The Little Princess

by Casey Watson

  Mike and I had dressed, but had purposely kept Darby in her nightwear because I knew my mum had bought her a beautiful red velvet pinafore dress with a silver and white striped T-shirt to go underneath it. They had yet to meet Darby, but there was no question of them not getting her something; one of my enduring joys was the support my parents had always given us with our fostering. And not just on a practical level. On an emotional one as well, in that any child who stayed with us was treated as one of the family, which, from chats I’d had with other foster carers, wasn’t always the case – leading to children who were already feeling lost and unwanted being treated differently, and so feeling more unwanted still.

  Needless to say, my mum and dad found Darby as adorable as we had. ‘Oh! Aren’t you just lovely,’ my mum said after I made the introductions. ‘And what a lovely, lovely name!’

  ‘My mummy picked it,’ Darby said as she held her hand out shyly to shake. ‘And guess what? Casey wrote to Santa so he’d know I wasn’t at home. And he found me all by himself,’ she explained, warming to her theme, ‘and bringed me loads and loads of stuff. I never had so many presents in my whole life!’

  ‘How lovely,’ Mum said. ‘And do you know what? He must have known we were coming to see you today because he dropped an extra present off for you at our house as well!’

  Darby’s eyes grew wider still. ‘Oh, lady!’ she said, as Mum gave her the parcel and she ripped into it like a pro. ‘Oh, lady! Another present, all for me?’ She gasped then, as the dress tumbled free of the paper. ‘This is just like a proper princess dress, like in Disney! Oh, thank you!’

  But again, in a moment, her expression completely changed. ‘I don’t have to work, do I?’ she said, looking up at me now.

  ‘Work?’ I said, confused.

  She held the dress up. ‘Like Snow White and Belle,’ she said. She might easily have added ‘stoopid!’ ‘Like Cinderella did,’ she explained, as if Mum and I were clueless. ‘Everyone knows! She was a princess, but nobody knowed it and she had to work all the time.’

  ‘Of course not,’ my mum said. ‘It’s Christmas, you silly sausage. No one works on Christmas Day. Well, bar Casey here, obviously.’ She winked at me and grinned. ‘And doctors and nurses and firemen and so on …’

  ‘And me,’ piped up Tyler. ‘I’ll be on plate clearing and washing up, as per.’

  ‘That’s okay, then,’ said Darby, who, to Mum’s consternation, whipped her dressing gown off and started pulling down her pyjama bottoms.

  ‘Hold your horses,’ I said, rushing to pull up her pants. ‘Tell you what, let’s leave my mum and dad to sit down for a minute, and we’ll go upstairs to get you changed, yes? I can fix your hair, too. I’ve got a bow that will match that dress exactly. How about that? Get you looking all Christmassy and pretty?’

  Which, being a little girl, Darby accepted without dissent, gathering up the dress, and the dolly – so she could be ‘made Christmassy too’ – and trotting upstairs with me gleefully.

  It didn’t take long to get Darby washed and dressed and ready, me pulling her hair into a ponytail and tying the red bow into it, while she did the same with her dolly. The dress, too, fitted perfectly, and she couldn’t wait to show it off. Well, till she came down the stairs and saw Kieron in the hall, at least.

  Which seemed to completely startle her. She stopped dead on the second to bottommost step, and so suddenly that I nearly cannoned into her and knocked her flying.

  ‘What’s the matter, love?’ I asked her.

  She pointed at Kieron. ‘Him! That man!’

  The penny dropped. A strange man had come into the house. Was that a regular occurrence at home?

  But her response, given the fact that this was obviously her ‘normal’, seemed a little OTT. Because she immediately burst into tears, and pushed me aside so she could run back up the stairs.

  ‘Darby,’ I called after her, pulling a ‘what the …?’ face at Kieron and Lauren. I then hurried after her, only to have the bedroom door slammed in my face.

  It wasn’t locked – it didn’t have a lock – but she was surprisingly strong, so it took a bit of pushing and a lot of coaxing to get into the room. And as soon as I was in there she was screaming at me and ripping the ribbon from her hair, then pawing at the dress, which did up at the back and, in frustration that she couldn’t undo it, yanking violently at the collar.

