The Girl with the Suitcase

by Angela Hart

  Grace arranged to visit her family on a weekend when Robbie was away playing rugby. She told me she was looking forward to seeing Harley, who was walking by now.

  I hadn’t seen a picture of Harley since he was a newborn, and I asked Grace if she could bring one home this time.

  ‘It would be lovely to see how he’s grown,’ I said. ‘Maybe we could put some pictures of him in your life story book, or up in your bedroom?’

  ‘OK,’ she smiled. ‘That’s a good idea.’

  I’d have liked to have seen Lily and met the baby, but this was not really on the agenda. Colette and the family still never ventured our way, and we were never invited to visit. It had been years since I’d seen either Colette or Lily.

  ‘Do you think Grace ever feels she leads a kind of double life?’ I said to Jonathan after Barry drove her away this time.

  ‘I know what you mean. I hope not. I think it probably feels more like that to us than it does to her.’

  Whatever the truth, we both agreed that it was good to see Grace going back to visit the family with a smile on her face. Harley had had such a positive effect on them, and the problems of the past seemed to have faded away. I couldn’t remember the last time Grace had said a bad word about Lee, Cameron or Lily, or her mum for that matter.

  When Barry brought Grace home I could see immediately that she was in a good mood, and I was looking forward to hearing all her news.

  ‘How was it?’ I beamed, welcoming her in.

  ‘Amazing! Remember Mum said about me moving back? Well she said it again! She said I can move back any time I like!’ Grace was almost breathless with excitement as she delivered this news on the doorstep.

  Barry caught my eye and gave me a wink. I knew him well enough by now to know this was his way of showing me a bit of support. I appreciated it, as my heart had sunk like a stone.

  ‘Thank you for bringing her back, Barry. Let me know the dates of the next placement meeting?’

  ‘I will.’

  I was almost on autopilot when I said this, as Barry and I always referenced the next placement or review meeting whenever he picked Grace up or brought her home. As time went on the meetings had fallen into a fairly predictable routine, which is not unusual when a child has been in a placement for a long time. Typically, the meetings amounted to a summing up of how Grace was doing at school and a discussion of any problems we had relating to her ADHD, or her contact visits or appointments. Occasionally we had an incident to discuss. This year she’d become more accident prone, perhaps due to puberty, and she’d had a few accidents, including falling off a ladder while dressing the stage for a show, and splintering her shin bone coming off a swimming pool slide.

  We could cope with things like that, but what now? I suddenly found myself on high alert, panicking about what might be on the agenda at the next placement meeting. Will we be talking about Grace moving out? I shuddered at the thought and tried, unsuccessfully, to push it out of my head.

  Barry said his goodbyes and once Grace and I were alone I finally responded to what she’d said.

  ‘Moving back?’ I said. ‘Did you say your mum said you could move back any time?’ I was trying to conceal my alarm and dismay, but I stammered the words and I’m sure I must have looked flustered; I certainly felt it.

  ‘Yeah. I think I should. Not right now! I mean, like, when I finish my exams and leave school and all that. The thing is, I’m fine now! Mum is, too. She can manage. I think it’s a great idea, and I’ll get to spend more time with Harley.’

  Grace said this in a naive, flippant way, in the way only teenagers can, I suppose. She can’t have thought through what it would really mean to move back home, away from everything she knew and all her friends, activities and opportunities in our town. What about Robbie? I couldn’t imagine she would want to live in a different town to her boyfriend. In that moment I felt very glad indeed that she had a boyfriend she was very taken with; Robbie might be the one to keep her here.

  I thought that Grace probably didn’t have a clue how discussing moving out would affect me. Jonathan and I had given Grace a good home since she was ten years old. She was fourteen going on fifteen now, and it pained me that she could consider giving up her life with us so easily. I wanted her to continue reaching for the stars, as we’d encouraged her to do from when she’d first moved in with us. Despite the positive changes in her family home, I still felt very strongly that staying with us for as long as possible would give Grace the best chance of reaching her potential. I also thought about the other two girls. They had lived with Grace for years and though they were not exactly close, I knew that if they heard her talk so flippantly about moving out they would probably feel hurt too.

  Seemingly oblivious to the bombshell she’d just dropped on me, Grace ran up to her room leaving me standing alone in the kitchen. My mind went into overdrive the second she had gone.

  What if she went back to her mother’s and was exposed to drugs? How would she manage her ADHD if she didn’t eat the right foods or get enough sleep? What about her college course or apprenticeship? She was working so hard on her GCSEs, and I was filled with dread that if she lived at home after leaving school her work ethic might change. Lee and Cameron didn’t have jobs. To my knowledge Colette had not worked for many years, and Lily had never got onto the job market after falling pregnant as soon as she finished school.

