A Boy Without Hope

by Casey Watson

  I looked across at the TV, which couldn’t have been more than a year old. What? What did ‘tuning the TV into the internet’ mean? Every time I thought I was just about up to date with technology, some new thing came along to confound me all over again. I made a mental note to ask Tyler what that meant in the morning.

  I stood up then, and plumped his pillows, then beckoned him to get back into bed. ‘Well, I’ll get Mike to look at it tomorrow,’ I said. ‘But for now, Miller, I’m afraid it has to be reading or nothing. I need you to be very quiet so that I can get a couple of hours’ sleep.’

  ‘Ok-ayyy,’ he said, tossing the tennis ball back into the suitcase, and, again, to my surprise, meekly doing as he was told.

  And again, at four, when I had to go in and tell him to stop singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and then at five, when I heard him fiddling about in the bathroom. ‘Told you I don’t sleep,’ he pointed out as I chivvied him back to bed a fourth time.

  But once again, he let me lead him back to bed without arguing and, by six thirty, when the scent of coffee roused me reluctantly from my slumbers he was, of course, sleeping like a baby.

  ‘You should have woken me up,’ Mike said, when I regaled him with the extent of my nocturnal activities. ‘I’d have gone in to have another word with him.’

  I reached for the coffee in much the same way as a drowning man would grab a passing lifebelt. ‘I’m not sure it would have done any good, love,’ I told him. ‘It’s almost like his body clock’s set to nocturnal. I don’t know about Lego Batman – he’s like a flipping bat! He wasn’t even tired. Not remotely. He was buzzing. So much for the sleeping pills he’s been taking.’

  ‘But a challenging day for him, don’t forget. Perhaps he was just over-stimulated.’

  ‘I wish I thought that, love, but I don’t. I got this impression that last night was pretty much as per. And with him not going to school, you can see how that might happen. And what’s the point of him popping pills if they’re not helping? It’s clearly something we’re going to have to address as a matter of urgency. Direct with the GP if need be.’

  And his former carers, for that matter. Had this been true for them too? If so, it was a habit that needed breaking, and fast.

  For the time being though, I was too tired to start, so once Mike went to work, and Tyler headed off to school, I did some housework, drank coffee and fired off a couple of emails, in the hopes of at least getting some sort of medical history. And all the while, our ‘non-sleeping’ nocturnal house guest slept on.

  I also decided to try and speak to Miller’s previous foster carer, Jenny, to get a better sense of his routines and habits. No, he’d not been there long, but, from their point of view, anyway, clearly more than long enough. Was it the lack of sleep that had pushed them to the brink with him?

  After flipping through the little paperwork I had, I found her number and punched it into my mobile. If Miller did come downstairs unexpectedly, I could easily take myself off into the back garden. And perhaps take him out there later, too, in an attempt to tire him out.

  ‘Oh, hello!’ Jenny said. She sounded happy. Like a woman, it occurred to me, who’d had a decent night’s sleep. ‘I would have called you but I was going to give it until tomorrow so you weren’t inundated with endless calls,’ she said. ‘I know what it’s like when you have a new placement.’

  I almost laughed. Did we even work for the same fostering agency, I wondered? When I had kids delivered, all I ever seemed to be inundated with was a big, noisy silence – the parcel, and the problem, passed on. ‘I haven’t heard from anyone,’ I told her. ‘That’s why I was calling. He’s been up half the night. Is he always like this? I was hoping you might have a few tips for me.’

  ‘Ah,’ Jenny said. And it was a very telling ‘ah’. ‘I wish you all the best with that, I really do.’

  My heart sank to hear my fears so swiftly confirmed. ‘So it’s not a one-off, then? I was hoping it might be just a first-night thing.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I wish I could tell you it was but, to be honest, we didn’t have an unbroken night the whole time he was with us. It’s one of the main reasons we had to let him go. He’s hard enough to cope with at the best of times, but when you aren’t getting any sleep … And with the hours my husband works … well ...’ She sighed. ‘Look, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the whole thing’s been a bit of a nightmare, if I’m honest. No point me sugar-coating it, is there? I’m sure Libby’s already told you, bless her. I mean, we’ve had our fair share of challenging kids, some of them long term, as I’m sure you have. But this one …’

  ‘So it’s not just the sleeping …’

  It was hardly a question, as I already knew the answer.

