by Anne Fine
Eleanor Holdenbach, Child Psychologist
Sometimes a child just walks away from disaster. People in my profession pass our lives with the unhappy and damaged. We spend a good few years reading about the myriad ways in which the psyche can be blighted. We study endless cases, discuss a thousand more, and meet the rest in person. Sometimes I think it stops occurring to us that it is possible to have an impaired childhood and a bruised soul, yet still come out of it close to unscathed.
But I have seen it often enough over the years. A drunken bullying father sends his car over a quayside and drowns. His daughter blossoms. The younger brother of a teenage drug addict accompanies his mother to the morgue where she identifies the messed-up, purple body. They walk away. Within a week the skin rash that’s disfigured him for four long years has vanished, her blood pressure is back to normal, and you see the two of them smiling at one another in a supermarket aisle, discussing nothing more stressful than the coming meal.
And there was something of that sort in Eddie. He wasn’t interested in talking about Bryce Harris or his mother, or anything else in the past. He wanted to leave all that behind like some bad dream, and talk of his new school, his teacher (the aptly named Miss Bright, whom he adored), and after-school club on Tuesdays where, over the months I had my sessions with him, he seemed to learn to play everything from Snakes and Ladders to some sort of slimmed-down chess I never understood.
He sometimes talked about computer games (though it was obvious that Linda and Alan let him spend only enough time on those not to disgrace himself among his classmates). He told me what he was reading by himself, and what the Radletts read to him at bedtime. He talked about the films they let him watch. (A good bit of ground had to be made up there. I’d ask him, ‘See anything good?’ and he’d be telling me all about Dumbo the baby elephant, or Nemo the lost fish, as if he were the only person in the world who’d ever seen the film.)
So what we mostly did was talk about how he could best cope with others – especially those his own age. He’d certainly grasped the fact that he was different, and understood how it had come about. But he was keen to hide the fact as much as possible. So we explored how he might work on covering up the many gaps in his experience – how he might keep his friends, in short, from thinking him ‘a weirdo’ when he began to tell them things they’d known for years, or rushed into the classroom bragging about the fact that he had paddled in the sea. The real sea! Not even holding hands with Linda! Not even scared!
But he was teased in school, for all that Miss Bright was relentlessly stern with the rest of the class on poor Eddie’s behalf. When he got low, I found our conversations drifted back, always, to Mr Perkins. He’d been a comfort to the child through those dark years, and it was to thoughts of the man that Eddie clearly turned in times of stress. I had persuaded PC Martin Tallentire to lend me a couple of the tapes still mouldering in police stores for want of anyone applying for their return. ‘A therapeutic necessity,’ I’d termed it in my request. And I admit that when I settled down to watch that sweet old fellow struggling in and out of his unstylish cardigan, and talking always as if the child watching was his particular favourite, I did feel my pulse settle and my spirits rise.
So there’s still goodness in the world, I thought. Yes, there is goodness. One human being can help another through a vale of tears.
Rob Reed
If there is any way that Social Services can get the timing wrong, we’ll manage it. We’d only had Eddie in the school for a few weeks when things began to move. Lucy’s psychiatrist finally sent us his report (more than three months late), making it clear that he did not envisage it would be possible for her to care for Eddie, even in the longer term. It was the usual highly technical report about effects of trauma, neurological damage – pages of stuff. But the conclusion, written plainly at the end, was that Lucy’s mental and emotional state would offer a seriously impoverished environment to any growing child.
And there was not much hope of things improving.
The panel met the following week and recommended, sensibly, that Eddie should be found a permanent placement.
Adoption, then.
I wasn’t sorry. It was for the best. The ideal thing, of course, was for the Radletts just to keep him there. But they weren’t licensed for anything more long term than emergency and transient placements. They were too old to permanently adopt a child of seven.
So we went looking.
