by Casey Watson
‘I don’t want to go anywhere,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you just go by yourself? I’m old enough to be left. I told you – Mavis leaves me indoors. Why can’t you?’
I knew this was true because she’d mentioned it herself, when she’d given me a debrief. And I’d thought, then as now, why indeed? Because I never had. And thought I never should. Because, unlike Mavis, I had assumed it would be inappropriate at his age. No, there were no laws about the age you could leave children – be they foster children or your own kids. People often thought there were, but the law was clear – there wasn’t one. But for me personally, both as a mother and a foster mum, twelve had always seemed too young; a grey area that, for me, was on the wrong side of black. Kids of twelve could get into all sorts of scrapes.
But Mavis had left him. And more than once. To go to the post office, to walk her dogs. On the common-sense basis that he’d neither cause harm or come to harm if she left him alone for twenty minutes. ‘You mean you haven’t?’ she’d asked, surprised, when I’d admitted that to her. ‘Flipping nanny state nonsense. I don’t hold with all that. The boy’s almost thirteen!’
She was old school and then some. Perhaps I should be too. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
‘Fine,’ I said, decided. ‘If you really don’t feel like coming, then I’ll go and leave you here. I’ll only be about twenty minutes. Will you be okay?’
Miller sighed and shook his head, pausing his game to actually look at me while he spoke. ‘I’m not a baby, Casey. You forget that I spent most of the time growing up being left on my own. I like being on my own, so just go. Do whatever you have to do and I’ll see you when you get back. I’ll still be here killing everyone online, so don’t worry about me.’
My turn to sigh, as I walked out and closed his bedroom door. That was another thing that I didn’t seem able to control: his obsession with violent games. PlayStations had evolved in the last couple of years and no longer needed actual physical games in order to play. At one time I could easily confiscate an inappropriate game by simply picking it up, putting it in its case, and removing it. But these days you could download a game instantly to the console and start playing it straight away. In Miller’s case it didn’t even require payment because, somehow, and don’t ask me how, he knew ways in which he could get it for free. No one else in the family knew how he did it either but both Tyler and Kieron had said it was impossible, and that you couldn’t do it without paying online. Well, impossible for most people, but clearly not for Miller.
I had, of course, reported it, because of it most likely being illegal, but nobody had been able to work out how it was happening, so nobody had been able to advise me on what to do about it. Other than take away the console, of course. The trouble was that Miller said he wasn’t doing this, but that ‘friends’ were giving him codes, and it was all above board. And, without proof of it being otherwise, my hands were tied.
I grabbed my handbag, phone and car keys, and rushed out to the car. I’d be really quick, I told myself, still feeling guilty that I was leaving him home alone. I had no choice, however. With Riley, David and the kids off to the Lake District for a few days, and Kieron and Lauren at work, I had no one to call to come over and sit for an hour. Well, there was always Libby, but, tempted though I was to facilitate an improvement in their thus far rocky relationship, a twenty-minute jaunt to the shops hardly warranted calling upon a social worker to provide day care.
I was as good as my word too, despite the temptations of the great outdoors, and all too soon I was letting myself back into the house. ‘Miller! I’m home!’ I called up the stairs before taking the provisions through into the kitchen. ‘I’ve got ice cream!’
It was an automatic thing to say. Most kids would come running down immediately given the promise of ice cream, but this was Miller, who only enthused about disasters. So, not expecting him, I quickly put the frozen things in the freezer, before going upstairs to check he was okay.
The door was shut, but there was no drone of the TV beyond it. I knocked. ‘I’m back, love,’ I called as I pushed it open. The room was in darkness, as per – he kept the curtains shut so he could see the screen better. But as light from the landing flooded in, two things became apparent. That the TV wasn’t on, and that Miller wasn’t there. My heart sank. Had he been waiting for this very eventuality to happen to either scarper or get up to mischief? Or perhaps – a less unwelcome thought – he was in the wardrobe?
