The Girl and the Ghosts
Page 22
‘It’s not fair!’ she repeated over and over again.
‘We’re not changing our minds,’ we chorused, which irritated her even more.
‘I hate you!’ she said. Then, out of the blue she shouted, ‘My mum says you got paid by Social Services to take me on holiday and that you didn’t pay for it yourself. So you should be giving me more money! Then I can pay for my own piercings!’
I was very taken aback by the accusation, particularly after we’d had such a lovely holiday, but I was incensed by it too, and there was no way I was going to let it pass unchallenged.
‘Hang on a minute,’ I said. ‘Social Services did not pay for your holiday. We paid for it ourselves, because we wanted to take you with us, so that you’d have a nice time.’
‘Oh yes they did!’ she snapped, standing in front of me with her hands on her hips and fixing me with a defiant glare.
‘OK, I’ll prove it to you.’ Sidestepping Maria, I unlocked the drawer of the desk where I kept her file, handed her a letter and said, ‘Read that.’
It was the letter from the social worker stating that Social Services would not be able to pay for the holiday and unfortunately had no recollection or record of ever promising to do so.
‘We did ask, because they had already offered, but when they refused we were perfectly happy to pay for you ourselves. See?’
‘Oh,’ Maria said, very quietly, after she’d read it. ‘Well, Mum said . . .’
The next time Christine called Maria took the phone cautiously, and looked deep in concentration as she listened to what her mother was telling her. Christine told Maria she had split up with Gerry and also said, ‘Did you know, Maria, Angela and Jonathan have lied about paying for your holiday.’
Maria gave a little shrug, went very quiet and looked sad. She had seen the proof about the holiday with her own eyes, and on this occasion Christine’s lies had been well and truly exposed.
‘Do you want a cuddle?’ I asked when the phone conversation was over.
She nodded, and we stood in the hallway for a few minutes together silently, having a hug. There was no need for words. I could see that Maria felt hurt and I felt very sorry for her. It was completely beyond me how a mother could lie so cruelly and unnecessarily to her own daughter, but it was all part of the on-off injections of antagonism that we had come to expect from Christine.
‘So she split up with Gerry? I said eventually.
‘Yes. Good ribbons to him.’
I smiled sadly. ‘Good riddance.’
‘Whatever, that’s what I meant. I’m glad he’s gone, psycho!’
Unfortunately, even though Maria knew that her mother’s claim about us lying over the holiday money wasn’t true, she started to become fixated by the idea that we were getting more money for looking after her than we were spending on her. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Jonathan and I looked after children for the love of the work we did, and because we wanted to help them grow into happy adults who could function well in society and lead a full and meaningful life.
Although foster carers are paid, it is a not a huge amount, and Jonathan and I manage financially because we also run a flower shop. Without that, there would be no holidays or any of the variety of other ‘extras’ every child needs. It’s one of the paradoxes of fostering: if it was well paid, it would probably attract people who are more concerned about money than they are about the wellbeing of the children in their care; but as it isn’t well paid, some aspects of the welfare of these children is reliant on the altruism of their foster carers.
Sadly, Jonathan and I could see that it was very easy for Christine to make Maria feel insecure about our motives for fostering. Even though she’d come on in leaps and bounds since she first moved in with us, Maria still had low self-esteem, which was regularly stoked by things her mother told her.
Incidentally, Christine never did give any reasonable explanation or apology for telling Maria she was being cut out of the family. She simply invited herself back into her daughter’s life when it suited her, prompting Jonathan to once again compare her to a ghoulish, shadowy figure. ‘What did I say?’ he said one time, when he was feeling particularly riled. ‘She’s like a ghost, I swear. Boo! Now you see her, now you don’t.’
He tried to say it in a jokey way, but once again the reference gave me the creeps, as it was a bit too close to the truth.
Christine’s constant complaints began to prompt aggressive behaviour from Maria. For instance, she threw a shoe down the hallway one day when I asked her to hurry up and be on her way to school. She went on her own now that she was at secondary school and was always leaving at the last minute, which made me feel anxious as I was trying to teach her the importance of punctuality.
‘What does it matter to you? I’m not your kid! What do you care?’ The shoe knocked over a vase of flowers, and water splattered all over the floor.
On another occasion, she kicked the hubcap on Jonathan’s car because he’d told her he wasn’t going to be able to give her a lift to her friend’s house, as he had work to do.
‘You don’t care about me! I’ll walk then. I’ll probably get murdered but you wouldn’t care, would you?’
After that particularly upsetting comment we asked if someone from Social Services could have a quiet word with Christine. Fortunately, whatever was said to her seemed to have the desired effect for a short while, although it wasn’t long before she found something else to complain about.
One of her gripes was that we didn’t spend enough on Maria’s Christmas presents that year, which was extremely rich seeing as the previous year, when Gerry was still on the scene, Maria wasn’t supposed to have had any Christmas presents at all!