  ‘No, it wasn’t just the sleeping. If it had been …’ Another pause. Despite what she’d just said, I could sense she was reluctant to be too candid. As would I have been in her shoes, since it was another carer she was talking to – and, in this case, the one to whom the baton had now been passed. ‘Well, perhaps we could have coped better if he had slept,’ she said eventually. ‘But the truth is that he’s sneaky. Manipulative. And clever. You’ve probably already noticed that yourself. He’s also methodical. And ruthless – knows exactly how to push your buttons. Though did Libby tell you? After all that – after pushing us way beyond our limits – he carried on as if leaving us was the end of the world. So much crying and begging and refusing to go. She literally had to drag him away. And only then because we promised he could come back and stay with us on respite from time to time. That was a lie,’ she finished, bluntly. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that, but it’s true. But we didn’t know how else to get –’ She stopped abruptly. Had she been about to say ‘rid of him’?

  ‘Well, thanks for filling me in,’ I told her. ‘I appreciate your honesty. I’m going in blind here, pretty much, and forewarned is forearmed.’

  Though it was worrying, to say the least, that she had been so candid. That she was talking about him as if he was a little demon, not a child; an evil force that she was only too glad to have expunged from her life. ‘I tell you what,’ she said. ‘Let me gather my thoughts and set everything down in an email. You know, anything that comes to me that I think you need to know.’ Then she laughed – actually laughed. ‘So expect a long email! Seriously, and this is strictly between you and me, if you value your sanity don’t agree to take on this kid lightly.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I said. And I meant it. ‘I won’t.’

  Miller obviously couldn’t know it, but his timing was impeccable. Because it was only moments after I’d rung off that he appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was tousle-haired, sleepy-eyed, barefoot and shyly smiling. And a great wave of guilt mushroomed up in me from nowhere. Because no child was a demon. He was just a child who had demons. If I refused to try and help him how could I look myself in the eye?

  Chapter 6

  Taking on a new child, particularly when that child has multiple issues and challenges, is almost always a bit full-on for the first couple of weeks, and can be intense in a variety of ways. There is invariably a measure of drama, and very often there are floods of tears. There can also be outbreaks of unexpected violence, meaning you sometimes feel more like a zoo-keeper than a carer, trying to fend off, feed and socialise a distressed, out-of-control child.

  Miller, however, did not seem to fit any recognisable mould. Here was a lad whose fearsome reputation had arrived before him. A child variously described as a nightmare, as sneaky, as manipulative and ruthless, yet, apart from the outburst when Libby Moran had left him, he’d done nothing to provide evidence that any of that was true. Yes, he’d been chippy about the gaming, and a little petulant about rules, but other than that he’d presented no notable challenges. Yes, he’d push at the boundaries, but once he established they were firm, he didn’t kick off – he just meekly accepted them.

  So was there a bigger game being played here? Was he sounding us out just a
s we were doing with him? Apart from the sleep situation, which hadn’t yet improved, I was struggling to understand just why he’d been flagged up as such a challenge.

  The only pressing problem – and ‘pressing’ was unquestionably the word for it – was that three days had now passed and I’d not left the house, and the walls felt as if they were closing in on me.

  It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if I’d at least had some outside input, but no email had arrived yet from Jenny, and I’d not heard anything else from Libby either. The only call I’d received had been from Christine, who’d called the previous afternoon and, when I told her I’d been given nothing further from social services, told me she was going to ‘kick some butt’, and promptly rang off again.

  It was now lunchtime – almost a full twenty-four hours later – and I was still waiting to hear from her. Or anyone, for that matter. In the meantime, we’d fallen into a less than ideal routine of disturbed nights, as I tried in vain to get him to either sleep or read quietly, and him sleeping in till gone eleven.

