by Anne Fine
I crossed my fingers hard.
‘And no one can get at you, either,’ she told me. ‘You are just as safe here. We lock the doors really well at night. So you sleep sound. And we’ll start thinking about everything else tomorrow morning, shall we?’
I must have nodded.
‘Kiss?’
I don’t know why I shook my head. I used to like it when Mum hugged and kissed me. But she turned at the door and blew a kiss from there. (I didn’t understand what she was doing till the next night, when she did it again.)
She left the door half-open. I slid out of bed and listened through the gap. Linda was going into the kitchen. Before the door closed behind her, she said, ‘Alan, remind me to phone the dentist tomorrow. Did you see his mouth?’
I wasn’t scared. I’d visited the dentist with Mr Perkins. If I felt anything, it was excitement. I shut the door, then pulled the downie off the bed to heap it in the corner. It was a whole lot puffier than the blankets I had shared with Gem. But still I couldn’t sleep for a long time.
PC Martin Tallentire
For all the fuss in the papers, we knew we couldn’t keep Bryce Harris locked up for long. He’d barely touched the boy. And when I phoned the hospital to see if I could get to see the mother, they told me that they’d given her some knock-out drops, and she’d be no use for a day or two.
Or even then, I thought, if I know her sort. We see them often enough, these women who’ve been eased away from all their friends and family, their jobs, and anyone who might support them in the business of leaving a thug. It happens in all sorts of families. Sometimes it’s simple intimidation: threats, bashings and the like. In others, the way it works can be more subtle. Everyone’s friends and relations get up their noses now and again. Most people let it be. They just back off until they feel a whole lot less annoyed, then they pick up the threads. But when one of these grim control freaks gets involved, you’re in big trouble. You are so much easier meat if you’ve no one to turn to, no one to say to you, ‘Excuse me? He did what?’ ‘He hit you where?’ ‘Christ, I would not put up with that – not for a single moment!’
And so the bully gradually and deliberately pushes all of these people out of your life. Your mother: ‘The old cow hates me! I can tell! You’re going to have to choose. It’s me or her!’ Your sister. ‘She’s a bitch! Look how she didn’t even speak to me when she was round here last time. This is my house and I don’t want her here!’ Your friends are easily frozen out. Even the girlfriend you have known for years stops calling for a while because her child’s sick, or she’s distracted or depressed, and in the bully steps. ‘She can’t be much of a friend.’ ‘I never mentioned it, but you should hear the things she says about you behind your back.’ On it goes. ‘Well, you can visit your Aunt Sue, but I’m not taking you. I’ll need the car for work. You’ll have to get to Scotland on the bus.’
Throw in the sulks and tempers, and the occasional stray fist let loose to put you right (‘That was your fault, that was. You were provoking me!’) and keeping in touch with anyone you liked or loved becomes not worth the effort. Your friends begin to take the hint, and drop away. Your family try to tell you a few home truths about your choice of partner, and that’s more grist to the bully’s mill. (‘See? They’ve had a down on me right from the start!’) And soon your world is him, and only him. And after that you gradually begin to see the whole boiling around you through his eyes because you’re so run down, and on your own, and standing up for yourself is so much harder than not arguing back. And if that makes you just a bag of worthless shite, because he tells you so, then you believe it. Add a few hard thumps and beatings, and it can take no time at all to turn an upright cheerful person into the sort of snivelling muppet that we police officers bail out time and again.
So best of luck to Mrs Bryce Harris, or whoever she was, with her long hospital sleep. Better off out of it, since all the woman has to wake to now is a child taken into care and one big mess.
But it was up to me to find out all the details. So while we had Bryce Harris under lock and key on suspicion of grievous bodily harm, I went back to the flat. One of our locks was on the damaged door to keep the neighbours out. In I went, hammering open windows as I walked through because of the stink. I was quite glad to see the dog was gone. I reckoned I owed someone from the council offices a pint for that. Now it was my job to go through the place with a fine-tooth comb, looking for anything that might give rise to tracking down the past.
