The Boy No One Loved

by Casey Watson

  ‘Oh, please,’ he begged. ‘Can Greg sleep at our house this Saturday? He’s asked his auntie and she said it’s okay if you say so. Oh, please, Casey. Please say he can.’ But though I might not have been surprised, I was also unsure. A sleepover was quite a big thing for us to contemplate, and was also something that could be construed as a ‘reward’ on his programme, for which he would need to earn points.

  Plus he hadn’t known Gregory that long yet. ‘I don’t know, love,’ I said, to give myself time to discuss things with Mike, and maybe John. ‘You’ve not known each other long, and your room isn’t that big, and …’

  ‘Oh please Casey,’ he interrupted, eyes wide, looking hopeful. ‘I’m begging you. We could easily make a bed up on my floor.’

  He looked so sincere, and so excited at the prospect, that my resolve started to weaken immediately. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘No promises, but here’s what I’ll do. If you ask Greg to get his aunt to call me tomorrow, so we can have a chat, then maybe – just maybe, mind – we could give it a try.’

  Saturday came and along with it the sleepover, which, following various chats and some hard thinking, we had now agreed could take place. I had spoken to Jennie, who had filled me in a little more about Greg. He had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), she told me, and was on medication, but that wasn’t anything I couldn’t deal with. I’d also spoken to Mike, and had a quick word with John, and we’d all agreed that this would be a good opportunity for Justin to develop his social skills. And this was something that so far, he seemed keen to impress us with – since I’d told him I’d consider it, he’d been a model of good behaviour, tidying his room and repeatedly promising that I wouldn’t have to lift a finger or get anything organised; he would do absolutely everything.

  And true to his word, he did just that, making up the bed on his floor by himself, and then, once Greg had arrived and settled in, not only showing him how to work one of his PlayStation games, but also allowing him to play with his precious toy soldiers. I smiled as I served them a special fish and chip supper. I needn’t have worried, I realised. He was doing himself proud.

  But perhaps I should have listened to my instincts more keenly, and been a little slower to relax. It was around eleven in the evening when I heard what sounded like a scream, coming from Justin’s room.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I asked Mike, reaching automatically for the remote, so I could check if my ears were working right. We were nearing the end of a movie by now and all had been quiet since I’d gone up to tuck them in at around ten, having allowed an extra half-hour with the lights and TV on.

  ‘I definitely heard something,’ Mike confirmed, getting up. ‘I’ll go and check. They’re probably just messing about.’ He headed off, seeming largely unconcerned, which was reassuring. ‘You’ll have to tell me what I missed when I get back.’

  Two minutes later, however, I was far from reassured to hear Mike’s voice from upstairs too – I could tell he was shouting. I leapt up to go and join him and really give the boys what for. I should have known they’d play up at some point.

  But what greeted me was not ‘playing up’ in any normal sense. I entered the bedroom to find Justin standing at the side of his bed, with a very strange look on his face. It took me a few moments to process what was happening. Mike was kneeling on the floor close by, glaring at him, and it was then that I noticed that Gregory was huddled beneath a duvet on the floor between them. I could hear Gregory sobbing and groaning from inside it, clearly reluctant to give it up, while Mike was trying to prise it from around him.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ I said, looking from Mike to Justin. Justin simply stared at me, his features hardening. ‘Mike?’ I persisted.

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said, turning to me. ‘But I think he’s hurt Greg in some way.’ He pointed his finger at Justin as he spoke. ‘That’s all I know, because neither of them will tell me. All I’ve managed to get out of Greg is that Justin’s really hurt him and that he wants to go home to his auntie. ‘C’mon mate,’ he said, giving another gentle tug on the duvet. ‘Let’s get you out of there and see how you’re doing.’

  I got down on my knees and put my arms around Greg through the duvet. ‘It’s okay sweetheart,’ I said gently as Mike moved aside to make room. Perhaps he’d respond better to a female voice. ‘Let’s just have a look at you, eh? Then we can phone your Auntie Jennie.’

