Nowhere to Go

by Casey Watson

  In the end just Kieron and I went, as it made no sense to leave the house empty – Tyler might show up there, after all. So, leaving Mike to hold the fort, we drove down to the town centre, following Kieron’s directions, fetching up at what used to be the old central bus station. A disused, concrete area, surrounded by an overgrown patch of woodland, it was a natural magnet for bored teenagers and those with mischief on their minds, as it was away from the main streets now and not overlooked.

  It had little else to commend it as a place for kids to gather and I wondered, as I always did, just where kids of that age were supposed to gather – something they were naturally drawn to do – particularly those who didn’t have welcoming homes to invite their friends into. It was a bleak part of the town, badly in need of regeneration, and with a bank of smelly, much graffiti-ed shelters at the back. It was grim, and put me in mind of a post-apocalyptic movie.

  ‘This is just so sad,’ I whispered as we climbed out of the car and made our way across to where we’d seen the glow of a small bonfire and the young people silhouetted by it. Close up they all looked so horrifyingly young.

  ‘Oh, this is nothing, Mum,’ Kieron said. ‘There’s a couple of places much worse than this – proper hardcore. But that tends to be more the old alkies and so on. This is mainly school kids.’

  Yes, I thought sadly, school kids who were often absent from school, puffing on skunk, necking cheap vodka and sniffing aerosols. I’d seen a few of them in my time, for sure. And seen the effects, as well, more to the point. Not to mention having read such frightening things about strong weed, and the potentially catastrophic effects it could have on young minds; science that was only now becoming apparent.

  Would Tyler be here? I both hoped he was, because I wanted to find him, and at the same time hoped he wasn’t. He was only 12, and I couldn’t help but cling to the idea that he might just be round Cameron’s playing some shoot-’em-up on an Xbox, so engrossed that he was unaware of the time.

  I was disabused of that notion in moments. Kieron was a few steps ahead of me as we crossed the scrubby ground and I guessed there was no major dispersal going on because they both recognised Kieron, who I knew cultivated relationships with these kids, and, with me being five foot nothing, probably assumed I was just another teen.

  ‘Yo, Jamie,’ he called out. ‘How’s it going?’

  It was only as we got close that I could see anxious faces beginning to scrutinise me properly, and for a moment I wondered if they’d all go haring off, just like me and my mates used to do when we were 13 or 14 and would be smoking the proverbial fags behind the park pavilion.

  How things had changed, I thought. Such innocent times.

  ‘K,’ the nearest lad said, which would in other circumstances have tickled me – was that what they knew him as? But not these.

  They clasped hands, and even as they did so I could sense a couple of the younger kids melting into the shadows, and it was when one moved that I realised I was looking straight at Cameron – well, someone I thought I recognised as Cameron anyway; it was difficult to be sure in the dark. One thing that I could see, however, was that he hadn’t really noticed me. He was sitting off at the side, his back against the one remaining piece of glass at the back of the furthest shelter and, surprisingly, seemed oblivious to our arrival.

  Kieron was chatting to the boy called Jamie, explaining that we’d mislaid Tyler, couching it in terms that made it sound a million miles from ‘who-is-under-a-supervision-order-and-this-is-serious’ kind of talk. I was very impressed. One hint of authority and it would have probably meant a total shut-down. There was a code, I knew, and it was part of their lore that it wasn’t broken. It would have been ‘No, I ain’t seen no one’ all round.

  But it soon became academic anyway. I touched Kieron’s arm. ‘That boy over there? The one sitting under that far shelter in the red hoodie? I’m sure that’s Cameron. Shall I go and speak to him? See if he knows where Tyler might be?’

  I felt a new hope flare. That with Cameron being here and there being no sign of Tyler, perhaps they’d been together earlier and had since parted company. Perhaps Tyler was already back home.