I was allowed to shift things about. They’d already taken all the photographs that one or two of those buffoons in Social Services might need to see a second time if they went all soft-headed, and talked of sending the child ‘home’. I would have thought the bruises on the mother’s legs would be enough. But Martha had photographed all around the flat as well. (‘Got some quite arty ones of all that dog poo.’)
I spent an hour or so opening drawers. Anything that was useless – the special offers, packs of cards, catalogues, porn – I threw in a pile on the floor. I kept the bills because you can track down a host of aliases and previous addresses from some of those. Crushed in a drawer were several anonymous letters about the noise the dog made all the time, and one warning Harris that if he didn’t cough up what he owed, he’d get a visitor he didn’t want. That too was left unsigned. The place was knee-deep in receipts, some three or four years old. Fags, beer and groceries mainly. I must say, that surprised me. I would have had Bryce Harris down for the sort that lets the receipts for anything he hasn’t shoplifted drop in the street because he can’t be arsed to stuff them in his pockets.
Then I went through the big cupboard in the bedroom, tossing the bottles behind me onto the bed so I could get right to the back. Christ, there were some horrors in there, but I pressed on. I found a discount card to some toddlers’ soft playcentre called Hurlabout. (Result! Name of child: Edward Taylor.) I found a hairdresser’s card tucked in a tampon box. A Cut Above. The salon’s address was in Sunderland. No time or date, but we were definitely getting somewhere. I found a first birthday card from somebody who’d signed herself Nana, but with so doddery a hand I reckoned she was probably out of it by now, all these years later. A postmark might usefully have pinned down Eddie’s year of birth, but the envelope was gone.
Then, at the back, I found the tidy little tower of unmarked tapes, with an old shirt draped over. I counted eleven of them, and hauled them out because I hoped we might get Harris for distributing porn – though it was most unlikely that any charge would stick, videotapes dating back almost to the days when showing a little bit of you-know-what was seen as daring. Most of the people in these blocks are skint, but if there’s one thing they spend money on, it’s fancy electronics. The only people with machines that could still play these things were all those middle-class old folk on the other side of town, hoarding their old boxed sets of The Forsyte Saga and I, Claudius.
Still, any chance to get that bastard under lock and key was worth the effort, so I heaved the tapes into my evidence box and kept on, poking through the cupboards till even the rubber gloves I wore disgusted me. The kitchen was a greasy pit. Revolting. I couldn’t even face the garbage can. I swear if Eddie’s birth certificate had been on top of that, in a clean plastic bag, I wouldn’t have picked it out.
Last came the bathroom. There was a stash of drugs inside the cistern, as there so often is. Good. One more possible charge. I didn’t bother with the mess of slimy bottles, or the sodden towels. I just kicked them aside to check that there was nothing underneath except more filth and mess. I broke the catch to push the window open and check the outside sill for yet more drugs, but all there was out there was heaps and heaps of ancient bird shit.
I picked my box up and walked out. When I got in the street the fresh air hit me in the face.
That poor boy had lived in that foul stink for four whole years. And no one had noticed. Christ alive! Sometimes I hate this country.
Linda Radlett, Foster Carer
I have to say that he was one of the easiest boys we’ve ever had. More of them than you’d think are good as gold – often from gratitude at feeling safe. But they still worry you with their haunted eyes and inability to concentrate, as if the only thing inside their heads is trying not to upset you.
Eddie was different. The way he responded was extraordinary for a child who’d come from a place like that. On the very first morning, Alan said to him, ‘You’re doing a fine imitation of a concrete mixer, chomping away on that egg with your mouth wide open.’
‘I’ve seen a concrete mixer,’ he said. ‘On telly.’ And you could almost watch him processing the memory to work out what it was that Alan had meant. And then he giggled with delight and shut his mouth! And after that, we only had to turn to one another and say, ‘Is someone round this table mixing concrete?’ and he’d clamp his lips together. He learned fast.