  So it was odds-on that the melatonin wasn’t working. Either that, or the dosage or timing was wrong, and, since Miller was on an adult dose, experience told me it was more likely a problem with the timing. As it stood, he was supposed to take them at 7 p.m., the idea being that, at around ten, he would simply ‘drift off’. Which he wasn’t.

  But why the three-hour gap anyway? Would it really take that long to work? Was he simply taking it too early in the evening? I’d looked after a child who’d been prescribed melatonin a few years back, Olivia, and though she’d been younger I had a hunch that the principle held true; she’d take the pill at bedtime and, for the most part, would be asleep fifteen minutes later. Should I hold off giving Miller his three till it was time to go to sleep? Perhaps having it too early made it easier for his body to resist it – something I would need to discuss further with my GP.

  For now, though, I decided, it was time to stop the rot. Yes, he was a serial absconder, but I’d managed my fair share of those, and even if taking him out meant risking him doing so, there was no way he could remain shut up in a house indefinitely. I needed to get him out, not least because it wasn’t rocket science that, everything else notwithstanding, some physical exercise would obviously aid sleep. He might manage to escape from me – from what I already knew, it was odds-on he would try – but I was reassured by what also I’d read and heard about him always coming back again and, in the absence of anyone else stepping in to either sit with him or accompany me, I was going out and he was coming with me, end of.

  To that end, I’d already told him it was too late for breakfast, and that, today, we were going to sit down and have lunch together before him getting bathed and dressed, and going into town.

  I’d made pasta, which he apparently liked, and set the kitchen table. ‘It’s almost ready, Miller!’ I called up the stairs. ‘Come on down, love.’

  As I was beginning to realise was his instinctive way, he immediately responded to the request. Not with ‘I’m coming’, however, but with his own counter-order. Just as he’d done with the games console the first night we’d had him, he seemed incapable of responding to any request for action without adding several minutes before he did it. In this case, apparently, he required three.

  This, in itself, wasn’t that unusual. Kids who are insecure because of abuse or neglect – and often both – will often attempt to exert control on their surroundings via time, needing to know what’s happening, when it’s happening, and needing constant reassurance that it actually will happen. This seemed different, though. It was almost as if he had a built-in resistance to doing anything without imposing his own timeframe on it. I suspected that if I told him there was a giant Easter egg downstairs waiting for him, he’d practise the same curious delaying tactic before he took it. It seemed almost knee-jerk, and I wondered if this was what Libby meant when she’d commented that he needed control. It didn’t matter what was asked of him – clean your teeth, go to bed, brush your hair, or whatever. He would only do it after a further few minutes had passed, the number of which he decided.

  I’d tried to be wily, saying things like ‘breakfast will be ready in three minutes’, but, faced with that, it was almost as if he turned into an android, for whom it simply ‘did not compute’. He’d either shrug or mumble, or not respond at all. Then duly appear, not in three minutes, but in five.

  I wasn’t stupid. I knew I had two choices in how to deal with it. I either accepted this oddity, and planned things accordingly, or tried to address it by tackling it head on, which would, of course, lead to endless confrontations, at least in the short term. But this was no easy choice till I knew what I was dealing with. If he genuinely had some kind of timekeeping phobia, then it would do him no good if I bulldozed straight in and created even more disorder in his already insecure world. If, however, it was simply a long-ingrained control thing, honed over years of manipulating various carers, then the sooner I tackled it the better. Quite apart from my own desire to escape the proverbial four walls, I knew, both as a mum and an employee – as a foster carer – that I wouldn’t be living up to my responsibilities if I simply allowed him to fester in his room, surfing the web. But without the bigger picture – all those long years of records I could pore over – I didn’t yet feel able to make the call. I simply didn’t know him well enough.

  Today, though, other concerns over his welfare took precedence. We were down to the last of the melatonin Libby had brought for him, so, one way or another, a visit to the doctor had to happen – as well as the necessary phone call to discuss it, so I could pick up a prescription. And with Mike at work, and my reluctance to rope in poor Tyler, that was happening this afternoon, come what may.

