Too Hurt to Stay: The True Story of a Troubled Boy’s Desperate Search for a Loving Home

by Casey Watson

  Now Spencer turned to look at me, visibly calming, if only a little. ‘He tried to take Connor and Adam off me,’ he told me. ‘An’ he called me a gay boy!’

  Looking at his expression, I could see that this definitely was not the best time to deliver a homily about sticks and stones. ‘Well, whatever,’ I said. ‘You’re grounded. And I’d like you to go to your room now. And while you’re up there you can use the time to reflect on what you’ve done. While I speak to Mike. Go on. Go.’

  He jumped up, and as he did so I saw his hard expression begin to crumple. ‘You’re going to send me away now, aren’t you? You just want to get rid of me. You do, don’t you? Just like my fucking MUM!’

  ‘No, Spencer,’ I said firmly, watching his eyes pool with anguished tears. ‘Don’t be so silly. Of course we don’t want to get rid of you. Though you’ll be losing more points now, for using bad language, so if you don’t want to make things any worse than they are I suggest you do as you’re told and get up to that bedroom. And stay there, okay? Now, move it.’

  Back in the kitchen I sat down wearily at the table. Was this how he’d always manipulated his parents, perhaps? By doing something wrong and, when they tried to discipline him and teach him the consequences, accuse them of wanting them to be shot of him? If so, then no wonder they were weary and at a loss to know what to do. And where did this anger – this hideously cruel streak – come from? If it was true that the other kids were all behaviourally normal, then why was this kid so challenging to manage? It didn’t stack up. Didn’t feel logical. And that look on his face had been something to behold. Was it possible he did have some deep-rooted psychological defect, just as his parents had said?

  Mike came in moments later, and I told him what had happened and, as ever, he was logic and calm personified – especially in the face of my anxiety about Spencer indeed being born ‘not quite right’.

  ‘Love,’ he said, ‘what’s happened isn’t evidence of that. Yes, he’s a funny lad, and he’s clearly got his issues, but he’s also a bit of a street kid, it seems to me. I know that sounds ludicrous for an eight-year-old, but it’s true. He’s clearly been allowed to run wild from an early age, and that’s hardened him up, way more so than other children of his age – and this sort of thing is all about territory. Anyway, you don’t know the full story, do you? Who knows what this other kid said or did to set him off? There’ll be more to it than you think, you wait and see. Boys have scraps. They –’ Mike stopped. The front door had banged. Was still banging – or at least, someone was furiously banging on it. ‘Who on earth’s doing that?’ asked Mike incredulously. ‘They’ll cave the glass in!’

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Probably a deputation of kids for him …’

  I left Mike unlacing his boots in the kitchen while I went to tell Spencer’s ‘friends’ that he wouldn’t be coming out again today. Or tomorrow, or the day after …

  But it wasn’t a gang of children. It was one woman. One very angry woman in her twenties, who looked as if she was ready to kill.

  ‘Would you like me to kick your fucking head in?’ she raged at me, stabbing her finger threateningly close to my face. ‘You keep that fucking animal away from my son,’ she screamed at me, ‘or believe me, I will come back and I’ll fucking kill you!’

  Mike, obviously hearing her, was by my side in seconds. ‘Do you mind!’ he snapped. ‘My wife has done absolutely nothing wrong. So I’d be grateful if you could speak to her a bit more civilly. Now, do you want to come inside and discuss this calmly? I’m assuming your Aaron’s mum?’ He paused. ‘Though it’s up to you, obviously …’

  The woman’s expression showed no sign of softening. She was just much, much too angry and a part of me wondered if I wouldn’t be the same in such circumstances with my own kids.

  ‘Yes, I’m fucking Aaron’s mum and no I don’t want to fucking come in! You –’ she stabbed the finger again, this time at Mike. ‘You want to control your kid a bit better, you hear me? And, while I’m at it, you’ll also be getting a bill for my son’s glasses.’

  ‘Glasses?’ Mike asked.

  ‘Yes, glasses!’ the woman snapped. ‘The glasses your son decided to smash before he beat my son up!’