The bed-wetting too. Obviously for the first couple of nights we thought it might just stem from tension and exhaustion. But soon it was obvious that it was a regular thing, so I persuaded Eddie to settle for a bed protector over the heap of folded blankets on the floor that he felt safer on, scared of the ‘too high’ bed. But then, as soon as we got into the routine of leading him through for a pee before we turned in ourselves, hey presto! He was practically dry.
And he asked questions all the time. Intelligent questions. ‘Why do you do it that way?’ ‘Why do you keep it there?’ ‘How does it work?’ It was a little like having a seven-year-old toddler trailing after us.
And there were odder questions too. ‘What’s a blood family, Linda?’
That stopped me in my tracks. I bustled round a bit, pouring my coffee. And then I ran my arm round his thin body to pull him close. ‘Have you heard someone saying it?’
He nodded.
‘Can you tell me who that was?’
‘Not sure,’ he told me anxiously. ‘Might have been Rob. Or Sue.’
‘Oh, right!’ Well, that was a relief. He’d clearly had the little speech I’d heard some social workers give a dozen times. So I knew what to say. ‘Most babies are born into families, Eddie. Some people call them “blood families” because the baby’s made out of the same sort of skin and bone and blood and stuff as their mum and dad.’
‘They’re not covered in blood.’
‘No. They’re not covered in blood.’ I gave him a moment to digest this before pointing to the raised veins on my hand. ‘See those wriggly blue lines? That’s all my blood rushing around my body, doing its job.’
‘It’s blue?’
‘Not really. Yes, the lines look blue, but if I cut myself, it would bleed red.’ I took his soft little paw. ‘And you’ve got blood in there too. It’s just your skin’s so fresh and young that we can’t see it going round.’
I let him leave his hand beside my battered old one for a while, and then I said, ‘The blood in me is the same sort my mum and dad had. And the blood in you is like your mum and dad’s. That’s why some people call your mum and dad and brothers and sisters your “blood family”.’ I pulled him closer. ‘And mostly families work well and babies grow up there. But sometimes things go wrong, like they did for you, and then people like Rob and Sue decide it would be better if you come to stay with people like us. Just for a while.’
I felt him stiffen at those last few words, so said it yet again. ‘But you will never, ever go back to Harris.’
‘You promise?’
‘I already did. About a hundred times.’
‘Not a hundred,’ he rebuked me. ‘Not nearly a hundred. More like’ – he counted on his fingers ‘nearly ten?’
Oh, he was bright enough.
He didn’t go to school at first. I reckoned if we kept him home, I could teach him to read a little quicker, one to one. (I used to be a teacher.) And so we started off with all my old staged readers. He knew the names of the letters, but still had to learn the phonic way of saying them. Then we were off. I bribed him along with little things he needed anyway. (I’d never seen a child with less in his Personal Box, and I was not sure when he would move on.) But after a while, as he began to get his confidence, the tiny treasures that I handed out were less important. He was on it in a flash, reading road signs to me whenever we went out, and almost incapable of pushing a shopping trolley past a sign without proudly reading it aloud to anyone around.
That supermarket. The first time we went, his mouth dropped open and he followed me around quite mesmerized, like a small zombie. On an aisle end where they sell stuff off really cheap, close to the date stamp, he whispered excitedly, ‘I know them! We ate them a lot!’ Once we were home and unpacked, I asked him what it was he’d liked so much about the place. First he said that it was the great long lights. Then that it was ‘so huge’. Then, ‘So much stuff, but all in places.’ In the end I reckoned what struck him so forcibly was the sheer order of the shop. And after that, neither Alan nor I could do the shortest supermarket run without him begging, ‘Can I come?’
I took him to the dentist, thinking that things were far worse than they were. Angela said to him, ‘Open your mouth for me, pet,’ and I expected to hear the usual cascade of clicks on the assistant’s keyboard as she flagged up each rotten stump and cavity – the usual stuff.
But, no. ‘Well,’ Angela said when they were finished. ‘It’s not too good. But let’s be fair, it isn’t that bad either. We can deal with that.’