  Grace would be sixteen and a half when it was her turn to leave school. At that age she would be eligible to go into supported lodgings, which were a kind of halfway house for kids moving out of care. Nowadays children stay in care for longer, at least until eighteen, and up until the age of twenty-one if they are in education and that is what they and their foster carers want. This ‘staying put’ policy, as it’s called, came into force in 2014, but back in the nineties going into supported lodgings was typically the next step for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. We’d seen how supported lodgings worked well for other children leaving care, though we’d also recognised that the teenagers who left us were still very young and impressionable. They needed all the support they could get and we kept in touch with nearly all our children who went into supported flats locally. Though we were in no hurry to rush Grace out, I had imagined this would probably be the next step for her, when she was good and ready, and most probably after she’d worked or studied for at least another year and was seventeen or even older.

  As taken aback as I was at what Grace had said, I did manage to keep my counsel. I couldn’t tell her what to do. I knew that no matter how a child’s natural parents had behaved, they would most likely still hold all the trump cards when it came to loyalty and allegiances. As I’ve said many times before, a child will forgive their birth parents almost anything, and kids in care nearly always crave a reunion, even after years of disappointment or worse. I’d recognised years ago that Grace had put her mother on a pedestal and, even though there had been ups and downs over the years, deep down this had not changed.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’ Jonathan said, walking in from the shop.

  ‘You won’t believe what Grace just said.’

  I told him exactly what she’d told me. He said the colour had drained from my face, and he could see how concerned I was.

  ‘Come here,’ he said, giving me a big hug. ‘We’ve been down this road before and you know what Grace is like. What was it Barry said all those years ago? “She’s a harum-scarum kid.” That’s as true today as it was then, except now the challenges have become more, well, psychological, I suppose. It’s all talk. Her life is here, in this town. I can’t see her ever moving back, frankly.’

  I let out a long breath. ‘God, I hope you’re right. I just can’t imagine what would happen. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘Angela, calm down and don’t worry. Only last week Grace was talking about her applications for apprenticeships, and she’s mad about Robbie, too. And what about the theatre group? She’d never give that up.’

  I
realised I’d had a nasty shock and got carried away with the worst-case scenario. Besides, it was still quite a while before Grace would start to sit her exams. I’d just have to hope she’d be snapped up by a course or apprenticeship scheme and that the whole idea of going back to her mum would have evaporated by the time she finished school.

  I’m very happy to say that after many months of working extremely hard on her revision and putting her heart and soul into her course work, Grace achieved nine GCSEs, including a B in Maths, which was a massive achievement. We were all so thrilled, and we had a very moving moment when we gave Grace a congratulations card.

  ‘I’ve got a card for you too,’ she said unexpectedly, handing us a giant-sized thank you card. She had written some lovely things in it, telling Jonathan and me she could not have got through her exams without us and describing us as ‘stars’ and ‘legends’.

  Though there had been no further mention of her going home – I imagined Grace had been too busy during the exam period to give this the thought it deserved – there had been moments when I’d expected, and feared, that the topic might come up again. One was when she filled in applications for her apprenticeship scheme and obviously had to think about where she would be living in order to get to work. This was another.

  The thank you card filled me with joy, but I had to push a nagging thought out of my mind. Now that Grace had finished school and got her exam results, what would happen? Was she thanking us like this because she knew she was going to be leaving? I told myself not to fret and to enjoy the moment. I’d been down this road before, and I knew that’s what Jonathan would say to me if I voiced my concerns to him yet again, so I kept quiet and focused on drinking in Grace’s success.

  Shortly after this, Grace heard the exciting news that she had been offered a place on an apprenticeship scheme with a fashionable advertising agency in our area. She accepted it immediately.

  ‘See, you can stop worrying about her leaving us,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘I wasn’t, honest!’ I lied.

  ‘Don’t fib! I was too. But this is a fantastic opportunity and it means she’s not going anywhere any time soon!’

  ‘At least for twelve months,’ I cautioned, as that was how long the scheme would last.

  Jonathan was cock-a-hoop and he wasn’t going to let doubts creep in.

  ‘Exactly. We can relax. Hasn’t she done well?’

  ‘She has. I’m so proud of her.’

  I realised I had tears in my eyes and I went to the mirror in the hallway to check my make-up hadn’t smudged. Glancing at the front door, I found myself remembering the slightly dazed and shy-looking little girl who’d arrived on our doorstep some six years earlier.

  Grace had come a very long way indeed, and now the world was her oyster.

  20

  ‘It’s just how my brain works’

  Grace began to spend more weekends at home with her mum, Lily and Harley. By now, Lee and Cameron had finally moved out, and at sixteen Grace was old enough to travel home under her own steam, which she enjoyed doing. Mind you, I had to remind her every single time which bus stop to go to, and where to change. If there was any disruption to the timetable, Grace was completely thrown. This led to her making some very convoluted and long-winded journeys, as she never remembered to take the leaflet that contained alternative routes and timetables. I found this incredibly frustrating, but Grace didn’t seem to mind. ‘I got there in the end,’ she’d say. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  I think this was one of the positives that came from having the ADHD ‘label’, because when irritating things happened to Grace, or when she created problems for herself that another person may have avoided or been incredibly frustrated by, she took it all in her stride. As she said, she always got there in the end, and usually had a tale to tell about a character she’d met, or a funny encounter she’d had. ‘It’s just how my brain works’ had become another one of Grace’s stock phrases. She used it liberally whenever she got her wires crossed and things went wrong. I really admired how she accepted and coped with her ADHD.

