Ghost Child

by Caroline Overington

  Hayley would also play with herself, if I can put it that way. Not just in the bath – look, again, I’ve got kids, and I’ve had dozens of foster kids staying here – I know what’s normal. A bit of exploration, I expect that. But this was incredible. Hayley would sit on the floor in the lounge room with no underpants on, and study herself. I’d say, ‘Hayley, that’s not appropriate. That’s a personal thing, and you do that in private.’ And once she said to me, ‘Like you pick your nose?’

  She would take my pads out of the bathroom cupboard. I scolded her. Another time, she went through a box of tampons. I guess we had them from a girl who was menstruating – and she popped them all out of the applicators, and was standing there, swinging one around when I walked into the bathroom and caught her.

  I spoke to the Department about it. As I say, I’m a regular foster mother; I’ve had plenty of kids and there have never been those kinds of problems. The social worker said to me, ‘Well, do you have sex in the house when Hayley is home?’

  I had no idea how to respond. I’m a married woman! My husband and I, we’re all fine in that department. It’s healthy and it’s completely private. Did they imagine that I assembled the whole family to sit and watch?

  We persevered with Hayley. Honestly, we did. Whatever her problems were, she was still a little girl, a lost little girl, and I’d have to be made of steel not to feel some compassion for her. But it soon got to the point where we couldn’t take her anywhere. One example: we went to a lunch once, a lovely buffet. There were platters of meat and chicken and bowls of salads. She started helping herself with her hands. That is not the way we eat. We taught her to use a knife and fork. Hayley knows perfectly well how to conduct herself in public. But she loved to shock. She needed extra attention. She was scooping up handfuls of potato salad and dumping it on her plate. She knew I would be humiliated, and that seemed to be the point.

  She wasn’t always like that. At other times – the times that really broke my heart – it was like having a baby in the house, a sobbing baby. I could be sitting, knitting, watching some TV, and Hayley would come and crawl into my lap, even when she was quite big, and she’d sob, and sob, and sob. She would be completely inconsolable, and at those times, I admit, my heart just went out to her. But then, just when I was feeling some sympathy, she’d climb onto my husband’s lap and try to kiss him on the neck, open-mouthed. I mean, really. She was absolutely uncontrollable regarding her sexuality. It got to the point where people just would not visit us, not even family. My brother – he is a very sensible, very decent man – told me he would not come into the house if Hayley was there. He told me she rubbed herself against his leg. ‘I’m sorry, she just terrifies me,’ he said.

  It wasn’t that she could actually do anything. She obviously couldn’t overpower a grown man and force him to have sex with her, but they – my husband, my brother, my son – were absolutely terrified of being accused of abusing her. It happens. A foster child will point the finger at a foster parent. And one of my nephews, a boy who would I suppose be a cousin to her if she were my own child, came running out of her bedroom breathless one afternoon and said, ‘Hayley tried to rape me in there!’

  I went in and she was leaning back on the bed head, her legs wide apart, clothed, but with a leer on her face – a leer that I don’t ever want to see again.

  There were times when I wished the Department would take Hayley away, but they didn’t and so I suppose we played the hand we were dealt. I wasn’t going to say, ‘It’s too hard, take her back.’ I have done that, with one or two kids who stole from me. With Hayley, it never got to the point where it was criminal, so what could I do? I could hardly have said, ‘I don’t like her. She frightens me.’

  Hayley got her period at eleven. Not that she told me. I only found out because I was cleaning her room one day, and I found a drawer full of bloody pads, and bloody underpants, reeking. They were stuffed in there behind her clothes.

  I said, ‘Hayley, there’s a way to dispose of these things. You wrap them up and you put them in the rubbish bin.’ But she was always a bit strange when it came to bodily functions. As a smaller child, she would wipe herself with her hand, and smear her poo on the wall.

  A short time after I found those soiled pads, Hayley told me, ‘I’ve had it off, you know, Mrs Mac.’

  I said, ‘Had it off?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I’ve had it off with a guy.’