I could see a notebook open on the bed with a pen at the side of it, and, as my eyes adjusted, I realised I could see that he was there. But not in the wardrobe. He was standing behind his curtains. It wasn’t as if he was hiding from me, however, as I could see he was facing out, towards the window. He was also talking softly to himself. Not a stream of consciousness however. Numbers. Was he counting?
‘Miller? What are you doing, love?’
‘Shush!’ he said as he popped out from the centre of the curtains. ‘Seventy-two seconds for subject twenty-three, and sixty-five seconds for subject twenty-four.’ He then walked to his bed, picked up the notebook, and started to write.
I waited a moment for him to finish whatever it was he was doing, and asked again. ‘Love, what are you doing?’
‘An experiment,’ he said, simply. ‘It’s been running for a couple of days now. ’ He waved the notebook in front of him. ‘I’m keeping track of all the evidence and results in here. I’ll soon have my conclusions and then I’m going to write it up. I’m going to do a talk about it in school in September.’
This was a surprise. Homework during the school holidays? I’d not been told he’d been given any. But he clearly had. I was impressed. Perhaps he liked school more than he had let on, after all. I watched him tuck the ballpoint pen behind his ear while he walked back towards his window. A cute gesture from a fledgling scientist? I hoped so. ‘So what is the experiment, love?’ I asked, keen to seize the moment. ‘You studying something you can see from there? Is it an experiment on birds?’
Miller laughed then. But then my hackles rose immediately. Because it was a throaty, unnatural laugh. In fact, not what you would usually call a laugh at all. More like something you would do if you were reading a story to a child and you’d got a line where you had to provide the pantomime-style cackle of an evil villain. He then grabbed hold of one of the curtains and theatrically pulled it back along the rail, so he could reveal his experiment to me. ‘Ta dah!’ he exclaimed, sounding animated and proud now. ‘Come look, Casey. You can watch me do subject twenty-five if you like. It’s my last one. Come on. Come and see,’ he added, gesturing.
I don’t know why – perhaps that laugh, or the theatricals, or both – but even as I walked towards the windowsill to look, I already knew that I was about to witness something distasteful. I was also aware of Miller watching me intently, clearly expecting, and relishing, a reaction.
And as he opened the remaining curtain, all was revealed. There was a long row of what looked like dead wasps along his windowsill but, on closer inspection, I could see that one of them was still alive. Writhing around on its back, but alive. It hit me at once: this must be ‘subject twenty-five’.
‘Miller, what have you done?’
Again, that strange laugh. ‘I told you, it’s an experiment. An experiment on wasps. They’re a pest to society and scientists experiment on pests all the time, like mice for example. And rats. This is no different.’
‘Yes, but what have you done to them? You haven’t killed all of these wasps, have you?’
‘Not all of them. Not yet. Obviously.’ He took the pen from behind his ear and, before my horrified gaze, poked the still wriggling wasp at the end with it. ‘But it won’t be long before this one goes, I think. I can’t record his results though, because you interrupted my timing. But it doesn’t matter,’ he added brightly. ‘Twenty-four results for today will still do.’
I had to sit down on the edge of the bed. I was literally lost for words and h
ad to give myself a moment to think. Finally I looked at Miller. ‘Love, this isn’t right,’ I said. ‘Most boys your age would not want to kill defenceless wasps. They just wouldn’t. This isn’t right. Do you understand that?’
Miller raised his eyebrows. ‘Defenceless? Are you kidding? These things are like flying snipers. Casey, they’d sting you in a minute. I’ve done you a favour by killing them, in fact. You should really be grateful.’
As I listened in stunned silence he went on to explain that his experiment was to see how long each wasp could live after he’d inflicted various forms of torture. He had pulled off legs and wings. He’d pulled one completely in half. He’d hit another with a book. Drowned another in a puddle of milk … The horrible list went on and I couldn’t listen to any more of it.
‘How did you get them?’ I interrupted. ‘You never had twenty-five wasps flying around your room and caught them all. You can’t have. So where did they come from?’
