The Girl and the Ghosts

by Angela Hart

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I laughed, ‘she’s already run the idea past us and had the same response. I suppose she was hoping you’d overrule us.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad we’re on the same page with this.’ Her voice had relaxed a bit, and I could imagine her ticking off another item on what I knew would be a very long ‘to do’ list that every social worker always had.

  As far as I was concerned, after that phone call the matter had been dealt with, and I had forgotten about it by the time Maria’s grandmother dropped her off the following Sunday morning and told me, ‘Maria was asking about getting a mobile phone, and her granddad’s told her he’d be happy to buy one for her.’

  ‘Oh dear, she hasn’t given up then,’ I sighed. ‘She asked us too, and we said to wait a while. In fact, her social worker’s adamant that she shouldn’t have one, particularly because one of the stipulations of her care order is that all phone calls with her mother are supervised, which obviously wouldn’t be possible if she had her own phone.’

  ‘I see,’ Babs said, nodding her head slowly and looking thoughtful. ‘Oh well, in that case, we won’t then.’

  32

  ‘It didn’t seem fair’

  The very next weekend, Maria came home from her grandparents’ house with a smile on her face. Normally, when Babs brought Maria home, she walked straight through the front door and into the kitchen without even waiting to be invited in. On this occasion, however, Babs seemed to be avoiding looking directly at us. She said, ‘Can’t stop,’ then turned and scuttled away down the path.

  As soon as she’d gone we realised the reason why. Maria had a brand-new mobile phone. It was an expensive model, and Maria was very excited about it as she showed it off and told us about all the different functions it had. I could see that Jonathan was biting his tongue as determinedly as I was, trying not to say something that might cause a row or inflame the situation.

  I called Babs later that evening, as soon as I had the opportunity to do so in private. Keeping my tone of voice as neutral as possible, I asked her, ‘Did you forget that I’d explained to you why Social Services don’t want Maria to have a mobile phone?’

  ‘Oh. No,’ she said, ‘no, I didn’t forget. But she’d really set her heart on having one and I couldn’t bring myself to disappoint her. It didn’t seem fair.’

  I knew there was no explaining to Babs that what was really unfair on Maria was allowing her to have and do things that weren’t in her best interests. It was a recurring battle we faced throughout the time Maria lived with us, and although we kept on fighting it – with tact and patience – I already knew by the time the mobile phone incident occurred that it was a battle we were never going to win.

  When I saw my chance, in a quiet moment before bed, I reminded Maria of what we’d said about the phone, but she just shrugged and reminded me of something.

  ‘You’re not my mum, so you can’t tell me what to do.’

  I didn’t rise to this.

  ‘No, I’m not your mum, Maria, but I do care very deeply about you and your safety and wellbeing,’ I said calmly.

  I then talked about phone safety, and how she should be careful not to give out her number to people she didn’t know and trust.

  ‘I know all this,’ she said, cutting the conversation short and rolling her eyes. ‘We’ve had a talk about it at school, because everyone has a mobile phone, remember?’

  I let this go too, even though I knew it was untrue. At that time it was absolutely not the case that every child had a phone in secondary school – in fact it was still quite unusual in the nineties. Nevertheless, I simply reminded Maria not to be rude to me. I told myself that she wasn’t really to blame for this behaviour. Any twelve-year-old child is going to be more focused on what they want than on the reasons why it isn’t a good idea for them to have it. This is exactly why it was so annoying that her grandparents so often did what was easy and indulgent rather than what was right for Maria herself.

  Once Maria had been given the phone it was her personal property and Jonathan and I didn’t have any right to take it away from her. We knew Social Services had no power to remove it from her either, as it belonged to her and was not technically a ‘dangerous’ item, which is the only thing we would have been able to confiscate.

  This meant that all we could do was report what had happened to the social worker, who spoke to Babs. Then we were asked to monitor the calls Maria made, which was not easy and certainly not foolproof. We insisted Maria left the phone downstairs when she went to bed at night, so that at least we knew she wasn’t using it when she should have been asleep.

