A Boy Without Hope

by Casey Watson

  Oh, great. ‘Libby,’ I interrupted. ‘How old was he when he did this?’

  ‘He was nine,’ she said. ‘But the thing is, the report just states exactly that, that the poor boy killed a family pet, and how he did it, but after double checking this morning, I found that the full story wasn’t there. I tracked Mrs Taylor down and she admitted that Miller had already been bitten twice by the rabbit. And on that particular day, he’d unlatched the cage and it had leapt out, scaring him half to death. He’d snatched the rake up in fear – she’s sure on this point – and started to swing it. And unfortunately, he hit the rabbit, and one of the spikey things went into it. And the injury was so severe that they had to put it down.’

  Well, that makes it all so much better then, I thought. Not. But I also knew how instinctive it could be for damaged kids to lash out first and think later. It was often all they knew. It was exactly how it had been with Tyler, for that matter – pushed to the brink and grabbing the first thing to hand. So it was important not to judge without first establishing context. And a good sign that she’d taken the trouble to find out a little more about it. She was obviously conscientious and that could only be a good thing. ‘Right, I’ll bear that in mind when I read your email,’ I said. ‘And the other thing?’

  ‘Just about his past, and how he came into care. There’s a lot to read on that, and I really recommend that you do. It’s a shocking read – worse than I expected, to be honest – but it’s also really illuminating.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll look forward to getting my teeth into that.’ Which then struck me as not quite the best way to put it, given what she’d just told me about the rake. ‘What about school?’ I hurried on. ‘Any news there? I just think the sooner we get him back into education the better. The rate we’re going, I wouldn’t be surprised to go upstairs and find him gone – sucked into one of his flipping computer games.’

  She laughed. ‘I hear what you’re saying. But, tentatively, that’s a yes. ELAC have apparently found a provision, and you should be getting a call later to let you know what’s been arranged. So that’s good news, isn’t it?’ she finished brightly. She sounded pleased with herself. And she’d a right to. Though I was still feeling a bit unsupported with my ‘little monkey’, at least we had some progress at last.

  I thanked her, and clocking the time – it was fast becoming a habit – headed to the foot of the stairs to do battle. And in the real world as opposed to the virtual. But no sooner had I opened my mouth to give him his three-minute warning, than I heard, ‘Shit, shit, shit, SHIT!’ from upstairs.

  ‘Miller!’ I called up. ‘Please don’t use that language in this house. And you have three minutes left to play your game, so finish up, okay?’

  I waited for a reply but all I could hear was the din from the PlayStation. I tried again, ‘Miller! Answer me, please!’

  ‘God!’ came the reply. ‘What is it now? I’m busy!’

  I took a deep breath. Start as you mean to go on, Casey. I pushed my sleeves up, and thundered up the steps to his room and, since the door was wide open, I went in.

  He was cross-legged on the floor, in front of the TV screen, with his back to me. ‘Miller, I told you. We have to go out. We are going out. Now put down the controller and get yourself dressed. Otherwise, I’ll have to switch off the internet.’

  There was a heartbeat of silence and stillness. Clearly, though he affected not to, he was listening to me. And, as a consequence, to my surprise, he didn’t bother giving me more lip. Simply threw down the controller, scrabbled to his feet and launched himself at his unmade bed, where he burrowed under the duvet and rolled himself up, Swiss-roll style. Completely, from head to foot. He then started to howl – not like a child would, but like a wolf. ‘Ahhhoooooo! Ahhhoooooooooo!’

  It was, as Tyler might put it, interesting. Quite unlike anything I’d heard before. I’d heard all kinds of noises coming out of kids’ mouths over the years, but this one definitely had an unusual repertoire. And, since he showed no sign of stopping – perhaps he was waiting for a reaction? – I crossed the room and placed a hand on the squirming mound. ‘Stop being silly, love,’ I told him. ‘Just come out from under there and get dressed, please. It’s such a lovely day out there, and you need some fresh air.’

  He twisted away from me, with another howl. This time one of pure anguish. ‘Nope!’ he shouted. ‘Nope, nope, nope, NOPE!’

  He sounded more like a toddler having a tantrum than a twelve-year-old, but while a part of me still felt an almost overwhelming urge to grab one side of the duvet and simply unroll him, I reminded myself that this wasn’t a normal twelve-year-old. This was a kid with a whole lorry load of deep-seated problems, most of which I hadn’t the first clue about beyond the various prophesies of doom that came with them. And who now appeared to be having a major meltdown. Cursing myself for agreeing to take him without first demanding the tools to enable me to understand him, let alone help him, I took another deep breath and quietly walked out of the room – time out for both of us, while I read Libby’s email.

  I was halfway down the stairs when I heard the sound of laughter. Then his voice, light and calm, came floating down the stairs.

  ‘Miller, one,’ he called out. ‘Hah! Casey, nil.’

  Ah, I thought. So that was how it was going to be.