  ‘Let’s go and see, shall we?’ Kieron said, nodding, and it took us no more than half a dozen strides to be in a position to see that just beyond Cameron was another lad, also sitting with his back against the glass, and who I’d not previously spotted in the gloom. He had one earbud in his ear and I realised he was sharing an iPod with a girl who was sitting on the other side of him. He was obviously listening to music, because though his eyes were half shut his head was nodding rhythmically, along with the girl’s.

  I felt relief wrapped in gloom. It was Tyler.

  He looked stoned. And, perhaps because of that, he was perfectly happy to see us. There was certainly no kind of scene or resistance. ‘You coming home, love?’ I asked him, and after blinking at me a couple of times he took out the earbud, handing it to the girl who was attached to the other end of it, and got unsteadily to his feet. ‘Sure,’ he said, brushing ineffectually at the dust on his trousers.

  And at that point I was glad no one else was involved because he was silly and giggly, his pupils like black moons in his already dark eyes. A proper little stoner.

  ‘Where’s your phone, Ty?’ Kieron remembered to ask him as we flanked him and herded him back to my car.

  Tyler patted his trouser pocket – it felt so incongruous that he was still in school uniform – then pulled it out with a dreamy smile. ‘Always safe!’ he slurred.

  ‘Well, at least that’s one bit of good news,’ Kieron said.

  Yes, I thought miserably. But only one.

  And the day wasn’t done with being unkind to us yet. We were home 20 minutes later and I hurried Kieron back out, so he wouldn’t be too late for tea. I knew Lauren would understand but I still felt guilty to have landed all that on them both when they’d both had full days at work already.

  Mike and I then put Tyler to bed. There was no point in even trying to talk to him, much less remonstrate with or lecture him. That would have to wait till he was sober and free of the effects of whatever he’d taken, something we didn’t as yet even know.

  ‘I suppose I could have asked Cameron,’ I said to Mike, once we were back downstairs clutching mugs of coffee, ‘but at the time it seemed the best thing was just to get him and go.’

  ‘I would have done the same, love, don’t worry,’ Mike said. ‘And would you have found out anyway? If they’re all stoned, would anyone have anything sensible to tell you? No, you did the right thing. And the best thing is for him to sleep it off now.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘Are you on first watch or am I?’

  I laughed too – also without humour: what a night we had in store. I’d been around enough to know he was probably not in imminent danger, but you never knew. And, in any event, he might be sick. No, vigilance was all in these kinds of situations, which I thought was what must have been the cause of Mike’s heavy sigh. But apparently not. ‘Case,’ he said, ‘there’s something else.’

  ‘Something else?’ I said, conscious of his serious expression. ‘What sort of something else? End of the world something else?’

  ‘Not quite,’ he said. Then he shook his head. ‘No, not at all. It’s to do with your mum and dad –’

  ‘Oh, God,’ I said, frightened now. ‘What? Is Dad okay?’

  He was quick to reassure me. ‘No, no, love – I just told you – not the end of the world. He’s absolutely fine. No, it’s about Tyler again.’

  I was confused now. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, you know after you and Kieron left? Well, I had this brainwave. It was only an outside chance, admittedly, but it occurred to me that he might have gone round there. Silly, I know –’

  ‘That’s not silly.’

  ‘Well, it is a bit – they would have called you, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Not if they thought I already knew he was round there. Which he wasn�
�t, of course, but – sorry. Go on.’

  ‘Well, I was telling them what had happened – how you and Kieron had gone out to look for him and, you know – just saying that we were worried about him, how things have been since his birthday and so on, and your mum told me …’

  He paused.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That your dad had seen him take a tenner out of your mum’s purse when he was round there last week, basically. She said they didn’t want to believe it, but they had no choice, apparently. Your dad was watering the window box under the kitchen window, and saw him doing it with his own eyes.’

  He drained his coffee cup and stood up – headed to the kettle again, no doubt. It was going to be a long night, after all, bless him.

  ‘Did Tyler see him?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ Mike said. ‘And your dad decided not to say anything till he spoke to your mum. They were going to tell us about it at the weekend. Bless them – they felt awful about it, and really didn’t want to get him into more trouble …’

  ‘I think we’re past that point now, don’t you?’ I said, handing him my empty mug.

