by Tim Roux
The one thing we cannot get the children to do on holidays is to laze on the beach. They always have to be doing something, which is slightly exhausting as we are not entirely happy letting them wander off on their own. Mark is too young, and Ella is too young for a girl, and especially for a startlingly attractive one. With long legs, Scandinavian clear blue eyes and precocious physical development, she could easily be mistaken for being two, three or even four years older than she is. While her tendency is always to be sensible, infatuation makes fools of us all, and she is certainly partial to boys with Latin looks and predatory confidence. I do try to warn the boys to go steady, otherwise they will have me to answer to, but being slim, light-boned and intellectual-looking with designer glasses, I am probably a good deal less frightening than their fathers, or even their mothers, and Chrissie does not come over as the rolling pin type either. I am delighted that we have one of each, but girls are a real worry, however laid back you are. We don’t want Ella pregnant at fourteen, not least in that Chrissie and I are beginning to savour our rediscovered freedom, although providing the local taxi service for our children does eat inordinately into our time.
* * *
There were no taxi services when Chrissie and I first met, simply because we didn’t have any parents to ferry us about. It was lucky that we found each other so quickly, and perhaps that is why we found each other so quickly, not that the authorities fully approved of such an intense relationship at such a young age. We learnt to be very sneaky about it all, which also added to the fun. I’ll never forget us cuddling up in a loft over one of the day rooms, while everyone was looking for us, often passing within feet of where we were lying barely daring to breathe. We bit into each others’ arms and legs trying to suppress our giggles. At one point I breathed very hard down Chrissie’s sweater, and she seemed to enjoy that. I think that may have been the moment when we decided that we would spend every moment of our lives together.
It was also the day when we were betrayed by Jenny Blythe who caught us sliding down through the loft hatch. Without a moment’s hesitation, she summoned everyone within bellowing distance to witness the fact that she had captured the absentees post-flagrante.
Initially, we were surprised by how gently our escapade was treated by the staff. Indeed, it was Jenny Blythe who suffered the immediate repercussions, not us, for being a malicious little snitch. They wanted to know exactly what we had been doing, of course, and they cross-questioned us for some time, coming at us from every angle they could think of. However, once we had persuaded them that nothing too outrageous had taken place, they seemed to want to play the whole incident down. Tiptoeing around us, they lulled us into a false sense of security where we thought that we had permission to be open about our feelings towards each other. Big mistake. The staff clearly must have gained the impression that if we weren’t into each others’ pants already, we soon would be, and between a twelve year old boy and a ten year old girl that would not look so good.
So we were separated. Chrissie was the first to go. Robert Dankworth told me one afternoon that he had just seen Chrissie packing her belongings (and orphans do not have many of those, especially in those days) and being driven off in the residential home minibus. I immediately rushed to the entrance hall, as if I would be able to pick up her scent. It was empty and echoing, masking any traces of Chrissie in shadows and fustiness. I went immediately to the Principal’s office, where Mrs. Foulks pretended not to know anything about anything. “Chrissie Jackson?” (as if there were another ‘Chrissie’ in the place). “I’ll have to ask around, dear. Leave it with me.” I left it with her, and there it stayed. The next day, having quizzed almost the entire staff, only to be met with shifty expressions and implied ignorance, I accosted the principal himself, a generally kindly man called Mr. Barr.
“Chrissie? Please sit down, Keith. You were very friendly with Chrissie, weren’t you?” That use of the past tense skewered me. He coughed. “I am sure that you will be delighted to hear that she has been offered the opportunity of an excellent foster home, and has accepted it. It is a wonderful break for her. I have no doubt that she will be very happy there.”
“Bollocks!” is what I thought then, and ‘Bollocks’ is what Chrissie was thinking too. They had played us for lemons, and then cut us in two.
What really gnawed at me was that Chrissie had not mentioned a thing to me. She must have been taken on several visits to see her prospective foster parents, and kept quiet. So, however betrayed I felt by the residential home staff, I felt ten times more betrayed by Chrissie. How could she?
I went berserk. If they thought that they were avoiding trouble by splitting us up, I was about to show them otherwise. I found out later that they were planning to ship me off to a foster home too, but I behaved so indecently that they never dared put me in front of any prospective foster parents, as they would have taken one look at me and said “No, thanks.” So the home got it in the neck. I refused to eat, I refused to study, I absolutely refused to be polite, responsive or otherwise accommodating to any request. I became bad.
Luckily, Chrissie became even worse. We often laugh together at the sorts of things she got up to once she got to her foster home, which wasn’t immediately after she left our residential home at all. The principal had lied to me. She had been transferred to another residential home, and gone through the placement process from there.
