A Boy Without Hope

by Casey Watson

  ‘How are things?’ Kieron asked, while I got some crayons and paper out for Dee Dee. ‘Any better?’

  As always, I’d briefed the children on the latest house­guest – well, as far as possible – because fostering, in reality, is a whole-family enterprise, and their support and involvement was key.

  ‘Not yet,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve not even managed to get him out of the house yet, to be honest. And I’m still feeling my way as to how best to approach things. But I’ve had some stuff through now at least, so I’m hoping that will change. Though he’s a complicated kid, no doubt about it.’

  ‘It certainly sounds like he has some issues,’ Kieron mused. ‘But don’t they all? Sounds to me like you should go all Casey on his butt.’

  ‘Oh behave,’ I said. ‘You sound just like Tyler! Like I’m some scary monster mum or something.’

  ‘Well, fight fire with fire, I say.’ I’d told him about the dinosaur impression. ‘Have you forgotten how to do “your look”? Trust me, that will definitely do the trick.’

  The door opened at that very moment and the kid in question appeared. I hoped he hadn’t been listening outside.

  Though he didn’t seem to have been. He looked agitated. As if he’d literally just run downstairs. ‘Drink,’ he announced, ‘I need a drink. And something to eat as well. I’ve got to get these guys banned from the game and take all their coins from their accounts.’

  I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. ‘Calm down, Miller,’ I said. ‘And come in properly and say hello, please. This is my son, Kieron,’ I told him. ‘And this is Dee Dee, my granddaughter. Dee Dee? This is Miller. Say h—’

  ‘I don’t have time,’ Miller said, not even looking at her, let alone acknowledging her. ‘Hurry up! I need to get back upstairs!’

  Kieron, who’d just sat down, now stood up again. ‘Alright, mate?’ he said amiably. ‘So what game is it you’re playing? And say hi to Dee Dee, will you, mate? She’s only little.’

  Seemingly stunned to have been spoken to, Miller looked Kieron up and down. Though mostly up. Kieron’s tall, like his dad. He then mumbled a ‘hi’, then something else, which I didn’t understand, but which I took to be the name of the war game.

  Kieron raised his brows. ‘Really? Aren’t you a little young to be playing that one?’

  I’d been pouring a glass of squash and Miller now reached out to take it from me. ‘It’s my own. I brought it with me,’ he said. ‘And my social worker says it’s okay, so it’s okay.’

  I held on to the glass, waiting for a ‘please’, which wasn’t forthcoming. Instead, just, ‘And a snack. I told you, I need a snack.’

  I was just about to remind him that he’d not long eaten lunch, when Kieron said, ‘Mate, please don’t be rude to my mum. Just ask nicely and say please. That’s the way to ask if you want something.’

  There was a moment of silence, Miller’s gaze darting between us, as if assessing the necessity of bending to our combined will.

  Dee Dee broke it. ‘We say thank you, we say please,’ she sang. ‘We say ’scuse me when we sneeze. I learneded that in school,’ she added proudly.

  ‘Quite,’ Kieron said. And would have said more, no doubt. But Miller, with an almighty ‘God!’, had already turned tail and, drink-less and snack-less, left the kitchen.

  ‘Ah,’ my son said, ‘I see what you mean.’

  ***

  After Kieron and Dee Dee left, some forty-five minutes later, I sat once again at my laptop and pondered; did this constitute one–all, or was it two–nil to Miller? Probably the latter.

  I then chastised myself for even thinking in such reductive terms. This was a child with a horrendous background, and though I didn’t doubt everyone had subsequently done their best for him, his years in the system had only added to his misery, compounding his considerable emotional problems, and hardening the angry shell he had built around himself. The question was, was it too late for me to take him on long term and try to fix him? The tentative answer was that I hadn’t yet found a child that I hadn’t at least tried to, and, for all that he tried so hard to make himself unlovable, I wasn’t about to give up on him without a fight – even if it meant fighting myself in this case, because the temptation to pass him on was still strong. That ‘month-by-month basis’ John had alluded to at the outset was never far away from my thoughts. It was almost as if I’d been given a free pass should I give up on him. No blame. No shame. Except I would feel shame, wouldn’t I? I would blame myself.

