Sarah’s face showed no emotion as she stared into the frothing cauldron of bubbles we were immersed in. “Go on.”
Pleased to have someone to confide in, I related the whole incident. That Mark had been so intuitive, acknowledging the mind-bending effects of exhaustion.
“A hallucination?” Sarah pondered.
I bit my lip. “It had to be, didn’t it? There was no one out there but it frightened me all the same.”
“Oh, Maisie! First the nightmares and now this?”
“There’s something else,” I kept whispering. “I know this sounds even crazier but you know I took the train to Swanley? I was freaked out by some trees. A clump of mature oaks on the edge of a wood. Did Mandy ever tell you about my phobia?”
“She did mention it, yes,” Sarah nodded. “Why do you ask?”
“I had a flashback,” I answered numbly.
Even the heat of the jacuzzi could not dispel the shivers running over me. Sinking deeper into the bubbles, I coiled my arms around my shoulders.
The resurrection of Sam was one issue – but to think of what Joe had suffered…
Sarah’s eyes met mine with a twinkle. “D’you want to talk about it over a coffee?”
As the morning advanced, I found it easier to share my worries. Not only was Sarah a good listener, but the ambience of the health spa induced a tranquillising effect, the restaurant no exception. A gentle glow of light bathed the walls, bringing a shine to the beechwood floorboards.
Picking up the thread of conversation where we had left it, I quickly found myself reminiscing about Joe again - from the memories extracted in therapy to the scene I had relived on my train journey.
“How strange. You talked a lot about this Joe when Mandy and Stewart first fostered you,” Sarah told me. “She was quite concerned.”
“She never said!”
Eyes lowered, Sarah stirred her cappuccino. “You don’t remember? She got in touch with the children’s home. Wanted to ask Joe over for tea one day, so they could meet him in person.”
“Seriously?”
“If only the man in charge hadn’t been so openly hostile...”
“What?” I spluttered.
Her face twisted with the effort of explaining it. “He was reluctant to let Joe out of his sight, on account of his behaviour. Said something like no respectable middle-class family would want anything to do with that boy.”
I lowered my cup unsteadily, drops of coffee splashing over the rim.
“What a bastard,” I whispered before I could stop myself. “Okay, so maybe Joe was a bit rough around the edges, but he was a nice boy. He did nothing to deserve such cruelty, and that’s what I saw in my flashback. He was covered in bruises from a thrashing Mortimer’s bully boys gave him...”
“But that’s a criminal offence,” Sarah gasped, “perhaps the real reason they didn’t want to let him out. They were worried he might tell someone.”
“Yes, but that’s not all,” I shuddered. “Joe knew something...”
Pain pierced my heart as I considered what Sarah had told me of Mandy’s proposal, the cogs in my mind turning faster.
“I wish Mandy had told me this.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to build up your hopes,” Sarah counselled me. “Given what you saw, it’s obvious he needed help but whatever that man said, Mandy wasn’t buying it. She was furious! Here they were trying to reach out to another defenceless child... if I remember rightly, they contacted Social Services.”
I clung to her stare. “Any idea what the outcome was?”
“Well, this is where it gets complicated,” Sarah said. “The social worker assigned to Joe’s case said he had left the home. He ran away.”
I took another sip of coffee, one part of my mind battling to take this on board, whilst desperately scouring the holes in my memory.
Joe ran away?
“She was an acquaintance of mine and had no reason to lie. What I’m more concerned about though, is the reason your friend ran away.”
“Mortimer despised him,” I mumbled, thrown back in time to my last therapy session. “Joe could have reported his cruelty but there was something else going on, something creepy and I’m sure it’s connected to my dreams; a scene that takes place in a forest...”
“Hmm,” Sarah pondered. “That makes sense. Just before your flashback, you saw oak trees and you’ve had a fear of forests since your teens.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
As the truth of her words sank in, a ball of fear gripped my stomach. For whatever Joe knew, he had taken a brutal punishment trying to protect me from it. Just the look in his eye had conveyed a warning.
Maisie, Joe and Sam. Maisie.
We were three kids in a care home
And somewhere buried in the dark twisted roots of that care home, lurked the key to all our problems.
“How are you feeling now?” Sarah asked me.
“Better,” I smiled. “Thanks for suggesting this, it’s a gorgeous place to chill out, and I really needed to have a proper chat.”
By the time we reached the spa, I was still thinking about what she had told me, revelations that held me mesmerised.
So maybe life had panned out okay for Joe, after his escape from the care home.
The thought of my parents’ intervention stirred ripples of love – but how strange they had never mentioned it. I turned to Sarah and saw her eyeing me curiously.
“I’m fine, really,” I reassured her. “Just sat here wondering why so many kids are in care, when there are people out there wanting to adopt them.”
Relaxing in the dry heat of the sauna, my muscles softened like marshmallow.
But Sarah didn’t answer straight away. Turning my head, I caught a faraway look in her eye, as if her mind was in another zone.