  Our expressions were obviously clear to her. ‘Oh, didn’t tell you that bit, did he? Oh, yes, lovely kid, he is. Took them off him and jumped up and down on them. Even told him he was “fucking blind now!” You’re lucky I’m not going to the cops with this, trust me. I still might. You’re going to pay for those glasses, you hear me?’

  I stood, dazed and appalled, as Mike tried to calm the woman down. I listened as he explained that Spencer was in care, that he was a troubled child and that we were his temporary foster carers, that we were doing our best and that this definitely wouldn’t be happening again. And that, of course, we would pay for new glasses.

  He might as well have been talking to her in Serbo-Croat.

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Fucking great! So we all just have to put up with that, do we? Fucking council. Sending kids like that to live with decent people. We should be told people like you live on our streets.’

  Mike did a brilliant job in keeping his cool. He just continued to apologise to the woman, until, eventually, she huffed off down the path. But I was really upset. Really properly upset. To think people would see us not as doing our best, but as nuisance neighbours. Pariahs. That really hurt me. Little did I know that, when it came to falling out with all the neighbours, in taking on Spencer we’d hardly scratched the surface.

  Chapter 12

  Because of the severity of Spencer’s actions, we did ground him, and this time there would be no discussions about his points chart – we decided to keep him in for a whole week.

  Not that he put up any sort of argument. When we told him he didn’t try to negotiate his way out of it, or lessen the ‘sentence’, just accepted it meekly and apologetically. He also tried hard to be extra well behaved. He spent the next few days coming in from school and playing quietly with jigsaws and board games with me, and by the time the weekend came around he’d still not so much as even asked when he might next be allowed to play out.

  Spencer also seemed keen to show us how much it mattered that he get back into our good books again. On the following Saturday he positively threw himself into the task of helping Mike clear out the shed. It was a horrible job, and one that turned up, like a bad penny, every autumn. Year in year out, it was always the same. We’d spend most of the year filling it with the usual family detritus: broken bikes, broken lawn mowers, broken toys and appliances, plus all the boxes that had contained their replacements. Mike would then insist, every year, that we clear it all out, in order that we could start refilling it after Christmas with the next round of discarded stuff that was too big for the bins and which had been edged out of commission by Santa Claus.

  Spencer took to this job with real gusto. I didn’t know quite how he felt about the impending festivities, much less how he felt about where he might be, but he threw himself into it, declaring himself not at all afraid of spiders, and despite all that had happened recently my heart went out to him.

  But he really stunned us by his announcement a couple of evenings later. Perhaps – just perhaps – we were turning a corner after all.

  ‘Casey, Mike,’ he said, as the three of us sat down to eat our tea, ‘can I talk to you both for a minute?’

  ‘Oh-oh, that sounds serious,’ joked Mike, putting down his cutlery. ‘Come on, then. What have we done wrong?’

  Spencer giggled and gave Mike a playful punch on the arm. ‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘It’s that I’ve been thinking. You know, about what a proper pain in the butt I’ve been lately, and everything.’

  Mike looked at him, wide-eyed. ‘You, Spence? Surely not.’

  ‘Oh, Mi-ike!’ Spencer moaned. ‘Casey, tell him.’

  ‘Shh, Mike,’ I said. ‘Let poor Spencer speak.’

  Mike apologised. ‘Go on, then, lad,’ he said. />
  ‘Well, like I was saying,’ Spencer went on, ‘I’ve been a right pain, haven’t I? So I’ve decided that instead of going to bed at seven, like I’m supposed to, I’m going to go at six. You know, so’s you can have a bit more time together. A bit more peace.’

  ‘Oh, Spencer,’ I said, touched, even though a teeny cynical bit of me was waiting for the deal-making ‘and if’ that must surely follow it. ‘That’s really very thoughtful of you, but six o’clock is way too early for you to be going to bed. There’s no need, honest. And besides, we like having time with you. We wouldn’t do this job if we didn’t, would we?’

  His tone was firm, however, when he answered. ‘I’ve made up my mind,’ he said. ‘I’m off to bed at six, starting from tonight. I won’t go to sleep or anything. I’ll just read or something, till I’m tired. You deserve it.’

