by Casey Watson
She shook her head now. ‘I’m not hungry. I mean, you get one if you want to.’
‘But surely you must be,’ I urged, heading towards the bakery anyway. ‘You’ve had nothing since lunchtime.’ And she’d probably eaten very little of that, either, it occurred to me. And I doubted she’d be monitored that closely over lunch – the older juniors generally didn’t tend to be.
‘Really,’ she persisted. ‘I’m fine, Casey, honest. But you get one if you want one.’
I pulled a sad face. ‘Oh, please,’ I said. We’d reached the counter by now. ‘I’ll feel like such a greedy pig if you don’t have one as well. Just a little fairy cake or something? Or a cookie? They look nice. Or an iced bun perhaps?’
I was being horribly manipulative, and I knew it. Poor Abby would be torn now between doing as I had asked and the stress of the situation, and I knew how much of a tussle must be going on in her head. Other kids would just refuse point blank to do something they didn’t want to, but I knew for Abby, who wasn’t used to being disobedient or contrary, this would be a real poser. I just hoped her urge to do what was asked of her would win out.
I leaned towards the trolley, which I’d made her push for me, citing a blister I’d got scrubbing the garden furniture. Like a school chair, or a public door handle, it might have been previously pushed by anyone, and having to touch it was already upsetting her equilibrium. ‘Sweetheart,’ I said gently. ‘Go on. Please. For me? I worry about you, you know. I’m sure you’re not eating enough. And I’ll feel awful if we go to visit Mummy on Friday and she starts worrying that you’ve been losing weight. Awful.’
This spot of emotional blackmail seemed to clinch it. She mumbled an okay and shyly pointed to the pile of hot cross buns, and within ten minutes we’d gone through the checkout with our bits of shopping, and I suggested we munch our cakes once we’d returned to the car. That way, I’d calculated, there would be no chance for her to fly off and do what she desperately wanted to – wash her hands. And as I’d told her not to bring her backpack – telling her we’d be there and back in no time – she didn’t even have recourse to the little bottle of anti-bacterial gel I’d recently discovered she kept in there.
‘How nice was that?’ I enthused, once I’d chomped my way through an uncharacteristically-decadent-for-four p.m. éclair. Abby had finished her bun as well – as I’d suspected, she’d been ravenous – but now wore an expression of great anxiety about what to do next. I switched the engine on, to forestall any requests to pop back and use the toilets, and as I reversed out of the parking space and swung the car round to leave the car park I marvelled on what a complex and powerful thing the human psyche was. How much of her day was governed, I wondered, by trying to organise every tiny detail so she could minimise such awful stress? It must have been so debilitating. No wonder she found school so challenging. Ditto living with us and losing so much of that control. One major factor in her previous living arrangements, I realised, would have been that she could give in to these compulsions and organise her life to do so. Her mother – probably preoccupied with her own debilitating illness – had quite possibly not even noticed.
I glanced across at Abby. She was sitting with one hand in her lap now, the other once again plucking single strands of hair from her scalp. ‘You know, sweetheart,’ I said, deciding this might be a good place to broach it, ‘nothing bad is going to happen because you haven’t washed your hands.’
The effect was instant. Her hand flew away from her temple and the hairs she’d pulled out so far were brushed from her lap. ‘I don’t …’ she began. ‘I mean … um … erm … what do you mean, Casey?’
‘I mean,’ I said, joining the crawling early rush-hour traffic – there was a reason I didn’t generally do a supermarket run after school – ‘that I understand how you worry about things, sweetie. Germs and so on. Getting sick. I absolutely understand why you might be worried about that. And yes, you’re right – the world is just full of germs, isn’t it? Just like it’s full of people. But, trust me, the chances of catching a bad one – one that’ll make you poorly – are really tiny, you know. Tiny. Tinier even than winning the lottery. I mean, it’s obviously sensible to wash your hands before your tea – that’s just good hygiene. But sometimes you have to relax and trust that nothing bad will happen. I’ve eaten that many cakes, from that many different bakeries down the years, and look at me!’ I patted my stomach. ‘The only harm that’s come to me has been the harm to my waistline …’ Which, to my relief, at least raised a suspicion of a smile. ‘So that’s what you have to do,’ I said. ‘You have to tell yourself that nothing bad will happen. And keep saying it to yourself till the other bit of you believes it. Maybe try that for me, hmm?’