  Greg slowly peeked out now, sobbing loudly. ‘J … J … Justin b … b … burned me, Casey. He’s a big meanie and he should have a smack. I want Auntie Jennie to come.’ His sobs began to grow even louder. ‘I want her to come and make me better!’

  He was clearly very traumatised and I was devastated. I’d been so full of hope, and felt badly let down. What on earth had Justin done to the poor kid? ‘Justin!’ I snapped, ‘Tell me what you’ve done to Greg, you hear me!’

  I don’t know what it was about the tone of my voice, but it seemed to finally shock him into talking. ‘I just wanted to see what would happen,’ he said plaintively. ‘That was all, Casey, honest. I just thought it would be interesting to see!’

  ‘What would be interesting?’ I barked at him.

  ‘What the wax did.’

  I felt alarm bells ringing. ‘Wax? What wax?’

  ‘In the tea-light,’ he said. ‘The wax in the tea-light!’

  It turned out, then, through a series of halting half-sentences, that what Justin had decided would be ‘interesting’ would be to witness what would happen if he melted a candle – he’d taken both some matches and a tea-light from the kitchen, he admitted – and poured the hot molten wax onto Gregory’s skin.

  ‘I didn’t think it would hurt him,’ he protested. ‘I only wanted to peel it back off when it set.’

  I was both speechless and furious with him, and Mike was livid. He could barely look at, let alone speak to, Justin, as he picked Gregory up to carry him downstairs.

  ‘Get to bed, young man,’ I told him as I followed Mike out. ‘Not a peep – we’ll be dealing with you in the morning!’

  I then had the unenviable task of phoning Jennie and explaining to her what had happened. It was almost midnight by now, and I felt awful that she had to rush around at this hour. She wouldn’t hear of us driving Gregory home ourselves, since we didn’t know the way, so she had to come out herself – probably the last thing she expected – to collect her frightened and traumatised nephew.

  Worst of all was that, seeing how upset we both were, she made it clear that we mustn’t feel in any way responsible. She knew, she said, that Gregory was a vulnerable child, and blamed herself for allowing him to sleep out.

  The next day we went through the usual sanctions with Justin. No privileges, no TV and no PlayStation. Not much of a punishment for most kids, I imagine, but to Justin, such losses were torture.

  But about the motivation behind his own form of ‘torture’ I was ambivalent. It had really seemed that he had no notion of the pain he’d inflicted, and I wondered if he was so used to extreme pain himself, via his bouts of self-harming, that he genuinely didn’t think he’d hurt Gregory that much. It was either that, or that he did know, which made for an equally depressing picture.

  Either way, it was a wake-up call for both of us. Not to mention being a stark reminder of Mona’s chilling prophecy.

  But incidents such as this, I mused, once my initial shock had died down, were exactly what our kind of fostering was about. It may have been shocking to see what had previously been just a set of notes actually happening in our midst, but this was why I’d wanted to do it so badly in the first place. This – this whole tapestry of tragedy heaped on tragedy, and all the far-reaching ramifications – was exactly what drove Mike and I. I just hoped we could unpick all the bad threads that were making a muddle of the rest, and so succeed where so many others had failed. But I knew now, more than ever, that this would be a tall order. A real challenge. Justin seemed more complex by the minute.

  �
��Curry or pizza or Chinese – what’s your preference?’

  It was the following Saturday morning and Mike and Kieron were off to football as per usual. It had been a quiet sort of week since all the revelations and rearrangements, but, even so, I felt shattered and not at all like cooking a big family dinner. Tonight I had a date with a take-away and the telly and someone else would definitely be doing the washing up.

  ‘Curry!’ Mike, Kieron and Justin all said together, though Justin’s contribution came from the behind the PlayStation controller that he was, as ever, feverishly playing on. Indeed, today, having only just got his privileges back, he was even more obsessed with it than usual. One day, perhaps, we’d get him off to football with the boys, but today wasn’t the day, I thought, to push it.

