Little Prisoners (9 page)

But, new uniforms sorted, packed lunches packed, backpacks ready, and the day to start school soon came around. And the children seemed really quite excited. We’d already been for a quick taster visit two days earlier and while I’d found the school secretary, Barbara, a little bristling and stern, I was pleased that Olivia would start the term in the ‘nurture’ room – a very small class for little ones who, for one reason or another, were not yet up to spending full days in mainstream classes. Here she’d be assessed, while the records from their old school came through, and have a chance to settle in and make friends. Ashton, meanwhile, would go straight into a class in Year Five, and had seemed happy enough when it came to it, trotting off with his new teacher, his hair neatly divested of most of its cloud of blond curls.

The parting today, however, was still a little fraught, and I was reminded of when my own two were first starting school; the way I had to peel their tiny hands from mine, and how minuscule the furniture all seemed.

‘Don’t leave me, Casey!’ Olivia entreated, as I kissed them both goodbye. ‘What if I piss myself?’

No-one but me heard her, thank goodness – a fine start that would be! – and after ticking her off for
swearing, I tried to reassure her. ‘No, you won’t,’ I said. ‘Remember, you just have to put your hand up, like I showed you.’

I didn’t linger. Long experience had proved that to be almost always the best way, and, besides, I was in a hurry; now the schools had gone back, I could enjoy some much needed time with my own daughter.

It seemed so long since I’d spent any proper time with Riley and Levi. Just me and them time, at any rate, without a houseful of kids, so today that was where I headed. Levi was a toddler now, stringing together three-word phrases, and seeming gloriously normal and well adjusted and uncomplicated when set against the two poor mites now in my care. But this was not to be a day for comparisons. I just wanted to spend time with my gorgeous grandson and my daughter and, as night follows day, it was pretty well a given that I’d get stuck into her cleaning for her too. She was now five months’ pregnant, and it was taking its toll. So it was a real pleasure to make myself useful.

And it was a pretty productive day; by the time I picked the kids up, I’d had an overdue blitz on my own place as well. Just as well, I thought, one eye on the clock, as I reached school. It had been years since I’d lived around school runs. It would be something I’d have to get used to again.

But it seemed their first day had gone well. I was just standing at the gate, feeling as old as Methuselah compared with all the conspicuously younger mothers, when I heard Olivia’s unmistakable tones.

‘Casey!’ she called excitedly, as she ran across to meet me, Ashton trotting along behind her to keep up. She was hyper, but this time in a wholly appropriate way – the words tumbling over one another as she breathlessly told me all about her day, while I spotted the nurture teacher smiling. She was still full of it once home and busy downing her milk and biscuits, until, out of the blue, she suddenly burst into tears. Even Ashton looked shocked as her whole face scrumpled up and she threw her face, rather dramatically, into her palms.

‘You okay, sweetie?’ I asked her, concerned.

She shook her head sadly. ‘I jus’ remembered!’ she sobbed. ‘I just remembered, Casey! And now I no like her no more!’

‘Like who?’

‘Like Miss Collinson! Miss Collinson said to anuvver Miss that I was in care. She’s a liar!’

I put my arm around her shoulder. ‘I don’t think Miss Collinson meant to upset you,’ I soothed. ‘She must just have been letting the other teacher know who you were.’

‘But I’m
not
in care! I’m not! There’s kids on my street –
they’re
in care. They got taken cos their mummy don’t love them.’

I was a bit puzzled. Did Olivia not understand that they were being fostered? I pulled a photo album from a shelf in the kitchen and beckoned her to me. Ashton, no longer interested now he knew what had upset her, wandered into the living room and started flicking through the channels
on the remote. So he was sorted. I took her with me into the conservatory.

‘Look at these,’ I said, once we were snuggled on the sofa. ‘These are children who’ve lived with me and Mike for a bit. They were just like you and Ashton – they needed somewhere to stay for a bit, when their mummies couldn’t look after them. Nothing to get upset about – it’s just staying with someone else for a while.’

Her eyes, by this time, were like saucers. ‘Casey, are you a foster mother?’ she asked incredulously.