  Of course, Maria wasn’t very happy about these rules, but every evening before bed she did show me her call and text list to let me see me what she had been up to. Usually Maria hadn’t made a single call beside the odd short one to Babs or me, to let us know she was on her way or going to be late. All the texts were to friends I knew or recognised. Clearly, Maria could have been clever and deleted her history, but I didn’t feel this was the case as I trusted her to be telling me the truth.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ I told Maria. ‘You’re managing it really well and being very sensible.’

  To be honest, I was surprised that Christine’s number hadn’t cropped up on the phone, and I was still trying to work out how and why Maria’s behaviour had taken such a turn for the worse. Surely seeing her mum at her grandmother’s house, during a supervised contact visit, couldn’t upset Maria in the dramatic way it seemed to have done?

  It was a weekday afternoon when a woman came into the flower shop who I knew to be a friend of the wife of one of Jonathan’s brothers, and also a neighbour of Maria’s grandparents. After spending a few minutes examining all the flowers with what I noticed was very intense concentration, she came over to the desk where I was sitting, picked up a gift card from the display, opened it, read what was written inside, then turned it over and read the print on the back.

  ‘Is there something I can help you with?’ I asked at last.

  ‘I couldn’t decide whether to come in,’ the woman said. ‘Not to buy any flowers . . .’ She looked flustered for a moment, then added hastily, ‘although they are all lovely. I just . . . It’s about the girl you’re looking after. I know her mum, a bit. God, she’d kill me if she knew I was telling you this. But I thought you ought to know something.’

  ‘I see. What is it?’

  ‘Erm, well, I’m afraid that after Christine leaves Babs and Stanley’s house on a Saturday with the social worker, she goes back.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I stuttered.

  ‘Christine. She goes back into Babs’s house, to see Maria unsupervised. You won’t say I said anything, will you?’

  ‘Not to Christine, no, of course not,’ I said, hopefully sounding a lot more calm than I felt. My blood was pulsing around my body and I could feel a tightening around my heart as I said, ‘I’ll have to report this, but I won’t tell anyone how I know. Thank you very much for telling me.’

  As soon as the woman had gone, I called Jonathan in from the stockroom to watch the shop while I went into the house to phone our social worker.

  ‘But Maria’s grandmother promised she wouldn’t let her daughter into the house while Maria was there except for that one hour when her visit is supervised by someone from Social Services,’ Jess said, sounding bemused. ‘I must say, I’m really surprised. I know the family has problems, but I thought Maria’s grandmother was the sort of person who would keep her word. She really does seem to be genuinely attached to her granddaughter.’

  Of course, I knew from long experience that Babs was capable of saying one thing and doing another – all with good intention, which was unfortunately often misguided. I didn’t want to accuse Babs of being a liar, but I had to speak out. I said as diplomatically as I could, ‘Well, the person who told me is absolutely certain about it, and I can’t think of any reason why she wouldn’t be telling the truth. Perhaps Babs can tell you more? Maybe there is
some kind of explanation?’

  ‘I’ll speak to Maria’s grandmother,’ Jess said with a sigh. ‘If it is true, it might explain why Maria has been less settled at school recently.’

  ‘You might be right,’ I agreed, as this thought had inevitably occurred to me too.

  It wasn’t that I thought Christine was necessarily mistreating Maria at those meetings, but rather that I was concerned about what Maria might be hearing about Christine’s break-up from Gerry, her personal life and goodness knows what else. Most of all, I knew that if Maria was being asked to keep her mother’s visits secret, this would put her under a great deal of strain.

  I imagined it was the sneaking around that had probably caused Maria to have behaviour issues, because it’s very tough on a child to ask them to keep a secret like that. For Maria, I think this kind of thing was particularly destabilising because she’d gone to church and had Bible-reading classes. During that period of time she had taken on board the basic message she was taught, which she told me herself one day was, ‘You shouldn’t lie or steal, because if you break the Bible rules, you’ll go to the devil.’