  It had been much colder than usual, with a bitingly chilly wind, and I was actually happy to spend the day indoors myself, my scheduled mooch around the shops with Riley having been cancelled a little while back because she’d been feeling a bit off-colour. I did miss my daughter, though, and felt a little redundant as I dragged the mop and bucket out from the cleaning cupboard.

  She’d said she might pop round later and, if not, I might stroll down to hers, but it was probably a good thing for me to catch up with a bit of housework and cleaning in the meantime; I’d forgotten, and had been forcibly reminded by having Justin, that having an extra person in the house created a lot of extra dust. And I definitely couldn’t be having that.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ I said, grinning. ‘Because I fancy Chinese …’ I pushed my sleeves up. ‘Only kidding. Now get out from under my feet. And you, Justin,’ – I paused here, to look at my watch – ‘have only forty-seven minutes of TV time left before I stage a takeover of the sofa and remote!’

  I’d planned, as is my slightly obsessive way with housework, on making a circuit of the upstairs bedrooms, stripping beds as I went, before embarking on a big upstairs dustathon. And since Justin’s was the first door on the left once up the stairs, it seemed logical to tackle that room first.

  It was, as it had been for a little while now, a mess, but in a good way. Since the last time he’d stripped it back to basics, he’d now got most of his belongings out again. There was dirty washing piled up in a heap behind the door, DVDs and cases strewn around the floor, and the carpet was actually a small sea of toy soldiers, which looked like they’d originally been set up in ranks but were now, given that they were mostly lying prostrate all over the place, in the last throes of some important battle or other, during which almost all of them had been slaughtered.

  I crossed the room, casually dispatching a further couple of gallant heroes, and pushed my sleeves up, ready to get stuck in. As I approached the bed, however, something caught my eye immediately. On it was Justin’s memory box, which, along with his photo album that he kept in it, was open.

  We’d learned about memory boxes during our training. Lots of kids in care have them apparently. In an uncertain world and with, very often, equally uncertain futures, they are encouraged to keep a tangible store of cherished memories, so they have touchable reminders of happy times. As well as photographs of loved ones, greeting cards and letters, a box might also include things like ticket stubs from the cinema or a sporting event, programmes, souvenirs, postcards – anything, really, with something meaningful about it, that they could look through when feeling sad or lonely.

  I had seen Justin’s memory box several times already, but he had always been looking in it and, invariably, he would close it if anyone approached. Where he kept it, I didn’t know, because he secreted it away, and though I’d been through his room thoroughly when I’d tracked down his stash of socks, I hadn’t seen it, and, in any case, hadn’t wanted to intrude. These things were clearly private, and I respected that, obviously, though I was very keen to have him open up to me more, and things like this would prove very helpful. I had asked him a couple of times if he wanted to go through the box with me, but he’d always shaken his head and gone, ‘Nah, there’s nothing in there. It’s just crap’, or something equally dismissive. And though he would sometimes bring photographs from the box to show us, the actual box always stayed put.

  Yet here it was now, just sitting on his bed, wide open, almost as if he’d put it there specifically for me to find. Engrossed as he’d been on the games console when I’d left him, he knew perfectly well that I was coming upstairs to clean bedrooms.

  It just seemed way too much of an open invitation to resist, particularly since the incident with Gregory – so, spurred on by the knowledge that the more I knew about him the better I could help him, I sat down on the bed and placed it on my knees.

  It was a shoebox, that had been transformed by being encased in black faux-leather, and was covered in Bart Simpson stickers. In the centre of the lid there was a small photograph of Justin aged around eight years old, though it was difficult to make out as the box and lid had obviously been reinforced often; both were criss-crossed with many layers of Sellotape.

  Inside was a menu from a Tex Mex restaurant, some birthday cards, a brochure from a theme park and a football programme, plus a number of different kinds of sea shell. There were also lots of photos, some of children – who I assumed were his little brothers, because I could see a definite family likeness. Not that I knew just how much of a family likeness, because, as with Justin, their paternity was unknown, none of her ‘boyfriends’ sticking around for long enough to lay claim to them. Justin had asked his mother, apparently, some years back, but had been simply told not to be nosey.