I was just nodding in reply when she leapt from the sofa and rushed indoors. I caught up with her back in the living room. She had her hands on her hips and was shaking her head.

‘Guess what, Ash?’ she said. ‘We’re in
care
! That’s right! Proper care, like them kids down our street!’

Ashton now looked as wide-eyed as Olivia had. How ridiculous, I fumed, as I tried to explain and to settle them. Why had nobody
told
them? And if they’d made a conscious decision not to, why had nobody thought to tell
us
? I called Anna at the first opportunity to ask her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but we thought it better just to tell them they were going away for a little holiday.’

I couldn’t believe it, and neither could Mike when he got home. Like me, he felt strongly that telling them lies was all wrong. ‘Don’t they think this job is hard enough already?’ he wanted to know. ‘It’s so unprofessional!’

I couldn’t agree more. ‘And if they thought it best that we break the truth gently to them, later, then they should have let us in on that, too!’

As it was, Olivia was shocked and upset now. As we’d find out very graphically an hour later. We were just clearing away the tea things when we heard her shouting upstairs, and both hurried up to see what was happening.

Her door was open, and she had her back to us, and we both stopped ourselves from startling her. The scene in front of us was bizarre and so sad. She had laid out her dolls – she now had three of them – and her teddy, face down on her bed, the dolls with their dresses pulled up, revealing frilly knickers. Shoulders racked by crying, she was smacking all her ‘babies’ on their bottoms, yelling furiously at them, as she did so. ‘Right!’ she was crying, ‘that’s it, you little bastards! For that, you got to go live with the foster carer woman! I don’t love you no more!’

I felt Mike’s arm slip around my shoulder as he pulled me gently back, putting a finger to his lips as we both stepped away. We crept quietly back downstairs, but as soon as I was down there I had to rush immediately to the sanctuary of the conservatory, before my emotions finally got the better of me.

Chapter 7

Finding out they were ‘in care’ upset the children dreadfully, and, perhaps predictably, they felt it must be their fault. No matter how much Mike and I tried to reassure them this wasn’t so, they kept coming up with arguments that meant it was.

‘It is, Casey,’ Ashton told me that evening. ‘Granddad told us. He said it all the time. If we didn’t keep the house clean, the social worker lady would take us away!’

‘Mummy was poorly, see,’ Olivia added. ‘An’ he was right. We was big enough to know better.’ Her eyes were red raw from all the crying she’d been doing earlier. ‘I wish we’d of knowed how to clean a bit better!’ She threw herself into my arms then, sobbing loudly.

‘Shh,’ I tried to soothe them. ‘It’s not your fault at
all
. Little girls and boys don’t know how to do all that stuff. And that’s not why little ones get put into care, anyway. There’s always lots of reasons, but they’re to do with the
grown-ups. You mustn’t blame yourselves, okay, because it’s
not your fault
.’

Ashton shook his head. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said, and his voice was very firm. ‘That’s not what the social worker lady said. She told Mummy off for the house being all dirty, I heard her. She said, “You’ve got enough kids. They should help.”’

I felt so sad for them. All these words – all these essentially throw-away little comments – all stacked up and stored and remembered so clearly. I knew I would have a hard time convincing them otherwise.

And I did. They’d now developed a real paranoia about cleaning. Any time I pulled out the mop or the vacuum cleaner, Olivia, particularly, would fly into a blind panic.

‘Who comin?’ she would cry. ‘Who comin’, Casey?’ Then she’d fling herself against my leg until I could convince her there was no-one coming; no social worker hell-bent on dragging them all away. It was heartbreaking. ‘Do it proper, Casey!’ She would chant at me. ‘Do it nice, else the social will take us!’

In the end, I had to make the difficult decision to do all my bouts of cleaning only when the children were all at school. And it was a pretty grim regime to have to adopt. I truly hated having to not clean at weekends. And the rest of the family, who obviously knew me inside out, found it highly amusing to watch my frustration.

‘God, Mum,’ said Kieron the following Sunday. ‘It’s like watching an addict drying out! Take a chill-pill – you can sniff the bleach again tomorrow!’