It may simply have been sour grapes on Christine’s part, because Maria had been so obviously pleased with what we’d bought for her, while her mother had given her something someone had given to her and she didn’t want. In fact, though, Maria’s mother rarely gave Maria any presents at all, for Christmas or birthdays, even after Gerry left and Maria was no longer expected to follow his religion.
Jess, who was still our support social worker, was livid when she heard that Maria’s mother had complained about the presents. Maria was very upset about it too, and it was heartbreaking to see that her pleasure had been tainted by anxiety when she told us, ‘I didn’t complain about the presents you gave me. Honestly I didn’t. I was really happy with what I got. Then I showed them to my mum and she went on the internet and worked out what everything had cost. But I think she made a mistake because . . .’
‘It’s all right, Maria,’ I said. ‘We didn’t think you complained to your mum about your presents. And the only thing that really matters is that you like them.’
‘I really do,’ she said. ‘They’re the best presents anyone has ever given me.’
Christine and Gerry got back together for a short time, then split up again. They were obviously leading a very tumultuous life, always falling out, having horrendous rows, then making up only to break up again.
‘I’m so depressed I’m going to have to go into a mental hospital, Maria,’ Christine told her daughter one night.
At this point I was no longer required to listen to Christine’s side of phone conversations – I think because Maria was now a little older, and also because Christine had complained bitterly about this being a breach of her ‘human rights’ – but Maria had developed a habit of relaying all the key pieces of news she heard from her mum. I didn’t mind, as it helped Maria unload, which she very nearly always had to do these days.
Although we were cautious about what we said to Maria, as we didn’t want to criticise her mother, Jonathan and I found it very uncomfortable when Christine passed on details about her relationship bust-ups and mental health. Sometimes I felt it was right to pass on certain information to Social Services, and when I heard about the depression and the mental hospital I did mention this to my support social worker. It was a relief when I subseque
ntly learned that it was a complete lie that Christine was having to go into a mental hospital, but I was angry nonetheless.
‘It was a despicable thing to say to Maria,’ I vented privately to Jonathan, feeling very protective of Maria. ‘Imagine what that does to a child’s brain – first the anxiety because she thinks her mother’s ill, then the confusion when she inevitably finds out it was just some story she had made up?’
Jonathan and I also became increasingly frustrated with Christine’s inability to move on from Gerry. It felt as though she was gradually abandoning all attempts to sort her life out. She allowed herself to be sucked back into all the rows, drama and aggressive behaviour that revolved around, and were encouraged by, Gerry.
‘There must be reasons why Gerry turned into an angry bully of a man,’ I said to Jonathan one day, when Gerry and Christine had got back together yet again. Maria had recounted a story about a bad argument they had, which her mother had given a blow-by-blow account of.
‘Yes, but I’m not sure what they are,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you get a sense with people that their aggression is a learned response or that they hide behind it when they’re feeling out of their depth. But Gerry just seems to be a really angry man, all of the time. What makes someone like that? I find it really worrying.’
It was clear there had to have been something seriously wrong in Gerry’s life to cause him to behave the way he did. Part of me wanted desperately to find out more about the man, and part of me was afraid of what secrets he held.
‘What on earth causes a person to be so cruel and nasty all the time?’ I said.
As I spoke, Jonathan and I exchanged glances. Of course, our years of fostering had taught us that a person could experience all kinds of unspeakable, unthinkable horrors in their life that can affect their behaviour. Time and again it had been reiterated to us in the regular training sessions we attend that it is not the person who is bad, but the behaviour, and that the behaviour is typically a reaction to life events the person has been exposed to.
The social workers had never given away any private details of Gerry’s life over and above the bare minimum they had to pass on to us when we took Maria in. Babs had never given any meaningful insight into the man’s character either, so all we could do was listen to our gut feelings and hope that we never had to deal with Gerry again. More importantly, we hoped that Maria could be protected from his negative influences on her life as much as possible.
31
‘It’s just the way I am’
Christine came back to live in our town again, after splitting from Gerry ‘once and for all’. It had been a violent parting of the ways, from what Babs told us, and although we did ask her not to say anything unnecessarily detailed to Maria about what had apparently happened, we weren’t sure if she would be as diplomatic as we hoped.
Maria eventually started having authorised contact with her mum at her nan’s house for an hour every Saturday morning. A support worker, who arrived before Christine did and left at the same time, always supervised it. So we knew nothing could have been said during any of those meetings that could upset Maria, unless of course it was coming from Babs, who might inadvertently say too much.
Unfortunately, despite the steps that had been taken to protect Maria from any unnecessary upset, it seemed that her mother’s return did cause her distress. Suddenly, as soon as Christine was back on the scene, Maria started getting report cards from school for bad behaviour. Then I was called up to the school urgently one day, after Maria had received detentions three days running.
‘What have you done to get the detentions?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. It was just stupid Mr Parsons picking on me. I’d had enough, I had!’
‘What do you mean, you’d had enough?’
It turned out that Maria had been losing her temper then running out of the classroom whenever she got into trouble. The reason the school wanted to see me as a matter of urgency was because they were concerned she might run off the premises, which of course could have serious implications for the school, as well as Maria’s safety and wellbeing.
