by Casey Watson
Justin had spoken with Harrison Green on the phone a couple of days back – a mandatory phone call made when a child is first fostered just to check the child is okay and that things are going well. It’s done in private, so the child can be honest if they’re not happy. I hoped that wasn’t the case with Justin, but who knew?
I told him that, yes, he most probably would have a wonderful second Christmas Day, while at the same time cursing Harrison for passing on such unnecessary details and over-exciting him. Why do that? Why get his hopes up about things he didn’t actually know to be true? Especially when the history with Janice – that was his mother’s name, apparently – had clearly shown they might well be dashed.
I waved them off, finally – it would be a long, boring six-hour drive there and back for Mike, bless him – and decided I should put it all out of my mind. Maybe his mother wasn’t as bad as we suspected. And there was no getting away from it: I needed a break. Had it really only been a week since Justin had moved in with us – less than two since we’d all first clapped eyes on him? In some ways it felt like a lifetime. He’d certainly turned all our lives upside down. But I knew it would be easier once the new school term started. That was when we’d settle into some sort of routine. In the meantime, I’d better shower and dress and get going, I realised. Me and Kieron were going to spend the day round at Riley and David’s. Mike would come there when he was back after dropping off Justin, and take me home a bit later for the blissful evening of relaxation we’d planned, just the two of us, in front of the TV. I couldn’t have looked forward to anything more keenly, I decided, as I happily skipped back upstairs to get ready.
‘Chinese or Indian?’ Mike wanted to know. ‘They’re both open. I’m feeling curry, myself – you?’
‘Don’t care,’ I called back to him as I plumped the sofa cushions, so we could sit down and watch yet another movie.
It was coming up to seven now, and the two of us were downing tools for the evening. Mike had returned around 2.30 and come straight round to Riley’s, and we’d spent an enjoyable couple of hours there, just chatting about nothing; something which, like tonight, felt like a very distant luxury; one which I aimed to enjoy to the full.
Kieron was now out – some sort of lads’ night on the tiles with a group of his college friends, and wouldn’t be back again tonight. He was loving college and we were so happy to see him fitting in so well there. He was really interested in becoming a professional DJ on the club circuits, so had decided to enrol on a media studies course. He was into his second term now and his tutor had said that he was making great progress. He’d also settled in socially and had made some solid friendships – he’d be sleeping over with one of his mates tonight, probably so we wouldn’t see what sort of state he’d be in.
Mike filled me in on his first impressions of Justin’s mother when we got home. Justin himself had apparently continued to be excited for the whole journey, babbling on about his little brothers and reminiscing about other Christmases and how exciting they had been. But when Mike asked anything specific, he tended to skirt around it; it was as if, Mike felt, he had this idealised perfect Christmas tableau in his mind, and that anything that reminded him of the reality had to be ignored, or the picture would be ruined.
Janice, Mike also told me, to my surprise, looked a bit like me. She was only a couple of inches taller than me and had the same dark eyes and black hair. He said she seemed very friendly and had invited him in. He’d felt reluctant but Justin was apparently insistent that he go in and meet his little brothers.
‘Oh, I wish I’d been there with you,’ I told him. ‘I’d have loved to have met the little ones. What were they like? Did they look anything like Justin?’
Mike looked at me with that characteristically blank male expression. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘I didn’t really notice.’
Typical male, I thought. Completely failed to get the facts. I shook my head. ‘So what did the house look like, anyway? Were the kids well dressed? Were there books around? What sort of toys?’
‘Hang on,’ he said, pretending to rummage in his pocket. ‘I think I have the full list right here. Complete with photographs …’
But I did wheedle some facts out of him eventually.
The family lived in a council house in the middle of a run-down estate, and the garden, Mike said, was full of rubbish. An old sofa, a load of broken kids’ toys, and so on, were strewn around, while inside it was old fashioned, with an old fabric suite, seventies-style brown curtains and an ashtray that was overflowing with cigarette ends. The one incongruous thing was an enormous flat-screen telly and home-entertainment system, which apparently took up almost one whole wall of the living room.
