by Casey Watson
I didn’t think this applied to Emma, but I obviously did know she was estranged from her mother, and as there’s nothing like the approach of Christmas to concentrate the mind when it came to family, Emma’s mum and what might happen was definitely on my mind. Given our line of work, Mike and I had now spent several Christmases that included children who’d barely known the joy of spending one with a family of their own or, if they had, one blighted by abuse or neglect. We still did – the first child we ever fostered, Justin, now a strapping lad of seventeen, still spent Christmas Day with us every year. Usually this happened at Riley’s since she was now the one with the little ones, but this year, because of our current situation, we had decided that the annual family feast would be at our house. I couldn’t wait. There was nothing like having a baby around at Christmas.
But not everyone felt the same as I did, clearly, and it was on a chilly morning about half-way through December when both Emma and I were about to find that out. It was feeling slightly more Christmassy now. There was no sign of actual snow yet, though the air was certainly cold enough and when I’d put my head outside the door to grab the milk I thought it might have snowed, the garden was so completely frosted with silvery-white. The post was slightly later, landing with a pleasingly hefty thump just as I was clearing away the breakfast things and Emma had gone into the living room to change Roman’s nappy. This was a regular event since the tree had gone up as he loved staring up at it – me being me I had the fairy lights going all day.
I went out into the hall wondering how many Christmas cards had landed. I’d spent an enjoyable evening a few nights back doing mine, and was looking forward to catching up now with old friends. I’d had a varied life, job wise, and it was nice to stay in touch with all the people I’d worked with along the way.
The scattered pile was made up of the usual collection of envelopes; the obvious Christmas cards, the obvious bills, the obvious junk mail and flyers, but as I riffled through, pulling the cards to the top so I could open those first, I noticed one in the pile addressed to Emma. Not that there was anything unusual in Emma getting letters; she had been receiving them almost every other day since she’d arrived with us – something Maggie didn’t have a problem with – but this one was different: it didn’t have the HMP prison stamp on it. So not from Tarim, this one. I wondered who might have sent it. As in the case of all children in care, it was important to monitor who they had contact with. I looked again at the envelope. The handwriting was tiny and spidery, meandering in a gentle downward slope across the front; the hand was distinctive, too, and right away something told me it was an older, rather than a younger hand.
‘There’s a letter for you, love,’ I said, taking my small haul into the living room.
Emma was kneeling by the changing mat, just doing the poppers up on Roman’s vest. She was becoming practised now, handling him so much more confidently and easily.
‘Really?’ she said, turning to smile, her ponytail flicking round as she did. Her hair was looking better as well, I thought, now she was over that debilitating early period. As was her skin, which was getting some colour back at last.
I handed the letter to her. It wasn’t thick – at most a couple of pages, probably only one. And not a card. It wasn’t stiff enough for that.
Nevertheless, she seemed to think it might be.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, as she studied it. ‘Oh my God, it’s from my mum, Casey! Shit, it’s been months …’ She peeled the corner of the flap. ‘Like, months and months. I bet it’s for Christmas. I bet it’s a Christmas card or some money or something!’ She finished ripping the flap open and began tugging out the contents.
‘That’s nice,’ I said, kneeling down alongside her and tickling Roman’s tummy.
‘She always does this,’ Emma qualified. ‘When she’s been through one of her episodes and that. Says sorry and stuff …’
She tailed off then and unfolded the sheet of paper inside.
I don’t know if I believe in a sixth sense – not really – but as she began reading I had this sudden jolt of anxiety about what the contents might say. I had no reason to – even with the history between them; this was Christmas, after all. And at Christmas people sometimes become better people, at least temporarily – or at least feel guilty about not having been. And given that history, perhaps Emma’s mother was having one of her ‘good’ periods, and, damaging though they undoubtedly had been and would be, children always kept the faith. They almost never gave up on hope.
But I had been here before, with other kids, and perhaps that was what had prompted it; that kind of heart in mouth sensation I knew so well.
And as soon as I saw Emma’s expression change from one of delight to one of despair, I knew the feeling had been right, however much I wished it hadn’t been.
‘What is it, love?’ I asked gently, but she was too absorbed in whatever she was reading to hear me. I watched her face crumple and saw tears begin welling. ‘Sweetheart …’ I prompted. Emma turned to me then and, hand trembling, she passed the letter.
‘Here,’ she said brokenly, ‘read it yourself. The bitch! The fucking bitch!’ She stood up, leaving Roman gurgling on the carpet, and walked over to the window, furiously wiping at her tears. ‘Why, Casey? Why does she hate me?’
I had already read the first line – ‘I suppose you think you’re so clever, don’t you?’ – and, tearing my eyes from Emma, braced myself for the rest. And perhaps Emma was right – what I saw written there could only be described as hate mail, and it broke my heart that a mother could speak to her child like this.
Dear Emma
I suppose you think you’re so clever, don’t you? Leaving me when I needed you the most and choosing that evil bastard and his spawn over me. You think you can just desert me and then send the social round, begging me to take you back? Well, no. Not this time, girl, you’ve really messed up. I’ve finished with you now, and to think that you are actually a mother, what a laugh! You aren’t fit to wipe that baby’s arse!
