by Casey Watson
But this wasn’t just about that – wonderful though it might be. It was mostly about putting together all the pieces of his past. Justin’s being able to piece together the details of where he came from was never going to be a bad thing; who doesn’t want to know how they got here, however difficult the circumstances? So I kept positive for his sake and my fingers firmly crossed.
And there was no let-up in Justin’s excitement. He was watching EastEnders that evening with Mike and me, and the Mitchell brothers were up to their usual antics.
‘I wonder if he’s going to be big and hard like Phil Mitchell,’ he wondered. ‘I bet he is, Mike, don’t you?’
Mike nodded. ‘He could well be. After all, you’re a big lad, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, he is, love,’ I said to Mike. ‘He definitely is. But don’t forget, Justin, there’s always a chance that this man isn’t your dad.’
I hated having to see the look of frustration cross Justin’s face, and also that I had to play devil’s advocate. It was me, after all, that had got this ball rolling. But, at the same time, I didn’t want it rolling out of control. I shot Mike a warning glance, and he seemed to understand. As, I think, did Justin, once he gave it a second’s thought. ‘I know that, Casey, I really do, honest. I’m just saying that if it is my dad, he will probably be big.’
‘Possibly love, yes. But it doesn’t matter anyway, does it, because the one thing we do know is that, whoever he is, he’s going to be good looking. How could he not be? What with having such a looker for a son.’ I reached across the sofa then, to tickle him. ‘What with all those blond curly ringlets.’
The next call came from Harrison only twenty-four hours later. He’d apparently spoken to the man in question that morning, and he’d agreed to meet Justin ‘for a chat’.
But this conversation was with me, and not Justin, for which I was grateful, because it seemed Harrison wasn’t holding his breath either.
‘I don’t actually know what’ll come of it,’ he told me. ‘Because the man sounds more interested in not being Justin’s dad. Told me he’d know straight away if Justin was one of his. Said all his other children look alike.’
Like he was siring dogs for Crufts, I thought, but didn’t say. How very nice.
But, if anything, it was Justin who reassured me.
‘Don’t worry, Casey,’ he told me, as I gave him his fifth ‘Don’t get your hopes up’ lecture. ‘It’s not like I have any feelings for him or anything. I don’t know him, do I? So if he’s not my dad, then it don’t matter, do it? It’s fine.’
We couldn’t go with Justin, obviously, because that was outside our remit. It was arranged that Harrison Green would come round and pick up, and then take him down to the snooker hall in the town centre, which was the agreed location of the meeting. It was hard to articulate my feelings as I waved them both off. I was just aware of this knot of anxiety inside me, which I couldn’t shake for the hour or so the two of them were gone.
Mike returned home in the interim, and I recalled that I’d felt something similar when Kieron had started secondary school. He’d been so proud that he was going, but I knew that at the same time he was terrified. Terrified of the sheer size of the place, the vast numbers of other children, the overwhelming nature of everything; so many people and so much noise. I’d felt physically ill all day for him, and by the time he came home, I had bitten all my nails to the quick.
I told Mike – I’d already told him what Justin had said to me about the photo – and I realised it wasn’t just me that felt this fierce need to protect him.
‘But, love,’ he said, ‘we’re here for him. And what he said to you is right. There’s never been a father in his life, don’t forget. So it’s not like this man can hurt him any more than he’s already been hurt. Sure, if it doesn’t work out, he’s going to be disappointed, but disappointed is not the same as heartbroken, is it? He’s enough on his plate in that department, dealing with his bloody mum.’
So I tried to be mollified and tried not to worry, but I still couldn’t help but feel my heart going out to him, having to go to a strange place, meet a strange man and to have to ask him, ‘Are you my dad?’ Should any child have to do that? No, they shouldn’t.
And I knew, just as soon as I saw Justin and Harrison walking back up the front path, that the whole thing had actually been fruitless.
‘So, love,’ I asked him, as I quickly toasted crumpets. Harrison had declined my offer of a cup of tea, thankfully, so it was just the three of us now in the kitchen. ‘How did it go, then? What was he like?’
Justin cupped his hands around a steaming mug of hot chocolate. ‘He was alright,’ he said, frowning. ‘But I was, like, dead nervous, Casey. I walked in, like, and I didn’t have a clue what to say. He was massive, too, and a bit fat, and I bet I’m gonna take after him.’ He didn’t qualify as to whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing. I could only go by his expression, which told me nothing.
‘Anyway,’ Justin went on. ‘He just goes, “Alright, lad? You want to play a game of snooker or something?” So we had a game, and, like, I let him win, because he’s my dad and that …’ Mike and I now exchanged glances. ‘An’ he bought me a Coke – sorry, Casey, he didn’t know I’m not allowed it.’
‘But you do, you cheeky monkey! But no matter now, I suppose. Go on. What happened then?’
