A Last Kiss for Mummy (5 page)

‘I hope you don’t mind, sweetheart,’ I added, as I quickly finished changing and re-dressing Roman. ‘Only he needed changing and I thought it best to let you get on.’

I made to hold him out to her, but she glanced at Mike and then back at me, making no move to take him. Instead she nodded. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I only came down to get a glass of water. If you want to play with him for a bit more, I don’t mind. I can finish our room off then, can’t I? You know, if you like.’

‘Oh, of course,’ I said, snuggling the baby back against my shoulder automatically. ‘He’s such a good little boy; no trouble at all. You get yourself a drink and get finished. Mike and I will mind him.’

‘Thanks,’ Emma said, disappearing into the kitchen to get her water. ‘Oh, and by the way,’ she called back through, ‘have you got one of those adaptor thingies?’

‘Adaptors?’ Mike asked. ‘What kind of adaptor?’

Emma came back in, holding a glass of water. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘So you can plug a few things in one socket at the same time. Only I need to charge my phone because I’m, um, expecting a call later, and there’s already the bedside lamp plugged in there. Well, the CD player right now, obviously, but I just wondered for, like, later. Unless there’s another plug somewhere? I didn’t see one.’

‘There’s another socket behind the bed,’ I said. ‘You can plug the bedside lamp in there if you like. I’m sure it’ll reach.’

‘Sweet,’ she said. ‘Great. Okay.’ She glanced at Roman. ‘Okay, I’ll be down in a bit then.’

I knew what was coming as soon as Emma had gone back upstairs. I’d answered automatically, but not without it flipping a mental switch with me. There were protocols for dealing with such things. As Mike well knew too.

‘A phone?’ he said, frowning. ‘In her bedroom and unsupervised? And a call from who exactly? She seemed cagey about that, didn’t you think?’ He sighed. ‘I can see this becoming complicated, can’t you?’

I knew what he meant, but didn’t share his anxiety. She hadn’t seemed cagey to me. If she’d wanted to be cagey she would have just plugged her phone in anyway, and made do with not having a bedside light, surely? Teenagers were notoriously obsessive about their privacy, but there was nothing in Emma’s tone that made me anxious about letting her have her phone, even if we did need to be clear on what the protocol was.

And there was always a protocol. There were protocols for everything in our line of work. Mike was right – with a young teenager like this we’d normally prohibit the use of a mobile up in their bedroom – and for obvious reasons. The children we looked after weren’t in any way the average; they often had dark and difficult pasts, and all the dark and difficult associations that kind of background tended to throw up. In some cases there might be family members wanting to snatch them back, even, which was why communication with families had to be supervised and managed, and our home address guarded as if it were a state secret. The risk to us, from some of the families whose children we took in, was very real and could not be underestimated. Though this was different. Well, as far as we knew, anyway. Emma’s mum had always put her in care voluntarily. And she was only with us now because of the baby. This wasn’t one of our ‘last chance saloon’ troubled kids, where violence and criminality were family norms.

‘Leave it with me, love,’ I said to Mike. ‘I’ll check with Maggie tomorrow morning. I know we wouldn’t normally allow it, but perhaps it’s not the issue it normally is in this case. Plus she might feel more secure having her phone close to her.’

Mike wasn’t convinced, though. ‘Or to conduct a whole life that we’re not privy to, more likely. You know what teenagers are like, love – always good at giving you the edited highlights of what they’re up to.’

Yes I did, and I’d known a fair few of them too. But that had been in my last job – not when it came to the ones we fostered. And that was precisely because mobile phone use was controlled. I still thought he was being just a little over-cautious, and we also mustn’t forget that Emma was a young mum – she had adult responsibilities now so we should at least grant her a few adult benefits. But I’d call Maggie anyway, just to put his mind at rest. Even if I knew he was worrying about nothing.

But it turned out that Mike was perhaps a little more perceptive than I was. It was in the small hours, around two, when I woke up that night. Woke up with a start, moreover, confused by what I was hearing. Was that a baby crying? Disorientated by the sound, I thought I was imagining it for a moment, and then my brain caught up – of course it was. We had a baby in the house now, didn’t we?

I didn’t stir, however, because my brain registered another thing as well – that the cry had come from downstairs, which meant that Emma had taken him down there, presumably to warm up one of the bottles she’d made up for him before going to bed.

But something was wrong. The crying wasn’t stopping. I lay in bed listening for what seemed like several minutes, at first smiling wryly at the memory of those interminable night feeds – both mine and Riley’s – but gradually becoming more and more agitated. How long did it take to warm a bottle? Not this long, surely. I glanced at the display on the alarm to find that it was approaching two-thirty. What on earth was she doing down there?