  Chapter 7

  Difficult to like. Those had been John’s words, and as I headed back downstairs again they nagged at me. I’d fostered many a child who had fitted that description – it sometimes felt as if it went with the territory. Kids who’d been in care for a long time often fell into that category, simply because they so often displayed long-entrenched behaviours that would challenge the patience of a saint. This was almost always because they had profound psychological problems, and sometimes, in addition, because they’d created a mental ‘loop’ – bad behaviour got them attention, so it was self-reinforcing, and, in addition, because that attention was negative in nature, it then confirmed their highly negative sense of self. This led to more self-loathing, and, even if it was subconscious, it almost invariably led more bad behaviour.

  Breaking the cycle, therefore, was, in part, about re-programming a child’s ability to control themselves – getting them to realise, through the use of a strict regime of consequences and rewards, that they had choices in how they handled a situation, earning points for good behaviours (obviously geared to their age and relative maturity) and losing privileges when they fell short of what had previously been agreed.

  It was the cornerstone of the programme Mike and I had been trained to deliver, and once negotiated and agreed upon, usually as soon as practical at the start of a new placement, it was simply a question of sticking to it, and rigidly. I’ve said it a million times but it wasn’t exactly rocket science. Basically, you did your homework, so you had an idea of what a child liked to do. Then, based on that, you’d decide what rewards were suitable reinforcements to offer in exchange for good behaviour and completed tasks.

  A child might want a cinema visit, for example, or a weekly trip to the leisure centre. Or they may enjoy having a particular takeaway meal, or like a certain weekly comic or magazine. In order to get these things they would have to earn points for doing chores, or getting off to school on time, or keeping their rooms clean.

  But this all assumed I had an idea of what ‘inducements’ might work for Miller, and since all I knew for sure was that he liked to park himself in front of a computer game 24/7, it would require a huge upheaval to adopt a new regime where his access to that reward became something he’d need to earn rather than assume was his right. In short, I badly needed to know what I was dealing with, and, ideally, before the pattern set in. Three days was one thing – a period of acclimatisation was obviously necessary – but more than that and we would be making rods for our own backs.

  So when I opened my laptop and saw Libby’s email had arrived, I decided to leave Miller to bask in his ‘one–nil victory’ for t
he moment, and try to find out what else made him tick.

  The body of the email told me little. It was really just a bullet-pointed summary of the dozen or so attachments that ran like a blue ribbon along the top of it. But at least there was plenty for me to read. So I plunged straight on in, clicking on and opening the most obvious. The one marked ‘Initial Care Plan Reports’.

  As the name suggests, this was the first report, logged when he’d entered the system, which, as John had said, had been almost seven years ago. So Miller would have been four or five. Only just school age. Still a baby. And if I knew anything about warming to a ‘difficult to like’ child, it was that it helped to be mindful of the journey they’d been on, and to remember the child they might have become, had their circumstances, and their life chances, been different.

  The report had been written up by the first social worker on the scene – presumably whoever was on call with the emergency duty team. It was a simple Word document, dated, but with no other details in terms of time and location; clearly just the notes they’d written up after attending the scene.

  The day that changed one little boy’s life forever. I scrolled down and got stuck in. The report began:

  Having received numerous phone calls from passing motorists, two police officers drove to where it had been reported that a young boy was playing dangerously close to a railway line. It had also been reported that he was dressed in nothing more than a nappy, and people were obviously very fearful about his welfare.

  When the officers arrived, it was to find the child – who’d presumably slipped underneath a fence – was about fifteen metres below them, down an embankment. Initially, though he saw them, he didn’t respond to their calls, so, given the danger the child was in, the female officer climbed part of the way down to the embankment, and eventually persuaded the child to climb up and join her. He still didn’t speak, answering questions with unintelligible sound and gestures, and appeared to be agitated and afraid.

  As the child was reluctant to take the officer’s hand, the other PC went down to help, but when the male officer attempted to grab him to pull him up to safety, he began hitting himself repeatedly on the side of the head, and kicking out when they tried to restrain him.

  He then ran away along the embankment, managing to evade both officers, to a hole in the fence some way down the line, which led to the rear garden of what appeared to be the only property in what was a mostly rural area: a dilapidated and abandoned-looking detached house. Both officers followed, catching up as the child began banging on a rear door, and were surprised to hear adult voices shouting from within.

  Coming up alongside the boy, who was still banging repeatedly on the door, the male officer knocked as well, and the door was then opened by a man who appeared to be in his mid- or late fifties. The man grabbed the child roughly and ordered him inside then demanded to know what the officers wanted.

  The police officers explained that they needed to go inside and, despite the male initially trying to shut the door, and then barring the entrance, eventually succeeded in persuading the male that they needed to go into the house.

  They described the scene as being ‘filthy and chaotic’. It appears the family (a 25-year-old female, a 58-year-old male, and the young boy, called Miller, who was four) were all living in something resembling a large conservatory, at the rear of the property. The house itself was derelict and abandoned. There were faeces covering the floor, dirty clothes lying everywhere, and takeaway cartons littered on every horizontal surface. There were also overflowing ashtrays and alcohol bottles everywhere.