  The photos also included ones of a variety of women, all of which (not just the dark-haired ones, this time, I noticed) had had their faces stabbed with something sharp and their eyes carefully removed. It looked like it had mostly been done with scissors. Most heartbreaking of all was that so many were crumpled; the ones of his mother particularly badly, as if they’d not only been stabbed at repeatedly, but then also been screwed up in distress many times.

  And then – and I felt my eyes smart at this – smoothed out again. At least, in so far as they could be. It was a record of the many times in his young life he’d felt unloved, and then loved, and then abandoned, and then hopeful. It was very, very difficult to look at.

  And it seemed I wasn’t the only one looking.

  I don’t know how much time had passed when I first became aware of it, but while I was sitting there deciding I must press Justin to talk to me about this, I suddenly had that feeling that I was no longer alone. I looked up then and, sure enough, he was standing in the bedroom doorway.

  He said nothing at all, just crossed the room towards me, took the box, closed it and calmly placed it under his pillow.

  For all his silence and his uncharacteristic lack of histrionics, I could feel his anger thrumming in the air. I felt a wave of embarrassment and floundered for a moment, feeling I’d been caught redhanded doing something naughty. ‘Justin, love …’ I began. I … I … was … well, it was just there, and –’

  ‘You were looking at my private stuff,’ he said calmly.

  ‘I was cleaning love, that’s all. And it was there, open, on your bed.’

  He stared at me for a moment before shrugging his shoulders ‘Don’t matter anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s only a load of old crap.’

  I stood up, then made myself busy smoothing the duvet. ‘I’m so sorry, love,’ I said. ‘It’s your personal things. I really had no right to …’

  ‘It’s fine Casey,’ he said, and his tone was light, even dismissive. ‘I’m just gonna stay in here now, though, if that’s okay. And watch a DVD.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s fine. I can do your room later.’

  I hesitated a moment, in case he wanted to say more, but he just turned, knelt on the floor and started gathering up DVDs. So I left the room, quietly closing the door behind me. And though the feeling persisted that he’d wanted me to see it, I couldn’t help feeling really bad. I had intruded on something personal to him, and that was somethi
ng I could never have imagined myself doing.

  When I passed his room later, Justin was still in there, only now he was no longer watching a DVD, but once again stripping it of all but its functional furniture, and apparently doing it on autopilot. If he heard me or saw me, he certainly didn’t register it. Same process, I thought, but this time without the drama.

  I wasn’t sure who he was trying to punish; me or himself. It was just such a desperately sad thing to witness.

  Chapter 11

  April had arrived and with it some slightly warmer weather at long last and, like another ray of sunshine, Riley was on the phone. ‘Mum, it’s me,’ she said, and I could tell right away that she was brighter than she had been of late. Which was good to hear, as I’d been a little worried about her. It wasn’t like Riley to be ill – she was almost invariably like a Duracell bunny. But she’d been feeling off-colour more than once in the last couple of weeks. I’d been just about to call her myself.

  ‘Hiyah, lovey,’ I answered. ‘You feeling better? You certainly sound it.’

  ‘Brilliant, thanks,’ she said brightly. ‘Just wanted to check you were in.’

  ‘Yes, I am. No plans to be going anywhere, either. Why, are you going to pop round?’

  ‘I was, yes. Mum, what time’s Dad likely to be home?’

  Strange thing to ask, I thought. ‘Usual time,’ I answered anyway. ‘Around five-ish or so. He didn’t say any different when he left this morning. Why?’ Mike was a warehouse manager for a big office-furniture supply company. He worked long hours, but, thankfully, also regular ones.

  ‘Good,’ she said firmly, but not answering my question. ‘I’m just going to wait for David to get back from work, then we’ll be over. Can we have tea at yours?’

  All these strange questions! But what a daft one this was. ‘Of course it’s okay, stupid! It’ll be lovely to see you both. I was just going to do pizza for Justin and Kieron, but I’m sure I can come up with something more elegant for us four. Hey, but listen, you sound like there’s some particular reason for all this. I mean, it’s lovely to see you any time, but –’