His eyes were wide. I’d no idea what her words meant to him, but she says that her tack of treating all the children like adults and all the adults like children has worked so far, so she keeps to it, even with my strange brood.
She turned to me. ‘Most of that rather weird-looking mess is normal. Things falling out and others growing in. There are some cavities I’ll fill next week. But’ – here she smiled at Eddie – ‘someone around here has clearly been looking after his gums and using his toothbrush. So, well done you.’
Eddie looked pleased. He lapped up praise. It made him almost radiant. ‘I didn’t always use the toothbrush,’ he confessed to me on the drive home. ‘But Mr Perkins took us to see a dentist and he told us that, in an emergency, like if we went camping and forgot to pack it, we can do a pretty good job using a finger.’
By then I had become accustomed to what Alan had begun to call ‘The Wit and Wisdom of Mr P’.
After a couple of weeks, I dared take Eddie swimming. He’d never been, and one of my jobs is to ease these children into normal life. They have to know the things the others know, or there’s no hope of ever making and keeping friends. So I did what I usually do – borrowed a smaller child to give us an excuse for keeping to the toddler pool.
We took Marie, from next door. She’s only two years old, but she is sturdy. And watching Marie gave him confidence. Again, you could see Eddie thinking, ‘If she’s OK . . .’ And after he had sat for a while scrunched in a ball on the side, getting used to the echoing noise and the splashing, and the sheer height of the glassed roof, he dared to slide his feet into the water and stand up. I think he was astonished it only came halfway up to his knees. He paddled further down the slope, survived his first splashed drops from two more toddlers having a water fight, and made it over to me.
Marie reached out for him, but it turned out to be more of a push than a clutch. He staggered backwards, losing his balance in the shallow water enough to have to sit down. But once he realized that the water still came up no deeper than a bath, he was away. Before we left, even on that first day, Eddie was spending most of his time on his stomach, ferrying himself across the baby pool with his hands, pretending to swim.
I didn’t know how long we’d have him. Sometimes that can depend on when the child sees a psychologist. And if there’s any possibility of giving evidence in court, that often gets delayed in case the defence starts arguing that ideas have been put in the child’s mind. So I was really waiting for Rob to let me know. I’d used the standard grant to take him shopping for clothes. He was en
tranced. Usually we encourage them to make their own choices, but that didn’t work with Eddie. He only wanted things like Thomas the Tank Engine shirts, and other baby stuff that would have had him shredded at the local primary school. He hadn’t learned that pink is social death for boys. I had to be quite firm.
So in the end we compromised with suitable stuff for daytime, but Thomas pyjamas. He loved the things so much that I went back the following week to get another pair. But even in the largest size, they were too short. ‘You’re soft, you are,’ said Alan, when he saw me sewing extra strips onto the legs and sleeves to lengthen them.
But I’d have sold my soul for Eddie. I had fallen in love.
(They warn you about that when you sign on.)
Eddie
The first time Linda mentioned it, we were sitting at the table, the way we did every day. Her hand had closed round mine to make sure I was holding the pencil the way she said was best – ‘No, Eddie. Like that. And now make me a capital S, just like a lovely curled snake. Yes, that’s right! Perfect!’
I was so happy. And then she suddenly made her voice go all casual, and out it came. ‘By the way, I was thinking about your mum last night. The bruises on her leg must have gone now. Maybe she’s feeling better. Would you like me to talk to Rob about fixing up a visit?’
I didn’t trust myself to answer so I shook my head.
She kept on, trying to persuade me. ‘She’d probably be really pleased to see how well your writing’s coming on.’
I knew that Linda didn’t really think that. I knew what they all thought because I listened all the time. Up on the landing. At doors. I acted good. I was good. But I still had two ears that worked, and wasn’t stupid. From the day of that first hammering on the door, I’d overheard all sorts of things that people said about my mum, whispering in corridors or talking quietly on phones – ‘in no fit state to defend the child’, ‘probably too scared to testify’, ‘under that bastard’s thumb’ – until I knew full well that everyone thought that she was useless. Useless.