  Great, I thought. Brilliant. I put a hand on Mike’s arm. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ I said. ‘You get off to bed. You’ve got work, haven’t you?’ I smiled again, grimly. What else could you do?

  ‘I’ll do first watch and second watch,’ I told him. I doubted I’d be sleeping a wink after all.

  Chapter 14

  I hardly knew where to start. After a night during which I probably wore out a whole swathe of landing carpet with my to-ing and fro-ing, I fell into a deep sleep at around 6 a.m., only to be rudely awakened half an hour later by Mike having his shower.

  I dragged myself up to a sitting position and fell gratefully upon the mug of coffee he’d left for me, the events of the previous evening clamouring for attention in my head. Where did I start? Who did I talk to first? What should be the plan?

  With consciousness, however, came calm and clarity. I needed to speak to Tyler to get some more facts, finish writing the log that I’d begun the previous evening, then email it to John, and copy it to Will. I’d also hit upon another potentially helpful plan in the wee hours, but I needed to run it by Mike before discussing it – ideally before he headed off to work.

  ‘Tyler’s okay,’ was the first thing he said when he returned from the bathroom. ‘Awake, busy texting, contrite – oh – and grey.’ He shook his head as he dried himself. ‘Things we do, eh?’ he mused. ‘One minute, our lives are all quiet on the western front – well, comparatively – the next we’re in the middle of a bloody war zone.’

  ‘Did you get much sleep?’ I asked him, feeling guilty about the dark smudges under his eyes, even though I knew I had no reason to. It had been a joint decision to take on Tyler, after all. But, still …

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘More than you did, love, at any rate. Are we sending him into school? Because you look like you need to schedule a “power nap”, or whatever they’re called.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch,’ I said. But then I nodded my agreement. ‘I feel about as powerful as a wet dishcloth right now,’ I agreed. ‘Plus I have some important conversations to have, don’t I? Yes,’ I said, ‘I think he should go to school. Christ, he went to bed at 9 p.m. and slept right through, so he can hardly claim he’s too tired, can he? And if he has a hangover, well, it’ll be a lesson learned, won’t it? One of several we have to start teaching him as a matter of some urgency. God,’ I said with feeling, yanking the duvet off and swinging my legs round. ‘I need a bacon and egg sandwich and I need it now.’

  I felt much better once I was downstairs with my hands wrapped around another mug of coffee and my lovely husband doing his thing with the frying pan. I’d looked in on Tyler, of course, but had kept it brief and to the point. That we’d talk later, that he was going to school and that he needed to be downstairs for his breakfast in 40 minutes, all of which pronouncements were met with meek, whey-faced acceptance. In truth, I think he wanted to go to school – it was probably way preferable to spending the day with me lecturing him – and I was happy that, today, he would come straight back home again; that I didn’t need to baby him by insisting on picking him up. It was all about trust, and it mattered that he didn’t abuse mine. I figured that he knew what the consequences would be.

  I had no idea why I felt so confident that Tyler wouldn’t abuse our faith in him, but, for some reason, despite the disappearing acts – of both him and that tenner – I did. Lack of sleep-induced mania? Perhaps. In any event, while he got showered and dressed upstairs, I quickly ran my half-plan by Mike, so that I could put it to John when I spoke to him later.

  We had a friend called Bob, who was a policeman. We’d known him since our twenties, and though he’d moved away we’d kept in touch. And now, following a divorce, he was back in our area, and I knew he wouldn’t mind helping out. ‘So I was thinking that perhaps we could get in touch with him,’ I suggested to Mike. ‘See if he’ll maybe do some work with Tyler – you know, educating him about the dangers of drugs; the sort of horrible things they can lead to.’

  Mike nodded. ‘Well, he’s certainly the one to do it,’ he agreed. ‘I doubt there’s much he hasn’t seen, don’t you?’