  Miller shuffled into the kitchen just as I was dishing up two bowls of pasta. ‘So, after lunch, love,’ I told him as I set them on the table, ‘I’d like you to get dressed, as I said earlier, because the two of us are going out. Remember?’

  He slid into his seat and picked his fork up, his gaze flickering intermittently towards me. Though it was almost impossible to catch his eye for any length of time and I wondered if there had been discussions about autism in his records. Struggling to make eye contact was common for kids on the spectrum.

  ‘Going where?’ he asked. ‘It might be somewhere I don’t want to go.’

  ‘To pick up a prescription for your pills,’ I said. ‘And then …’ I shrugged. ‘Who knows? It’s a beautiful day. Perhaps the park?’

  ‘But I feel sick,’ he said immediately. The response seemed automatic. And this despite the speed with which he was shovelling pasta into his mouth. ‘So I can’t go out. It’ll make me feel sicker.’

  I sat and watched him eat, waiting for him to recognise the absurdity of what he was saying. But he didn’t – or didn’t appear to. He just polished the lot off. All but licked the bowl out, in fact. ‘What?’ he said, as he raised his head finally and caught me smiling at him.

  ‘Enjoy that?’ I asked him mildly, nodding my head towards the empty bowl, and inviting him to get the point I was making.

  But bright though he obviously was, he didn’t. But perhaps that was intentional. I stood up and reached across for his bowl. ‘Half an hour.’ I told him. ‘Then it’s bath, dress and out, okay?’

  He pushed his chair back, rolled his eyes at me and headed back upstairs. I didn’t push it, but I did need to decide how to play it. Stern adult mode? Pleading mode? Negotiation-for-a-reward mode? I had a selection of ways to approach the problem. I just had to decide which one to try.

  Because of his many problems – both behavioural and medical – Miller was under a consultant who specialised in sleep disorders, which meant that though I knew my GP would be happy to take him as a patient, he would be unable to prescribe his current medication without the surgery first contacting the doctor in question and him confirming that it was okay to do so. In the longer term I’d doubtless be taking Miller in to see him, but, for the
moment, it was more a case of all the boxes being ticked so that I could have a new supply of the apparently precious pills – even though they seemed to be doing precisely nothing.

  I’d just finished speaking to the surgery, who’d confirmed the fax had come through okay, when my mobile trilled again. It was Libby Moran.

  Finally.

  ‘So, how’s the little monkey been, then?’ she chirruped, putting the lie to what I’d seen with my own eyes when they’d arrived: that she didn’t see him as a little monkey at all.

  There was no point in being anything other than frank. ‘Well, to be perfectly honest, I’m struggling to work out how best to look after him,’ I told her. ‘I know so little about him, and nothing else seems to be forthcoming, either. It’s like I’m trying to feel my way in the dark. Plus, right now, I can’t even get out of the house.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Libby replied in what I imagined was meant to be a soothing tone. ‘That’s precisely why I’m phoning you. To check how things are going, but also to tell you that I’m about to send you an email with some attachments. It’s mostly bits and bobs of things I’ve managed to get hold of, but I wanted to highlight a couple of things before they land in your inbox, because I feel they need a bit of clarification.’

  This was an oddity. Wouldn’t the record for Miller speak for itself? Why would his official history need clarification? If it did – and she clearly thought so – why not just amend the record before sending? That said, I could probably answer my own question. Because experience had long taught me that ‘facts’, taken out of context, could be misread. Perhaps that was the case here; perhaps she’d done some digging and decided time was of the essence. Better to put me in the picture first, and amend the record later.

  ‘What sorts of things?’ I asked her.

  ‘Just a couple of things I wanted to flag up, really,’ she said. She was obviously in her office. I could hear paper being moved around, the clack and clatter of people typing. Other people. What I wouldn’t give for spending time with some right now. ‘Firstly,’ she went on, ‘the report from a particular foster carer, a Mrs Lyndsay Taylor. She tells of an incident – a really horrible incident actually – where Miller has killed a pet rabbit with a rake …’