Abby didn’t look convinced, even though she did nod her acknowledgement, and once we were home she bolted straight for the loo, as I’d expected. This time I didn’t try to stop her. But neither did I let up on my subtle pressure to challenge her obsessions. On the contrary. Over the next couple of days I gently stepped it up. Not overtly – it seemed too much too soon to start actually interrogating her about things like flicking the light switches and patting the door frames – but in the sense that I tried to make it just that little more difficult for her to give in to them. I began making it harder for her to avoid touching door handles, for instance, having noticed, as with the hair, that it mattered to her that we didn’t notice when she did things like covering her hand with her sleeve to open them. If we were around, and she had no choice, she would always try to compensate – by immediately going off ‘to the loo’ to wash her hands. So I’d have her open a door for me, saying my hands were full or something, and then herd her off into another room on some pretext or other, so that she would have to wait for another hand-washing opportunity. I would similarly tend to hover around light switches, and forestall her in flicking them on and off. One thing, I thought wryly, would be a big dip in the electricity bills. The Watson house had never been such a bastion of green living.
It wasn’t plain sailing – I could see that it was actually adding to her anxiety, but though it upset me to see that, I trusted Dr Shackleton. Over time, I hoped it would help. I was also anxious to be proactive rather than just reactive. My role as a foster carer was to provide an environment that helped the kids in my care to feel better, not worse, and what the school had said – that since we’d last spoken she seemed to have got quite a lot worse – went against everything Mike and I set out to do. I knew it wasn’t strictly our fault – Abby had come from somewhere she was cherished, not neglected, where normally the opposite was true – but, even so, it definitely concentrated my mind. I could accept the fact that Abby wanted nothing more than to be home again, and that was what we all wanted too, however unlikely that was currently looking. But in the meantime, the very last thing I wanted was to take her to see Sarah and give Sarah any reason to worry about her.
Which was a reasonable enough aim, I thought. Wasn’t it?
Chapter 12
In the end, we didn’t go and visit Sarah on the Friday. I took a call from Bridget late that morning. The hospital had called her to tell her that Sarah was exhausted, having had daily physio for the past few days, and that she’d also been having a series of drug infusions, which had been really knocking her for six. As a consequence they’d all agreed that perhaps it would be counter-productive for Abby to go and visit her while she was so far from her best.
‘Given how distressing it was for them both last time,’ Bridget finished. ‘Sarah will call Abby tonight at some point, obviously. But we wondered if you could take her in on Sunday instead. Give Sarah a day to recover. If that’s not going to inconvenience you too much?’
‘Not at all,’ I reassured her, thinking how, actually, it was just as well Jackson’s party had been cancelled, as fitting in both would have been something of a struggle. At the same time, my heart was plummeting towards my boots. Poor Abby. The one thing I knew was keeping her going was the knowledge
that she would be seeing her mum again this afternoon. Instead, I’d have to break bad news when she arrived home from school.
And she was every bit as upset as I’d expected her to be. I’d seen her arrival from the kitchen window, and she’d fairly skipped up the path – looking the brightest she’d done in days. I hated having to burst her fragile bubble.
‘Why does she keep doing this!’ she railed at me now, her eyes filling with tears immediately, as I explained that we wouldn’t now be going to the hospital to visit Mummy after all. ‘She told me she was feeling better. She told me! She promised!’