According to Chrissie, her foster parents were not horrible, but nor were they in any way equipped to handle her, especially in her current mood. One morning they woke up to find the kitchen plastered with the contents of twenty-six yoghurt pots, three tubs (two half-finished) of cream and seven cereal packets. Chrissie hid in the utility room, the other side of the kitchen, waiting for them.
“You could certainly hear them coming,” she giggles. “Crunch, crunch. Pause. Crunch. ‘What on earth? Sandra, come and look at this. Chrissie has gone crazy. Where is she?’”
Her foster father, Stephen, went to her room, and did not find her there. He searched the rest of the house, and did not find her there either. He glanced into the utility room, but Chrissie had hidden herself silently in a cupboard. Her foster parents assumed that she had run away, and called in the Care people, who were less easily fooled, discovering her hiding place within five minutes of turning up. Chrissie was subjected to a long “Are you unhappy? What were you feeling?” session from the Care people, with an even longer tale of perplexity from her foster parents who woke up the next day to find their white car splattered with khaki-grey anti-slip floor paint.
Within a week Chrissie was back in a residential care home, but not ours. I did not see her for another two years, during which time we each got ourselves into serious trouble. In retrospect, despite the heartache of our separation, we were lucky, believe it or not. Both of our residential homes had devoted principals who were desperate to find a child who might prove to be a credit to them. 85% children in care are so fucked up that they leave without a single exam pass. Chrissie and I emerged into the world ready to study law and architecture at Bristol and Bath respectively, which must have made us two of the highest-achieving orphans of all time. Both of our principals believed that really troublesome children are likely to be highly intelligent, and we were among the worst-behaved they had ever come across, smashing, wrecking, sabotaging, punching, spitting, sneering, complaining. We were so continuously abusive of everything and everyone within those two years that our principals decided that we must be geniuses. Coincidentally, they each oversaw our schedules personally, insisting that we spend between ten and fifteen hours in detention each week to keep us out of trouble. We honoured their commitment to us by being both devoted students and habitual criminals. Chrissie destroyed the banister on the stairs. I added paint to several baths while children were sitting in them. To be precise, I poured it all over their hair. Chrissie set fire to the dining room (although she claims that this was an accident); I added weed killer to the Sunday lunch, not r
ealising quite how dangerous that was. Nevertheless, our respective principals never gave up on us, however tempted they must have been to march us down to punishment cells and to throw away the key, which we now know did indeed happen in some residential care homes.
Then they did an even more courageous thing. At the ages of fifteen and thirteen, they brought Chrissie back to my residential home and left us to get on with it. We never put a single foot wrong again after that, unless you count the things we did with each other.
Another thing we were extremely fortunate about is that there was never any significant sexual abuse in either of the residential care homes we were in. The children were certainly abusive to each other – bullying was rife – and some of the staff could give better than they got too. However, it was rare that anyone insisted on forcefully removing our pants, and the staff never did. Chrissie and I regularly removed each others’ pants, but the only force exerted was that of frenzied downward pressure, and by that point nobody dared mess with us.
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Chapter 4
Both Chrissie and I love socialising. We insist on getting together on either Saturday or Sunday lunchtime with friends who have children who match ours, so that our children have lots of good friends, and we have lots of laughs. We don’t do anything particularly fancy. We eat and the children play, and we never get those two things mixed up. The children are banned from the table, and we ban ourselves from playing with any of their toys before four o’clock.
Jerry and Sam and their two children, Jack and Natty, are particular favourites of ours. Jerry is a social worker and Sam is a travel agent. Before any of us had children, we would have long boozy dinners where we discussed anything and everything with declining comprehensibility. Jerry never asked us about our childhoods, but one night we insisted on telling them all about them. What was extraordinary was the number of details we disclosed that we had never shared with each other, and had totally forgotten about until then. It became a very emotional exchange and we all ended up sobbing our eyes out and hugging each other, until Sam said she would fix a weekend in Paris for all of us in compensation for all the misery we had undergone, at which point we all hugged her instead.
