The Wild Child: Secrets always find a way of revealing themselves. Sometimes you just need to know where to look: A True Short Story

Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates,

have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.

HarperElement

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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First published by HarperElement 2015

FIRST EDITION

© Casey Watson 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photograph © Vanesa Munoz/Trevillion Images (posed by model)

Casey Watson asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

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Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780007543113

Version: 2015-07-14

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Epilogue

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Chapter 1

‘How about it?’ I asked my husband Mike and our long-term foster son Tyler.

Neither batted an eyelid, because it was the sort of thing they were both used to me saying – Mike because I’d spent most of our marriage persuading him to do things against his better judgement, and Tyler because in the year and a half he’d been with us he’d had ample chance to get to know how I ticked.

I looked pointedly at my watch. ‘Only they’re phoning back in ten minutes and we need to make an executive decision.’

‘I know,’ said Mike, equally pointedly. ‘And I know the one they’ll want. But hold your horses, Superwoman. Let’s stop and think first. Come on. It’s a bit short notice, after all.’ He held his hands up then, presumably seeing my expression, not to mention realising the silliness of what he’d just said. Of course it was short notice. It was an emergency placement! ‘Okay, point taken,’ he said. ‘But, like I said, we should still stop and think first. What with John being on holiday, and everything …’

The mention of the word ‘holiday’ was like rubbing salt in a wound. It was just what we needed, too, but currently couldn’t quite stretch to, our elderly car having recently gasped its last. Yes, we had a new(ish) one, but a car that starts is no match for a week spent on a beach, particularly today, which had dawned hot, dry and sunny but already saw me sweating over a hot stove.

It was Saturday and Tyler had half a football team coming over, not only to go to football, but also to eat the breakfast I’d impulsively promised them before going to footie practice: bacon butties, sausage sandwiches, the lot. That was the sort of hare-brained thing superwomen tended to do as well.

‘John’ was John Fulshaw, our fostering agency link worker, and when it came to taking kids on, everything normally came through him first. ‘I know,’ I said to Mike, ‘and in an ideal world we’d run it all by him, of course we would, but EDT need an answer, and they need it fast.’

‘They don’t have any other options?’ Mike asked, probably seeing his weekend disappearing.

I shook my head. ‘Nope. Well, they say not. Say there’s absolutely no one else to ask.’

‘Eight you say?’ Mike asked. ‘A boy? Eight years old?’

I nodded.

‘And just for the weekend?’ Tyler asked. ‘Because I’m on my soccer skills course next week, aren’t I?’ He grinned. ‘So I won’t be here to help you if he runs you ragged.’

I blew Ty a kiss, bless him. I’d forgotten about that. He was right. He was off at some ungodly hour on the Monday morning and, as he’d pointed out, would indeed be unable to provide an extra pair of hands if our potential house guest did end up staying longer.

I glanced at Mike. We both knew there was no such guarantee that he wouldn’t be, either. We both knew that ‘just a couple of days’ or ‘just for the weekend’ didn’t really mean anything in our line of work. The truth was that once a child was out of imminent danger, safely installed in an emergency placement, then, bingo, the urgency was over. Which meant that (sometimes fortunately, and at other times, unfortunately) the child who you’d agreed to take just for the weekend could end up being with you for weeks and maybe even months.

Which was fine. Fostering was what we did. Most placements were long ones. The problem lay in that word ‘emergency’, which meant little time to consider. No time for preparatory meetings, no chance to see if there was a ‘fit’. It was a ‘sold, sight unseen’ sort of situation, almost. Yes, you’d see the child, but they would be even more of an unknown quantity than the children you did get to see before you took them, and they could be complicated enough.

‘I think you should say yes,’ Tyler piped up. ‘Just go for it. Might be fun to have another kid around for a couple of days, mightn’t it? ’Specially another boy,’ he added. ‘Yeah, I think you should say yes.’

Mike rolled his eyes and grinned. We all knew the circumstances in which Tyler had come to us. ‘So let’s be clear,’ he said, holding a hand up to tick on fingers. ‘He’s eight. He’s attacked a social worker. And there’s an iron bar involved. What could possibly go wrong?’

Chapter 2

We all laughed of course, but taking on such a child was a serious business, even if it was only in theory for a couple of days. That they’d rung us at all seemed to be an indication that we shouldn’t take the child on lightly; EDT (the social services emergency duty team) only rang private fostering agency carers like us when they had exhausted all other avenues.

Which Julie Jenkins from the EDT had already confirmed. ‘We’ve tried every single authority carer we could think of,’ she’d explained, ‘and without success. So I really don’t have anyone else to turn to. And I saw in your file that you’ve helped us out in the past. I know it’s not an easy one, but we’re pretty desperate.’