  I did not believe her. I thought she was too young.

  But still, I agonised over what to do: tell the Department or not? And in the end, I really had no choice because you can’t take the foster kids – not even the long-term placements – to see a medical practitioner without permission from the Department, and I thought, ‘What if she’s pregnant?’ I wanted somebody to talk to her about sex, before she had it.

  They said, ‘We will have a counsellor talk to her,’ but it seems the counsellor only talked to her about ‘safe’ sex, not about not having sex. That didn’t seem to be part of it.

  ‘It’s all right to give a blowjob without a condom,’ Hayley told me after one of these sessions. ‘It’s anal sex that gives you AIDS.’

  I couldn’t believe the Department would discuss these things with such a young girl, but they said, ‘It’s her sexuality, Mrs MacInerney, not yours.’

  They said, ‘We’re going to put her on the contraceptive pill.’

  I said, ‘What, at this age? She can’t even remember to brush her teeth every day.’

  The other problem was that from a very young age, Hayley was aware that she was about to come into some money. She used to say to me, ‘I’ve got a victim’s payment coming, when I’m older.’

  I said, ‘Who told you that?’

  She said, ‘My mum.’

  It was true. Hayley would, when she turned sixteen, come into money. Not a huge amount, just a few thousand dollars, but it would certainly seem like a lot to Hayley. It was money to compensate her for the crime committed by her mother: the loss of her brother, Jacob. In the eyes of the law, Hayley was a victim of crime, and entitled to compensation.

  To my mind, these victim’s payments cause more trouble than they are worth. What was the point of giving a large amount of money to somebody like Hayley, who was essentially a troubled child? It would be a sum far too large for her to manage; she would blow it all in a very short period of time. I knew it would provide her with the illusion of security where there was none.

  Look, I know, I know, I know. What happened to Hayley when she was a child – the loss of her brother, the break-up of her family – was extremely unfortunate. It must have been terribly upsetting. It shouldn’t happen to any child. But honestly, to instil in these children a sense of themselves as victims and to give them a ‘victim’s payment’ is in my opinion very wrong. In my opinion, they should be encouraged to get over it, to move on. They should be told, ‘You cannot let this control your life. You’ve got to control your life. You have to say: “I will pull myself up. I won’t let this beat me.”’

  Hayley was never encouraged to do that, not by her social worker, anyway. Oh, we tried. My husband and I, we tried. But I could not find a way for her to focus on something other than herself. The number of times I said to her, ‘Hayley, it’s not all about you. Other people have trauma. Bad things happen to people all the time. It’s how you respond that matters.’ She would say, ‘And what would you know?’

  I told her, ‘Hayley, we’ve had children come through this house who have been involved in the most horrific child abuse. We’ve all seen it on the news; we’ve all heard it on the radio.’ But Hayley wouldn’t listen. She needed to be the one with the worst problems. She would go off, wailing, ‘You don’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like …’

  Was she actually affected by what happened to her brother? You assume so, and that’s the thing you reach for, when things go wrong. It’s the first, and the obvious excuse for why a child might be behaving badly: they are troubled. But sometimes – a
nd it’s not easy to say this – foster kids don’t actually remember anything about the abuse they’ve suffered. They hear it from the Department and they use it as an excuse to behave badly. I can’t tell you the number of children I’ve had come through here who say, ‘I’m not going to be like my mum’ or ‘I’m going to finish school. I want to make something of myself, not like my deadbeat dad.’ It’s their quiet determination that gets them through. They’ve seen what happens if you don’t apply yourself and they refuse to play the victim.

  I wasn’t sure how much Hayley genuinely remembered about the house on DeCastella Drive or how much she’d been told. My best guess is that she didn’t remember anything at all. I do know she adored telling people the story about her brother. She loved it when they were completely shocked that he had come to an untimely end and that was how she ended up in foster care.