  He was right. Bob had been on the drug squad for years, and, back in the day, would regale us with tales of dealers and addicts and situations that were invariably pretty shocking – tales that underlined that everything in the movie Trainspotting was true. But Tyler was an innocent still – well, comparatively – and although he already had good reason to fear drugs (that being how he lost his mother) I knew how easily a young boy could blank all the rational thinking that was required if you were going to keep saying ‘no’.

  ‘I think it would be so good for him,’ I said. ‘I know he might only have been smoking a bit of weed, but, God, he’s so young still …’

  ‘And weed isn’t weed any more, is it?’ Mike pointed out. ‘Not like the stuff that used to be around. It’s potent. And pretty scary. Could do all sorts of damage.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘plus I’m hoping it will reassure John that he can leave us to handle things, rather than bringing in anyone else. Or running it by Mr Smart and probably making everything even worse. I mean, I know it’ll all have to go on his file, but I’m sure I can convince John we can handle it.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that for a minute,’ Mike said, chuckling as he plonked a mouth-watering-looking doorstep in front of me. ‘But right now, see how well you can handle that.’

  The things we were currently dealing with – a kid smoking dope and stealing a tenner from a family member – were nothing we hadn’t dealt with before. And in the big scheme of behaviours we’d had to address as foster carers over the years this was relatively mild.

  So once I’d got on the outside of my sandwich and topped up my reserves of positivity I was able to put things in the right kind of perspective, i.e. bad, but not heart-in-mouth bad. And when Tyler came down and I could see the remorse in his manner, I thought that, actually, there was much to be positive about. He knew he’d done wrong – he understood that he had let Mike and me down. It didn’t matter so much if he didn’t think his high-jinks with dope were that dangerous – I’d recruit Bob to address that particular childish misconception – but it did matter that he understood that he’d let us down personally, and felt bad. And in that I felt we did have a result.

  ‘Are you gonna ring social services and have them take me back now?’ was almost the first thing he said, once he’d told me he was sorry and he was absolutely ravenous. Which wasn’t surprising, since, though he hadn’t been sick at any point, he probably hadn’t eaten anything of substance since he’d left school the previous afternoon.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ I said mildly, while I stirred the porridge he’d requested. ‘Because that’s not the way me and Mike do things.’ I nearly added – instinctively – that ‘sending kids back’ wasn’t an option for parents, was it? And thank
God my mouth wasn’t too far ahead of my brain, because that’s precisely what his own ‘parents’ had done. ‘The way I see it, Tyler, is that we took you in with a plan – a plan to teach you a bit more about life’s realities – how to approach it, how to behave, how to treat people …’ I glanced across at the fridge-freezer. ‘That’s what that chart there is for. So you can learn that the best way to live a useful and happy life is to behave well and treat people with respect.’

  I put the porridge in front of him, then pulled out another chair and sat down on it. ‘Tyler,’ I said, ‘we’re cross you put us through so much nonsense last night, of course we are. Look at the bags under my eyes – I’ve got to go to Tesco looking like this. But mostly we’re worried about you. Yes, it’s your body and once you’re an adult you can choose to fill your body up with stupid drugs, but right now you’re a child and we’re here to keep you from harm. And now you’re almost a teenager, that’s not a case of keeping you physically contained, like you were a toddler. It’s a case of giving you the wherewithal to control your own behaviour; of you learning that if you’re hell bent on being irresponsible, that’s a choice – a choice you make – and that there will almost always be consequences.’

  It was a little speech that would come back to haunt me, but right now I decided it was enough to be going on with. He needed to get to school and to reflect and then we’d talk again later. It was at the forefront of my mind that there was another important matter we still had to talk about – the business of the money he had purloined from my mum, presumably to give him the funds for last night’s bit of fun.

  ‘Dear me, there’s nothing new under the sun, is there, Casey?’ was John’s pronouncement once, having waved Tyler off, I’d sent him the email and he’d phoned for the low-down.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I said, stifling my zillionth yawn of the morning. ‘I’m obviously going to tackle him about the money once he gets in from school, but I’m confident we can handle it if you are.’