Wednesday's Child

by Shane Dunphy

  ‘Dunno. She sits down with me.’

  ‘Is she vomiting it back up?’ Andi piped up from beside me. ‘Libby, we’ve talked to you about Gillian’s anorexia before. She needs to be watched.’

  ‘Ah, she’s a wilful creature. I can’t watch her all the time. She eats and then she pukes. She’s been at that since she was a young one. I can’t follow her into the toilet! What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Follow her into the toilet,’ I said quietly. ‘When she’s like this, you do what you have to, Libby.’

  ‘Easy to see you’re not a parent of a teenager, Mister. You try following a fifteen-year-old into the bathroom.’

  ‘I have done so in the past.’

  ‘You’re full of shit, Mister.’

  I let that one slide. There was nowhere to go with it that was productive.

  ‘Libby, I want you to make an appointment to take Gillian to your GP. I need to have her looked over. When the weight of a person drops to the level she’s at it has fairly severe knock-on effects on the organs. She’s putting herself at risk now, and she needs to be seen by a medic as soon as possible. I know you have a medical card – it’ll cost you nothing. If transport is a problem, I can organise that also. But Libby, I will be checking to make sure she goes. I want you to go with her tomorrow.’

  I knew that I had crossed a line with her. Her eyes narrowed and she stepped back from the window. Just like her daughter, she had shut down.

  ‘Right,’ she said, moving back towards the house, her eyes still fixed on me as she slowly paced backwards.

  The dogs seemed to sense a change in mood, and the growling resumed as the beasts rose, their hackles up as if by some unspoken command. Then she was at the door of the house and was gone, and the air about us exploded into noise and ferocity again.

  Andi turned the key in the ignition and we reversed back up the dirt path for half a mile until we could turn. We said nothing.

  When we reached the main road she looked over at me, sunk in my seat and deep in thought.

  ‘So what did you make of that, Mister?’

  I smiled and looked over at her, mental and emotional exhaustion settling over me like a shroud. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt this way. It was like every drop of emotional resistance had been wrung from me. My brain felt like cotton wool.

  ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘Well you must have some comment. How do you think you’re going to get on with them?’

  ‘I think,’ I said, struggling for anything useful to say, ‘that I am in way over my head.’

  Andi laughed aloud and patted me on the knee.

  ‘Once you know that, Shane, you’ll do fine.’

  We drove through the beautiful midlands countryside as the sun dipped over the hills, and my first day of casework came to an end. As we headed back towards the office, I reflected on the fact that I had not achieved one single thing that day, other than probably alienating two sets of clients and the Principal of a local school. I reckoned that I could be thoroughly proud of myself.

  ‘How d’you think I did?’

  ‘You seemed to do grand so far as I could see. But then, I don’t know shite.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Shane, go home, have some dinner, watch something mindless on the television and forget about it. There’s tomorrow and the day after and the day after that etc., etc., etc. The O’Gormans and the Kellys and all the others you have on your caseload aren’t going anywhere. You might be public enemy number one today, but in a week or three weeks the phone will ring and there will be Libby O’Gorman on the other end looking for you to do something for her, and you’ll be the man. She’s a manipulator. And Gillian is learning the same behaviour. She’ll flutter her eyelashes and expect you to come running. You did the right thing today. You laid some solid ground rules about how your relationship will work. The trick with the O’Gormans is to stick by them.’

  I knew she was right.

  ‘You in a hurry to get home?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘Let me buy you dinner?’

  ‘I like Indian.’

  ‘Indian’s good. Muriel won’t mind?’

  ‘She works nights at the shelter. She won’t be home until around midnight. Until then, I’m a free agent.’

  ‘Well drive on then. I presume you know a good place.’

  ‘Oh no. The Indian place in town is terrible. I said that I liked Indian. I didn’t say the restaurant was any good.’

  ‘Oh. Well, let’s go somewhere else then.’

  ‘No! I like Indian!’

  ‘But I thought you said …’

  ‘We will go to the Indian place and will put up with it! It might not be any good, but it’s the only place in town.’

  ‘I tell you what. Just as long as it doesn’t give me food poisoning, I’ll give it a shot.’

  ‘Can’t promise that.’

  I looked over at her, and in the failing light I could see that she was barely suppressing a huge grin. I was glad of her company, and as we made our way back into town the ridiculous conversation continued and Andi and I put the day behind us and effortlessly became friends. It was a friendship I would come to value a great deal over the next year and, when everything began to fall asunder, she would be there for me when few others were.

  3

  The next day dawned bright and cold.

