Groomed

by Casey Watson

  It was only when she got to the part about him offering to send her money that her composure started to slip – her fingers plucking at imaginary fluff on the sleeves of her dressing gown, and her expression and tone softening.

  ‘It was like I’d forgotten it wasn’t actually me by then. You know, the version I’d made up. Does that sound really weird?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘You’d constructed a different you and he’d responded to her, hadn’t he?’

  ‘He loved me,’ she said simply. ‘I’m not just saying that, honest. He really did. He said I made him laugh. He made me laugh …’

  ‘And that’s important.’

  ‘And it wasn’t just some silly childish thing, it really wasn’t. He got me.’ That term again. ‘I mean I know you think I’m mad and that it wasn’t even the real me. But it was. It was still me and he was just, like, so in tune with me. People just don’t get it that you can really know someone just from speaking to them online and phoning each other and stuff, but –’

  This was news. ‘You chatted on the phone to Jamie?’

  Now she looked shocked. ‘Yes, of course, I did. Loads. Well, not, like, for hours at a time, or anything. He was on a pay-as-you-go contract and he sometimes ran out of credit.’

  ‘Yet he had the money to send you to get a train to visit him?’

  I saw a flash of what looked like irritation cross her features. She would defend him to the last and perhaps that was to be admired. Well, if he was the innocent he seemed, anyway.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ she said. ‘He’s just not organised about stuff.’

  In for a penny … ‘The policeman said Jamie had some mild learning difficulties,’ I chanced. ‘When you say he isn’t organised, is that what you mean?’

  A sharp glance came my way. ‘He’s not simple. Not in the way they mean,’ she huffed. ‘He’s just got some problems, that’s all. His horrible bloody flatmate, for one.’

  Who wasn’t in fact a flat ‘mate’ but the tenant named on the lease of a flat in which he’d kindly agreed to sub-let (presumably illegally) a bedroom. And who’d been away on a mini-break – hence the timing of the tryst – and who had returned on the Monday, understandably horrified to find that Jamie had a sixteen-year-old girl sleeping over. And sleeping with him? I thought about asking but thought better of it. How much difference would that make to where we were now? No. That could wait, I decided.

  Whatever had or hadn’t happened, it had been the flatmate who’d precipitated the move to the park. After a night in a down-at-heel (and presumably undiscriminating) B and B Keeley had persuaded him to find for them, there was nothing in the pot for a bed for another night, so they’d spent it in one of the shelters in the local park. They’d returned to the flat the next day, once the flatmate had gone to work, but at the time they were approached and questioned by the police, later that day, they were still contemplating what to do next. Jamie’s next benefit money was not due till Thursday.

  Love’s young dream it was not.

  I wondered what kind of magazines Keeley read online. Inside this cynical, embittered teen was, I suspected, a die-hard romantic. The fact that after all that she was still sticking so rigidly to the construct she’d created, rather than the grim reality of his being thirty-five and out of work, and of no fixed abode, said so much.

  But perhaps it was me who had the learning difficulty here, because what she said next made me see it all so differently.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, though more in sorrow than in anger. ‘I didn’t care about that. He wasn’t any different from how I imagined him. Yes, he was older, but other than that – honestly, Casey, you’d get it if you saw him – he was just a nice bloke. A kind bloke. Just so different from all the shit blokes I’ve known in my life.’ She sniffed. ‘And trust me, I’ve known fucking loads. And I’m sorry for swearing. I can’t help it.’

  We’d been sitting opposite each other, but now I stood up, and dragged my chair round, so I could sit close beside her and put my arm around her shoulders, thinking even as I did so that her use of the past tense in describing him was a definite positive. One which I intended to capitalise on, too.

  ‘Love, I believe you,’ I said. ‘I’ve been your age too, you know. And in my past life I worked with lots of people like Jamie, and I don’t doubt he’s all the things you say he is. And if it’s any consolation, he’s not going to be in any trouble. They told me that for definite. But, you know, love is a big word to be using. It’s a big word because it’s a big, powerful thing. Which is not to minimise what you’ve told me about your feelings for each other, just to say that true love isn’t about fluttering hearts and butterflies and sexual attraction – true love is about an emotional connection, one that builds up over time, along with mutual respect. Darling, I’m not trying to put you down, but you have so much to go through yet, and so many people to get to know. You’ll probably believe you’re in love many, many times over the next few years, but you know what?’

  Keeley shrugged. ‘What?’

  But that at least meant she was listening. ‘The most important person you should be learning to love right now is yourself. What you said to me last night, Keeley’ – I touched my chest – ‘about that hole you feel inside yourself? That’s the place you need to start. That’s the kind of negative thinking you have to work hard to start challenging. Easier said than done, I know, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doable. Thoughts are just thoughts. They only exist in our heads. So you have to start thinking differently about yourself. You have as much right to exist on the earth as the next person, and, particularly given the terrible times you’ve been through, I’d say more right to happiness than many. If you make your first goal to accept that, then everything else will follow – then you can start building on the rest. Like looking in the mirror and seeing someone who’s capable and smart and thoughtful and kind – someone who has every bit as much potential as the next person. You just have to find out where that potential lies, and you can only do that if you feel you’re a project worth working on. Do you? Because I do or I wouldn’t be sitting here telling you that, would I? But you need to, Keeley. Everything else flows from there. Including making successful relationships.’