He was satisfied, however, that Janice’s welcome was authentic, and that she and Justin were genuinely pleased to see each other.
Mike looked tired now, and he’d have another early start tomorrow, as he was due to collect Justin from his mum’s at around noon. So, satisfied that all was okay, I could finally relax – I intended to make the most of some ‘us’ time before then.
‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is on – perfect!’ I said as he returned with the take-away menus. ‘And it’s only just started, too. Come on, snuggle up. You can put the order in when they have the next bunch of adverts.’ I had held off from eating for most of the day, and was definitely looking forward to my Indian-style butter chicken and pilau rice, but I could hold off for another twenty minutes.
But whatever was going on in Jimmy Stewart’s life, someone up there definitely didn’t seem to like us. From the hall we could suddenly hear ringing – it was the phone. ‘Who on earth could that be?’ I said, as we both went to get up from the sofa at the same moment. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ I told Mike, nudging him back down again. ‘Stay put there. I’ll go and see.’
I walked out into the hallway and picked up the receiver, by now half-expecting to hear either my mum or dad’s voice – the rest of the family, like us, all used their mobiles these days. But before I could so much as get half a word out, I was greeted by the sound of an angry woman’s voice.
‘Can you come and get this little bastard?’ she snarled at me. ‘I fucking mean it. Come and get him now!’
I was absolutely gobsmacked and at first had no idea what was happening. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘Who is this?’
‘It’s me!’ the woman snapped. ‘Janice. Is that Casey?’
This was the first time I’d ever spoken to Justin’s mother and I was mortified. ‘Janice!’ I said. ‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’
I could hear her shouting, then, away from the phone, to someone else. ‘You go near those kids, I’ll kill you, you evil little bastard! You there, Casey?’ She was back shouting at me again now. ‘Can you here what’s going on here? Can you?’
‘Please Janice,’ I said, trying to keep my own voice calm and level. Mike had appeared in the hall now and was looking at me quizzically. ‘Just tell me what’s going on there. Is Justin alright?’
She laughed sarcastically, but I could tell she was finding none of this any funnier than I was. ‘Justin? Is fucking Justin alright? No he’s not! He’s not fucking right in the head!’ She burst into tears then and now I could hear Justin in the background. He was shouting now: ‘Casey! You’d better come and get me, Casey! I’m going to kill this fucking bitch in a minute!’
I tried hard to keep composed in the face of the reality that Mike would have to get him, and right away. ‘Right, Janice,’ I told her. ‘Janice? Listen. Mike’s going to set off now, okay. Just try to calm down … he’ll get to you as soon as he can … tell you what, can you put Justin on the phone for me?’
I cupped my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘I’m so sorry, love,’ I mouthed at Mike, making faces to let him know that there’d been some sort of crisis. ‘But you’re going to have to go back and get him. Sounds like all hell’s broken out up there. She’s hysterical and crying and he’s threatening to kill her. God …
Can you just get ready while I try to calm things down?’
Mike, now resigned to the fact that our ‘peaceful’ night was not to be after all, left me trying to get to the bottom of things while he went to get himself ready for another long drive. In the meantime, I heard the phone being picked up again. ‘Justin? Is that you, love? What’s been happening? What’s going on?’
He was crying too. Big snuffling sobs were pouring out of him in waves. ‘Just get me, please, Casey. I’m going to kill the slag, I swear it!’
‘Justin, love, it’s okay. It’ll all be okay. Mike’s already left …’ which was only half a lie since he was doing so even as I said it, bless him ‘– and he’ll get there as soon as he can, okay?’
I could still hear Janice, close by. ‘Little bastard!’ she was shouting, and I presumed it was for my benefit. ‘I’ve a good mind to call the fucking cops! Hit your fucking mother would you, you little bastard?’