Don’t worry though, Emma, you won’t have him for long. The social will have him off you in a breath when they see how completely useless you are. If I’ve got anything to do with it, he’ll be put into care and you’ll never see him again. That way you can get on with it, play at being a grown up with that junkie dealer. The next letter you get will probably be addressed to the next prison cell to his. Won’t that be a laugh? Anyway, fuck you and your kid. You’ve been a weight around my neck since the day you were born.
Mum
I had to take a gulp of air as I folded the letter up and looked at Emma, and I realised I’d been holding my breath. She was watching me now, waiting for a reaction, I suspected, and I gave her one. I smiled at her, weakly.
‘Do you want to talk about it, love?’ I asked her.
‘What’s to talk about?’ she fired back at me. ‘I think she made herself pretty clear. That, Casey, is my mother for you.’
I picked Roman up from where he was kicking about and placed him in his Moses basket with his bunny-rabbit rattle.
‘Come on,’ I said to Emma as I sat on the sofa and patted the space next to me. ‘Sit down for a minute and let’s just think about it. It sounds to me like your mum is very angry at someone or something, but I can’t believe that she won’t regret writing all this.’
Emma, sobbing freely now, sat down heavily beside me. And as she crossed her legs under her and lowered her head into her hands, it really struck me just how young she was. ‘She won’t regret it, Casey,’ she said, lifting her head again. ‘She never does. She might forget it, and never mention it again, but regret? No, that’s not her style. She’s never happy unless she’s upsetting somebody.’
‘She’s said things like this before, then?’ I asked. I’d seen all sorts in my time but some things never changed – like just how appalled I felt that a mother could hurt her daughter like this.
Emma sniffed and then gave a harsh laugh. ‘That’s tame compa
red to some of her motherly rants, trust me! I don’t know what they’ve already told you, but she’s sick in the head.’
‘You mean mentally ill?’ I asked.
Her voice was full of bitterness. ‘And the rest! She calls it depression and has tablets for it and everything, but soon as she starts to feel better she quits them and says she doesn’t need them any more. Even accuses the doctor of trying to poison her and stuff. That’s when she turns into a complete Loony Tunes.’ She nodded towards the letter I was still holding. ‘She’s probably off the pills now. I’m sick of it, Casey. She’s been like this ever since I was a kid.’
I wasn’t surprised she was sick of it. It was clear that she’d become no more used to her mother’s breathtaking cruelty than I had. She wiped the back of a hand across her eyes.
‘She sometimes used to forget I even existed. Would piss off somewhere for hours on end and forget to buy food and stuff. Then after days of me begging her to take her tablets, she’d suddenly spend every penny we had on a new TV or a big bike for me or something.’ She turned to look at me. ‘Honestly, she’s mad!’
I listened in growing amazement. What a childhood Emma had endured. It must have been so hard for her growing up with this see-saw existence. What a life sentence it must have been – still was, in fact – the business of having a mother whose life was dominated by bouts of depression.
‘Well at least you know that it’s a sickness, love. I know it must still hurt, and God knows how I would feel in your shoes, so let’s hope she gets better again, and soon.’
Emma stood up, and her expression seemed to say that, actually, she’d heard this before – many times before. ‘I won’t hold my breath,’ she said flatly. She then glanced over at Roman, who was now fast asleep in the Moses basket. ‘Is it okay if I get a shower while he’s quiet?’ She sighed as though resigned to her fate. She looked suddenly worn out. I wondered what effect her mother might imagine her note would have on her. Did she even think that clearly? Think at all?
‘Course you can, love,’ I said. ‘Go on – go and have your shower. I’ll see to him if he wakes up.’
I watched her go, noting the dejected slope of her narrow shoulders, and weighing the single sheet of cheap paper in my hand. This was terrible. I needed to find out more about the poor girl’s history. And, now I thought about it, how come her mother had been given our home address? I gave it five minutes, then got on the phone to John Fulshaw.
Chapter 8
January is never my favourite month – is it anyone’s? Such a depressing come-down from Christmas and New Year, it’s the sort of gloomy month that could do with being cancelled – and the whole ‘twelfth night, decorations down’ thing with it. If I ruled the world, I mused, as I drove the short distance to Kieron’s, I’d decree that all fairy lights stayed in position at least till the clocks all went forward.
But it wasn’t just the short days and long nights that were getting to me; it was Emma, who had seemed so stuck in glumsville since Christmas that if I didn’t know her problems were way too big to be addressed by quick fixes, I’d have gone and ordered her one of those light boxes off the internet. It was mid-January now and the mother and baby group were meeting again, but I’d been unable to coax her out to attend the day’s session – or come to Kieron’s with me either, for that matter. I almost offered to take the baby with me but pulled back from actually saying it; much as I knew she could use the sleep (or, more likely, the time on the laptop) it wasn’t the sort of thing I was supposed to be doing, so in the end, telling her I’d only be gone an hour or so and suggesting she could perhaps write to Tarim, I left her and little Roman to it.