I pulled Abby towards me, but she struggled to get out of my grasp, and thundered up the stairs to her bedroom. I heard the door slam behind her and, as I followed her up, I also heard various thumps and bangs starting up. She was clearly venting her distress at the furniture. Which might be no bad thing, I decided, as I reached the landing. I wasn’t fazed – as far as explosions of temper went, Abby’s was relatively minor compared to some I’d had to deal with, and dealing with distressed children was all part of the job in our line of work. But for Abby it was quite a big deal to lose control like this; it wasn’t something I’d so far seen from her and I’d bet my last farthing that having childish tantrums, for any of the usual childish reasons, would have been something she’d stopped doing very early on. She’d had to grow up much too fast, in order to care for her mother.
I knocked on the door, feeling a wave of irritation at Sarah. Much as I tried to be politically correct about the situation – and I did feel pretty guilty for even thinking it – I couldn’t help thinking that Abby’s not being allowed to see her had been decided for all the wrong reasons. However difficult it would be for Abby to see Sarah so poorly, surely not being allowed to see her at all was far worse. After all, she’d been caring for her sick mother for years now. And in that time she would surely have seen her in a pretty bad way, wouldn’t she? She used the words ‘relapse’ and ‘remission’; she knew the illness. More than most, in fact, me included – because she’d been living with it, day in, day out. And I didn’t doubt she knew how things stood. No, I thought, as I softly knocked on her door, this was a bad call. This was just shutting her out, which wasn’t helping her one bit. Surely her mother – who must be aware what an anxious child she was – must have known that?
There was no response, just the sound of the continuing thumps and bumps. Was she kicking the chest of drawers? Well, if so, so what? They could take it. It was the same chest of drawers I’d bought when we first started fostering, and had already put up with plenty. It would survive. I turned the handle and opened the bedroom door to find I’d been right. Abby was laying into the chest of drawers with one foot and thumping it at the same time with one of her cushions – a Glee one I’d found in the supermarket recently, on special offer, being left-over Christmas stock.
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ I said to her. ‘I’m so sorry, I really am. But it’s only going to be a couple of days. And Mummy’s going to phone you later, so at least you’ll get to chat to her …’
‘I didn’t want to see her anyway,’ Abby railed at me, ‘and I don’t want to talk to her!’ She flung the cushion back on the bed and angrily wiped the back of her hand across her tear-stained face. ‘She obviously doesn’t need me to look after her any more, and that’s fine. That’s just fine.’ She spat the last word out. I could see spittle arc across the space between us. I’d not seen her furious like this before, but I decided it would probably be cathartic, even though it was heartbreaking to hear.
‘You know that’s not true,’ I said gently. ‘Of course she needs you. She loves you, Abby.’
‘No she doesn’t!’
‘Sweetheart, she does. She loves you more than anything or anyone in the whole world. And what she most needs is to know that you’re okay while you can’t be with her. I’m sure you’re on her mind every minute of every day.’
Abby’s expression remained one of angry rejection. ‘No, I’m not! If I was, she’d let me go and see her! She’s just forgotten about me, now she doesn’t need me to make her food and wash her clothes and keep the house tidy for her! She doesn’t even care that it’s going to be getting so filthy!’
‘Sweetheart, that doesn’t matter. The house can be cleaned. What matters is that Mummy gets properly looked after by the doctors and nurses. That they do the very best they can to make this horrible illness she has …’ I grasped for words – ‘go away’ were entirely the wrong ones. ‘… beat it,’ I plumped for. ‘Try to beat it a little better. So she’s got a chance of getting home again and being more independent. So that the two of you can be together again. Get back to being a family …’
The word seemed to inflame her anger further. ‘We’re not a family!’ she yelled at me. ‘How can we ever be called a family?! Everyone else has daddies and brothers and sisters and cousins and nannies and granddads and everything!’ she spat. ‘I don’t have anything! I don’t have anyone in the world now!’