  Her delight in this was troubling. Honestly, she never said, ‘Oh, I miss Jacob,’ or ‘It hurts me, what happened to Jacob.’ None of those things you might expect. No, Hayley seemed to use the story of what happened to Jacob to make her own circumstances, and her own life, more special and interesting. It also gave her an excuse for otherwise unacceptable behaviour. ‘Oh, you can’t discipline me. I’ve had a hard life!’ Well, that didn’t work with me, but it has worked with others.

  We raised our concerns with the Department. I told them, ‘There is no way she will be ready to live independently, not at the age of sixteen, and certainly not if she is about to come into a large sum of money.’

  I found that my advice was unwelcome. They told me, ‘We appreciate all you’ve done, but once Hayley is sixteen and can live independently, that is her right.’

  Again, with her rights.

  More troubling, to my mind, was this: their contact with Hayley would also cease on the day she turned sixteen. By that time, of course, her mother had died in prison. Hayley will tell you that she did not get to see her mother before she died, and I’m sure she blames me for this, but it was not up to me to make sure she went. The Department told Hayley that her mother was ill. Hayley said she could not care less. Afterwards, Hayley was offered the opportunity to go to the funeral. Hayley did not want to go. Hayley was offered the opportunity to meet with her siblings, to discuss the funeral arrangements. As far as I could tell, she shrugged off that meeting. She went along, and never mentioned it again. She was not upset by it; she didn’t afterwards express any desire to see Lauren or Harley again, and if that seems strange, well, it shouldn’t, because Hayley Cashman has very little interest in anything other than her own tragedy.

  In any case, I said, ‘Here is a child with very limited life skills, a very troubled, very unhappy girl, and you are saying she can just take control of her life at the age of sixteen? It will be a catastrophe.’

  The Department said, ‘We will provide Hayley with information that will enable her to transition to independent living.’

  It was all jargon, useless jargon, and tell me, who was right? Me, or them?

  I know what people think: how could we have let her get pregnant? It’s not a matter of allowing it. You tell me how to stop it. I didn’t want her to go on the pill; I certainly wasn’t going to be asking her whether she was actually taking it. My own children wanted nothing to do with her, so they weren’t in the loop. I couldn’t blame them. She’d go into their rooms, take their diaries and try on their clothes. They screamed at me, ‘Why does she have to live here?’

  Half the time I didn’t know, but I had to say, ‘She’s got nowhere to go.’

  At about the age of thirteen, Hayley had started writing boys’ names on her arm with a thick black marker, a wash-proof texta. I told her, ‘That looks absolutely appalling, Hayley, you should scrub that off. And who is that boy, anyway?’

  She’d say, ‘We’re in love, Mrs Mac.’

  In love! One day she was in love with one of the Veal boys, then it was one of the Crumps – first Shane, then his brother – and then somebody else, all of their names scrawled onto her forearm, and all over her school books, and even on her school uniform!

  The first time she came home with love bites on her neck, I nearly had a fit. I said, ‘Hayley, what’s that on your neck? I wasn’t born yesterday. I know what that is. That’s love bites.’

  She said some nonsense about being bitten by a spider and then getting a rash, and I said, ‘I didn’t come down in the last shower, Hayley.’

  I peppered her with questions, ‘Are you having sex?’ ‘Who is he?’ ‘Are you being careful?’ But she was always on about her rights. ‘You’ve got no right to ask me those questions,’ she’d say, and of course the Department was totally in cahoots, telling me to mind my business. She hacked off the hem of her school uniform, made it so short that her knickers touched the table when she sat down. I told her, ‘That’s not acceptable, Hayley,’ and she said, ‘I’m entitled to express myself.’ Tell me where she got that from?

  I saw she was pregnant before she told me. She was the tiniest thing. She never ate anything as far as I could tell; she was always bringing her lunch home, exactly as I’d packed it. I don’t know what she lived on. Suddenly, there she was, in the kitchen, and I could see, under the uniform, clear as day, a baby bump.

  I said, ‘Hayley, are you pregnant?’ And she just burst into tears and ran into her room.