‘I can’t say I blame her,’ Lauren said, leaving the flat just as I was arriving. She was off to teach her first dance class of the New Year, and seemed to be wearing three woolly scarves all at once, one of them almost the same shade of pink as her nose. ‘If that church hall is anything like as cold as the community centre I work in,’ she laughed, ‘she’s made a shrewd decision staying put in the warm.’
I knew that, and I didn’t want to press her to socialise. She was obviously still hurting badly from the memory of her mother’s cruel invective, and it didn’t matter how much she had told us that she knew it was just the drink talking and that she’d become used to it over the years – I’d yet to meet a child who didn’t crave a parent’s love, or hope that one day, just one day, they might get some. She’d also been particularly quiet on the subject of Tarim, and I had this persistent itch about what might be going on there. I had no grounds for my worries – well, no more than I’d had since day one – but she’d just been so uncommunicative since the day she’d had her mum’s letter, and though I was pleased in one way that everything we were doing was so baby-centred, I felt frustrated about the wall there still was between us. Still, chatting with Kieron always made me feel a bit better, and though I’d popped round to see how he was doing in his new job I always valued his refreshing brand of black or white insight.
‘It’s much harder with teenagers, isn’t it?’ was Kieron’s sage comment, once we’d waved Lauren off and made coffee. ‘I remember you saying that to me once. It’s always stuck.’
‘Has it?’ I smiled. My son looked so grown up all of a sudden, his blond bum-fluff replaced by a coarse mat of designer stubble. He was growing more like Mike by the day. ‘So what did I say exactly? I’m assuming you were on the receiving end of one of my moans after doing something despicable – yes?’
‘I wasn’t, actually,’ he said. ‘It was when we were watching something on the telly about teenage runaways, and I remember you saying that the teenage bit was the worst bit. That everyone always said that the hard part was the first part, with all the sleepless nights and terrible twos and so on, but that, actually, that wasn’t true.’
I grinned at him. ‘I did?’
Kieron nodded. ‘You said it was hard because with little ones you could almost always solve their problems, and that with teenagers you couldn’t – that a lot of the time all you could do was support them through them.’
I didn’t recall the conversation, but I wasn’t surprised Kieron had. He was good at remembering things, and very often verbatim. And I didn’t doubt I’d said that, and I could probably pinpoint when, too. It would have been when I was working in pastoral care in our big local comprehensive – running what was informally (not to mention infamously) called The Unit – and usually filled with a number of adolescents who had the sort of family and social problems that didn’t lend themselves to fixes, quick or otherwise. It was one of the reasons I went into fostering in the first place, so I could better provide support, one on one.
And this one was proving intractable. The fact was that Roman was still a baby and, grim though the thought was, if he was taken from Emma he’d barely even remember her. He’d more than likely get placed within a lovely foster family, and, given his age, be adopted in no time. No, it was Emma who needed my support here, if she was going to be allowed to hang on to him. And if they didn’t let her – if they took him from her – what then? Kieron was right; I had been clear on what I thought was the most challenging part of parenting. But I don’t think any amount of sage advice could have prepared me for what I found when I got home an hour or so later.
Even before I put my key in the front door I could tell something was wrong. Babies have all sorts of different cries, as any mother soon learns, all of them transmitting a different need. As with Inuits, and their endless reams of words to describe snow, a mum soon gets used to identifying all the different ways their infant tries to communicate their needs; the ones that say I’m hungry, the ones that say I’m tired, the ones that say, ‘Leave me alone! I’m over-stimulated! Just put me down and let me lie here …’
I knew the nature of the cry that I could hear from the other side of the frosted glass. It was a distressed cry, but at the same time had a very specific quality. It was the cry of a distressed baby who was also exhausted from lo
ng crying. The sort of cry that baby manuals tell you to try and ignore in the small hours, when you’re trying to get them to settle themselves and sleep through the night. But a baby of Roman’s age shouldn’t be left to cry like that, ever. He was a scant four months old, bless the little mite.
I twisted my key in the lock and called out to Emma as I stepped inside. Fallen asleep, was my guess, and I exhaled in exasperation, knowing precisely what I’d find when I got up to her bedroom – Emma spark out, with her earphones in, oblivious to Roman’s wailing, the sound drowned out by whichever cool R&B star was currently flavour of the month.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that I got no response to my call, and, shrugging off my coat, I made my way up the stairs. But when I went into Emma’s bedroom, where Roman was indeed lying in his cot crying, there was no sign of Emma herself. I scooped him up, rubbing his back and nestling him tight against my neck, which he nuzzled against, rooting for milk.
‘I haven’t got anything for you, lovely,’ I whispered, feeling an automatic stab of anger and irritation that he had been left to get into this state. That’s what a baby’s cry did to you. Put you all out of sorts. ‘Where’s mummy, eh?’ I asked him as I carried him out of the room again, his sobs, though no less anguished, at least becoming quieter, now he was at least being cuddled and rocked.