‘Has she ever done this kind of thing before?’ the teacher asked. He had clearly had no information passed to him from other members of staff who were aware of Maria’s background.
‘Losing her temper and running away?’ I asked. ‘Yes, I’m afraid she has, for as long as I’ve known her.’
We discussed a positive strategy for helping Maria deal with her temper within the classroom, which involved her being moved to sit at the back of the room to ‘cool down’ if she became agitated. It would be made clear to Maria that if this didn’t work she would then be taken to the ‘chiller’, which was a supervised room where disruptive pupils were taken for detentions, ‘time out’ and so on.
I felt relieved that the school was very understanding and had invited me in to discuss Maria’s behaviour in this way, and with such a positive strategy. It seemed to work too. After she was moved to the back of the class a few times to cool down, Maria soon decided that she didn’t like the attention this brought her and began to regulate her temper on her own much better.
Whenever I saw an opportunity, I gently attempted to get Maria to open up about what was causing her temper to flare up so dramatically, and so frequently. Clearly, I didn’t want to put words into her mouth about how her mother’s move had affected her, but I did ask, ‘Is there anything that has happened to you, recently, that has upset you? Has something changed? Has somebody said something? You know you can talk to me, if you need to.’
‘It’s just the way I am,’ she said. ‘It’s the way I’ve always been. I’m bad-tempered, that’s all. I’m not going to change, you know!’
‘No, Maria, you are not a bad-tempered person, you are a person with a bad temper at the moment, and there’s a big difference,’ I told her. ‘You are a lovely girl, but your temper is spoiling things for you. We need to work out why that is.’
‘It’s nothing! Leave me alone, will you! I’ve had enough of everyone!’
I thought there had to be some explanation for her change in attitude, either directly or indirectly linked to Christine, but Maria simply refused to discuss it. I was also aware that, as she was soon to become a teenager, she had her hormones to deal with too, and I talked to her about how this might affect her.
‘I know all this!’ she said sulkily. ‘I’m not a little kid any more!’
One day Maria announced that she wanted a mobile phone.
‘No, not yet,’ I said. ‘You’re still only twelve. You’ll have to wait until you are a bit older, until you’re thirteen.’
‘Thirteen? Are you serious?’
‘Yes, Maria.’
‘No way! That’s ages! Only the losers don’t have a phone! It’s not fair! Why are you so mean to me? Can’t you ask Social Services to pay? Is that what it is? Are you too mean to pay for it?’
‘I’m not discussing this any further,’ I said, turning on my heel and climbing the stairs to run myself a bath. ‘That is the rule and that is the end of it.’
Setting the age at thirteen was a rule Jonathan and I had established in the house some years earlier, as it was a topic that often came up with children of Maria’s age. There was no practical need for a child any younger than thirteen to have a mobile phone, as the only place they went on their own was to school and back.
Though many of the children we had staying with us chose to get the bus to and from the local secondary schools, they were close enough to our house to make the journey on foot. This meant that there was no argument that a child needed a phone in case they got stranded because the bus hadn’t arrived, for example. Ultimately, our biggest concern was to put their safety first, and make sure they were old enough to use the phone in a sensible way.
I found out later that, while I was in the bath that evening, Maria asked Jonathan the same question, without mentioning our conversation at all and knowing we hadn’t had a chance to discuss it.
Jonathan tried to defuse the situation by turning a glass upside down on the kitchen table and saying, ‘Spirit of Angela, are you there? I know you can hear me, wherever you are . . .’
Maria froze, and Jonathan knew instantly that he’d triggered something in her. He immediately felt guilty, and foolish. He knew Christine claimed to have a psychic gift, and while he certainly hadn’t done this to mock her or indeed make fun of anybody who believed in that sort of thing, Jonathan realised too late that his silly joke would inevitably make Maria think of her mum and her supposed connection to the spirit world.
‘Are you all right, Maria?’ he asked.
She appeared to stare straight through him.
‘I was only joking. I didn’t mean to scare you, if that’s what’s happened.’
‘I’m not scared,’ she said eventually, but continued staring, glassy-eyed, in Jonathan’s direction.
‘That’s good to hear.’
Moments later Maria let out a deep breath.
‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I hate you, Jonathan! Just give me a mobile phone, you’re so tight!’ Then she stomped off upstairs to her room, leaving Jonathan open-mouthed at her sudden shift in behaviour, and at her rudeness.
I went to see her after my bath, when she’d had a chance to calm down.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Mum’s ghost used to get on my nerves.’
‘Mum’s ghost?’
‘Yes. Night, Angela.’
A couple of days later, I had a phone call from Maria’s social worker, sounding as rushed as she typically did.
‘Hi, Angela. How are things?’ she said, barely waiting for me to answer before continuing, ‘It’s just a quick call to say please do not buy Maria a mobile phone. She’s been on to me about it and I’ve told her it’s a definite “No”.’