  I didn’t know what to do. I stood at the door for ten minutes or something, saying, ‘Let me in, let me in,’ and asking my daughter whether she knew what was going on. And she said, ‘Mum, I just pretend I don’t know her. I don’t hang around with her.’

  When she finally came out, I don’t know if it was the same day or the next day, I said to her, ‘Hayley, sit down, we have to talk about this,’ and she said, ‘I’m having the baby.’

  I implored her, ‘Hayley, how can you have the baby? You haven’t even finished school. You don’t think I’m going to stay home with the baby, do you? That’s not going to happen.’ I didn’t even know whose baby this was, for goodness sake, and although I pestered her about it, she wouldn’t tell me, and to be honest there were times when I thought, ‘She probably doesn’t know who the father is.’

  And even though she was pregnant, everything just stayed the same. She would vomit in the morning, go outside, have a cigarette, come in again, wrap a scarf around her waist to try to hold her stomach in, put her uniform over the top, and go off to school with her cigarettes in her bag. I was in a state about what to do, and then it was taken out of my hands. The principal called me up to the school and said, ‘Well, it’s obvious that she can’t stay on. She’s starting to show and it’s not exactly the right message for the other girls in the school, is it?’

  And I said, ‘And what am I supposed to do?’

  He said, ‘Well, we don’t want that sort of thing at the school.’

  And I said, ‘You can’t expel her. She hasn’t broken any school rules.’

  He didn’t care. He said, ‘She can’t be walking around in a St Michael’s school uniform, eight months pregnant.’

  I contacted the Department, obviously, and their first question was, ‘Who is the father? Is it anybody in the house?’

  I said, ‘Excuse me. We didn’t do this to her! She did this to herself!’

  I never said – never, not once – that I would turf her out, although I did say, I admit, that I wouldn’t be taking care of the baby. I wanted her to have an abortion. I won’t pretend that I didn’t. She told the Department, and they said, ‘Hayley does not want to have an abortion. We will set her up for independent living.’

  I said, ‘You cannot be serious.’ This was a girl who could not cook a piece of toast or boil an egg. But they said, ‘Yes, we have a place.’ They took her to a high-rise building, a housing-commission building, filled with drug addicts and the homeless, and put her up in a one-bedroom flat.

  I went to visit her. I looked around and said, ‘Hayley, you cannot bring a baby in here,’ but she thought it was marvellous.


  ‘My rules now, Mrs Mac,’ she said. The apartment was terrible, and she’d made it worse. In fact, I could hardly believe what she’d done to the place. She and some new friend of hers from down the hall – another single mum – had taken a black texta and basically drawn a whole household-full of furniture on the walls. In the lounge room, she’d drawn a sofa; she’d drawn a mantelpiece with a clock on it; she’d drawn a cat; she’d drawn a table with a vase with flowers, all over the walls.

  She had blown the victim’s compensation on a ridiculous bed – the salesman must have seen her coming – with a stereo and rolling lights in the bed head. She also had a kettle and a toaster, and a few other things. I gave her some warm clothes and some things for the baby. I said, ‘Hayley, what are you doing? You can’t bring up a baby in here, how on earth are you going to manage?’

  Look, I admit, part of me was thinking, ‘If I have to take the baby, I will take the baby.’ I’m not made of stone, after all. But she was cocky. She said, ‘We’ll be getting the single mother’s pension. We’ll be fine here, thank you, Mrs Mac.’

  I stayed for less than half an hour. While I was there, the girl from the other flat came by with a baby – it was a well-dressed baby, I admit that – and they sat on the floor with texta furniture on the walls, smoking, with Hayley swollen like a basketball.

  I thought, ‘Good God, is this really the best we can do for these kids?’ Because here’s the truth: I care about Hayley Cashman, I really do. For all I’ve said, I do have fond memories of her as a small child. There are memories I still treasure, memories of her curled up, allowing me to stroke her hair, or tuck her into bed with a hot-water bottle.

  Once, when she was about fourteen, she even said, ‘I love you, Mrs Mac. I know I don’t always show it, but I do.’