When the baby’s cries were so plaintive I could almost feel his distress personally, I flipped the duvet from over my legs and dragged on my dressing gown, before shuffling out of the bedroom and trudging downstairs. Perhaps she was having a problem with the microwave or something.

The crying was coming from the front room, however – not the kitchen – so that’s where I headed, and as I took in the scene I felt a wave of pure maternal anger. The baby was in his pram, screaming, kicking his little legs in frustration, while Emma, the sound conveniently muffled by a pair of earphones, was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, tapping away on – no, my eyes hadn’t deceived me – my laptop! And at her side, I belatedly noticed, was a large measuring jug, half full of water, in which a bottle of milk was bobbing, presumably cooling after having been heated up too much.

Presumably now cooled, in fact. I snatched it up, wiped it on my dressing gown and placed the teat in Roman’s open mouth, and while he sucked lustily – I held it in place for him as he fed – I turned my attention to Emma, who seemed almost completely oblivious. She’d seen me come in, of course – she’d even glanced at me – but she was doing that oh-so-teenagerish thing of finishing whatever she’d been doing – the furious typing of what was presumably some vital message – before deigning to pull out her earplugs and give me her full attention.

I stopped myself from picking up the baby. And it was hard. Though his hungry cries had by now been reduced to gulping sobs, this was no way for him to feed – he’d be gulping in as much air as nourishment – and it was only the insistent voice in my head, reminding me just how young and clueless (not to mention motherless) his mother was, that stopped me rounding on Emma in anger.

‘Emma,’ I said instead, keeping my voice low but firm, ‘what’s going on here? Surely you could hear Roman screaming? Even through those.’ I gestured pointedly to the earphones.

She looked up at me, completely without guile. And then at her baby, as if nothing much was up with him. ‘Oh, was it cool enough? I didn’t realise. It takes for ever to cool down, milk does. And I know he fusses, but, look, he’s fine now.’ She paused then, as if unsure quite what to do with me, since it didn’t look as if I planned on going anywhere any time soon. And then she seemed to decide I needed mollifying. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, seeing me still standing by the pram, feeding him. ‘If you just roll his blanket up into a ball and prop the bottle up, he’ll be fine. He can practically feed himself, that way.’

I was flabbergasted. He wasn’t even five weeks old! Practically feed himself? ‘Emma,’ I said sternly, ‘this bottle is almost stone cold. And a baby of Roman’s age needs to be held while he’s feeding and, equally to the point, what are you doing on my laptop at this hour of the night? What are you doing on my laptop at all?’

I could see from where I was that, as I’d thought, she was on Facebook, and was also aware that even now I didn’t have her full attention. Her eyes kept flicking back to whoever she was messaging on screen.

‘Emma!’ I hissed again.

She sighed, betraying a distinctly adolescent irritation at the interruption. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you chill, woman?’ she fired back at me, causing me to be even more flabbergasted. ‘I came down and warmed his bottle for him, didn’t I? And would have fed him, too, if you hadn’t come in and beat me to it. He’s not going to die, you know, having to wait a few minutes. He’s –’ and then she stopped, abruptly, and burst out laughing.

Heaven knew, the last thing I wanted to sound like was the prissy Miss Jean Brodie character Kieron used to accuse me of sounding like whenever I used to tick him off, but that’s exactly what I heard in my voice when I asked Emma quite what it was she seemed to find so funny.

But she evidently didn’t. ‘Oh, it’s my mate,’ she said, with one eye still on the screen. ‘She’s off her head on vodka, and she’s having this major row with these two geeks on here. It’s funny as.’

Words really did almost fail me now. But not quite. ‘Well, I’m afraid I don’t find anything about any of this remotely funny, Emma. This isn’t a very good start, is it? Now kindly log off my computer, and come and sort your baby out, please. In the meantime I am going to switch the internet off, and you and I are going to discuss this in the morning.’

It nearly killed me to leave the room without picking up the baby, but I held firm and, as Emma watched me with the sullen eyes I absolutely expected, I left the room, climbed the stairs and crept as quietly as I could back into bed.

I couldn’t sleep then. I tossed and turned all night, unable to settle, and though it might not have been conscious, with half an ear out for further baby-centred disturbances. And then, the following morning, without even thinking what I was doing, I did something completely out of character – I told a lie.