  His expression was so sweet and sincere that even though the cynical part was still nudging me for attention I didn’t have the heart to turn down his offer. Who cared that it might be to butter us up for some as yet undisclosed reason? If it turned out that it was because he wanted to wheedle an extra half hour’s peer time once he was allowed to go out and play again, then was that such a bad thing anyway? Better to learn give and take – better to learn that doing nice things for people usually made them think well of you – than to rail against boundaries and think you could do just as you liked. No, this was fine. ‘Well, thank you for thinking about us,’ I said. ‘That’s very thoughtful, Spencer.’

  Even so, for the next couple of nights I would sneak up and listen outside his bedroom door, wondering exactly what he might be up to. I didn’t imagine he’d go back to gouging holes in his bedroom walls, but, well, given the circumstances, I just couldn’t help but feel suspicious.

  But after four days in which nothing untoward seemed to be happening – no suspicious noises, no hint of mischief – Mike told me to calm down and just accept it for what it was: Spencer’s way of showing us he was trying to be good for us. And, as I’d said, even if he did have ulterior motives, better this than thieving or getting angry, or running away. Bless him, I decided. This was progress.

  But on the fifth night the true extent of our naivety was about to hit us squarely in the face.

  I’d just sat down to watch EastEnders when the doorbell rang. I’d been looking forward to it, too, having not caught up with it for so long. At first I thought it might be Kieron, who’d mentioned something about coming around to use our printer during the week. But then I decided it couldn’t be. Kieron was too routine-obsessed for that. He’d have called and texted first to make sure not only that we were home, but also that there was definitely ink and paper.

  ‘Watch carefully, and tell me anything I miss,’ I ordered Mike, as I got up from the sofa and went out into the hall. Once there, I then unlocked and opened the door. And then froze. I couldn’t quite take in the reality of what I was seeing, which was an angry-looking man I didn’t recognise holding by the scruff of his scrawny eight-year-old neck an equally angry-looking Spencer.

  It took me several seconds to even think about speaking. This just couldn’t be. He’d gone to bed. The doors were locked. How could he be standing on my front doorstep? Wriggling on my front doorstep, in fact.

  ‘What?’ I finally managed. ‘I don’t understand … what’s going on?’

  The man was quick to supply me with an answer. ‘I’ve just caught this little prat in my bedroom is what’s going on,’ he said. ‘Going through my stuff. Almost got away with it, too, didn’t you?’ He glared down at Spencer. ‘Except he didn’t count on my wife being in the en suite at the time, did you?’ Now he also gave Spencer a little shake.

  As had happened only so very recently, Mike had heard the man’s raised voice, and, once again, had come to join me at the door. He looked as stupefied as I had, his gaze darting from the man to me to Spencer.

  ‘He’s been in their bedroom,’ was all I could manage to say.

  ‘Thieving!’ the man added, for good measure.

  ‘You!’ barked Mike. ‘Inside with Casey. Right away.’

  His tone was obviously sufficiently strong that the man released Spencer, presumably satisfied Mike would give him the sort of hiding he deemed appropriate. Spencer shot in and I hurried with him back into the living room. I shut the door on the two men, who were having a heated exchange now, and also the TV and my quiet half hour in Albert Square.

  Once again, a cynical part of me couldn’t help but observe that in Spencer we had a ready-made plot line. But the enormity of what he’d done meant my wry humour was quickly gone. I put my hands on my hips and reconfigured my face into an angry frown. Neither was difficult. I was absolutely furious.

  ‘Spill,’ I commanded. ‘No lies. No excuses. No justifications. You’ve been caught, so there’s nothing you can say that will get you out of this. The whole truth. I need to know everything.’

  He’d barely opened his mouth when Mike came back in and joined us. ‘And it had better be the truth, mind,’ he told him. ‘Better match up exactly to what I’ve just been told or you’ll find yourself grounded till you’re 16. I mean it!’

  And, outmanoeuvred, Spencer did tell us everything. Pretty much every night, since the first night of his six o’clock, self-imposed, terribly thoughtful curfew, Spencer had been climbing out of his skylight, crawling across our roof, shimmying down a drainpipe onto the roof of the (now beautifully tidy) shed, and from there scampering across a fence into the next street. There he’d been meeting up with a seven-year-old boy – another one he’d recently befriended.