I smiled, of course, but, actually, I didn’t find it funny. Even less so when I overheard Mike on the phone to Riley. ‘Honestly,’ he was saying, ‘she reminds me of Monica from
Friends
. And it’s crazy because the house will stay fine in any case, because none of us dare move anything anyway!’

God, I thought, slinking away. Was I really that much of a tyrant? They were right, though. Come Monday I felt like I had a new lease of life. Perhaps abstinence was good for a clean-junkie like me because once the children were both in school again I set to with a vengeance. I don’t think I’d enjoyed a bout of housework so much in years.

But where we’d at least sorted the matter of the kids’ anxiety about ‘the social’, there was a dark strand of behaviour now increasing instead. Good as it was to have the children becoming settled, it seemed the more at home they felt, the more they felt able to be themselves. And in this case, it meant some pretty worrying behaviours. They would come home from school and get changed – all very normal. But then, sitting at dinner or watching TV, they would think nothing of reaching out and grabbing one another’s genitals, or indeed, putting their hands down their pants and touching their own. And when I tried to put a stop to it, I always got the same confused look. It was almost as if they were angry at me too; frustrated that I couldn’t seem to understand.

One day, after I’d told Olivia not to touch Ashton ‘down there’, she grabbed him by the hand, shook her head in my
direction, and said, ‘C’mon, Ash, let’s go to my room to do it.’

Talking seeming futile, my words falling on deaf ears, I just picked Olivia up and took her out to play in the garden. I was at a real loss to know what to do with them.

I wasn’t surprised, therefore, when a week or so later I got a concerned phone call from a fellow foster carer, Mandy Ellison. She worked for the same agency as we did and was caring for the three youngest siblings. If I had my work cut out, so did she.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Casey,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t know who else to phone.’

‘What is it?’ I said, instantly alert to her anxious tone.

‘Well, I just wondered how you were getting on with your two. My little ones … well, the only way I can describe it is that they keep, well … simulating sex with each other … and I wondered if yours were doing the same. The implications … well, you know what I mean, don’t you?’

I was horrified. Her three were only babies! Two, three and five, as far as I could remember. How on earth could they have learned to do such things? But in my head, I immediately answered my own question. There was basically only one way of doing that, wasn’t there? The implications, as Mandy, said, were clear.

‘Do what I’m doing,’ I advised her, once I’d confirmed what mine were up to. ‘Pass everything on to John Fulshaw. We both need to push this. There’s clearly a jigsaw taking shape here, and someone needs to be putting the pieces together.’

But if I was shocked by what I’d seen from the kids so far, I was about to find out they could take the shock factor to a whole other level. A few days after taking the phone call from Mandy, I was in the kitchen, dishing up tea for the family, and chatting to Lauren, Kieron’s girlfriend.

‘They’ve settled so well, Casey,’ she was telling me, as she helped me dish up. ‘You must feel so good about how much they’ve changed since they came here.’

I smiled at Lauren but took a moment before answering. In my own mind, we hadn’t really accomplished much at all. It always surprised me when people noticed changes in kids in our care. But perhaps that was because we saw them every day, so it wasn’t so obvious to us.

‘Well, I suppose they
are
calmer,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s still a struggle most days …

‘No,’ Lauren said, mashing the potatoes. ‘Trust me. They
have
changed.’

Reassured, I handed plates out – an enormous roast dinner. One thing, I conceded, was that they were really good eaters. No fads about veg, no ‘I’m not going to eat that’. I suppose that, having been so hungry for so long, all food was good food to these two.

But I was abruptly reminded that food wasn’t the main issue, as was Lauren.

‘You all right, Olivia?’ I said, noticing she was playing with her food, and not tucking in with her usual gusto.

She shook her head, but said nothing.

‘Something happen at school?’ I asked her gently.

She shook his head again. ‘No. It was Ashton,’ she eventually answered, sticking her lower lip out. ‘He’s
mean
. I give him his go with his pee pee okay, then he tells me I don’t get
my
go.’

I was instantly alert for what might come next in this tale. As were the rest of the adults. Conversation ground to a halt.

‘Your go?’ I asked her.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s not fair!’

I turned to her brother. ‘Ashton,’ I said. ‘Can you enlighten me?’