  She sat silently for a bit, hopefully digesting what I’d said to her.

  ‘I feel so bad for him,’ she said eventually. ‘I know I said it wasn’t like that and that they didn’t understand, but I’m not stupid. I know Jamie’s got a bunch of stuff going on that means it wouldn’t have worked.’

  Not least his age – which was more than double hers – I thought, but didn’t say. ‘Because you’re an intelligent girl,’ I said instead.

  ‘And he never lied to me. Not once,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he was capable of lying,’ she added.

  That spoke volumes to me. To wilfully play with the truth for personal gain – well, that took a certain level of intellect, didn’t it? And she had enough of that to have reflected on that, too.

  ‘He reminded me of my mum,’ she said next, surprising me.

  ‘Your mum?’

  She sniffed again. ‘In a way, you know? As in needing to be helped. You know – problems in his head. My mum was a bit like that. Not good at coping with stuff. Day-to-day stuff, you know? But she managed okay. D’you think he’ll manage okay?’

  I thought about Keeley’s rose-tinted interpretation of the word ‘managing’. Her mum hadn’t managed anything, as far as I could see. Well, she’d managed to have five children and lose them to the care system. But it always needed remembering that heroin was at the top of the villainy food chain there.

  But that wasn’t what we were about here in any case. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he’s managed well enough this far in life, hasn’t he? But he’s not for you. And I don’t think you need me to tell you that, do you?’

  She shook her head. Then she managed a wan, even slightly playful smile. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for sleeping in park s
helters,’ she said.

  I got a phone call from Danny just as I was making some bacon sandwiches for our lunch. Tyler had got up and gone off with his mates while Keeley had been showering, and since then she’d spent a little time helping me with chores. Then, because there didn’t seem any single good reason not to, I said I’d join her in watching Everybody Loves Raymond on TV, the fact that she’d even asked me to sit and watch it with her being absolutely key.

  ‘I’m running late,’ he said. ‘Sorry. You know how it goes. Too many cases and too few of us. And between you and me, certain people are being too flipping precious about which cases they will or won’t take. Anyway it means it’s looking like it’ll be nearer two now, I’m afraid. Is that going to mess up your schedule?’

  I smiled at the notion that he thought I even had one. ‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry to hear that.’ And then something struck me. Something triggered by what he’d said. The name Keeley had mentioned. A name I hadn’t heard before. ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ I finished, suddenly anxious to ring off.

  I smiled across at Keeley as I’d said this, catching her yawn turn to a grimace. Despite her early start, or because of it, more likely, it was clear she was now beginning to flag.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I was going to go for a nap after he’d been. Would it be okay if I go back to bed for a bit now instead then? And you can call me when he gets here? He’s only coming here to shout at me, after all.’

  I didn’t need to confirm that, because she already knew the drill. So I simply said of course she could. She was still evidently very short on sleep – a commodity teens needed more of than people often gave them credit for. It also gave me a chance to write up all my notes while they were fresh in my mind. And, to use Tyler’s parlance, to follow up the interesting lead I’d just been gifted.

  It took no longer than fifteen minutes to confirm what I thought. That the social worker assigned to Keeley before Danny hadn’t been called Mrs Higgins. Which was what I’d already worked out, because I remembered that it had been Keeley herself that had called her previous social worker a bitch, hadn’t she? Not cool. Not nice. Far from it. A bitch.

  So when was a Mrs Higgins assigned to her, then? There was nothing in the notes about a social worker called Mrs Higgins. Just an on-duty social worker for Keeley’s first few days in care. All the subsequent notes – the ones made by her social worker as opposed to those by her foster carers, panel, child and adolescent mental health services, and so on – were in the name Banks, the woman assigned to her before Danny.

  Of course, it might well be that this Mrs Higgins meant nothing. She probably did. That she was just assigned to her temporarily, perhaps only very briefly. But Keeley had spoken about her warmly, which was a positive in an otherwise negative file. Except she wasn’t in there. No sign of her name anywhere that I could see. Despite knowing he was busy, I called Danny back and asked him. And he hadn’t heard of her either.

  ‘But certainly I’ll see what I can find out,’ he promised. ‘Cross the I’s, dot the T’s.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. Though my purpose was rather different. I just wanted to follow up any shred of evidence, however ancient, however random, however tenuous, however sentimental – that Keeley hadn’t been entirely alone.

  In the meantime, of necessity, it was business as usual, and I knew that when Danny arrived to see Keeley the riot act would duly be read.

  So while he composed himself in the living room as her hard-talking social worker, I went upstairs, woke Keeley and asked her to come down. I then had to listen while he sat her down and gave her a stern lecture about how badly she’d let him down, just how close to the wind she was sailing as far as this placement went, and how she was not only extremely lucky we’d agreed to continue to keep her, but, with this latest stunt, not even deserving of our largesse.