I suspected some trap somewhere. Some ongoing business. I didn’t know what, but, eerily, like a villain in an Agatha Christie novel, he seemed keen to explain all. He turned around and reached behind the curtain at the far end of the window, then produced a paper cup. ‘Not twenty-five,’ he said, tilting the cup so I could see inside it. ‘There’s around sixty dead ones in here already – look.’
The cup was filled almost to the brim with dead, dismembered insects. I felt sick. ‘So where, Miller? Where did you get them?’
‘You have a nest outside my window,’ he said. ‘Surely you knew that. I just leave my window open, and they fly in. Specially if I leave crumbs of biscuit on the windowsill. They’ve been doing it for weeks. Some of them get away, but usually I manage to stun them and catch them before they do.’
He leaned down and reached under his bed to produce a can of insect-killing spray. ‘I use this. I found it in your conservatory and I thought, well the nest is outside my room, so it’s only right I keep it up here, isn’t it? For my protection.’
For my protection. That term again. But it wasn’t for protection. It was to provide specimens for his ‘experiment’. I didn’t know what to say. All the time I had thought he was up here playing on his games, or sulking about one thing or another, or writing his endless lines of code, and all the time he’d been devising ways in which to kill wasps, and then recording how long they took to die using each method.
Why did he get such enjoyment out of things like this? Because he’s psychologically damaged, Casey, remember? More pressingly, how could I put this right? Could it even be put right? I had no answers. But I finally found my voice.
‘Close your window, Miller,’ I said as I stood up. I took the spray from his hand, too. ‘And I’ll take that, thank you. This stops now. You can scoop all the rest of those wasps into that cup and take them down to the garden bin straight away. And I’ll be checking up here daily. No more, do you understand?’
‘But there’s a nest. And they’d only die anyway. They don’t live forever.’
‘Mike will get someone up to sort that out,’ I said. ‘The nest will be gone.’
‘But what about my talk for school?’
‘Miller, school won’t want to hear about experiments on living creatures.’
He looked genuinely perplexed. ‘But scientists experiment on living creatures all the time!’
I had no answer to that. Not in terms I could explain without tying myself in moral knots. There was absolutely no point in trying to have a discussion with him, period. Certainly not about the more macabre side of what he’d done. He just didn’t – almost certainly, given what I’d witnessed, couldn’t – understand. He was proud of his experiment. And nothing I could say would change that. As he was quick to point out. He had found something to engage him that wasn’t on a screen. I should be pleased about that, shouldn’t I? He had at last found a hobby. Wasn’t I pleased about that? I shuddered.
So instead, after telling him we would talk about it later, I went downstairs to do some recording of my own, and as I typed my emails to various people, detailing the experiment and our exchanges, the thought hit me that Miller was our experiment. He had been scooped up from an environment he had grown used to, thrown into the care system, into a world totally alien to him, and had been poked and prodded by professionals of one kind or another ever since, to watch his reactions and record their findings. I shuddered a second time as these thoughts joined the wasps buzzing round in my head.
And as they floated down and settled, a truth hit me, too. That this human experiment was happening in my home. Among my loved ones. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue to be part of it.
Chapter 23
Though I wasn’t exactly having wasp-infested nightmares – I’d put enough jam jars out as wasp traps in my time, hadn’t I? – Miller’s experiment on defenceless insects had opened a whole new can of worms. If I’d been unsettled by his ghoulish attraction to news stories about violent death, and interest in how much it might hurt, I was much more disturbed by him personally administering it.
Though I didn’t think I was being naïve. It was hardly unknown for children to go through a stage of casual cruelty – at least some of them, anyway. Particularly those who had suffered backgrounds of neglect and abuse. Neither was it news that cruelty to animals was part of the adult landscape either. Barely a day passed without some report or other of animals being abused, as the RSPCA would, I’m sure, readily testify. Then there was dog fighting, cock fighting and all manner of similar cruelties. So, no, I wasn’t about to over-think it and make mountains out of molehills.