II
Eddie
I don’t remember all that much about the changeover. There didn’t seem to me to be any specific day in which I was, as you might put it, ‘handed over’ to my new parents. I do remember the first time I met them. It was in Linda and Alan’s living room. Nicholas and Natasha Stead were already sitting there when Alan and I came in after the walk back from school. He and Linda had warned me endlessly that they were coming. (Nobody sprang surprises on me at that time. If anything, coming events were usually described in such laborious detail that once or twice I even ended up with the idea that they’d already happened.)
There they sat on the sofa, side by side. Natasha had frizzy copper hair and wore a pretty dress. She sat back quietly. Nicholas (Natasha always called him Nicholas, never just Nick) seemed far more eager to get talking. He leaned forward so far I thought he might slip off the edge of the cushion seat and end up on the rug.
‘Hi! So you’re Eddie. Good to meet you. Linda was just this minute telling us . . .’
I wasn’t listening. I was trying not to stare at his hand. It was a sort of fleshy stump. I’d not been warned about that. He clearly recognized I was distracted and, after a few more pleasant burblings, broke off to say, ‘I see you’re curious about my hand. It does look weird and horrid, doesn’t it? It was an accident when I was young. But I’m quite used to it now. And no, it doesn’t hurt. Not in the slightest.’
Do you know why I liked him from the start? Because he didn’t begin this speech, which I imagine he had made a thousand times, with, ‘I see you’re staring at my hand.’ It was that generous but honest choice of phrase, ‘I see you’re curious’, that made me warm to him. (I had been staring, and I knew I had.) Before I had to think of a response, or even nod, he’d turned to Alan and started saying something about the number of butterflies drawn to the pinkish bush outside the window. I padded over to park myself on the floor between Linda’s knees, the way I did sometimes when we watched television. She clamped me affectionately tight, and I can remember sitting there, listening to the four of them chatting about this and that, and, in the end, arranging to meet a day or so later at one of the pubs that had an outdoor garden somewhere between their town and ours.
I know that I’d been told exactly who they were. And yet I don’t believe, that afternoon, I truly thought the Steads had much to do with me.
After they’d gone, Alan ruffled my hair. ‘Come on, mate.’
I followed him down to the shed. He set me to my favourite job of sorting out his flowerpots. (I look back now and realize that he must have cluttered them deliberately over and over, so he would always have a reason to bring me down with him and keep me busy.) He hacked away at something growing in the way of the shed door. ‘I’ll tell you something about this climber, Eddie. It really knows how to annoy me.’
Finally he asked, ‘So? What did you think of them?’
I don’t know what I answered, though I’ve been told that later, maybe in bed that night, I’d asked if Nicholas was telling the truth when he said that his hand didn’t hurt.
I don’t remember that.
Or any trip to a pub garden. (Maybe it rained.) But gradually the visits to Nicholas and Natasha must have begun. I went first for an hour or two, along with Linda. Then on my own for one whole day. I got to know their rabbit, and later, when she came back from a day spent with a friend, I met their daughter. She was a couple of years older than me and, just like Linda and Alan’s girl, she was called Alice. I do remember once or twice getting con
fused when people talked of either of the two. Sometimes I must have seemed quite thick.
And all the while, Rob Reed kept ‘dropping in’ and ‘passing by’, doing his job. His questions were different now. How did I feel about the Steads? Did I get on with Alice? Did I know she was adopted too? I did realize, didn’t I, that I couldn’t stay with Linda and Alan, but that the Steads would like to have me in their family. For good. Did I know what that meant? How did I think my mother (whom he had taken to calling Lucy all the time, even to me) would feel about that? Did I think she’d be glad that I was settled? Had I seen the new school?
It seemed to me that my new life was one long answering of questions. And, maybe because of Harris, I’d never learned the knack of looking honestly inside myself to find a real answer. All that I ever did was say what I thought would sound right. Often that was as easy as when Miss Bright asked, ‘What’s four times five?’ and out came the answer, ‘Twenty.’ After all, if someone says, ‘You can’t stay where you are. So do you think you can be happy with these kind, smiling people offering you a home?’ a child like me would never in a hundred years have realized that he could say ‘No’.