“So how are things with you?” I added. “I gather you were looking into fostering yourself...”
She clutched her robe tighter around her body.
“Connor,” she murmured. “Yes, we went through years of assessments to get this far and we very nearly gave up.”
“So tell me,” I coaxed her. “I’ve offloaded enough of my problems, now it’s your turn. Why did the authorities make it so difficult?”
Chapter Six
Sarah would never forget the grim words voiced by his social worker.
‘Connor Wilson. Born in Amsterdam, mother worked as a prostitute and served four years in prison, where she developed a ‘class A’ drug addiction.’
She exhaled a sad sigh. Having spent a lifetime working as an adoption reunion counsellor, whose principal goal was to help adoptees find their natural birth parents, she was moved by Connor’s plight.
Yet how could she tell him?
“Connor was a strange boy. Maybe it stemmed from his autism, but whatever it was, I wanted to help him. He seemed so lost, so locked into himself, he needed careful handling.”
“But he was kept in a residential care home?” Maisie breathed.
“Connor’s been in and out of residential care homes for most of his life.”
That a boy so fragile had been confined in a care home brought another wave of sorrow. In all the years she had worked alongside Social Services, Sarah had come across some tragic cases and Connor’s was no exception.
“They chose to hide his identity because of his parents. Monsters, both of them, but I’ll spare you the details. Irrespective of who they were though, he was an innocent child. Pure and unblemished, the reason Peter and I applied to adopt him. We just wanted to give him a decent start in life.”
“Well, that’s fair enough! Surely kids are better off out of care homes.”
“Yes, but there were complications. By the time we approached Social Services, that boy was damaged. There was a time when the authorities would do anything to keep a child with their natural birth parents, but it didn’t work out. Connor’s mum rejected him when he was six. She just wouldn’t bond with him and consequently dumped him st
raight back into care.”
Her face flushed with anger.
As if the poor mite hadn’t suffered enough stigma with his autism, she couldn’t imagine how deeply this rejection had hurt him.
“Poor kid,” Maisie pondered. “So what’s he like personality-wise?”
“Different,” Sarah reflected. “Quiet, withdrawn, which is understandable, but it’s his lack of communication skills that presents a challenge.”
She took a moment to reflect. Cold to the point of wooden, maybe Connor’s autism could account for his aloofness, but there was more. He had built a wall around himself, so that no one else in the world could hurt him.
“No one could get a response out of him, not a laugh nor even a smile. He didn’t like being touched or hugged, which some parental figures find hard, and don’t get me started on his more challenging behaviour...”
Maisie nodded intuitively. Working in a fostering environment herself, she was all too familiar with similar cases.
“I feel as if I’m rambling. He may have complex personality issues but he is intelligent. He’s achieved high grades in every school he’s attended. Loves nature and science, has a yearning to understand the world all around him...”
“But I don’t get it,” Maisie broke in. “How come you and your husband had to fight so hard to try and help him?”
“I was coming to that,” Sarah sighed, wriggling into a sitting position.
Much as she loved the sauna, the heat was beginning to stifle her. Drawn to the glacial shine of the plunge pool, she slid unsteadily off the bench.
“I need to cool down first,” she added, dropping herself into the water.
Immersed in the chill, she caught her breath. It felt invigorating, bringing a much needed clarity to her thoughts.
“What were you going to tell me?” Maisie mumbled.
As she hovered on the edge of the plunge pool, Sarah couldn’t help but think how innocent she looked. The whiteness of her robe magnified her pureness, the chestnut shine of her hair.
She smiled gently. “You want to know why we were met with resistance? It was because of my husband. He was abused as a teenager.”
“No!” Maisie gasped. “I’m so sorry...”
“Don’t let on I told you,” she continued. “He is very sensitive about it, but as you know, in some scenarios, abuse victims turn into abusers. It took months of psychiatric assessment to convince the authorities he wasn’t damaged in that way and as a trained counsellor, he’s helped dozens of victims deal with similar emotional traumas. Yet there was still this tiny seed of uncertainty.”
Maisie stared back horrified. “That must have been awful for you.”
“Yes, but we’ve moved on. Passed all the medical checks, done the training and we finally got to spend time getting to know Connor. The next hoop we had to jump through was convincing them we could cope. But with parents like his, people feared he was born evil...”
“But every child deserves a chance,” Maisie protested.
“That’s what we said,” she nodded. “It’s a shame Social Services needed a little more persuasion.”
Moving onto the loungers, Sarah took a moment to compose herself, the spa working its magic.
“Let me tell you what happened in his last foster home,” she continued. “You know I mentioned his more challenging behaviour?”
“Go on,” Maisie pressed.
Gazing into the distance, Sarah recalled the story. “He has a tendency to hide. It’s a type of mental shut-down to avoid social stress, and not unusual in autistic children. From what I heard, he used to spend hours hiding in a tree, even after dark, but on one occasion he went missing for a whole day. His foster carers couldn’t cope with the worry.”