  Even as I was having these thoughts, I was also chastising myself for using the term ‘fix’. Social services don’t like us to use the word to fit any more, because it’s no longer politically correct. In my world, however – the coal face of care – I don’t always have time to search for the right socially acceptable expression. I had been told off for putting the word ‘liar’ in a report once, the correct term now being ‘a tendency to create an alternative story’. You can no longer refer to a child having ‘stolen’ something, either – you have to say ‘they take things without asking’.

  I know it’s progress, and it definitely sounds less accusatory, but, at the same time, it still feels a bit alien to me, because I grew up in a world where a spade was called a spade.

  But that’s the way things work now, and one thing I can no longer do is try to ‘fix’ kids. I can only try to help them ‘reach their potential’. But given what I already knew, and what I was going to learn over the coming weeks, what kind of potential did Miller even have?

  The phrase ‘not a lot’, though politically incorrect, was, sadly, the first that sprung to mind.

  Chapter 8

  So. Casey nil. Miller – what must it be now? Around twelve? Because over the next dozen or so days, I had failed to make progress – either on getting him to sleep through the night, on any night, or in getting him out of the house.

  Most frustratingly however, the rot was setting in, because, despite throwing everything at the problem, and pretty forcefully, I’d made little inroad in addressing the number-one issue: Miller’s obsession with staying in his room, playing computer games all the time. It would have been easy to regret having got him the PlayStation in the first place, but, in truth, without it, I don’t know how things would have panned out. Without it – and we rationed it regularly and frequently – he would simply get into bed and roll himself up in his duvet, and no form of inducement or threat of sanctions would winkle him out. We tried offering incentives, such as the purchase of a new game a few days hence, to reward good behaviour, but he seemed incapable of understanding the ‘jam tomorrow’ concept. Miller was only interested in the here and now. And if we tried sanctions – no getting the controller back until he spent an hour downstairs with us, say, watching TV together, getting to know each other – he would simply assert that he didn’t care if he never got it back; he was not ‘hanging out’ with us, and that was that.

  In fact, the only time he seemed able to amuse himself differently was in the small hours of the night, when he’d while away his time playing with the assortment of distractions in his suitcase.

  It was obvious that Miller had an addiction to playing computer games – and in that, he was far from alone. But I also had to factor in the control aspect of his make-up; with no one to control, because the household was asleep (well, in my case, more often than not, tactically feigning sleep), there was no incentive to exert his considerable will, because it would achieve nothing, manipulate no one.

  It was also impossible, without him having a daily spell in formal education, to get him started on our strict behaviour modification programme, as so much of its effectiveness relied on the daily routines around education: getting up at a set time, getting washed, dressed and fed, then, in the evenings, doing any homework he’d been given without making a fuss, and going to bed at a time that had been agreed.

  Without these simple daily rhythms – part and parcel of any childhood – we were in limbo, and had been for way too
long a time now. It was only half-jokingly that I’d quipped to Mike one night that I half-wished he would bloody abscond.

  Not that I’d been stuck in every day, all day. The day after Kieron’s visit, he’d been on a late shift, and had, to my immense gratitude, come over for the morning so I could have a couple of hours to myself. I’d like to have been able to report to Libby that this had proved a help to Miller, but, on my return it had been to hear that the nearest Kieron and Miller had got to ‘bonding’ was Miller’s grudging acceptance of Kieron sitting in his bedroom, and being ‘permitted’ to sit and watch him play his game.

  ‘Mum, he’s weird,’ had been Kieron’s considered view after spending a little time with him, echoing Tyler’s thoughts. ‘His face when he’s killing things is plain creepy.’

  And it was an impression that hadn’t changed for Tyler either. He seemed happiest skirting around Miller wherever possible, and as he was knee-deep in revision for his coming exams, I wasn’t about to try and coax him to do more. Not least because I could feel the tension crackle between them whenever they were in the room together; I had this strong sense that Ty, though he’d never actually said so, would much rather his home hadn’t been invaded by Miller – our Ty, who, because of his own difficult background, had a huge amount of sympathy for difficult kids as his default. And I really didn’t want him to have to deal with any stress; not with his exams coming up.