‘Casey,’ Justin said then. ‘I’ve gotta go now. Okay? I’ll tell you later.’ God, I thought miserably. Tell me what? ‘Just tell Mike to hurry up, okay?’
And with that, he hung up. All we could now hear was the twang of James Stewart coming from the TV.
Yup, I thought grimly. Such a wonderful life.
It was in the small hours before Mike returned home with Justin. A very tense time since, in his rush to go and get him, Mike had not only left his mobile behind, he’d also left his wallet, and had been really concerned that he’d run out of petrol on the way home.
Justin looked shattered and in terrible pain and immediately went up to his bedroom. I wanted to reach out to him – if only just to hug him – but he seemed shut down and I sensibly didn’t try to stop him. There was nothing to be achieved at this hour of the night. Let him sleep. That was the best thing. Time enough to deal with the whole sorry debacle in the morning.
Still, I felt desperately sorry for him; I was physically aching with the kind of pain any mother feels when one of her children is hurt or so deeply upset. Mike, too, looked tired – as he had every right to. I flicked the switch on the kettle and waited for him to speak.
‘It was a bloody mess,’ he said, once he’d sat down and got his freezing hands around a hot mug of coffee. ‘She was already out and down the front path in her dressing gown before I’d so much as killed the engine and climbed out of the car. She was dragging the little ones with her, too. Couldn’t shut her up – went off like a rocket – all about how she’d thought she’d surprise him by telling him she was pregnant – can you credit it? – and how he’d immediately lunged at her – by all accounts – and called her “fucking slut” and a “dirty whore”.’
I shook my head, listening to all this. ‘Pregnant?’
‘So she said. Anyway, she told me she hit him back when he said that, and he apparently hit her right back again, threatening to punch her in the stomach.’
I couldn’t take it in, even though it was perhaps exactly what we should have expected, given the history. ‘Oh, God,’ I said, with feeling. ‘What a mess.’
‘Oh, but there’s worse. He then “purposefully” – though how you can do that I don’t know – threw up all over his unopened Christmas presents and then told her she could stick them all up her arse. The little ones were apparently crying and begging him to be nice to her, but his response, or so she tells me, was to start on them too – telling them that their mother was a slut and both their dads were junkies. And so on and so forth till we got the call.’
‘Where was Justin while she was telling you all this? Did he have his own version?’
‘No. Not with us. He was already by the car. He had run out ahead of her when I first pulled up. He was just sat in the road, against the wheel, on the far side, crying his bloody eyes out.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it, Case. Really, I can’t. How could the woman be so bloody insensitive that she had no idea – and she didn’t, you could see that pretty clearly – how much she’d hurt him by what she’d said to him. Tell you what, I could have happily smacked her myself.’
‘So did Justin tell you much when you set off?’
Mike shook his head. ‘He was wretched, Case, really wretched. He said the first thing she told him was that they’d already done Christmas the day before, and that the second was that she had a surprise for him. And, I mean, if you say that to a kid …’. He shook his head again, and I could see the whole thing had really got to him. ‘But the surprise, of course, was that she was going to have a little girl. He said she really seemed to think the idea was funny – I think it’s bloody criminal – and that she told him this girl of hers was going to be a princess and be spoiled and have everything. And be special. Not a “lunatic like him”, those were his exact words’. He sipped his coffee and sighed as he set the mug down. ‘And then he slept. All the rest of the way home.’
We went to bed heavy of heart, around three. How could any mother in the world say such wicked things to her own child? One thing was sure: if we had even the smallest chance of helping Justin, there was so, so much more that we needed to know.
Chapter 5
One of the main things Mike and I had to do as foster carers was to keep a log of anything and everything that happened during each placement: a comprehensive record of progress and pertinent information that could be placed on record in a child’s file. In Justin’s case, his file being something of a black hole up to now, I felt it was doubly important that I get everything down while it was fresh in our minds. I was also anxious to press John Fulshaw for more facts about Justin’s mum and what exactly had been happening between them these past years. Twenty failed placements. I kept returning to that stark fact. If we wanted to help him we needed answers to so much. What had happened with this child? What had gone so badly wrong in so many placements? And we needed to know not just what had happened to him but why.
