by Casey Watson
Maggie patiently explained that, because of the aggression Tarim had shown towards Emma, contact would continue to remain supervised for the foreseeable future and she wouldn’t be allowed to go to either Tarim or his dad’s house with the baby for at least the next few weeks.
‘It all depends on Tarim,’ she finished, ‘as I’m sure you can appreciate, Emma. He’ll be starting from scratch again, given the way he’s behaved. And he won’t be getting any further chances.’
Emma’s mouth had been set in a thin line as she listened to this. ‘You can’t fucking do that,’ she said now, making me wince. ‘You can’t make promises and then break them whenever you feel like it! This is you lot all over, this is – you make your fucking rules up as you go along! Great,’ she said, ‘this is just fucking great!’
‘Emma,’ I began, anxious to at least bring the bad language under control. But Hannah spoke over me.
‘Emma,’ she said sharply, ‘are you aware that your baby is right here, in his playpen, and that you’re shouting and swearing in front of him?’
Emma looked at her witheringly. ‘He’s eight months, not eight years. I’m not an idiot! He doesn’t understand.’
‘He can hear your tone of voice, though,’ Hannah persisted. ‘And it’s upsetting him. Can’t you see that?’ She was right. Roman was indeed looking anxiously at his mum now. I resisted the urge to pick him up, and instead let Hannah press her point home. ‘And getting back to what you said, actually, we can change the rules, Emma. We can change them whenever we feel we need to, to protect Roman. I’m sorry, but you and Tarim have brought this on yourselves. You are lucky to have Mike and Casey fighting your corner for you, actually, because believe me, in other circumstances, you might have lost more than you bargained for.’
There was a silence then, as we all took this in. Then Emma spoke. She was shaking and I could see tears pooling in her eyes. ‘Well, fuck you!’ she shouted. ‘Fuck you!’
Maggie flinched, Hannah looked stony and now Roman responded, bursting into the sort of wail that meant I could no longer ignore him. And since I was closest, I plucked him from his play pen.
‘You see?’ Hannah said, her patience by now clearly frazzled. ‘Is this what you want for your child? To feel constantly anxious and upset like this? To see his mummy swearing, and with her face black and blue, and letting the man who did it get away with it? Do you think that’s fair on him? Do you think that’s what he wants? To be so scared? To feel you care more for some low-life boyfriend than your own little boy’s welfare?’
The words had come out, I could see, without Hannah really thinking. And she meant well. She just wanted to make Emma see. So I felt a little sorry for her as Emma squared up to her, finger raised and trembling. Glancing at me, as if to acknowledge that she really needed to do this, she scowled at the startled twenty-something in disgust. If looks could have killed, she would have floored her, for sure.
‘You really don’t have a clue, do you? Welcome to my world,’ she said.
For a time after the meeting, I felt hopeful for progress. After the two social workers had gone – Emma had already fled the room, distraught, by then – I had put Roman down for his nap on a makeshift bed within the playpen and gone upstairs to see how she was doing.
And she was crying, curled up foetally, clutching a pillow to her chest and weeping into it. And I knew why, too. She was crying for the childhood she’d never had. For the mother who had always put her men before her little one. Had put the drugs and the alcohol before her too. Oh, it wasn’t that simple – I knew that – these things were always complicated. There was no simple ‘bad person’ tag you could affix. Who knew what demons caused Emma’s mum to fail Emma so badly? Who knew what injustices and cruelties had been visited on her?
But for a child there is no room for excuses, justifications. The best that could be hoped for, long term, was that, at some point in adulthood, she would come to understand why her mum had failed her and learn to deal with it. And I knew why she was so upset, hearing those few words from Hannah – it was because, despite her attitude, she desperately didn’t want to repeat the cycle with Roman. She wanted the best for him. I truly believed that.
I sat down on the bed and stroked her back, and she seemed happy enough to let me. And after a time the crying quietened and she lowered the pillow enough to speak.