  Ditto Mike, despite him similarly being happy to do his bit. We were supposed to be a team, after all. But of all the kids I’d ever fostered – and this struck me as weird myself – Miller felt very much my responsibility. My personal cross to bear.

  And my self-inflicted personal bête noire as well? It was becoming to seem so. ‘Love, just make him go out with you,’ Mike had said, more than once. But no tool in my toolbox seemed up to the job. Short of lassoing him and dragging him bodily to the car, kicking and screaming, I had no means of doing so, did I? Not with a child who knew exactly the way things worked; that physically dragging him anywhere could so easily be ‘spun’ into an official allegation of assault.

  And that was the confounding crux of it all. Most kids, in my experience, at least have some fear of consequences. The bar might be set high with damaged, vulnerable children, but there would usually be some point, even if way beyond normal boundaries, when they’d pull back, frightened about what might happen to them if they tried to go further. Miller, however, displayed no fear at all. Indeed, it often felt as though he pushed us because he welcomed the consequences, because they fitted with his world view. Certainly, when he got them – almost exclusively to lose the right to play computer games – he would smile, almost knowingly, as if his hunch had been right: that adults couldn’t be trusted; that all they wanted was to make his life difficult.

  Still, today was Saturday, which at least meant I had a little company.

  Though right now, not of the pleasant kind, it seemed.

  I was just easing into another day, sitting sipping my second coffee in the kitchen, when I heard a furious yelling coming from the top of the stairs. Not Miller, but Tyler, who was decidedly unhappy.

  ‘Mum! What the hell is going on with this internet?’

  I pushed my chair back and pulled my dressing-gown cord a little tighter, then went out into the hall to see what was going on. Though things ‘going on’ when it came to anything internet-related were about as far from my area of expertise as it was possible to be. I was still at the same ‘bash the telly to see if the picture improves’ stage I’d been at since about 1973.

  He was standing at the top of the stairs, fuming. ‘What’s up, love?’ I asked. ‘Has it gone off again?’

  Tyler’s face was a picture of barely contained anger. ‘Yes it has. And if I’ve lost my assignment I’m going to go so mad,’ he said. ‘It’s the third time this morning and it’s driving me nuts. I was halfway through some coursework, which I haven’t even saved yet, and all the bits of research I had opened have gone!’

  ‘Well you can still save the work you’ve done, love,’ I said, trying to be helpful. ‘And Dad’ll be home from work before too long, won’t he? I’m sure he’ll know what to do. But if he doesn’t, we’ll get on to the internet company and find out what’s happening, okay?’

  Tyler sighed theatrically, and slapped his hands against his sides. Then glared pointedly towards Miller’s closed bedroom door, before stomping off into his own room. I saw his point. It had gone off suddenly a couple of times one night in the week, and we’d already visited the idea that it might been something to do with Miller. But Mike had interrogated, investigated, and run all kinds of checks, and declared it to have been ‘just one of those things’, reassuring me that while Miller could control lots of things, our entire domestic internet wasn’t one of them. Not without us realising, anyway.

  Even so, it now occurred to me that if the internet was off again, then Miller couldn’t be playing on the PlayStation, could he? So why wasn’t he kicking off as well? He had ants in his pants if he had to wait five minutes to eat a sandwich, if it meant losing some precious game time.

  So what was he up to instead? I headed upstairs to find out.

  I was surprised to see him sitting quietly on his bed, writing something on a large unlined notepad. It wasn’t one I recognised. Perhaps something from his case? I wondered if the little train I’d read about was somewhere in there too. Though now obviously wasn’t the time to ask him.

  The TV screen was also blank. ‘First time I’ve see that thing off,’ I remarked mildly. ‘You not playing on your game this morning?’

  Miller didn’t look up from his writing. He simply shrugged. ‘I was. I can’t play it right now, though. It’s off.’

  Again, a completely uncharacteristic lack of concern.