  I was renting a small cottage in a tiny hamlet about twenty miles from town, and was still very much living out of boxes. I had moved in on the Monday, started work on the Tuesday and was unpacking as I went along. The cottage consisted of two tiny bedrooms, a good-sized and quite cosy living room which had an open fire and an old (but very comfortable) suite of furniture, a shower and toilet, and a kitchen that was so small I reckoned that the previous occupants must have been the Seven Dwarves. I crawled out of bed, stumbled into the shower and, after I had scrubbed myself into an acceptable level of consciousness, made a pot of coffee. I had to dig around in a cardboard box and unwrap a clean cup from newspaper, only to find of course that I had to wash it anyway to get the newsprint off.

  I munched on dry brown toast and drank the coffee as I read the paper, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue playing on a small stereo system I had unpacked. In my head I was going over the events of the previous day, wondering if I could have done things differently. Eventually I gave it up. Maybe I could have been more gentle with Sister Assumpta. But then, Gillian’s state warranted the comments I made. Perhaps I could have handled the situation at the Kelly’s better, calmed Mrs Kelly, been more sympathetic. I wondered whether I should have refused to go out ten minutes after arriving in the office for the first time with an obviously sick man. Maybe, maybe, maybe … social care is full of maybes. There are almost no absolutes. I checked my diary for the day. There was to be a staff meeting at ten, which would take most of the morning, and I was visiting the McCoys, the family Andi had kindly passed on to me, in the afternoon. Hoping it would be quieter than the previous day, I got in my car and headed for town.

  The offices of the Social Work Department were the busiest I had yet seen them. The full complement of staff, twenty people in all, were in for the meeting. I made my way up to my office. No Melanie this time, but a load of papers and files that were obviously hers were strewn across the desk. I knew that I would not last the week without having a showdown with her over this, and pulled up a chair.

  I reached over to my file cabinet and took out the O’Gorman file. To say that it was huge would be an understatement. I was not even going to begin to try and read it then. I planned to take home some of my bigger case files to read in my own time (this was frowned upon by management as a security risk, but it was fairly common practice) and for now just riffled through the paperwork, looking for something specific. Five minutes later I found what I was looking for. Four coloured Polaroid photographs of Gillian were among the reports and letters. They had obviously been taken while she was on a trip
with a group of other children – possibly even when she was in residential care. They showed her horse-riding; at a table in a restaurant with an enormous pizza in front of her; hugging another girl as they stood outside a cinema, both of them grinning and making antennae with their fingers behind each others’ heads; pulling on a bowling shoe and looking irritated at being photographed. The photos were similar to any you would see of a normal, happy teenage girl. What was jarring about them, and what had caused Andi to advise me to look them over, was the obvious change in Gillian. In these photos she was certainly slim, but she looked healthy and full-faced and pretty. The spindly, hollow-eyed creature I had met the day before was almost unrecognisable as the child in these photographs. I looked at them for a long time.

  Photographs do not always tell the truth. People perform for the camera when they know it’s on them, putting up a façade and hiding who they really are. The best photos are those taken when the subject is unaware. The photo I kept coming back to was the one of Gillian on horseback. In it she was hunched over the pony’s neck, a riding helmet that was much too big for her head was pushed back on her forehead and she was looking to the side nervously. In the other three photographs you could mistake Gillian for a well-adjusted girl, full of fun. Not in this one. That pain I had seen was present here in those brown eyes. She was looking at something off on the horizon line, something that seemed to be moving away from her, something she could not quite make out. I wondered if she had ever managed to capture it, whatever it was.

  ‘Shane?’

  The voice startled me. A tall woman, maybe thirty-five years old, with long, black hair stood at the door. She was dressed in a long, black dress and black, high-heeled boots with a white, crocheted cardigan loose over the outfit.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, realising that I had made my way through the assembled group without saying ‘hello’ to anyone and had come straight to my desk. I suddenly felt very rude and anti-social.

  ‘I’m Josephine, Team Leader.’

  She extended a hand, smiling. Yesterday she had been out sick.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I began, standing up. ‘I just wanted to check the file. I had no time yesterday and I had to go into a couple of cases fairly cold. I didn’t mean to ignore everyone.’

  She laughed, brushing away the apology. She was full of abundant good humour, shaking my hand vigorously and placing her other hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I understand. I heard that you had some fun yesterday morning all right. Baptism of fire, or what? You must think that we are the worst crowd going! I feel awful. I should have been here to meet you and make sure you settled in.’

  ‘Not at all! You were ill. I got on fine. I was quite impressed with Joe, actually. He got that knife off Mrs Kelly while he was only really semi-conscious. Had to be seen to be believed!’

  She laughed again, leaning back against the door frame.