‘I fucked up again, didn’t I?’ she said quietly, wiping her good eye with a corner of the pillowcase. The swollen one I noticed she left well alone, so it was obviously still sore, even if less swollen. ‘I’ve just made everything worse for us now, haven’t I?’ she finished. ‘I just get so angry with them. They just don’t understand.’
I told her everything would work out, that all she had to do was keep doing what she was doing with Roman and prove to social services she was a good, responsible mother. I told her that she was a good mum – anyone could see how much she loved Roman. It was just that Hannah and Maggie had to know she was prepared to put him first – and that Tarim understood that if he wanted to play a role then he had to grow up, mend his ways and show he cared for them.
Emma sat up. ‘Casey,’ she said. ‘Would you speak to him, please? He wanted to call you, but I told him best not till I’d asked you. He’s just, like, so sorry. He’s been crying and everything – he knows he did wrong. An’ he’ll do whatever it takes – you know, the family centre and shit, basically – like, everything it takes. He’s so sorry. He just lost it, and he knows he did and he wants to put things right again. Casey, he’s not like you think he is. He really isn’t.’
I patted her. This was not the time to dredge the whole thing up again, even if the image of Tarim crying – hot, self-pitying tears, I didn’t doubt – stuck in my craw. ‘I know,’ I soothed, ‘I know. Let’s just give it a couple of weeks, eh?’ I smoothed a finger across her brow, just above her swollen eye socket. ‘If I speak to him now I might feel much too inclined to give him a piece of my mind, Emma. No, let’s leave it a couple of weeks. Let everything calm down. Let him show that he means it as well as tell us he does, eh?’ I smiled. ‘And I’m not talking flowers here, okay?’
A week passed. Ten days. A run of blistering ones. There was one meeting with Tarim at the same family centre, and though all I saw of him was a glimpse when we picked up Emma and Roman he was at pains to wave manically as we left. He clearly wanted us to like him – to accept him and forgive him – and, in that sense, I did believe his feelings for Emma were genuine. It was just the small matter of leopards and spots. The world was full of men who loved their women to distraction; trouble was that a few of them also saw their women as possessions and, if challenged, saw physical aggression as their right. Was he one such? I really wished I didn’t think so.
In the short term, however, I had a new period to look forward to. It was almost the start of the school summer holidays, which meant no school for Emma and much less baby minding for me, which I didn’t feel disloyal for telling Riley I really welcomed; treasure though Roman was, looking after babies all day was time-consuming. And also limiting – when you had to have a baby in tow at all times, there were lots of small freedoms that had to be curtailed.
No, I was looking forward to being able to spend much more quality time with my grandsons, not to mention my pregnant daughter, and the rest of the family too. I was also pleased that there would be lots of opportunities to do some fun things with the little ones, which would very much include Emma and little Roman.
I was just thinking this, while peeling potatoes for chips, when I heard my mobile chirrup in my bag. It was just after three, which meant Emma should be home within the hour. It was the last day of term, though, so perhaps she’d stay on a bit – bond with her friends, perhaps make plans for some outings.
I quickly wiped my hands and grabbed the phone from the pocket. It was Tash, I could see – Emma’s friend.
‘Casey?’ she said, and I could tell right away that there was something to be concerned abo
ut in her voice.
‘Tash?’ I said. ‘What is it? Are you at school?’
‘We didn’t go in,’ she said. ‘We – um – well, a few of us didn’t, actually. It was, like the last day, an’ – well, we went to this flat, an’ well, she got pissed and – I don’t think she meant to, but – oh, Casey, I’m –’
She was stumbling over her words. She was clearly worse for wear herself. ‘Tash,’ I said, ‘where are you? Where is Emma?’
‘I’m at the hospital –’ she started.
‘Hospital?’
‘Casey, I know she didn’t mean to. She’d just had all this cider. And then some shots, and – then, well, she had like this massive row with Taz then, and –’
‘Tarim? Tarim was there?’ Visions of further violence flooded my brain now.
‘No, no,’ Tash reassured me. So that was something to be grateful for. ‘It was on the phone,’ she went on, ‘but, like, really, really bad. I think he dumped her. An’ she was like “I’ll show him”, and so in the end we called an ambulance and –’
‘Show him by doing what, Tash?’