‘Well we just sat for a bit …’ He grinned now, obviously remembering. ‘Like two old men sat in a pub we were, the pair of us. Then he goes to me, like, “It’s been good today, lad, and all that.” And then, “And to be honest, lad, I still don’t even know if I am your dad.”’
‘And then?’ asked Mike gently.
‘An’ that was it, really. He said I needed to know that he’d got his own family now and that him and my mum were, like, years ago. He said he didn’t even really remember her. An’ then he said that that was, like, as far as it goes. And then he said sorry …’ Justin now picked up his crumpet and looked at it. I could see that, little by little, this was becoming more and more painful. Just the action of recounting it was hammering it home. ‘He said he was sorry,’ he finished, before taking his first bite, ‘but he already had enough on his plate.’
Mike and I were silent for only a short second, but it was a deep heavy silence even so.
‘It’s okay, sweetheart,’ I said, pulling out a chair between them at the table, and sitting down. ‘But at least you finally got to meet him – at least you can put a face to him now. Far better, that, than not knowing, eh?’
‘And he did the right thing,’ added Mike, reaching out to pat Justin’s arm. ‘He took the time and trouble to come and see you at least.’
‘Exactly,’ I agreed, though inside I was so sad for him, having it pointed out so baldly that he was a child who had simply been replaced.
‘I suppose so,’ Justin said, and, again, I couldn’t read him. ‘Though he did say, if ever I needed a kidney or owt … But I think he was joking, don’t you?’
Chapter 19
Though we didn’t know for sure (and, as it turned out, we never did find out) who Justin’s father was, the business of looking for him had sparked a new enthusiasm in Justin to sit down and really get to grips with where he came from and who he was now.
This was a major step on the road to unravelling the tangle of dark thoughts and memories in his young head and would, I knew, be an important part of the process we started when he came to us. It also seemed a sensible idea to unravel things, literally. To sit down and make a chart of his life, in date order, so he could look back with clarity at what had gone before. He’s always been quite vague about where he’d been and when, which wasn’t surprising, given the number of placements he’d been through, which also meant he would often get confused about dates and names.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and we had the house to ourselves, while Kieron and Mike were at football, so I suggested Justin bring down his memory box and that we start creating a personal tim
eline for him.
‘Like you might have done at primary school,’ I said, thinking back to find a good analogy. ‘Do you remember those ones they do in class on a long, long strip of paper, to explain how the earth was made? Where you start at the beginning of time and work forwards, putting in the creation of the mountains, and then the first life beginning in the sea, and then the dinosaurs –’
‘And with humans right at the very end, like, for only this much?’ Justin pinched finger and thumb together to indicate a tiny distance. ‘Because we’ve only been here for such a tiny amount of time?’
‘That’s the one!’ I said. ‘So you were obviously listening, then!’
I’d been feeling quite emotional since the business with Justin’s dad, as it had really hit home to me just how grim his life had been. I’d been lying in bed on the night of the meeting, unable to sleep (as Mike remarked, nothing new there, then), and had been saying how awful it was that, apart from his little brothers, who would probably end up losing contact with him anyway, there wasn’t a single person out there who loved him. It upset me so much, that; to think of it in those terms. To embrace the enormity of having to live in a world where there’s no-one who cares if you’re happy or sad, whether you’re well or feeling down or making your way or need a hug. It was so far from my own experience, with our huge loving family, that it was difficult to take in as a concept. I tried to explain it all to Mike, who lay and listened to me whispering, then turned and said, ‘But, Case, he has us now, at least’.
‘I know, but –’ I started to say in reply.
‘And we love him, don’t we? You and me,’ he whispered back.
And he was right. Yes we did. He had us now.
Once I’d explained the concept to Justin, and how we’d go about making a timeline just for him, we both went into the garage and, after a short rummage, found what I knew was in there somewhere. A big roll of leftover wallpaper from way back – from when we last decorated Kieron’s bedroom.
We took it into the dining room, and set to work to make sufficient space to do it, moving the dining table and chairs and stacking the latter against the opposite wall, so we had plenty of big empty floor and wall space. ‘This is a hell of a lot of paper,’ Justin observed, holding one end up as I balled bits of Blu-Tack and stuck them to the back of it.
‘That’s because,’ I said, grinning, as I fixed my end to the wall, ‘you’ve had one hell of a lot of life, love.’
It turned out to be a long old process. We started with his birth, which he carefully wrote at one end of the timeline – he’d bought his pencil case of coloured felt pens down from his bedroom for the purpose, as well as his memory box of mementoes – and then moved forwards, year by year.
Right from the off, I realised this would be no simple task. Justin had an awful lot of gaps in his memory, and really struggled, initially, with the order in which we were doing things. It really hit home when I glanced at the time, hearing the front door open. We’d been at it for three hours already by that time, and on our timeline he was still only six years old.
With Mike and Kieron home, I took the opportunity to suggest a break for tea. This was turning out to be a bigger job than I realised.