  ‘Sweetheart, what is it?’ I said, rushing over to her, and trying to gather her into my arms. I was at a loss to understand her near-hysteria. ‘It’s just Kieron, my son. He won’t hurt you!’

  ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ she yelled at me, her cheeks pink and hot now. ‘Liar, liar! You’re a liar, and I hate you!’

  Still at something of a loss, I took a firmer line and gathered her close to me, then sat down on the bed so she was clamped on my lap. ‘What do you mean, love?’ I asked her. ‘Why am I a liar, liar?’

  ‘Because you said I didn’t have to work!’ she sobbed. ‘An’ that lady said it too! And then you tricked me!’

  ‘Tricked you?’

  ‘You got me a pretty dress and you tricked me!’ She was gulping her sobs now. ‘You’re a liar, liar, pants on fire, and I don’t want no dress anymore! I want it off!’

  ‘Then you shall have it off,’ I told her, loosening my grip on her slightly. ‘See?’ I said, dealing one handed with the buttons down the back. ‘There,’ I said. ‘Hop down and step out of it. That’s the way.’

  She did so, and stamped on it a couple of times for good measure. I let her. ‘Better?’ I said finally. ‘Pyjamas again? What?’

  ‘I want my jeans on,’ she said pointedly. ‘I don’t want your dress-up princess dress!’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, getting up and going to the chest of drawers. She stood and pouted, scowling, in her vest and pants and woolly tights. ‘But Darcy, can you explain why you’re so cross with me?’ I asked her gently. ‘Because I honestly don’t understand.’

  ‘I told you,’ she said, crossing her arms across her chest and pushing her lower lip out. ‘Because you said I didn’t have to work. And you told a lie!’

  ‘You don’t have to work.’

  ‘But you got a man with a camera!’

  The penny dropped. What had distressed her had clearly been Kieron’s bag of tricks. Being a bit of a techie – not to mention a new dad with a baby – he was keen to record every precious moment of this particular Christmas, and had accordingly brought his super-high-tech camera.

  And, with the benefit of hindsight, I could have kicked myself, truly, for being every bit as clueless as Darby herself had already pointed out.

  ‘Kieron? But he’s my son, Darby. Levi and Jackson’s uncle – you already know that.’

  The ridiculousness of what I’d just said struck me. My son. Somebody’s uncle. A succession of men coming round. I cringed inside. Coming round with one thing in mind. To provide material for the delectation of their sick friends, for money. Coming round, to see Darby, to film her playing dress up – then undress – as their little princess.

  Which meant she must be thinking that we had … It didn’t even bear thinking about. ‘Sweetheart,’ I said, dropping to my knees in front of her and taking her hands. ‘You do not have to work. You will never have to work again – not in that way. That’s a promise. No one will ever make you dress up, or take your clothes off, or work here, you understand that? Never. The dress is for you. It’s for you to wear because you want to. Not because anyone wants you to get dressed up to work. It’s …’

  I floundered. How the hell did you discuss such vile things? How did you begin to explain something so horrible? What words did you use to explain to a six-year-old that she was not going to have to spend any part of Christmas Day being photographed and filmed simulating sex acts with toys for God knows how many men, pay-per-view?

  I handed Darcy her jeans, suddenly remembering a headline I’d seen calling for paedophiles to be castrated. It wasn’t that simple. It wo
uld never be that simple. But right at that minute, I couldn’t have agreed more.

  In the end, after another bout of tears, and many assurances, Darby decided she did want to put the dress back on. So I re-dressed her, did her hair again, and listened to her talking about how work could be so boring sometimes, and how sometimes she got a very sore twinkle, and how at other times men came round who didn’t smell nice and shouted at her when she didn’t play properly.

  She had really begun to open up now – which was distressing in itself, as I realised her former reticence about telling of her experiences was simply because she’d been told that if she said anything to anyone, the consequences would be dire. And that was up to and including her mum saying if she wasn’t good, she’d not be allowed out of the ‘pink fluffy handcuffs’ and miss her tea.