‘I’m off now, love,’ Mike said at seven as he placed my morning mug of coffee at the bedside. ‘Well,’ he went on cheerfully, ‘that went well, eh? There was me worrying we’d be back to sleepless nights again – but nothing. Can’t believe I never heard a peep!’ He chuckled then. ‘He’s a lovely little fella, that one. They’re both down there, by the way – Emma’s busy changing him, and he’s gurgling away, bless him. You know, I swear he’s even watching the cartoons with her. I told her you’d been down once you’d had your coffee. Anyway, how about you?’ he finished. ‘Did you manage to sleep through?’

And I lied. ‘Yes,’ I said, nodding, ‘I did. Right through.’

And I felt awful. I wasn’t even sure why I’d lied to Mike, not really. Was it the idea that Hannah might just come and snatch Roman away without a by your leave? Was it because I felt so sorry for this poor motherless girl? Whatever the reason, I vowed then and there that it would not be – it mustn’t be – the shape of things to come.

What with the phone business and the computer business – not to mention the general night-feeding business – I had got out of bed that morning feeling somewhat heavy of heart. Emma hadn’t even been with us for twenty-four hours yet, and already we’d been cast in the roles I least wanted – me as the stern deliverer of rules and regulations and her as the unwilling recipient. If ever there was a situation most likely to cement her position as a sulky teenager it was the one that I had no choice but to create: the speller out of ground rules on all fronts.

But perhaps that was going to happen anyway. Emma was just a child herself, after all. And though she wouldn’t have to sit down and work through the list of points and privileges that was the basis of our specialist fostering programme, she perhaps did need to have certain things made clear.

Roman had gone straight to sleep after his morning feed, so I suggested Emma do likewise, and while she got her head down I got on the phone to Maggie about Emma’s mobile.

‘Oh, it’s absolutely fine to let her have it,’ she reassured me. ‘Just as you would with any teen of her age. Unless you have good reason to think you shouldn’t, obviously. Why – do you?’

‘No, not really,’ I said, swallowing the slight guilt I felt. ‘We were just thinking of the circumstances and wanted to be sure, that’s all, because she’s a little older than the kids we normally have. What would constitute “good reason” in this case?’

‘Oh, the usual,’ Maggie said. ‘If she’s sitting chatting on it for long periods late at night, that sort of thing. In which case you’d obviously need her to leave it downstairs when she goes to bed.’

All of which constituted sound advice, I thought. And would be something with which I could reassure Mike when he got home. Though it wasn’t late-night phone calls that I needed to have stern words about – it was the thing I’d neglected to mention to Maggie, the middle of the night sessions on my laptop. So that was exactly what I did, just as soon as she was downstairs.

‘It won’t happen again, Casey,’ she promised plaintively. ‘Honest it won’t. I was just so lonely – it’s scary being up in the middle of the night all by yourself, when everyone else is sleeping and everything, and now I don’t have my iPod to listen to I just get so freaked out. An’ I get so tired, I can hardly keep awake without anything to listen to. And I just saw it there – and you did say I could borrow it – and I just wanted to catch up with my friends. I’ve hardly seen any of them since Roman was born …’ She sighed. ‘I just wanted to cheer myself up, that was all.’

Which left me with very little I could say, because, much as I knew it had been important to discipline her, at the same time my heart really went out to her. I remembered when Riley had been small and Mike had needed to be in the warehouse overnight for some reason and how frightened I’d been, left alone in the house with a tiny baby. And I’d been an adult, not a fourteen-year-old among strangers. I also remembered how when Kieron had been Emma’s age he could hardly bear us being out for an evening, he’d get so twitched on his own, let alone a night.

And Emma had another dependent human being to think about now, too. Didn’t matter that some might want to argue that it was self-inflicted. It would have been hard, and would still be hard for some time to come: hard to leave the usual childish things behind her, along with all her unencumbered friends. And such a shock to the system to one day be so carefree and the next have such an enormous responsibility.

No, I couldn’t come down too hard on her because I did understand. I said so. ‘But when I said you could borrow the laptop,’ I pointed out, ‘it was on the basis that you asked me first, wasn’t it?’

She nodded glumly. But then brightened. ‘But if I play my cards right I’ll have my own soon anyway, won’t I? So it won’t be an issue, will it? And in the meantime I promise I’ll only use yours if you say it’s okay.’

‘Which is never going to be in the middle of the night, I’m afraid,’ I pointed out. After my chat with Maggie, this seemed fairly essential. ‘But what about your iPod? What happened to it? Did it break?’