Not that I thought that I would be unhappy. I didn’t know how other people ticked, but I remember nothing, way back then, of tranquil, quiet feelings like simple happiness. I did feel triumph, yes. The very first time I managed to catch a really fat, wobbling rainbow bubble back on the plastic wand without popping it. Brilliant! Learning to work myself up on the park swings without a starter push, and sweeping my hair backwards along the ground in glorious celebration. And, joy of joys, finally getting the knack of balancing on a bike. I still recall the rush of pride. I couldn’t sleep for longing for the morning, when I could pull the bike out of the shed again. Each skill tucked under my belt made me feel just a little more like everyone else, and moved me gradually further and further away from my old life in Harris’s flat, making me safer and safer.
Yes, feeling safe was at the root of it.
That’s why I’d fallen in love with Linda and Alan. I didn’t care that they were old. I didn’t care that everyone at school thought they were my nana and grandpa. I trusted them to protect me. I didn’t even care that sometimes in the night the doorbell rang, and in the morning there would be a huddled, heavily breathing mound in the spare bed, or some pale girl with blurry blue tattoos screaming obscenities at Alan in the hall, or some other child my age mimicking me across the kitchen table as I ate, or snarling at Linda. These passing visitors could be as loud and nasty as they liked. There was a far, far deeper fear for me than their aggression – that, if I left Linda and Alan, things might work out so I ended up back with my mother.
It was the thought of that which made me sick with fright.
So happiness was nowhere in my mind, and I could easily agree with Rob that Nicholas was warm and loving, and Natasha endlessly smiling and kind. I suppose wheels turned. I know I had a special session with Eleanor. And Rob explained the panel had decided that I could see my mother even after the papers were signed.
‘Will I be sent to stay with her?’
I reckon Rob knew perfectly well what I was thinking. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Never. Definitely not. You will be able to visit Lucy. But never on your own. And you can’t stay the night.’
‘Not ever?’
‘No. Of course, so long as everything goes well, you can write letters and send cards and things. But as for seeing Lucy, the panel were quite clear. No sleepovers. Day visits only. And never on your own.’
And that, in my young book, was that. Done deal.
There were more overnight stays with Nicholas and Natasha. My bike and clothes seemed gradually to drift across to their house. It was agreed I’d stay for two last weeks with Linda and Alan because Miss Bright had picked me to be one of the singing oysters in the school play. But as soon as term came to an end, Linda and Alan went off on holiday while Rob drove me to Fairhurst for my first long, uninterrupted visit.
‘See how things go,’ said Rob. ‘See how you settle down.’
I loved my room. They had transformed it since my last short stay and I couldn’t believe how bright and glossy it looked. I was allowed to choose my own duvet cover. I could tell that neither Natasha nor Nicholas was crazy about the one I picked, but they had promised me. Natasha hid her panic well, and Nicholas’s remark – ‘Brave fashion choice!’ – held only a hint of sarcasm.
Only Alice was rude. ‘Ee-ew! That’s awful, that is!’
Next morning, we went shopping again. Nicholas led me along the strangely crooked-looking streets of their small town and bought a whole new school uniform for me in a grown-up-looking grey. That’s when it finally dawned on me that I was truly starting over. There would be visits back to Linda and Alan, yes. I had been promised that. But I’d been moved.
I know I cried my eyes out secretly in bed that night, thinking that I would never see Miss Bright again.
Alice
I was excited. Alison, my best friend, had four cheery brothers and I was jealous. (Back when I lived with Mum, I had had an imaginary cousin. His name was Robert, but he was tied up in my mind with the old floaty curtains that I used to watch while I was going to sleep; and though the boxes of my own stuff went with me to Natasha and Nicholas’s house over the months that Mum was ill, Robert got left behind.)
