mother. Easy enough mistake to make, given how young Mum is – she’s still only in her thirties now – and easy enough to see why Millie would be attracted to someone a bit older too – losing her dad that young meant she was probably looking for a father figure. But not a father – and it seemed pretty obvious to me that it was too much to expect the lad to take on a role like that.’

And perhaps understandably – because who could blame them, really? – the young couple had made the painful decision that enough was eventually enough and left to make a new life for themselves away from the burdens of the family.

‘Does Millie stay in touch?’ I asked, because it seemed so obvious to me that she would. She had clearly been the biggest influence on Harley’s young life and for that to be ruptured so completely must have taken a huge toll. ‘Maybe she’s the one who is best placed to help Harley out of this. I know it’s a lot of responsibility to place on such young shoulders, and making the decision to leave must have been a hard one, but—’

‘That’s just it,’ Tessa said. ‘Whether because of apathy or, more likely, self-preservation, Millie has now pretty much cut off all contact. They spoke often in the beginning, but it became less and less and I believe now that contact has pretty much stopped completely. I spoke to her myself just after she left and she was nothing if not forthright. Said she was sorry, but she just wasn’t up to it anymore – that she needed some time out to have her own life, unencumbered by her mum and sister’s problems.’

‘Sounds a bit harsh,’ I said, trying to imagine a scenario where someone would completely turn their back on their sibling. But even as I thought it, I knew the reality was that it did, sadly, happen. And in the world that I had made myself part of, the fostering world, it happened with depressing regularity.

But who was I to judge? I’d put money on the fact that if I asked her myself she’d tell me that the only way to get her mum to address her issues was, in her view, to make her face up to them – a dose of very necessary tough love. Plus, she’d clearly decided she’d done all she could, as had her boyfriend, and was bailing before she was sucked under herself.

Tessa nodded. ‘I know. It does sound harsh,’ she agreed, ‘but all we can do now is work with what we’ve got, and respect the fact that Harley’s sister and her partner have every right to make a life for themselves, and who knows – perhaps Millie is right, it will make Mum face up to and actually deal with her addictions. And though it’s perhaps not ideal that Harley’s no longer in a secure environment, given what’s happened, I’m hoping the ticking clock will at least concentrate Mum’s mind to really engage with the intensive work we are going to do with her, the plan being to hopefully get her to a point where she feels able to trust herself to look after Harley with minimal ongoing intervention.’

‘But what if Harley is clinically depressed?’ I asked. ‘Can’t they start her on some medication?’

‘Tried that, a number of times, but she refuses to take it. The thing is, the general consensus, silly as it sounds, is that Harley actually thrives on the attention of the professionals. A kind of Munchausen’s thing, if you like. She knows refusing meds will mean more time spent with doctors and refusing to speak to psychologists means more time spent with child and adolescent mental health services. Seems a ridiculous merry-go-round to anyone not on it, but for Harley, well, the proof seems to be in the pudding, doesn’t it? Her “suicide” attempts are all just that. Attempts.’

I saw Tessa off soon after, feeling little had changed. She’d go away and continue her work with the mother, and, in the meantime, I would continue my ‘caretaking’ role – continuing to care for Harley’s physical needs till the twenty-eight days (twenty-five days now, in fact) were up and she would ‘hopefully’ be returned home.

But for one thing, which could hardly escape anyone’s notice – not all suicide attempts end in failure.

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