One thing was crystal clear. That Justin was struggling to hold it together. He was hurting a lot and, from what Mike had witnessed at his mother’s house, with very good reason. And there was something else, too. Since returning from there, he seemed to have decided, consciously or unconsciously, that he needed to take what his mum did out on me. Me and all women, perhaps.
Since Mike had pointed out the similarities between Janice and myself, I started to wonder if Justin sometimes found it difficult to separate his mother and me. It wasn’t too far fetched an idea, I thought, not with all the trauma he had suffered in his short life.
‘What you doing the cooking for?’ he asked Mike, when he was in the kitchen preparing lunch the next day. ‘You don’t have a dog and bark yourself.’ Surprised by that sort of comment coming from a child of eleven, Mike explained that not only didn’t we talk like that in our house, we didn’t believe it to be true, either. There was no hierarchy in our house, he explained. No order of importance. We were equals and in all things we worked as a team. If a meal needed preparing, then someone would prepare it. There was no law that said that someone had to be me. But Justin was adamant. ‘That’s women’s work,’ he said. And though Mike then explained that there was no such thing as ‘women’s work’, he wouldn’t have it. ‘You won’t ever catch me doing women’s work,’ he said firmly.
Later that day, he came down from where he’d been playing on his computer in his bedroom to find me, Riley, David and Kieron playing Scrabble.
‘D’you want to join us?’ Riley asked him. Justin looked shocked that she’d even spoken to him. ‘Now, why would I want to do that?’ he said. He then, very pointedly, turned to Kieron and David. ‘Do you two want to play footie outside?’ he asked them. ‘We could set my new net up if you like.’
Riley set her Scrabble tiles down, her face fixed in a grimace. ‘I was only trying to be friendly!’ she snapped at him. ‘And you can see perfectly well that they can’t play “footie”. We’re in the middle of a game, if you hadn’t noticed, so –’
‘It’s okay, Riley,’ I interrupted, conscious of the sudden tension. ‘I�
�m sure Justin didn’t mean to be rude. How about you stay and watch who wins this round, eh, Justin? Then maybe the boys will have a kick about with you after.’
‘Yeah,’ added David, grinning. ‘Stay and watch us annihilate these girls, yeah? Then we’ll play footie.’
I loved David. He was such a great partner to Riley. Cheerful and funny, and also a rarity: a match for our very strong-willed daughter. Mike and I had both known him for longer than she had, as he was the son of a good friend of ours. I still didn’t think Riley realised quite how big a hand her mum and dad had had in having them ‘bump into’ each other so often.
But like many men, he didn’t see the signals the way us girls did, and got a scowl from his girlfriend for his well-meaning comment, made, I didn’t doubt, to try and lighten up the situation. Justin sniggered, too, which annoyed Riley further. ‘You don’t think much of women, do you, Justin?’ she observed sharply.
‘You don’t think much of women, do you, Justin?’ he parroted. ‘Nag nag bloody nag.’ Upon which he turned on his heel and left the room.
The boys still seemed largely oblivious to what was going on here, but Riley and I weren’t. Quite the opposite. We were seeing a pattern. And also a symptom, I thought – of a child trying hard to provoke a reaction.
‘I definitely think he’s trying to make you pay for what his mum said to him,’ Mike suggested, confirming my own thoughts, when we had a few moments alone together later.
‘Me and Riley,’ I said, nodding. ‘It’s that whole black-haired woman thing, I’m guessing.’ I sighed. ‘I wish he’d actually sit down and talk to me, instead.’
But that wasn’t happening. And there was more to come, too. It was obvious that we were really only scratching the surface of how much pain Justin was really suffering. The following morning I came down to find him sitting at the table, his empty breakfast dishes beside him, reading a magazine.