  It was the first time I’d seen Danny in this different incarnation, and I realised he was going to have a brilliant career. It’s not often someone so young (not to mention young-looking) can command such respect. I could see Keeley wilting, her chin wobbling under his disappointed gaze, and in that, I also saw something positive – that he had earned her respect. Had he not, her demeanour and body language would have been so different – she would have been sullen, unresponsive, defiant.

  Still, when he responded to her abject tears and saucer eyes with a sharp ‘it’s way too late for turning on the waterworks with me, Keeley!’ I wanted to run across and hug her and tell him to leave her alone, even as I understood that it was an act for her benefit; that he was only doing what he had to.

  Because if you took it back to the day she was taken into care, it couldn’t help but strike me that she was the one who’d been let down – so badly – first by being born into a life that no child ever deserved, and then by a system that was financially so under-funded that it had little choice but to focus on the greater good; setting her needs against the needs, as perceived, of her siblings – four against one. No contest. So she’d languished alone, adrift from all of them not by accident, but by design.

  Which wasn’t Danny’s fault, obviously. Not any one person’s fault. Just a series of assumptions and predictions and discussions, all of which had conspired – even if not wilfully – to aid her progress to the place where she fell through the gap. And because no one had subsequently questioned the decision to cut her off, the reasons for the decision had become subsequently set in stone. Immutable.

  I picked up the tissue box and took it across to her, and Keeley plucked a couple up under Danny’s hard glare. It was scant consolation, I thought, as she scoured at her cheeks, to think her future couldn’t possibly be worse. Because, the way things so often went, it could.

  Chapter 18

  And it was to the future, and only there, that I now resolved to look. Which was why when, a few days later, at the end of half-term week, I got an unexpected call from Danny, I had all but forgotten our recent conversation. Or, if not quite forgotten, had put out of my mind. It had been something of little consequence, after all; just my usual need to have loose threads tied up, with a fanciful bolt-on of imagining there might be something in Keeley’s file that might give her self-esteem a boost – a link to her past that we could perhaps revisit without causing her more pain. After all, I knew more than one retired social worker personally who sometimes wrote to former charges, sent birthday cards even – and, oh how precious those connections were once made.

  But it turned out that there was much more to it than that. ‘I tracked her down,’ Danny was saying, once he’d reiterated why he was calling and my brain had finally clicked into gear. ‘I felt bad, to be honest,’ he said. ‘You know, after that chat we’d had before.’

  ‘Why on earth?’ I was shocked to hear this, having accepted his reasoning.

  ‘Because you made a valid point. That her future had been decided – her extremely lonely future – on the basis of a statement made by a traumatised four-year-old. Anyway, suitably humbled, I bring tentatively positive news.’

  I begged to differ. One of the plus points of being at the sharp end, i.e. living with a child who was in the care system, as opposed to just visiting, was that, with a fair wind and a keen ear, there were all sorts of occasions where ‘right place, right time’ dynamics kicked in. I’d been lucky. It was often thus. I said so. ‘Anyway, what news?’ I added before he could disagree with me.

  ‘Tell you what – I’ll pop round, shall I? Better to run through it in person. Well, if you can come up with a time when Keeley’s otherwise engaged? I know it’s half-term, but –’

  ‘No problem,’ I said, excited now. ‘Leave it with me.’

  So it was that the same afternoon, with Tyler out anyway, and having sneakily dispatched Keeley round to Riley’s (so she could help with some firework-night kids’ party she was making decorations for – totally spurious but credible) I opened the front door to a decidedly cheerful-looking twenty-something social work
er, clutching a manila folder against his jacket.

  ‘I’ve managed to comb through a load of old material,’ he said after settling down on the sofa with a mug of tea and a plate of biscuits. From my stock of posh biscuits. I had a hunch he’d be deserving them. ‘Did you notice the gap in her records?’

  I shook my head. I’d not paid that much attention to the dates. I rarely did.

  ‘Well, there is one. The small matter of an unaccounted-for couple of months. I don’t suppose you would notice – not unless you were actually looking for it. As I was, of course, because I was trying to marry up this Mrs Higgins with the dates on Keeley’s file.’

  ‘So what happened in the gap?’

  ‘Precisely my question. It wasn’t long after she entered the system – a matter of days, that’s all – and my first thought was that she might have left the system for a bit, obviously. Gone to a family member or something.’

  Which could have been the case, because this happened reasonably regularly. Children were taken into care as emergencies and then a relative would step in, step up and offer to take them on, and, after all the necessary checks were undertaken this was sometimes what happened. A win-win situation for all concerned. And no more contact with social services, file closed.

  But sometimes caring relatives bit off more than they could chew, and the children were subsequently returned to the system, creating a lose-lose situation instead. A child traumatised, then relieved at being back with known faces, then, their hopes dashed, traumatised all over again. I knew gaps in records were often because of situations like these.

  But this hadn’t apparently been the case with Keeley. Mrs Higgins had been assigned to her after a couple of days in care, and had been looking after her when she was moved to her intended long-term foster carer, a Mrs Stewart, where Keeley had spent the first fortnight.