  ‘Will you join us in the kitchen for a coffee? There’s a nice bakery just down the road and we get some scones and cakes delivered up on Wednesdays for the team meetings. Call it a hidden incentive. One of the few rules that I have is that everyone make every possible effort to attend the team meetings. I understand if you’re in court or if there’s a case conference you have to attend or an emergency visit you just have to make, but that shouldn’t happen more than once or twice in a year. All the other weeks in the year, I want you here on a Wednesday morning.’

  ‘Got you.’

  ‘Good. Then we’ll get along fine. Now, come and have coffee and an apple sponge and meet some of your new colleagues. You look like an apple-sponge man to me.’

  ‘Well, I guess we’ll see, won’t we?’

  She laughed again and led me out the door and across to the kitchen.

  ‘Yes, we will.’

  The meeting itself took place in the room downstairs. A circle of chairs was pulled up and the assembled throng, most still clutching mugs of tea or coffee, gathered round. Minutes of the previous meeting and an agenda for this one had been distributed into our pigeon holes that morning. They were about cases and issues that I had, as yet, no knowledge of. There was also a notice that training in Child Sexual Abuse Assessment was being made available in the coming month, but only to social workers. I felt the old irritation at this kind of slight.

  The lines of rank and file among the professions are clearly drawn out in Social Care in Ireland. In other countries, I had learned, they were far looser, but in the class-conscious society that has developed here everyone must know their place and live with it. The order ran as follows: at the top of the pile are the social workers. They run the cases and must make all major decisions as to how a case is operated. In practice there are many cases that have no social worker, and there are indeed social workers with a great deal of respect for their non-social-work colleagues, but the fact remains that rank can be and is pulled on an all too regular basis.

  Next in line are the childcare workers. Their role, as I have already stated, is to work in a therapeutic and child-centred way with their clients, representing them at case conferences and presenting their needs and opinions to any agencies they are working with. Childcare workers are much more ‘at the coal-face’ than social workers. Their contact with the children is more constant and more regular.

  The final link in the chain are the family support workers. Their job is to work with families in an holistic way, assisting with matters such as financial management, behaviour management with challenging children, hygiene and nutrition.

  The reason for this hierarchy stems, probably, from qualifications. In the past, social workers had degrees while childcare workers did not. Family support workers, despite the hugely important work they do, were rarely qualified, and often only worked part-time. While this is no longer the case, the delineation remains.

  The meeting rattled on until 12.30 or so, and then everyone broke for lunch. Lunch happened in a pub just down the road from the offices. I stood at the bar, feeling uncomfortable, like a child on his first day at school. I ordered coffee and a club sandwich, and then found Andi at my arm, leading me to a table.

  I remember reading an article in Empire magazine about the making of the movie Planet of the Apes. It observed that during breaks in filming, the actors playing the apes in the movie would automatically congregate in the canteen with actors who were wearing make-up of a similar breed of ape. So a visitor to the set would see a table full of gorillas, a table full of orang-utans, a table full of chimpanzees. No one forced this, it wasn’t a ‘method technique’, it just naturally occurred.

  In the pub this lunchtime, I found myself participating in something very similar. At the table Andi led me to were the two family support workers, Marjorie and Betty. Andi pushed me into a chair and sat down beside me. And there we sat: childcare workers and family support workers, the two lowest primate groupings on the Child Protection Team.

  ‘So you’re the new boy in class.’ Marjorie smiled at me.

  Marjorie was dressed in a long, tie-dyed skirt and beaded top with Doc Marten boots. Betty was very smartly dressed in a suede suit, a cigarette already smouldering in her hand and her eyes languidly half-closed.

  ‘What in the name of God brings you to this godforsaken part of the universe?’ she asked, blowing smoke out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘I’m a sucker for punishment,’ I said, shaking my head at the proffered box of cigarettes.

  ‘You must be.’

  ‘You’re not from around here,’ Marjorie said, putting sugar into her coffee and helping me to move plates and ashtrays as our food arrived.

  ‘No. I’m from Wexford. I have family here, though. That’s how I know the area.’

  ‘So you’re not quite a blow-in.’

  ‘Well, I’ve only really been here on visits before, so I’m hardly a local.’

  ‘Well, you’re very welcome anyway.’ Betty grinned.

  ‘Thanks. Any hints on survival?’

  ‘With the case
s you’ve been given?’

  Marjorie and Betty shared a wry glance.

  ‘Well, I reckon you’ve got two choices really,’ Marjorie said, solemnly patting the back of my hand.

  ‘And they are?’

  ‘You can drown or you can thrash your arms about and scream for help.’

  I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘I’ve seen people who were loaded with the real problem cases, who worked themselves ragged, never complained, never caused a fuss and who ended up actually quite poorly as a result of the stress. D’you see Melanie over there?’

  She gesticulated with her head towards the person in question, who was sitting at a table on the other side of the pub with a group of cronies.