While I went into the kitchen to knock up some drinks and a round of sandwiches, I could hear Justin explaining to Kieron and Mike exactly what it was we were trying to achieve.
‘Only it’s hard,’ he was saying, because I keep getting confused. It’s such a long time back, being six.
‘Even longer for me, mate,’ I heard Mike observe. ‘Perhaps,’ he lowered his voice here, in a theatrical manner, ‘Casey’s had you go about it the wrong way. Tell you what I’d do if it was me trying to remember. I’d forget putting up dates; I’d just work with ages. Start with the things you definitely remember when you were whatever years old. Then you can go though that lot [he obviously meant Justin’s memory box] and start by sticking up all the things you can be sure of the date of – that photo for instance, and that ticket stub – see? That’s dated – and once you’ve got all that up and in definite order then it’s just a case of filling in the gaps.’
By the time I came in, with my tray full of cheese and ham sandwiches, they’d made more progress in fifteen minutes than we had all afternoon.
I smiled gratefully at Mike. What would I ever do without him? We were away again and storming along straight after tea.
And it was such a positive thing to do because, rather than keep focussing on the negative, using Justin’s happy memories and mementoes made us focus on the good times, reminding him that there were chinks of light amid the darkness and that, actually, there were a lot of good people in the world.
‘Oh, yes!’ he’d enthuse. ‘That was when I was living with the Phillips family, and I went to St Cuthbert’s and had this friend, Tom.’ Then his face would light up and he’d be off on another memory, excitedly telling me about something good that had happened instead of painfully recounting something bad.
Listening to him, I suddenly realised how absolutely crucial these memory boxes were, and how right social services were to insist that each foster carer had to record all memorable events in a child’s life. Without the photos and mementoes, we could have never done this, and it was so enlightening and therapeutic to see. I remembered how, in my training, I’d been told that children often resented their memory boxes – saw them as a sad reminder of unhappy times. That may have been so, but at times like this, when a child was obviously ready to address such things, it really was a vital piece of kit.
As we continued with the marathon bout of sticking and note-writing, we were able to talk about relatives that Justin had never even mentioned: aunties and uncles and even several cousins. So without him even realising what he was doing, he was actually extending his family and placing himself in a far wider support circle. Someone, somewhere within social services, obviously knew what they were doing when they came up with the idea of memory boxes.
But the bad memories were, of course, every bit as important as the good, because the process of taking ownership of these previous suppressed memories was vital to his emotional wellbeing and, at one point, when talking about his nanna, his mum’s mum, he suddenly came out with a comment about his mum that really proved just how far he’d come.
‘I know drugs are wrong,’ he said. ‘But I can also kind of see why she did it. Because no-one stopped her. Because my nanna never really cared what she did.’
‘Did your mum tell you that?’ I asked him. He nodded. ‘Yeah, she did. She said she was left by herself all the time, pretty much. So her mates would come round and they’d smoke weed.’
So simple, I thought. And so depressingly telling. From such small beginnings do whole lives get destroyed.
Completing the timeline ended up taking up most of that weekend, and it was immediately obvious that it had proved cathartic for Justin. It was as if it had opened up a new seam of memories; memories, moreover, that Justin wanted to share.
We were having our usual Sunday roast the following weekend, around the middle of September, with the whole family there, including David and a now very heavily pregnant Riley, and we’d just finished eating our dessert. Conversation had turned at that point to something topical that had been on EastEnders that week, as it often did, as we were all fans. I don’t recall the exact storyline, but I think it was something about drug abuse, prompting Justin to comment about his mum ‘doing drugs’ and how he remembered how scary it had been.
‘I was about seven,’ he said, brow furrowing. ‘Something like that.’
I recalled the timeline. So this would have been one of the intermittent short periods when he was back with his mum and his brothers. ‘I was upstairs,’ he went on. ‘It was evening, I think. Night time. And I didn’t know where she was, so I went downstairs to find her. An’ she was lying on the floor in the living room, on the rug, and it was like she was dead. I couldn’t wake her up.’ We were all riveted now, of course
, listening intently. ‘I kept shouting at her and shaking her and she just didn’t move. And then I saw this needle, and it was just sticking out of her arm, and I was really frightened, so I went to get Paul.’
‘Your next door neighbour?’ I asked him. He nodded.
‘Yes, Paul. And he came back with me and put her in the bath. Just pulled the needle out and picked her up and carried her upstairs, and put her in the bath, with her still with all her clothes on.
‘An’ then he just kept slapping her in the face until she woke up. An’ then, when he was trying to get her back out of the bath again, she threw up all over herself. There was sick everywhere – everywhere. All over her clothes, all over the lino. An’ then, when she moved, I saw there was poo running down the insides of her legs, too.’
We were all, I think, too stunned to speak as he said this, the horrible images all clamouring to fill our heads. It was a pretty grisly scene to see from anyone’s perspective, let alone that of an impressionable seven-year-old child. And this wasn’t just anyone, either, of course. It was his mother that Justin had seen in this state.