‘Not an easy one’ was something of an understatement.

‘He’s called Connor,’ she explained. ‘Latterly of a children’s home in Swindon. He’s been in children’s homes since he was five, by all accounts –’

‘Five?’ I spluttered. ‘Not with a family?’

‘No, not with a family,’ she confirmed. ‘And right now, his current placement is no more.’

She went on to explain that Connor had taken an iron bar and attacked his social worker with it and, as the children’s home staff had tried to restrain him, another child – a ten-year-old girl – had ended up in the firing line and had also been hit; she had cuts to her face and a broken bone in her hand where she’d raised it to try to protect herself.

‘Wow,’ I’d said, shocked. And I’m fairly unshockable.

‘I know,’ Julie said. ‘And I’m afraid that’s pretty much all I can tell you. But the manager at the home is ringing me back with more details any minute, so while you have a think, I’ll see what else I can find out. And don’t worry. They have assured me that after the weekend they have a number of carers who will be freed up and can take him. So it really is just till Monday, I promise.’

Although I was slightly stunned by the thought of an eight-year-old who could be so violent, as I’d put the phone down – having promised to talk it through with Mike and Tyler – I reminded myself that a collection of bald facts could sound so much more damning than they might be in reality. Take Tyler himself, for instance; our first meeting was following a phone call from John asking me to turn up at a police station to see about taking on ‘an 11-year-old boy who’s stabbed his stepmother’. Which he had, but the reality was quite different from the image that series of words first conjured up. Rather than it being an act of extreme violence – a knife plunged into an innocent victim – it had actually happened by accident. Which wasn’t to condone it; the knife should not have been in his hand in the first place, even if it was only being wielded after provocation, as an empty threat. But it did serve as a reminder that it was important to see the whole picture with a child, and a situation, before jumping to conclusions.

And I knew Mike was thinking that, too.

‘So, yay or nay?’ I asked again now, as my mobile began to vibrate again. Both Mike and Tyler nodded – as I’d already known they would – so I shooed them into the kitchen to take charge of breakfast as I took the call.

Julie Jenkins couldn’t have been more grateful. ‘Really?’ she said, as if she really couldn’t believe her luck; a child with nowhere to go wasn’t the sort of headache anyone wanted – particularly on a Saturday morning.

‘Really,’ I confirmed. ‘No, that’s fine. We’ll take him for the weekend. Well, provided he isn’t a serial killer or anything.’

‘Oh, Casey, that will be such a help,’ she said, the relief evident in her voice. ‘Honestly, trying to get a carer freed up on a weekend is nigh on impossible. Mind you, I can’t lie to you. It hasn’t helped that he’s a bit of a nightmare.’

Alarm bells began buzzing in my head. Had I got that wrong about her having no prior knowledge of the boy? I’d assumed she’d been reading from notes she’d been given, but did she already know him? Trying not to feel cross – had she deliberately kept that from me till I’d agreed to have him? – I regrouped. ‘Oh, right,’ I said lightly. ‘Do you already know him?’

‘Not personally,’ she replied, ‘but this isn’t the first time we’ve had to find an emergency placement for him, sad to say. I can recall doing it myself on at least three occasions and I know other colleagues have had similar dealings with him, too.’

I felt a mixture of heart-sink and determination when she said that. Much as a child like this could completely derail our weekend, there was always this part of me mentally rolling my sleeves up. Which is undoubtedly why I became a foster carer in the first place. I do love a challenge. ‘Is he really that bad?’ I asked, now I knew there was more she could tell me. ‘I mean, how bad can an eight-year-old really be? And was it really an iron bar? I know how these things can change in translation. And how on earth does a child get hold of such a thing in a children’s home?’

I heard Julie sigh. ‘And it wasn’t just any children’s home, either. It’s a semi-secure unit. I don’t know where he got the weapon from but, yes, it was definitely some kind of iron bar. And he had no fear about attacking the staff member or anybody else who got in his way.’

I started to waver then, regretting my earlier gung-ho enthusiasm, imagining recounting these minor details to Mike and Tyler. What was I letting myself in for? What were we letting ourselves in for? ‘Can you be straight with me?’ I asked. ‘We have a 13-year-old boy here, as I’m sure you already know. I feel daft even asking this given Connor’s age but, well, will we be putting Tyler in danger?’

There was the briefest of pauses. ‘All I can give you are the facts,’ Julie said. ‘But if it’s any reassurance, what I can tell you is that when it gets to this – when Connor has flipped out so much that he’s had to be taken off somewhere else to get himself together, then that’s just what he usually seems to do. He usually has a few weepy days away, feeling very sorry for himself and for all the trouble he’s caused, and then goes back all contrite and vowing to be better.’ She sighed. ‘You know how it works, Casey – it only ever lasts for a couple of months, sadly, but there you have it. The one thing I can say with a bit of confidence is that the respite carers don’t get to see the worst of him.’