Natasha let me in on all the getting ready for Eddie. I helped her choose the shade of yellow from the paint samples she splashed across his bedroom wall. I went with them to fetch the shiny new table and the matching chair. Natasha chose the curtains, but let me pick the one I liked best out of the three rugs in the soft-furnishing department that she said ‘sat with them nicely’. (That’s why she was so horrified when Eddie chose that purple duvet cover with the dinosaurs – though Nicholas told her firmly, ‘No, it’s Edward’s choice.’)
The thrill wore off. In fact, I look back now and wonder if it wasn’t more the shopping that excited me, rather than Eddie. He was so quiet. Not a bit like Ali’s brothers. He didn’t even move around the house much. He sort of stayed wherever he’d been left. He never argued. Nicholas would watch me mooching about, not really doing anything, just getting more and more bored, and he’d get irritated. ‘For heaven’s sake, Alice, why don’t you go out in the garden?’
I’d give him the evil eye and tell him sullenly, ‘I’ve already been in the garden.’ But Eddie would go out as if it were an order, even if till that moment he’d been perfectly content doing one of his jigsaws.
He adored jigsaws. Natasha asked him once, ‘What is it about them that gets you, Edward? Is it the the pictures, or getting finally to put the last piece in, or what?’
Do you know what he said? He said, ‘I like to think of all those tiny little bits going into the exact right place, all comfy and cosy and safe.’
He said it. But he didn’t bother to look up. So it was only me who saw Natasha and Nicholas eyeing one another over his head.
It was a weird look they exchanged.
I just thought he was rather odd.
Edward
I became Edward. Natasha and Nicholas didn’t exactly come out and tell me openly, ‘We prefer Edward.’ But that’s what they called me, and when I went to my new school, that is the name the teachers used. I must have seemed a little dense, taking so long to respond till I got used to it. Before, when I’d been Edward, it had been Alan ticking me off for leaving stuff about. ‘Edward James Taylor, is this your clutter left all over the floor? How about coming back to clear it up?’
It was what Linda, with a smile, referred to as my ‘Sunday name’. But from the start Nicholas and Natasha had used it almost as often as they called me Eddie, and once I’d moved into their house they used it more and more. The notes the teachers gave me to bring home always had ‘Edward Stead’ written along the top because I’d been advised by Rob to use that name at school. ‘It’s simpler. But you’ll keep the name Taylor for quite a time, in case you change your mind
.’
He meant about being adopted, although he didn’t spell that out. He’d already brought round what he called my Life Story Box. I’d never seen it before. It was a sturdy yellow cardboard carton with flaps tucked in on top. He dumped it on my bed. ‘Here you are. Everything except the stuff Natasha and Nicholas will have to keep safe for you.’
‘Stuff like my birth certificate?’ (I was determined to keep track of the replacement. Rob had seemed disappointed that there was nothing written in the space for Father’s Name. But I was simply thrilled to know my proper birthday at last. And Priya had assured me in front of everyone in my old class that I was a Leo. Loyal and strong, she said, just like a lion. And someone who liked changes.)
‘Yes, they’ll keep the stuff like that. But all the rest of your things are in this box, and you get to look after them.’
Prising up one of the carton’s flaps, I spotted my school report card from the term before, and one of the Frog and Toad books.
‘Want to go through it?’ suggested Rob. ‘Maybe show some of the things to Natasha and Nicholas?’
I shook my head and slid the box away, under my bed. Later, in private, I pulled it out and rooted through. Olly the owl, of course. (I took him out and put him on the shelf above my bed.) All of the little things that I’d been given to encourage me when I was learning to read. One or two muddy paintings from back when I was still getting the hang of rinsing my brush between colours. The photo Alan framed of me dressed as an oyster, standing between Priya and Jamie. Two cards from my mother’s nursing home, probably written by someone else but both signed ‘Mum’. The photocopies I had watched come churning out of the machine that day with Rob in Gateshead. Some grubby birthday card a policeman found in our flat. The musty book that Rob took with us when he first led me away.