‘No, I … well, actually, yes, kind of. It needed fixing and I never got it back off them after.’

‘So should we follow that up?’

Emma shook her head. ‘No, you’re all right. No need. I don’t think it was fixable.’

‘Well,’ I said, hearing the tell-tale bleat of a waking baby, ‘I’m sure Riley or Kieron will be able to find you one – I think they both still have their old ones. No vouching for what’s on them, of course – though I suspect you and Kieron share a taste in music – but he’s a music whizz so I’m sure he can sort something out for you. That way, the nights won’t seem so scary, eh?’

Which seemed to make Emma brighten. And as she skipped off to get Roman from his cot, I felt the heaviness lift. It hadn’t been nearly as bad as I’d thought. Nor would it be, I decided, when I looked in on the pair of them an hour later. They were both curled on the sofa watching – of all things – a cartoon. And the thing that most struck me was that while Roman was sucking contentedly on his bottle, Emma, her hair once again scraped into a hurried and messy ponytail, was unthinkingly sucking her thumb. Who needed the most mothering in this scenario, I thought ruefully. The truth was that, actually, they both did.

Hannah was still going to be on her three-times-a-week phase for the first few weeks Emma was with us, and scheduled to come pretty much every other day. And by the time of the third visit, which was early the following week, I’d come to see a pattern had emerged. I wasn’t privy to what had happened before she’d come to us, obviously, but I could see Hannah’s visits really loomed in Emma’s mind.

I didn’t try to draw her out on the subject – I’d simply watch and see how things developed – but what was clear was that, like a nervous beginner anticipating their next driving lesson, Emma’s mood grew increasingly anxious and raddled as the time of the next visit came around.

That the visits were necessary was not in dispute. As Roman’s social worker, Hannah’s responsibility was towards him. Where it was Maggie’s job to oversee Emma’s personal welfare, Hannah had no such professional remit. It was her job to look out for the interests of Emma’s child, and if that meant parting him from his mother, then so be it. So I was well aware that a tough assessment was vital for the baby’s welfare – I just hated seeing how much that stressed and upset Emma, who, knowing she’d be on show and scrutinised, presumably, would become negative and fatalistic and all fingers and thumbs. It almost felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy – a bit like being so nervous about your driving test that you shake so much you can barely drive. Except the stakes were way higher than being stuck with getting the bus. It was a cycle I was determined to break.

‘Oh, Casey,’ Emma wailed as the appointed hour grew nearer, ‘can you help me find some clothes for him? I can’t find anything decent to put him in!’

‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of clean babygros in the airing cupboard. Just put him in one of those. He’ll be fine.’

She wasn’t to be mollified. ‘Oh, I wish he’d been a girl. Girls are easy. You can put them in frilly stuff and make them look all pretty. Boys’ clothes are shit. He always looks a mess.’

If it weren’t for the need to give her a stern look about the swearing, I would have laughed out loud at this. It was just such a crazy thing to get in such a flap about. How things must have changed. But perhaps they hadn’t – perhaps teen mums just cared because they were teens. And given the time teenage girls often spent caring about clothes shopping, perhaps it was just an extension of that.

‘Emma, calm down,’ I said again. ‘Roman always looks beautiful. And you know, Hannah doesn’t care a bit what he’s dressed in. All that concerns her is that he’s clean and he’s healthy.’

I fished out a babygro and commanded her to put him in it. I was feeling guilty for having done too much that morning already – I’d given him his bath when he’d woken up, so she could get an extra hour’s sleep. It had been such a little thing to do, but even so I knew I shouldn’t have done it; particularly when she’d barely even noticed that I had done it – just whined about having had to get up for his night feeds and how unlucky she was to have a baby that still needed them, as if she didn’t already have no luck at all.

She was still not dressed now, in fact, and Hannah would be arriving in half an hour. So, having delivered yet another lecture, about how all babies needed night feeds at this age – not to mention for some time to come – I suggested that now Roman was attired in his babygro she get on and make herself respectable too.

‘Humph!’ she huffed, tugging the belt of her dressing gown tighter round her. ‘She can just take me as she finds me. She isn’t my social worker, is she? I’m not doing anything till I’ve had something to eat.’

I went to make her breakfast almost on autopilot, really. After all, that was what I did – I looked after children. But even as I popped the slices of bread in the toaster, and reached for the hot chocolate, it occurred to me that, actually, I shouldn’t be doing this. Emma didn’t just have to prove to Hannah that she could look after Roman, she had to prove she could do so while still taking care of herself. After all, she was right – she wasn’t one of the lucky ones, was she? If she’d been my child, I’d be there for her, helping her through the hard bit. If this had been Riley, that would have been exactly what I’d have done. Thank God it hadn’t been, but saying it had, I’d be there for her, making her breakfast, supporting her, helping her through.