  The female officer noticed the child had now disappeared and asked the female where he had gone. She replied with ‘to bed’ so the officer asked her where, and was led into another area – a former utility room, which also housed a toilet and wash basin. There were no utilities – just a single mattress along the back wall, with various coats, curtains and other clothing items strewn across it. The boy was apparently huddled beneath all of this.

  The woman, who seemed inebriated and/or under the influence of drugs, seemed to already understand that the officers would want to remove the child. ‘If you come to take him,’ she said, ‘you’ll need a few nappies. The filthy little savage still shits himself.’

  She apparently laughed as she said this and then picked up a half-pack of nappies and tried to hand them to the officer. Having established that the adults were the boy’s parents, the male officer explained that he was phoning a social worker, as the living conditions were clearly unsuitable for a young child.

  ‘Fuck the social workers, just take him now,’ the father told him. ‘We’re sick of looking after him. Look at him, he’s a simpleton. Four years old and he can’t even talk.’

  The boy had by now emerged from under the pile of coats, looking distressed and afraid. The mother laughed at him. ‘Don’t you think he looks like an alien?’ she asked, pointing at the child. ‘You’ll have to get the social to buy him some clothes because we can’t find his stuff since we moved.’

  The boy began to cry then, leading the officers to suspect that, though he’d yet to say anything intelligible himself, he understood exactly what was being discussed.

  ***

  I turned my head upwards, as though I might be able to see Miller through the ceiling, and wondered how much of the memory of that day – and those cruel, cruel words – still burned brightly in his head. He’d been four. He was twelve now. I was almost certain he remembered every last awful thing said. Either that, or he had worked hard to try and erase them from his memory; buried them, in other words. Which was not always emotionally healthy.

  I returned to my reading. The social worker herself was on the scene twenty minutes later, by which time the female officer had found something for Miller to wear. He’d cried and whimpered continually, but his parents, who she’d also noted seemed under the influence of some sort of drug, apparently took no notice. They just sat passively smoking on the rattan sofa in the conservatory, leaving the female officer to dress him. The report continued:

  I arrived at the house, and took in the squalid conditions, as the officers explained where and how they’d found the boy, and such information as they’d been able to establish up to that point. I then explained to the parents that we’d be taking the child into temporary foster care, until a decision was taken by the courts regarding a full-time care order. Neither objected. As had already been conveyed to me by the police officers, they made it clear they didn’t want to keep him anyway.

  Sobbing convulsively now, Miller allowed me to carry him out to my car, but only after he had rummaged through some rubbish on the floor to pick up a small toy train. It had no wheels, and almost all the paintwork had been chipped away, but it was clearly important to the boy. There seemed to be no suitable footwear for him, bar a pair of adult socks, so carrying him was more necessity than anything. Again, he allowed me to do this, clinging on to my jacket, and once I placed him in the back of my car, alongside the female officer, he continued to sob as we followed the squad car to the station.

  Further reports will follow once an emergency placement has been identified.

  ***

  I leaned back in the dining chair and put my reading glasses on my head. I was well used to reading such reports because, in one form or other, they came with every child we cared for. But they never failed to move me, despite the clinical, emotionless way in which they were written. Which, of course, they had to be. They were designed for one purpose only – to record the facts. But the very lack of emotion, or comment, or judgement (and it was important that there weren’t any), was precisely what made them so difficult to read, as it brought it home that such tragedies, abhorrent as they were, filled files and folders the length of the land; Miller had at this point become a ‘case’. A numbered statistic. And you didn’t need to be given to extremes of emotion to know just how much damage had already been done to him. Damage that would almost certainly prove hard to hea
l. It didn’t matter how much money was thrown at the problem (and there was precious little of that around anyway), or how much time and loving care was devoted to trying to help kids like Miller, some of the scars sustained by children such as him would never fully heal.

  So it was something of a relief, just as I was about to open to the next report, to hear the front door open and a familiar voice.

  ‘Only me and Dee Dee!’ It was Kieron’s.

  My son and my gorgeous youngest grandchild couldn’t have been a more welcome diversion at that moment, so I hurried out into the hall and scooped up my little granddaughter. ‘So what’s all this about?’ I asked her. ‘Why aren’t you at school? And, more to the point,’ I asked Kieron, ‘why aren’t you at work, love?

  ‘Had to step up to the plate,’ he said, shrugging off his jacket. ‘Glands are up,’ he said, nodding towards Dee Dee, who was busy trying to show me the inside of her mouth. ‘And she’s been complaining of a sore throat so we thought best to keep her off.’

  Though no such concerns about her showering her poor nanna with germs, obviously. But that, of course, was a given.

  I smiled. ‘And I’m sure you were quick to sacrifice yourself so that Lauren didn’t have to, my brave little soldier.’

  He grinned at me as he followed us into the kitchen. ‘Okay, I admit it, I did fancy a play day. So shoot me.’ He glanced at my computer screen. ‘You’re not too busy for us, are you?’

  I lowered the lid. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘Just catching up with some reading.’ I tilted my head upwards. ‘Trying to gather a little intelligence to work out a strategy.’