‘She took some pills, so –’
‘Oh my God. Look love, I need to get down there to you, don’t I? The general hospital? Right. I’m on my way.’
I ended the call and tried to get my head together. I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe she would do this again – what about Roman? Shit, I thought. What about Roman?
I grabbed my phone again, pressed some buttons and connected with Riley, who was thankfully in. That done – and thank goodness, she was round to me in minutes – I hot-footed it over to the hospital.
On the way there I felt uncharacteristically frightened. I was a born optimist, hard-wired to look on the bright side, but right now I couldn’t seem to grab a single positive thought. They were all crowded out by so many negatives. Chief among them, of course, was the daddy of all the bad ones I could imagine – that Emma would this time have succeeded where last time she failed.
It was a chilling thought. She’d been drunk, perhaps very drunk – Tash had mentioned shots – and kids regularly managed to kill themselves with drugs and alcohol without even trying, didn’t they? And if you took that in tandem with another row with Tarim … I gripped the steering wheel and willed the car to eat the miles up faster. It hardly bore thinking about.
So when I got to the hospital and was taken through it was with a massive surge of relief that I heard the brisk but kindly nurse say the words I most needed to hear, namely, ‘She’s fine.’
‘What a silly girl, though,’ she added, once she’d established I was Emma’s foster mum, ‘because, of course, she was in such a to-do about the idea of us pumping out her stomach, so it’s just a blessing she’d got so inebriated that she sicked the whole lot up again. And that, thankfully, there weren’t really very many pills in her, because otherwise we would have had to insist. Boyfriend blues, I hear,’ she added, her matter-of-fact manner acting like balm on my emotionally frazzled mindset. But then she sighed. ‘Seriously though, Mrs Watson, I don’t mind telling you we’ve had very stern words with her. Easy to blame the hormones, I suppose, but you’ll perhaps want to keep an eye on her. An extremely silly thing to do at any time – especially for a not-quite fifteen-year-old – but a particularly stupid thing to do when pregnant. This could have had a very different outcome, as I’m sure you’re all too aware.’
I did a double take. Had she really just said the word pregnant?
‘Did you just –’ I began.
She blinked at me. ‘You mean you didn’t know she was pregnant?’
I shook my head.
‘No,’ I confessed, ‘I didn’t.’
She returned my look of shock with a ‘been there and done that’ expression.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘and, well – now you do know – yes, she is. Around ten weeks or so, she reckons, give or take.’ She gestured to the furthest of a row of A&E cubicles. ‘I think you’d better go and have a chat with her, don’t you?’
My mind was a blur of a different kind as I walked the dozen or so feet to the cubicle. When had this happened, then? I counted back. Must have been immediately Tarim was released from jail, must have been. Which seemed logical. Oh, the stupid, stupid girl – how could she have been so reckless? And stupid me, for not having a conversation with her about contraception at any point either. I could have kicked myself, much good that would do now. And then another thought zoomed up and slapped me round the face for good measure. Was that what those rows had been about? Did Tarim already know she was pregnant? Did he do the maths and work out that it couldn’t have been his? I wished I had a calendar. It was tight – it was conceivable that it could have been someone else’s. What a mess.
And more to the point, what would happen now?
Chapter 17
Emma had her back to me when I entered, lying curled up on her side, presumably sleeping. Tash was sitting in a chair, glued to her mobile. She was massively pregnant herself now and I felt a rush of both sympathy and gratitude. This was the last thing she needed to be dealing with.
She hauled herself to her feet as I parted the curtain. ‘Oh, you’re here,’ she said. ‘Great. I’ve got to get back or I’ll get into trouble.’
I didn’t comment that I imagined she was probably in trouble anyway, what with bunking off school and going to some lad’s flat. But they would go easy on her, I was sure, given her condition.
‘How will you get home?’ I asked her, shrugging off my jacket. The place was roasting. ‘Are you going to be okay? You look like you’re due any day.’