I made a mental risk assessment. What she said did make sense. Then I told her yes for a second time. That she could have him transported to us and that I’d just be extra vigilant on all fronts. The way I saw it, Mike and Tyler would be out at football for half the day anyway and, well, we’d deal with the rest of the weekend when we got to it. If this lad was going to be as wet and weepy as Julie predicted, perhaps a day trip would be in order for Sunday – maybe out into the surrounding countryside for a picnic. Something calming and low key anyway, and then, before we knew it, it would be Monday. Nothing I couldn’t handle, I was sure.

‘So there’s no chance of him going back to where he’s coming from then?’ I finished.

‘Sadly not,’ she said. ‘But we’re already looking at various options. Don’t worry. We’ll have him fixed up by the time Monday comes around. Oh, and I’ll email his files over so you can read more of his background. Well, if you’ve time. If I make the call now, he’s not going to be long. On which note, will it be okay if I give the home manager your mobile number so he can give you a ring and have a chat with you as well?’

There was never a situation in fostering when extra information was a bad thing, so I agreed to that, too; after all, the home manager would know Connor extremely well. Then I hung up and headed off into the kitchen.

Tyler’s friends had all arrived while I’d been talking and the decibel level was through the roof, with Mike in the midst of it, wielding the fish slice, asking for orders. Calming and low-key it wasn’t, and I was glad our temporary charge wouldn’t arrive till the boys had headed off to training.

Mike put the fish slice down and pointed to a fat bacon sandwich he’d just made for me. It was stuffed with crispy bacon and oozing ketchup, just the way I liked it.

‘All sorted?’ he asked, as I joined him cooker-side to eat it.

‘All sorted,’ I said. ‘He should be with us in a couple of hours. Coming in private transport apparently.’ The rest I could (and perhaps should) leave till later on. No point paving the lad’s route to us with negativity.

Mike raised his eyebrows. ‘No expense spared, eh?’ He then checked his watch. ‘We might well be back from football by then, too.’

‘Yes, do try,’ I said, and then glanced around at the scattering of black and white striped football jerseys. ‘But just you and Tyler, please. I think that’s best, don’t you? I think this little lot would be a bit too much as a welcoming committee given the circumstances.’

Mike grinned. ‘I think this lot would be a bit much given any circumstances. You can almost smell the testosterone in this kitchen!’

I licked ketchup from my lips and pretended to sniff the air. ‘At least it’s better than the smell after the match.’

Chapter 3

As soon as my house was male hormone-free I made a quick call to both my kids. Both adult now and with their own families (Kieron had not long had his first baby) it was odds on that either or both would pop round at some point. We had a bit of an open-door policy in that way, and what mum doesn’t like seeing her grown-up kids?

Today, however, it made sense to ask them not to call round, so that I could give Connor a chance to settle in. And if that went okay, we could all get together on the Sunday. In my experience, something like a big family picnic was one of the best ways to take a troubled child out of themselves – fresh air and exercise being two of the best medicines around.

That done, it was time to go and power up my laptop so I could see what might have fetched up in my inbox. And something had. And it made interesting reading.

It seemed Connor had been born in south London. In his early years he’d lived there with his mum – who was called Diane – and his dad, Connor senior, together with an older brother and sister. These older siblings were, according to the notes, Connor’s polar opposites, in that, while they were model kids (if such a thing exists) he’d been labelled a ‘problem child’ early on; screaming all day for no apparent reason, and violent from the moment he could walk. He had been excluded permanently from every school he had attended in his short life (including nursery, where he was already deemed too aggressive to be around other kids), and by the time he was seven he’d already been tagged ‘streetwise’.

I continued to read with a sense of depressing inevitability. Though it seemed no one had commented on or suggested reasons for Connor being such an apparently difficult toddler, one thing leapt out as a factor that might exacerbate the problem; that his father had been in and out of prison all his life. Connor senior was quite the criminal, it seemed; something not usually conducive to family life, and when Connor was five his wife left and then divorced him.

Then came the nugget that I couldn’t help but home in on. That she’d left him, taking only two of her three children. She simply left for some village in the north-east, close to Scotland, and as it coincided with a period when Connor senior was at liberty, she left little Connor behind with his dad.

I couldn’t help but sigh. I could never do such a thing. I struggled to understand how a mum could leave her kids at the best of times – in all but the most extreme of cases – but to take two and leave one with a jailbird husband? How much more completely could a child be rejected? I read on. It seemed Dad had been happy enough to keep him, but within six months he’d received yet another prison sentence and at that point five-year-old Connor had been taken into care. He’d been part of the system ever since.