  It turned out that Babs was fully in support of the clandestine meetings, and she had told Maria, ‘It’s a secret, not a lie. Don’t say anything about it to anyone or you’ll get your mum into trouble.’

  Clearly this must have created a pull in Maria’s mind. She was a bright girl, so she would probably have been able to see that sometimes ‘a secret’ is just a lie by another name, and she wouldn’t have liked having to hide the truth from us or anybody else. And when Maria was confused and upset, or faced with a situation she didn’t know how to deal with, her default response was to have a tantrum or run away, as we’d unfortunately seen many times.

  When Jess confronted Babs about all this she had said she ‘felt sorry’ for Christine and that she felt it ‘wouldn’t do any harm’. She didn’t seem to understand that in trying to be kind to Christine and Maria by giving them unsupervised time together, she was causing all kinds of problems for the granddaughter she loved dearly.

  I had no doubt that in her own way Christine loved her daughter too, despite what had gone on in the past and the way she was behaving now. Why else would she risk being caught by Social Services to spend time with Maria like this? It was a mess, it really was. Neither woman could see how their actions were wreaking havoc in Maria’s life, and that unsupervised time arranged like this was incredibly damaging and destabilising.

  Social Services stopped all visits from Christine while they worked out a way forward, and for the time being Maria was not allowed to go round to her grandmother’s house. Jess said the probable solution, in the future, would be to fix up supervised visits for Maria and Christine in a contact centre. However, before this was arranged Christine moved out of the area once more, with no plans in place to have any contact with Maria.

  After her mother had moved, Maria eventually told me one day that she was sorry about what had happened.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s dealt with now.’

  ‘But I lied to you.’

  ‘Maria, you were asked to keep a secret by your mum and nan and so you did. I understand what happened, and that it can’t have been easy for you.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t like secrets, but Mum does.’

  ‘Your mum likes secrets.’

  Maria sighed deeply. ‘She had to keep secrets when she was a girl, because she was visited by her spirit guide.’

  ‘Visited by her spirit guide?’

  ‘Yes, he is an old Irish farmer and he is the one who lets her talk to the people on the other side.’

  ‘The people on the other side?’

  ‘Yes, the ghosts. She kept them secret too, but she has lots of ghost friends. And they aren’t all good.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Yes, they tell my mum to do stuff. Stuff that gets her into trouble.’

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘You know, the stuff she did when I was little. The stuff she let Gerry do. It wasn’t her fault. The ghosts made her.’

  33

  ‘I don’t care’

  After Maria’s mother moved out of the area again Maria seemed to become more settled at school, and both her behaviour and her work showed a marked improvement. In time, we heard that Christine was in a relationship with a new boyfriend, and eventually Babs told us that Christine was expecting another baby, a little girl.

  ‘Isn’t that good news!’ Maria said, a little unconvincingly.

  I couldn’t work out if she was putting on an act or not, but something was off about her reaction.

  ‘It’s probably a shock,’ Jonathan reasoned. ‘I mean, what must Maria think about her mum having another daughter, when she hasn’t exactly raised Maria?’

  I felt Jonathan was right. It’s a big deal for any sibling when a new baby is on the way, and it must have been difficult for Maria to grasp how her mother could raise another child while Maria herself was in care. I made a point of telling Maria she could talk to me about this or anything else that might be worrying her, but she told me flatly she was ‘over the moon’ about the new baby.

  Maria’s visits to her grandparents had been reinstated by this time and one Sunday, when Babs had brought her home and we were sitting in the kitchen drinking a cup of tea, Maria said, ‘My mum says that as soon as she gets a new place, I can go and live with her and my baby sister, and then . . .’

  ‘Goodness, are you all right?’ I asked Babs, who was suddenly coughing loudly and seemed to be choking on the mouthful of tea she’d just swallowed.