She threw herself down on the bed then, her whole body overcome with huge, racking sobs. I sat down beside her, and tried to envelope her. ‘You are a family,’ I persisted, speaking quietly into her ear. ‘You’re your mummy’s little girl, and that makes you a family. Yes, a small family, compared with some, but still a family. Still unbreakable. Family’s not about numbers anyway. It’s about love. And I know how much your mummy loves you. And how much you love her too. And you know, Abby, I’ve looked after lots of children, and some of them don’t even have mummies. And some of them have mummies who don’t love them anything like as much as yours does. Mummies who don’t cuddle them or care about them. Mummies who don’t even want to know them. That’s not your mummy, is it?’ I stroked her hair. It was wet around the temples, where she’d been perspiring from all the flailing around. ‘Why do you think Mummy was so upset last time we visited her, hmm? Because she misses you so much, and can hardly bear that she’s not with you …’ I had slid my fingers beneath her hair now, pulling it back from where it was sticking to her face, to loop around her ear. I was just about to speak again when her hand flew up and clamped mine. ‘What, sweetheart?’ I said, shocked. ‘What’s the matter? Did I scratch you with my nail?’
Abby wriggled up to a sitting position, freeing my hand and now clamping her own firmly to her temple. But why? What was she hiding? What didn’t she want me to see? ‘Abby,’ I tried again. ‘What are you doing? Why’ve you got your hand there?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, straightening up. ‘I just didn’t want you to …’
‘What? Love, if it’s nothing, then why don’t you want me to see it?’
She looked agitated again, shaking her head now. What was she trying to hide from me? ‘Abby,’ I said, ‘you know, you might as well let me see it, whatever it is. I’m going to get to see it eventually, so –’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! OKAY!’ She stepped towards me, thrusting her face at me and pouting. Then she turned sideways and yanked the hair back out of the way. ‘There!’ she said. ‘That’s what it is. Are you happy now?’
It didn’t need much looking at, now she’d scraped the hair away from it. It was a bald patch, pink and stark, just slightly behind her ear. A completely bald patch, about two inches in diameter. Shiny. Substantially bigger than a ten pence piece.
I was shocked. Oh, yes, I’d seen lots of things that had shocked me over the years, and, no, in comparison, this wasn’t that shocking. Yet it still was. Because why the hell hadn’t I spotted it? Why hadn’t I thought about all her hair pulling and the obvious result of it? Why hadn’t I realised just how bad it was?
I held her head in both hands and inspected it more closely. And it extended. The hair around it was thin and sparse as well. ‘Did this fall out?’ I asked her, even though I already knew it probably hadn’t. She shook her head, confirming it. ‘This is the place where you pull your hair out, isn’t it?’ Now she nodded. And I cursed myself again for not making the mental leap about what we’d
seen her doing, not doing something about it, before it came to this. It was so big – and now so obvious – yet she’d still managed to keep it hidden from me. ‘Has it been like this for long?’ I asked.
Abby shook her head. ‘Only a little,’ she said in a small voice. ‘But it’s just got so … so … It’s just that I can’t seem to stop doing it. I don’t even realise I’m doing it … except I do …’ Her eyes glistened with fresh tears.
And then she’d carefully cover it up, I thought, every single day, by neatly pulling her hair into bunches, or plaits. Never a pony tail. Always bunches, always plaits. And I recalled that she also used those little spring clips you got in Claire’s Accessories. So that even when it wasn’t safely covered up by plaits or bunches, she could still hide it, by clipping her hair in place, to hold it down.
I took her hands in my own now and made her hold my gaze. ‘We can get you some help for this,’ I said. ‘We can get someone – a special doctor, who knows about the things people sometimes do when they’re anxious – someone who can help you stop doing this, okay? And then it will grow back again –’
‘Will it?’ she asked, her eyes wide.
‘Of course it will!’ I told her, trying to pack my voice with confidence and authority. Because it would do. I was sure of it. As sure as I could be, anyway. I racked my brains. This was different from stress-induced alopecia. This had another name. And it would surely grow back. Why wouldn’t it? If it were caught in time. ‘Of, course it will,’ I said again, firmly.