She waggled her phone at me. ‘I’ve sorted a lift, thanks. I just texted my mate. He’s going to come and get me now.’ Then she turned to Emma. ‘You okay, babes? Text me, then, yeah?’
I saw Emma nod slightly, so she obviously wasn’t asleep, just weak and sick and resting her eyes. As I came round the side of the bed I noticed there was a small cardboard bowl by her pillow. She looked impossibly tiny. Frighteningly young.
‘Well, thanks for having the presence of mind to call an ambulance, Tash,’ I said. I smiled at her. ‘You did well. You did brilliantly. Emma’s lucky to have such a wonderful friend.’
At which Tash blushed to the roots of her hair, bless her.
Emma rolled onto her back and groaned as soon as Tash left us. And almost immediately sat up instead, retching. I grabbed the bowl and passed it to her, then scooped her hair up and held it, while she threw up a cupful of what mostly looked like water.
She sat back again, spent, looking a fetching shade of green. ‘I’ve really done it this time, haven’t I, Casey?’
I reached for the jug beside her and poured her half a glass of water. ‘Just sips,’ I said. ‘Don’t gulp it or you’ll set your stomach off again.’ Then I pulled the chair closer and sat on it. ‘So,’ I said, ‘how long have you known?’
She sniffed. ‘That I was pregnant? Pretty much since I missed the first period. And then when I didn’t come on again.’ She groaned. ‘God, I feel so ill.’
‘So you told the nurse …’
‘I thought I’d better. In case, you know – because of the pills and that and everything. And if they wanted to pump my stomach …’
Which wouldn’t have mattered, I knew that much, but there was no point in telling Emma that. In fact, her thinking it might had been a blessing, in some ways. Had she not been worried, when would I have known? Not till it was too late to do anything about it? ‘And it’s definitely Tarim’s?’ I asked.
She looked aghast. ‘Of course it’s Tarim’s – who else’s would it be?’
‘Love, after the things you’ve been saying to me – and that shiner he gave you … Not to mention his mad drunken rant outside our house – well, you can’t blame me for asking the question, can you?’
Emma shook her head. Her hair looked like strands of oily spaghetti, and her clothes – a grimy T-shirt and pastel skinny jeans – looked like they’d been dunked in th
e pasta water, too. What the hell had she been doing all day? And with her pregnant, as well. Drowning her sorrows? I decided this wasn’t the time to ask her about the latest spat with Tarim. There was a bigger thing at stake now – a potentially equally grim situation. She was a few weeks shy of fifteen, that was all. Still a child. She’d have two kids before she hit sixteen – it was unthinkable.
‘Love,’ I said quietly, ‘have you thought about what you’re going to do now? I mean, you don’t have to have another baby – you know that, don’t you?’
Emma turned towards me, her expression one of shock.
‘I’m not getting rid of it,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in abortions. I’m keeping it.’
I opened my mouth to speak and then shut it again, quickly. Much as my knee-jerk reaction was to start up a dialogue to try and convince her otherwise, it wasn’t my place to. Or my professional remit. I had no right. Young as she was, it was her body, her baby, her absolute right to choose, and it wouldn’t be me who tried to interfere with that. If other people – other professionals – wanted to say something about it, then well and good. But it wouldn’t be me who’d be imposing any belief system on her. There was an option and I had mentioned it, as was my duty. But there it stopped. What happened now was out of my hands.
They decided to keep Emma in overnight. So I travelled home alone, to find a concerned Mike and Riley at home waiting for me, anxious for more detail than that which I’d already texted, the gist of which was just on way back now, Emma recovering, but also pregnant, followed up with a sincerely felt arrgghh!
Not that any of us felt the breeziness the exclamation points might have suggested.
‘How on earth will she cope, mum?’ Riley wanted to know, shaking her head. ‘She struggles to cope with the responsibility of looking after one baby, so how the hell is she ever going to manage two?’
‘Especially with that waste of space for a boyfriend,’ Mike added. And he wasn’t even up to speed with the latest development. He might have an even stronger description in mind once he was. Though, if it was true that Tarim had dumped her, so much the better for her, as far as I was concerned.