  ‘Yes. Fine, thanks,’ she said, as soon as she was able to speak. ‘But, well, that’s not um . . . That’s not right, is it Maria? Your mum didn’t say that to you, did she? She wrote it in that letter she sent you.’

  If I hadn’t already suspected that something was wrong, I certainly did now, looking at the anxious expression on Maria’s face as she hastily corrected herself.

  ‘That’s what I meant,’ she said, glancing at me sideways and then quickly looking away again. ‘Mum said it in . . . in a letter.’

  It was clear to me then that Maria was having some form of unsupervised contact with her mum, either on the phone or in person. I was confident she wasn’t speaking to her from our home phone, as I monitored all the calls and phone bills, and I had no evidence she used the mobile phone to talk to Christine either. I suspected, from the way Babs behaved that day, that despite the fact Christine had moved away, she might still be sneaking round to Babs’s house when Maria was visiting. However, I had no proof of that either.

  Jonathan and I talked about it later, when Maria had gone to bed, but there wasn’t really anything we could do except report the conversation to our social worker and try to encourage Maria to focus on her schoolwork, which, along with her behaviour, was suddenly beginning to go downhill again.

  Another issue that was concerning us was Maria’s weight. She had always been fairly slight at primary school, but now she had started putting on quite a lot of weight. We knew she didn’t have the healthiest diet in the world as we still had to regulate the amount of crisps and Coke she consumed, and she also much preferred to eat a chocolate bar than a piece of fruit, which I understood but couldn’t let her get away with, except as a treat.

  What we hadn’t realised, however, was that Maria had started to eat vast quantities of junk food, including multipacks of crisps and Coca-Cola by the litre, when she was round at Babs’s house. We found this out from Maria herself, but unfortunately not before she had already gained a lot of weight.

  ‘I can have what I want at Nan’s house,’ she began to tell me, crossly, whenever I wouldn’t let her have something unhealthy she wanted to eat or drink. I suspected that Babs gave Maria whatever she wanted partly because she was trying to make up for all the negative, hurtful things that had happened to her, and partly because it made for a more peaceful life if she and Stanley said yes rather than no. The problem was that a
lthough Maria was happy to eat the food, she was becoming very unhappy about the weight she was gaining, which only served to reduce her already low self-esteem.

  We discovered much later that what was also contributing to Maria’s weight gain was that the dinner money we gave her every day to pay for her lunch at school was actually being spent on sweets. Apparently, she had been sneaking over to her grandparents’ house for a cooked lunch every day and spending her dinner money at a sweet shop she passed on the way. Although Maria wasn’t allowed to leave school at lunchtime, unbelievably it seemed her teachers weren’t aware that it was happening any more than we were. In hindsight, all of these bad habits helped to explain why Maria continued to gain weight despite the healthy food we gave her for her evening meal every night, and in spite of our best efforts to get her walking and doing other physical activities.

  As her weight increased we noticed that the trampoline Maria had loved when we first got it hadn’t been used by her for months and months. We had other children staying with us by now, filling the rooms vacated by Tom and Dillon, and they loved the trampoline, and often asked Maria to go out and jump on it with them, but she always refused. She avoided PE like the plague, to the point where we got a letter from the school saying that the next time she didn’t participate in PE she would be put in detention.

  I can’t remember now how many letters we received about it, or how many detentions she was actually given, as there were so many of them. Nothing the school or we did to encourage her to do PE made a difference, unfortunately, and in the end the school simply gave up. So, from the age of about fourteen, Maria didn’t ever do PE again.

  It was a vicious circle, I suppose, and probably a common one among adolescents: because Maria ate unhealthy food – far more than we realised – she put on weight; as she got heavier and less fit, she didn’t want to expose herself to teasing, or even bullying, at home by trampolining with other children or at school by doing PE; then when she stopped doing PE, she put on more weight and became even more reluctant to do any sporting activities.