No, it was Miller’s breezy attitude towards his grisly ‘experiment’. This wasn’t an immature, troubled twelve-year-old getting up to something that, at least on some level, they knew to be wrong. He didn’t just think it wasn’t wrong – he was on a whole other level. He’d really thought I was the mad one for thinking so. Something he’d reiterated when Mike had tackled him about it as well. Wasps were pointless, he’d told him. They were a stain on the earth. Why not experiment on them to find the best ways to ‘off’ them?
And, of course, we’d then had to ‘off’ them in any case. We’d called out an emergency pest-control firm, and had the nest removed that very evening – something Miller had been delighted to watch from his (firmly shut) window. ‘But it’s still a waste,’ he’d commented, once they’d packed up and left. ‘I could have done loads more experiments if you hadn’t let them kill them.’
To use his own parlance: He. Just. Didn’t. Get. It.
But Libby Moran needed to. CAMHS definitely needed to. By the time Tyler arrived home I was once again back at my laptop, typing up yet another urgent report. In which my number-one concern was that this showed he lacked empathy. Not headline news, obviously – he’d not shown much in the way of empathy at any point, but hadn’t I read somewhere about how one of the indicators of possible psychopathy was a history of inflicting pain on defenceless animals? It certainly fitted – he’d been treated like an animal himself. And hadn’t he said he’d been referred to as a runt?
In tandem with the growing pile of other kinds of evidence of Miller’s disturbed state of mind, this new situation was a definite concern. For the moment, however, my emails written and sent, all I wanted was to enjoy having Tyler back with us, and for nothing else to blow up in the next ten days, so that we could arrive at the next respite without further damage – to either wasps or my flagging resolve.
***
To my relief, the next few days with Miller passed largely drama-free. And I suspected that this might have had more than a little to do with Tyler’s presence once again in the house. No, they didn’t interact much – Tyler was out with his friends most days, anyway – but I think both were more than happy to give one another a wide berth, which was absolutely fine by me. There was only one major revelation and, given what had happened recently, it wasn’t even major. The fact that the following weekend, when clearing some of the untamed undergrowth in
the area of the back garden where the pest control men had set up their ladders to get at the wasps’ nest, Mike had come upon something unexpected.
‘Come look at this, love,’ he’d told me, coming in through the conservatory to find me. ‘Seems to me laddo up there’ – because, of course, Miller was up in his bedroom – ‘has been pulling a fast one, and for some considerable time by the looks of things.’
I followed him back out to the patch of flowerbed just underneath Miller’s window. He put a finger to his lips, and pointed, mouthing ‘down there’.
At the back of the flower bed was a runaway cotoneaster – a spiky evergreen that had taken advantage of the sunny spring to get seriously out of hand. Using his gardening gloves, Mike then pulled back the branches to reveal his find. Among and beneath what had remained of the torn pages of Tyler’s burned college papers, there were what looked like dozens of white pills all around.
‘The little s—’ I began, before clamping my mouth shut, in case he heard us. ‘But how?’ I hissed. ‘I’ve watched him take them – at least at the start – and so have you!’
But only at the start. When, wise to childish tricks, I’d asked him to stick his tongue out to prove he’d swallowed them. Which he had, with his usual whine: ‘I’m not five!’ After that, no, not so much, but I’d definitely seen him swallow them.
I whispered that to Mike. Who, in response, popped his tongue into his cheek. ‘So you thought. And obviously thought wrong,’ he whispered back.
He released the bushes. Rolled his eyes. ‘So now we know why they weren’t working, don’t we?’ he said, once we were back out of possible earshot.
Didn’t we just? All that time he’d not been sleeping, and here, perhaps, was the reason. Perhaps he’d never taken the melatonin pills at all. Or, at least, since he was old enough to realise he didn’t want to. So he’d taken control. And how many placements ago now? No wonder there had been no discernible difference between the real melatonin and the placebo.