“Well, I guess that would cause some concern,” Maisie argued.
“Yes, but they handled it all wrong...” Conscious of others moving into the area, she tilted her head closer to whisper. “If only they’d tried to empathise with him. Let him build a den in the garden, give him some personal space, instead of trying to control him. That was their mistake. They locked him inside the house.”
Denying Connor a chance to detach himself had done them no favours. With his stress levels soaring to fever pitch, he must have thought he was being punished for something. And Sarah couldn’t help feeling that perhaps, if they had tried to understand him better, the inevitable storm would have been avoided.
Sarah took a gulp. “He lifted the biggest chair in the room and lobbed it against the patio doors. Smashed his way out. I know it sounds awful, but they shouldn’t have tried to constrain him. The upshot is the police were called, Connor arrested and that was the end of it. It traumatised the whole family.”
“They didn’t want him back then,” Maisie finished dryly.
A cynical laugh escaped her lips. “No way! But in the meantime, Peter and I had been reading up on the autistic spectrum and everything clicked into place. We convinced the authorities to let us meet him... at least allow him to spend an afternoon with us.”
Her heart squeezed inside her chest. Yet with another black mark on his record, Connor’s meltdown had been one more factor to add to a long list of negatives.
Who would want to foster him now?
“At fifteen, the only prospect left was to keep him in residential care, until they finally considered our application. The day we met Connor, his social worker was present, as if they didn’t quite have the faith to leave him alone with us. But we offered him a quiet room to sit in and a stack of National Geographic magazines... and it was amazing how quickly he settled down.”
She felt the warmth of a smile spread across her lips. No one expected miracles but giving him that much needed personal space had nudged the barriers away.
“He made no secret of the fact he liked our home, especially the books, and that’s what he told his social worker. He didn’t want to go back to the children’s home.”
Even Maisie knew it had taken them three years.
“To think, he was ultimately the one who chose us!”
Chapter Seven
I couldn’t quite find the words to express my feelings; only that something about Connor’s predicament tugged at my heart strings. I confess, it was cases like Connor’s that had drawn me to work in fostering in the first place.
“What an amazing story,” I remarked, “so how is it panning out?”
“Connor hasn’t changed much. He is still very much an introvert.”
Mulling over her depiction though, I could not shift my own personal darkness.
Quiet and withdrawn.
I had never forgotten my arrival at the children’s home. A day when all I wanted to do was retreat. Shut out all the cruelty in the world.
Doesn’t like being touched.
Was this a symptom of his autism or was there a more sinister reason? You see, I too shied away from affection. I feared intimacy. Something I dared not admit to my foster parents.
“You should come over and meet him,” Sarah added warmly. “You know you’re always welcome to visit us in Rosebrook.”
“I’d love to. I hate to think of any child left at the mercy of a care home. So how many times did you see Connor over the years?”
“I lost count,” Sarah mumbled. “As you know, it takes many sessions for adults to bond with kids, especially when applying to foster them.”
I frowned, unable to fathom what it was about those words that stirred some deep underlying emotion.
Moving around the spa, we spent the last hour to-ing and fro-ing between sauna, steam room and plunge pool.
Yet all the while we were discussing Connor’s case, I could not escape the terrors embedded in my own psyche.
******
Hannah Adams. Registered Psychotherapist and Counsellor. West Sussex.
Client: Maisie Bell
6th March 2015
“Come through,” Hannah said. “Sit down and make yourself comfy.”
After a much
needed heart-to-heart with Sarah, it made sense to get another therapy appointment booked sooner rather than later. I had left Champneys on a high note, my mind as lucid as it would ever be, and with none of the emotional baggage getting in the way.
Coaxed into her therapy room, I breathed in the scent of lilies before lowering myself into a reclining chair. Deeply padded with velvet upholstery, this had become a sacred place now. Within minutes I would lapse into a mild hypnotic trance and allow the portals of my inner consciousness to be prised open.
On this occasion I welcomed it.
“I want you to close your eyes,” she began, “switch off your mind and relax. Take some deep breaths - four seconds in - ten seconds out...”
The lights dimmed. I heard a swish of paper as she turned the page of her note pad and gradually my heart began to slow.
“Where would you like to begin?”
Where indeed? The nightmares had been disturbing me for weeks now, a resonance that stayed with me, long into the evening, as if the danger had never really gone away.
“Last time, you told me about Joe,” she prompted, “your friend in the care home. I got the impression he meant the world to you.”
“Joe had a heart of gold,” I mused. “Despite his troubled background, he was one of the kindest, bravest boys I ever met. I wish we had stayed in touch.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Once I was fostered it was impossible. Kids weren’t allowed private phone calls and even if I wrote a letter, there was no guarantee he would get it. In fact, I’ve only just learned my foster mum tried reaching out to him. She wanted to invite him around for tea but he was barred!”
“And this was down to the man in charge, was it? Mr. Mortimer? You described him as ‘a nasty man’ and said he hurt Joe.”
Lethal Ties Page 4