  They too had a shed, and, with another bout of gymnastics, he’d then been climbing into the boy’s bedroom. From here he had been on a number of sorties, wandering around much of the upstairs, snooping for things he might pinch.

  Tonight, however, he had finally been scuppered. He’d gone into the boy’s parents’ room and, seeing a pair of discarded jeans on the floor, had set about checking all the pockets in the hopes of finding money. At this point the boy’s mother had emerged from the en suite and had caught him both red faced and red handed.

  Bizarrely, the first thought that crossed my mind as Spencer admitted this was that I hoped she had her modesty covered.

  ‘I can barely believe what you’ve just told us,’ I spluttered. And I couldn’t. I was simply lost for words. Quite apart from the danger of playing Mission Impossible on the neighbourhood roofs and fences, how on earth had Spencer managed to persuade the boy in the next street to let him do that? Not climbing into his bedroom – to an impressionable seven-year-old, I could see it might all seem rather exciting – but to give him carte blanche to simply saunter round his house? It beggared belief. But then, did it? Where Spencer was concerned, I was rapidly re-writing the credibility handbook. His latest escapade sounded so cartoonish it was almost funny. Except it wasn’t. It wasn’t funny at all. He could have been seriously injured, or even killed!

  ‘You silly, silly boy!’ I berated him now. ‘Do you not realise how dangerous what you’ve been doing was? You were risking your life. What were you thinking?’ My voice had gone up a couple of octaves as the full implication began to hit me. I was also very angry. Where did I start with this child?

  ‘What do you care?’ Spencer answered, in a much calmer voice than I’d managed. ‘Anyway, I’m like a spy, like that man on Mission Impossible. I can run just as well on rooftops as most people can on the ground.’

  That he’d mentioned the same movie I’d thought of hit home for me. He really did seem to think that. He was deadly serious. He meant it.

  ‘Spencer, that’s a really silly, childish thing to say. You know full well that what you see in the movies is all made-up stuff. You know better than that!’ I snapped.

  I brought myself up short then. Did he? Did he really? And why wouldn’t he say childish things? He was a child. He seemed so streetwise, so sassy and so big for his age that I kept forgetting that this was a little boy of eight.
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br />   Mike could obviously see we’d get nowhere. Not tonight, anyway. ‘Go back to bed, Spencer,’ he said wearily. ‘Just go back to bed, and stay there. We’ll deal with all this in the morning. And that window, as well … Go on. Hop it!’

  Mike’s voice seemed to jerk Spencer’s brain to a new place. Head now lowered submissively, he crossed the room, then stopped and turned in the doorway, looking once again like the troubled, vulnerable little boy he really was.

  ‘Mike, d’you swear on me mother’s life that you won’t send me away again?’

  Mike sighed heavily. ‘It’s a bit late to be worrying about that, isn’t it, lad? But no, Spencer. That’s not the plan. Never was. Now get to bed.’

  Spencer nodded and disappeared off up the stairs.

  ‘God,’ I said, once he’d gone, ‘what on earth are we going to do with this child?’

  ‘Call John, I think, love. Get some advice from him in the morning. The guy from Mission Impossible?’ He shook his head. ‘What next?’

  I smiled, but the reality of Spencer’s flights of fancy was very serious. ‘I’m hoping he’ll agree we can just ground him until further notice.’

  Mike shook his head. ‘Yes, and I’ll pop down to the DIY store and see if I can knock up a cell, shall I? Can’t see how else we’re going to keep him indoors, can you? Come on. Must be nearly time for Police, Camera, Action! Perhaps we can pick up a few tips …’

  Happily, John agreed that the best thing would be for us to keep Spencer under house arrest (not his words, but definitely how it was beginning to feel) until he could come up for a proper progress meeting the following Friday. ‘And let’s see how the next contact visit goes, as well, shall we?’ he added. ‘Which I was going to call you about anyway. Will next Saturday work for you two?’

  I checked the calendar on the kitchen wall as I spoke to him. ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ I said, pencilling it in. ‘Well, at least I hope it will be …’