  ‘Because of the internet going off again?’ I asked. ‘I’m going to try unplugging it and reconnecting it. See if that works. It often does.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ Miller said. ‘It’ll be back on again in ten minutes.’

  It would be wrong to say alarm bells rang in my head. They didn’t need to.

  ‘And how exactly would you know that?’ I asked him, perching on the bed.

  Silence. ‘Miller, answer me, please. How do you know that?’

  The pen left his hand and whistled across the bedroom. ‘Oh my God,’ he said, as it clattered against the opposite wall and fell to the floor. ‘You moan when I’m on my game and now you’re moaning when I’m not! It’s fine. Everything is fine. We’ve just been hacked, that’s all.’ Hacked? ‘But it’s only for half an hour and then he’ll put us back on. So there’s no need to go off on one. It’s fine.’

  ‘Hacked?’ I spluttered. ‘What on earth do you mean, “We’ve been hacked”? Miller, what on earth have you done?’

  ‘God. There you go. Straight away blaming me. I told you. It wasn’t me. It was a hacker!’

  There were so many levels on which this whole exchange was wrong – in fact, on every level – that I hardly knew where to begin. With the pen that had narrowly missed me? With the cheek and disrespect? Or with the fact that he’d just told me our home computer network had been hacked? Probably that one, for starters, though there was one important point. I didn’t really have the first clue what he was talking about. ‘Hacked’ was one of those terms that just pushed all the buttons. Like ‘scammer’, or ‘identity theft’, or ‘virus’.

  ‘So you just said,’ I went on. ‘But what I don’t understand is why a hacker would suddenly want to interrupt our internet service.’ I paused. ‘But something tells me you do, Miller.’

  Miller threw the pad down as well now, and I could see what he’d been writing. Or, rather, couldn’t. It just looked like rows of weird hieroglyphics. Then he sighed and scratched his head, then rolled his eyes, as if despairing. Of the situation, or of my ability to understand anything he might say?

  ‘Look, I just chucked the wrong guys out of a game and stole their money. And because the
moderator of the game knew my IP address, he hacked into our system and got us chucked off to pay me back. But he’s putting us back on again. It’s no biggie.’

  I still didn’t have a proper grasp of what he was saying, but one thing I did know was that he didn’t have access to my laptop – anyone’s laptop for that matter – so how did he know that? ‘How the heck did this guy know our IP address?’ I demanded. ‘Even I don’t know that, Miller. How do you?’

  ‘Because I gave it to him!’ I turned to see Tyler standing in the doorway. ‘God, Miller, you little shit!’

  He turned to me then. ‘Sorry, Mum, but he really is! You told me you needed it to reset the PlayStation!’ he said, jabbing a finger in Miller’s direction. ‘God, why didn’t I think of that? Listen, you’ve got to stop whatever it is you’re doing, get out of that game and change your player ID, and pronto. Because this won’t stop, Mum.’ He turned back to me. ‘Trust me, it won’t. Not unless he stops messing around with other players. And he knows it.’ Another jab of the finger.

  I had even less idea what was going on now, and absolutely no idea what Tyler was talking about, but Miller clearly did. He looked suddenly nervous. Even slightly afraid. Tyler wasn’t a particularly big lad for sixteen, but a few years make a world of difference at that age. So, for all that he’d take us on over every tiny thing, sheer physicality still held sway over Miller, clearly. I put a hand on Tyler’s arm. Felt the anger in him. ‘So at least you know what’s going on round here, then. Good. So, Miller,’ I went on. ‘You need to sort this out, now. And if we have any more of it, I will disconnect the internet, full stop. No more online gaming, period. Are we clear?’

  In answer, Miller picked up his control pad, flicked a switch, and his TV sputtered back into life again. ‘It’s all back on now anyway,’ he said, pointing to the PlayStation. ‘Drama over.’

  ‘No, mate, it’s not,’ Tyler said, ‘and I mean it. You need to stop hacking and just play like everyone else does. It’s not fair and it’s causing big problems for everyone. I mean it. You knock it off. You hear me? I’m sick of your nonsense!’