  She talked of ‘only ever being allowed to wear pretty clothes for the pictures’. Of not ‘minding it so much most of the time, only sometimes’, but of being lonely. And of wanting to ‘have friends round to play’, and not ever being allowed to. Out it all came – all of a chitter-chatter, as I tied her second ponytail. All so much everyday girl talk.

  And down we went then, me hoping Mike would have explained just enough that her peculiar outburst would be put into some sort of box, so that we could gloss over it now, ready to welcome Riley and everyone when they arrived, and get on with enjoying our Christmas Day.

  And it appeared he had. ‘Well, look at you,’ said my mum when Darby returned and did a twirl for her. ‘You know what?’ she said, pointing upwards. ‘You look just as pretty as a princess!’

  Our little princess. As advertised by devils. I could have wept.

  Chapter 8

  Had that been the end of it, I imagine we would have carried on over Christmas, doing what foster carers everywhere do – trying to minimise a child’s distress by keeping them distracted and as happy as possible under their invariably traumatic circumstances, while at the same time staying mindful of the root of their vulnerability without fixating on the evils of the world and the bleakness of such a damaged child’s probable fate.

  As it was, though, there was more upset to come.

  Once she’d got over her anger about the lies she thought she’d been told, Darby soon returned to doing what any six-year-old would on Christmas morning, playing with her – and Tyler’s – Christmas presents, eating too much chocolate, and generally running around in an over-excited fashion.

  I was still on edge, even though now she knew she wasn’t going to have to ‘go to work’, Darby was becoming more relaxed and playful by the minute, her initial shyness around Kieron and Lauren having vanished.

  ‘Do you think it’s reasonable for me to ask Kieron not to film any of today?’ I asked Mike when I managed to engineer for us to snatch a couple of minutes to ourselves, ostensibly while taking bin bags of rubbish and wrappings out.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how. On what grounds? He’ll think you’ve gone mad.’

  ‘I was thinking, you know, on the grounds of Darby’s privacy, something like that. I don’t know … I just keep having this sense that she wants him to film her … Like she’s playing to the cameras, and, after what happened with Marley Mae the other day …’

  ‘Love, you know you can’t. And calm down. We’re all with her, aren’t we? What d’you think is going to happen when we’re all sitting around the living room?’

  ‘Yes, but no one but us knows what’s been done to her, do they? What she thinks is normal.’

  ‘Nor will they,’ Mike said grimly. ‘So before you suggest it, no quiet words with Kieron, either.’

  ‘That was the last thing I was about to suggest, believe me, love.’

  ‘Good. Look, try to keep calm. We’ve both got our eyes on her and I’m sure we can keep her occupied till Levi and Jackson get here – at which point I’m sure she’ll want to play with them instead. Besides, Dee Dee’ll be down for her nap soon, so Kieron will take a break from it anyway … Seriously, Casey,’ he said, finally plonking all the wrappings in the right bin. ‘It’s only –’

  But I never got to hear what further pearl of wisdom he was about to impart, because the back door suddenly opened, revealing a rather frazzled-looking Mum.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, love,’ she said. Did she think Mike and I had sneaked out for a tryst? ‘But there’s been a bit of a to-do.’

  They say that sometimes it’s best to work on a need-to-know basis but, in the case of little Darby, the jury was definitely out. On the one hand, I was glad Levi and Jackson hadn’t been there to witness it but, on the other hand, had I taken the decision to be open about the horrors of Darby’s grim past, then perhaps it wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

  Not that ‘it’ was anything that terrible, not by the standards we were used to, where kids came from backgrounds that made your hair stand on end and would so often scar them for life.