  In all the years, Grace had never had any further sessions with any kind of therapist or psychologist and she never took any medication. We’d have sought help if we’d felt it was necessary, but knowing she had a name for her disorder was always enough for Grace.

  As time went on and information became more readily available, I learned a lot more about ADHD. I devoured all the articles and research I could, while Grace never bothered. She had always been satisfied with what the educational psychologist had told her all those years before and didn’t seem to be the least bit curious to find out more. I don’t think this was a bad thing; she was doing well for herself and obviously didn’t think it necessary. As long as she had her lists and reminders in place, and was vigilant about her general health and lifestyle, she could manage her ADHD very well. We could too. We knew not to overload her with information and to write things down all the time, and we learned to be tolerant of her mood swings and not to be irritated when she interrupted us, lost concentration, did something clumsy or was distracted or overly impulsive.

  Grace’s apprenticeship started in the September and she had to fill in a medical form and have a meeting with the human resources department at her new company. She wasn’t shy about telling the personnel officer, a middle-aged woman called Bev, all about her ADHD.

  ‘Bev is great,’ Grace told me. ‘Her brother has ADHD too!’ Grace said that Bev had listed several well-known brands of sweets that made her brother hyper and said that as long as he avoided those and a few other food products, he could generally keep his hyperactive episodes under control. ‘It’s never held him back,’ Bev told Grace. ‘He was a terror when we were kids, but you’d never even know he had it now. All his coping strategies work.’

  I was very pleased when Grace told me that. Back then, there was a lot more stigma and mistrust attached to ADHD than there is today. Lack of knowledge and understanding fuelled this, and I’d heard stories of people being unfairly judged because of it. ADHD had also got a bad press for being used as an ‘excuse’ for unruly behaviour in kids. One article I read talked about the fact it’s hard to diagnose and kids don’t get statemented when they have it. It quoted a head teacher as saying there had been an influx of parents labelling their kids as having ADHD without the backing of expert opinion.

  ‘What caused my ADHD?’ Grace asked out of the blue one day, when the two of us were unpacking the shopping.

  ‘That’s a good question,’ I said, stopping to consider this.

  ‘Like, what actually is it, and why did I get it?’

  ‘That’s not the easiest question to answer. Nobody is sure of the exact cause, but I know it tends to run in families.’

  ‘So it’s a dodgy gene?’

  ‘No, they reckon the genes you inherit from your parents have a bearing on whether you’ll develop it, but it’s not linked to one single genetic fault.’ I added that people with ADHD possibly had differences in the way their brain was structured, and how the neurotransmitters worked. I also told Grace that I’d never heard of ADHD before she was diagnosed, as I wasn’t sure if she remembered that. I said that now there was plenty of information available, if she wanted to find out more. I had a book she could borrow, and several websites I could recommend. I’d told her this before, but she had never taken me up on it.

  ‘OK,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Thanks, but I don’t think I need to know any more. I’m absolutely fine.’

  A couple of weeks later she returned to the subject, having had another conversation with Bev at work.

  ‘We talked about coping strategies,’ Grace said. ‘Bev asked me what mine were and I said I didn’t really have any.’

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise and Grace started to laugh. ‘That’s exactly what Bev did. So, how did you know?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How did you know about all the strategies, if there was no information availab
le when I was younger?’

  She pulled out a leaflet, given to her by Bev, with ‘ADHD – HOW TO COPE’ written in bold across the front. The literature stated that it could be draining to cope with a child with ADHD and gave tips to counteract the ‘impulsive and chaotic behaviours that can make daily life stressful and exhausting for parents and carers’.

  Inside, there were sections on the following: how to plan the day, so the child knows what to expect and what equipment they need; setting boundaries, to ensure the child knows the rules and what behaviour is expected; staying positive and giving praise when a child has done a task well; giving simple, clear instructions so there is no doubt what you are asking the child to do; intervening early, when a child becomes frustrated or over-stimulated; monitoring social situations, and making sure the child doesn’t become too tired or hungry; encouraging plentiful exercise, a healthy, wholesome diet and a good sleep routine and, finally, speaking to the child’s school to make sure they get extra support.

  I could identify with all of those pointers. ‘We just had to do our best and use common sense,’ I told Grace. ‘You could say I knew you had ADHD but I just didn’t know what it was called. For instance, I worked out even before we’d heard about ADHD that it was best to give you one instruction at a time.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Well, it was obvious. If I said go and clean your teeth and put on your pyjamas, and when you come back downstairs, bring your washing, you’d only remember to do one thing. So I’d send you to clean your teeth, and when you’d done that I’d send you back up to put on your pyjamas, and the third time I’d ask you to fetch the washing down. You never minded making three trips up and down the stairs when you could have made one. You ran everywhere all the time.’ I added that once we had the diagnosis we simply did more of the same, and it helped enormously that we knew we were on the right track.