It was dreadful reading – starts in life don’t come much worse – and I felt genuinely moved, not to mention slightly sickened, thinking of where he’d come from and just how damaged he must be as a consequence. I wasn’t alone; various social workers and carers had made similar observations, one noting only recently that, at the age of just eight, Connor truly believed himself to be ‘properly grown-up’, had seen enough of life to know ‘exactly what was what’ and that half the adults he’d encountered ‘didn’t have a clue’.

I closed my laptop. Bye bye weekend. This clearly wasn’t going to be an easy one. Though I already knew that – mine was a job that required me to know that – I also knew instinctively that I now had to make a choice. Not about hanging on to Connor – our next long-term placement would be decided in consultation with John Fulshaw – but about how I – or, rather, we – approached the next two days.

I had two choices. I could fill the time with fun things to do, keep Connor happy and act like he was just with us for a little holiday, or I could choose to try to help in some way. That would mean touching on some very painful areas for Connor and ‘interfering’ in his life, and I knew doing that was tantamount to creating all kinds of trouble. But to opt for simple containment would leave me feeling that I wasn’t doing my job. And that, admittedly to my own detriment at times, simply wasn’t in my nature.

John Fulshaw was still away, of course, but I could hear him like Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder. He’d have looked at the notes and advised against this particular bit of respite, for sure. I could actually hear him telling me not to take it on, saying that since we’d decided to take on Tyler permanently we needed to take a break before embarking on our next quest. Yes, do a bit of respite, perhaps – for quiet, biddable children who happened to find themselves in unfortunate circumstances – but save our emotional energy for our next long-term challenge; not take on a kid with a dossier of escapades that made for more eye-popping reading than James Bond’s.

John would probably have been right, but I’d committed to it now, so it was up to me to advise me, and I told myself sternly that I should play things by ear. Much as my instinct was to cast myself as a mixture of superhero and avenging angel, the best thing to do would be to see how things went. In any case, half the day would be gone before Connor even got to us; I’d never been to Swindon but I knew it was at least a couple of hours’ drive away, probably more. And he’d be tired, he’d be shaken, he’d be scared; hopefully he’d be contrite. Which thoughts showed just how much I didn’t know.

Mike and Tyler arrived back from football at one o’clock, exactly the time I expected to receive Connor, so I hustled them in, ordered them both to the bathroom with a command of ‘Get those filthy sweaty things off!’ and flew around with a can of air freshener. Only then, with my home feeling fit to receive visitors, did I take up a vigil by the living-room window.

‘Is that a security van?’ Tyler wanted to know, once he and Mike had come to join me.

‘Certainly looks like one,’ Mike agreed. He laughed. ‘Though I’m sure it’s not. It’s probably just –’

‘It bloody is,’ I said, gawping at what had just pulled up outside our house. ‘Look at the writing on it! And it’s got those armoured windows and everything.’

‘It is,’ Tyler agreed. ‘It’s one of those vehicles they use to transport criminals back and forth from where their trials are. I remember seeing them when we were there. Don’t you remember?’

Indeed I did, one of our first outings with Tyler having been to accompany him to court.

‘Bloody hell, Case,’ Mike observed before I could answer. ‘What the hell did he do?’

We all watched, agog, as the driver got out. He was a huge man – as tall as Mike and a great deal wider – and when he went round the back to open it he was joined by another man-mountain; they were clearly hand-picked for the job.

Which was what made what happened next seem even more incongruous. Because what emerged from the van was a slip of a boy; if I’d been asked his age, at this distance I would have guessed somewhere around six. They were joined by a third man – three men! Come all this way with him! And all three, amazingly, escorted the lad up our path.

I realised we all had our mouths hanging open. ‘Come on,’ I hissed. ‘Come away from the window. The kid’s probably petrified!’

Not, it had to be said, that he looked it. It was hard to drag ourselves away from watching this tiny thing, his head a mass of blond, cherubic curls, who was currently marching towards our front door. Really marching, too. Like you see young boys doing when they’re playing soldiers. Arms stiff and swinging in time with their feet, expression blank, head held high. I had never seen anything like it in my life and half expected one of the ‘guards’ to shout ‘Halt!’

I rushed to open the door, closely followed by a bemused Mike and Tyler. Trying to ignore the hard, inscrutable gazes of the three men, I immediately bent down so I could smile at Connor at his level. ‘Hiya, sweetie,’ I said, touching his shoulder as I spoke. ‘I’m Casey, this is Mike and this is Tyler.’