  All ‘it’ was, as I described haltingly to John Fulshaw on the day after Boxing Day (at 9 a.m. precisely), was Darby having started pulling her dress up, more and more, and, with everyone’s attention on her, clearly warming to the attention, gyrating around and, just as she’d already instructed my elder granddaughter, stuffing her hands down her tights and thrusting her pelvis in a fashion that left no room for doubt as to what she was enacting. She’d apparently picked up a walnut – it really didn’t bear thinking about – and had even been about to demonstrate where she could put it, to a stunned Kieron, when we’d returned to the room.

  ‘I’ve put it all in the log, John,’ I finished up, lamely. ‘But the main thing is that I’m all at sea, and I’m not sure I can cope with something like this, I’m really not. And nor can Mike,’ I added. ‘Not when it potentially involves the grandchildren.’

  John was silent for a moment, and I knew he was trying to digest the unlikely scene I’d just feebly sketched out. Funny, I mused, how we dealt with so many domestic horrors, but this particular scenario crossed an unspoken line.

  Which was odd in itself, and I’d lain awake the previous two nights, trying to get to grips with it, because I’d thought – indeed I still largely thought – I was un-shockable. I knew all about the depths to which some depraved parents sunk. Sexual abuse, violence, neglect, outright abandonment. But mostly, if not always, I could tease out the factors that went some way to explain, if never condone it. Substance abuse and addiction, for example, were so often contributory factors. Violence meted out due to alcohol addiction, or neglect and exploitation due to a parent being a slave to heroin; a heroin addict, I’d learned long ago, would do almost anything (to themselves or their child) to get a fix.

  This, though, was different, and I think that was what was troubling me. This sense that these people had so calmly and deliberately used their own daughter as a child star in the worst kind of pornography. I didn’t know how old Darby had been when they first started taking pictures of her, or precisely what acts she’d been trained to perform, and, though I usually craved – and invariably nagged John for – more information about the kids we had, I found myself in the uncharacteristic position of not wishing to know more than I already did.

  It was quite the opposite in this case, and that was what kept me awake. I didn’t want to know. In fact, I wished I could un-know it. Because I knew about the importance of those early impressionable years. Was little Darby already damaged beyond help? Beyond our help? The guilt for thinking that pressed down on me.

  ‘It’s not that she’s not a sweetheart,’ I told John now. ‘It’s just that I don’t know what to do with her. Not without psychiatric support, and a comprehensive care plan.’

  ‘Which will all be put in place immediately after the New Year,’ he said quickly. ‘You know you can trust me on that score, Casey, always.’

  ‘I know, John –’

  ‘And that you’ll be supported on all fronts,’ he added. ‘You know that too. We wouldn’t expect you and Mike –’

  �
�John.’ The guilt pressed even more. I thought of little Darby, out with the doll and buggy as I spoke, with Mike and Tyler, the former knowing the call I’d be making in their absence. The latter knowing nothing.

  ‘John,’ I said again, speaking quietly, as if that would make the impact less. ‘We can’t keep her. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to come clean. Darby’s not going to be right for us, long term.’

  The words out, I felt immediately that I should retract them. It just seemed so selfish. She was six, for God’s sake! And we’d coped with worse. We had coped with so much worse. But there was a world of difference between this and managing challenging, aggressive, violent, or even suicidal children. We knew how to do the latter; it was what we’d both trained for. But Darby was complicated, complicating psychological territory, and even if I’d felt equal to the task of trying to unravel it, I could only do so if I disclosed the extent of it to our family. And this was a burden I could not expect them to bear.

  So I was effectively disowning her, on their behalf, without even consulting them. Riley’s words – it’s ‘too cruel’ – were clamouring in my head. I was all too aware that I had no simple excuse; not like with Connor, the lad we’d briefly had, and whom we’d considered keeping longer – till it turned out that he’d waged a war for supremacy with Tyler, assuring him that, soon, he’d be our favourite. That had been easy, in the end. Because Tyler came first. But this was a six-year-old, now utterly alone in the world.

  ‘I know,’ John said simply.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course I do. Casey, I knew almost immediately. It’s never been never my expectation that you’d keep Darby long term. I was just hoping you could keep her for a few weeks, that’s all. I’m expecting a call today about it, as it happens. Darby’s being pushed through immediately for adoption.’