But that wasn’t the case. Emma had no such support to rely on when she left me. She’d be on her own and, as such, she had to learn to survive.

I sighed heavily, as the reality of what was to come started sinking in. It was such a dilemma; I wanted to help her, but there was a clock ticking, loudly. In order to keep Roman, she had to prove she could survive without help. She was being monitored and it was my job to collude with those doing that monitoring, which meant that if things went wrong – if the decision was reached that she couldn’t be trusted to look after Roman – I would be a part of that decision-making process; a decision to part him from his mother. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so torn about a placement, or so emotionally on edge about what was the right thing to do.

I finished making the breakfast and took it in to her anyway. By now Roman had been relocated to his Moses basket – a surprise gift Mike had brought home a couple of evenings before. ‘Save him having to be up in his cot upstairs all the time for his naps,’ he’d explained. And I understood perfectly. Out of sight out of mind was the last thing that was required.

‘Come on, Emma,’ I said once she’d finished the first slice. ‘Come on, get a move on!’ She was flicking through the channels now, inertia kicking in. ‘Get upstairs, get yourself showered, and get dressed, quick smart. You might not care what Hannah thinks, but I do. You need to show her that you can set a good example to your child, and lounging about watching TV in your PJs isn’t one, in my book. Come on, take the rest of your toast up and get organised.’

She huffed again, and I was reminded that in the normal course of things she’d be in school, probably huffing about having to sit through double maths instead. ‘A good example?’ she spluttered. ‘He’s not even two months old! It’s not like he’s going to start copying me, is it? Christ!’

She stomped off then, slamming the door behind her for good measure, which made me flinch, expecting Roman to wake with a start and begin wailing, but he was obviously used to noise. He barely stirred.

Emma was still upstairs when Hannah arrived on the doorstep fifteen minutes later, looking a picture of smiling efficiency.

‘Morning, Casey,’ she said cheerfully as I ushered her over the threshold. ‘Goodness, it’s warm in here after the nip in the air out there. Had to ramp the heating up for our little man, I suppose?’

She shrugged her parka off as she went in, and cast around, looking for him.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Not ideal for a woman at my time of life, it must be said, but needs must, eh? Cup of coffee?’

‘That would be lovely. Ah! There you are – look at you, all snug in your lovely basket!’ She plucked Roman from his bed and turned back to me in one smooth movement. ‘And where’s our little madam today?’ she asked.

It was nothing personal, but I didn’t really like the way she called Emma ‘our little madam’. It was the sort of term a mother might use affectionately for her own teenager, and, though it wasn’t for me to say, in this context it just felt slightly inappropriate – as if she was already encouraging her to play that kind of role, despite Emma being a mother herself. It also riled me that Hannah was only young too and, though she was possibly the best social worker since the invention of sliced bread, had no personal experience of being a mum herself. (I’d checked.) Which didn’t mean she couldn’t do a brilliant job for Roman – some of the best midwives out there were childless, after all – but did mean it sat uneasily with me that she should slightly patronise Emma in that way. So I lied. I just didn’t want to give her further fuel to think of Emma like that.

‘She’s upstairs sorting out the baby’s laundry, I think,’ I mumbled. ‘I’ll pop the kettle on then I’ll nip up and tell her you’re here.’

‘Excellent,’ said Hannah. ‘Now, little fellow,’ she said, turning back to Roman, ‘how are you?’

Once I’d chivvied Emma down (having first, of course, briefed her) I left her and Hannah to it, and got on with doing a bit of laundry myself. I was out in the conservatory – a welcome addition Mike had made to the house not long after we’d moved in – hanging it on my airer when I heard the door go, and by the time I returned to the living room Emma was back in position on the sofa, Roman in the crook of one arm, remote in the other hand, TV on.

She glanced up. ‘She said she’ll see you Thursday,’ she told me. ‘And maybe phone you. Prob’ly to bitch about something else I’m doing wrong.’

‘Wrong?’ I asked. ‘What did she say you were doing wrong?’

Emma pouted, seemingly lost for an answer. ‘Nothing,’ she admittedly finally. ‘But she doesn’t have to. I can just tell. She thinks I’m useless. “You should do this that way, you should do that this way. You should hold him like that, not like that –” She never stops.’