This conversation set off a week of soul-searching between Chrissie and me. Up until that point we believed that we had never hidden secrets from each other, but our revelations during that dinner party blew away that theory. We both recognised that the other had not been deliberately withholding information; it was more the realisation of how much of our lives had passed the other by. We believed ourselves to be so much the same person that what the one knew, the other knew too, by relational osmosis. Not so. And it was not the quality of the missing facts but the quantity of them. I counted over twenty things that Chrissie had never told me about herself and, if anything, I had held back even more. By the end of the dinner party, we were sparring, driven crazy by the heretofore invisible childhood debris that had been separating us to a far greater extent than we had realised. We monopolised the conversation so that Jerry and Sam never got a chance to spill their own beans there and then. Apparently, their session started on the way home, and didn’t end until the evening of the next day. After that, I expected them to pull the plug on us for future encounters. Instead, we were back together the following week, saying how much fun the previous party had been, and vowing never to repeat the experience. However, they still call me ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ and Chrissie ‘the Damson Damsel’ in honour of that night.
We see Adam and Julie with their children, Rock and Crystal (yes, really) about every two to three months, which is about as regularly as any of us can bear. To be honest, the thought of them is much worse than the reality. Each and every time so far, much to our astonishment, we have had a ball together, we adults at least. It is much stickier with the children. Rock is a year older than Ella, and Crystal is three years older than Mark, so their ages run 13, 12, 10 and 7. Rock expends much energy and ingenuity trying to make Ella fall for his body through the chimera of his mind, affecting a veneer of jejune sophistication that wrinkles our toes and sends shivers up behind our ears. Crystal thinks Ella should be her friend exclusively, and goes all out to drive Rock away from her by spitting a relentless stream of acid invective at him while deconstructing his sneaky stratagems. Ella, cool as ever, balances her favours, thus extending her quiet enjoyment in having others fight over her. Mark is left out in the cold as being too young for the adolescent game the other three are playing, and therefore too lightweight and naïve for their consideration. After about half an hour of trying to fit in, he normally slinks off to mitigate his sense of rejection by determinedly distracting himself with his toys in his bedroom. Chrissie and I have vowed never to invite them around again because it is so unfair on Mark, but what do you do when Adam is your boss and the man who gave you your chance in life by hiring you against all the odds and at considerable personal risk?
Well, I say that, but he was really only making a point to the rest of the partnership about who was in charge. He had inherited his position from his father who retired to play golf and to monitor his investments and, like all such presumed impostors, he wanted to do at least one thing markedly differently as an exercise in flexing his power to both subdue and impress the sceptical board of management he had inherited. The particular ground on which he chose to make his revolutionary impact was that of the impartial selection of candidates, regardless of colour, race or creed, to shake up the cosy professional-class recruitment policy that obtained at that time by insisting on introducing a bit of rough into the team. According to gossip, he was pushing hard for a black African candidate before he discovered that I had been an orphan brought up in a residential care home - just the level of disadvantage he was looking for, alongside his growing conviction that I actually had natural talent, whereas the African was only African (actually he is carving out a name for himself very nicely over at Kempson & Baileys).
Another foursome we have invested in are Robert and Fiona, and their children Richard and Andrew. We all try our best to swing along when we meet three or four times a year but, in truth and try as we might, we interact at best like weak magnets, failing to either attract or repel each other, although at the end of each session we book up the next appointment all the same. We have numerous sets of friends like that, several of whom are a riot so long as we stick to trying to entertain each other rather than attempting to communicate at any meaningful level.
Our most outrageous lunch dates are Kyle and BoJo (I haven’t a clue what the ‘Bo’ is – she did tell us once - but ‘Jo’ is Jo), with their Brett and Emico. Kyle and BoJo are self-confessed anarchists, or ‘anashits’ as I have been known to describe them snidely. If they could manage to kill enough people, they could be Che Guevara and lady friend. They don’t believe in government, they don’t believe in religion, they don’t believe in taxes (so far, so Wokingham), they don’t believe in discipline, they don’t believe in competitive sports, they don’t believe in non-organic food (still fairly Wokingham), they don’t believe in school, they don’t believe in miscegenation, they think the poor should be sterilised, and that the Jews should be driven into the sea (and the Mediterranean would not be their first option – too calm, too shallow). We don’t really understand how they became our friends at all, but they are such bêtes noirs among our other friends that we feel it would be moral cowardice to disown them, even if we want obsessively to stab forks into their hands to accompany every word that they utter. I know what is going to happen. In thirty years’ time, they will be the only friends we will have remaining to us dating from this period in our lives, and they will have spun volte-faces like Greek plates and ended up ultra-respectable and exceedingly dull.
We also have a paper-cup army of other friends we only wave at when we catch sight of each other across rooms at parties. They are running candidates to become real friends if we had the time to check them out in the social dissection area of our dining room, but we lac
k the vacant diary slots.
* * *
Chapter 5
I tell you all this in the present tense because it was once like this, and I sincerely pray that it will be again. However, in the present-present, Chrissie and I have separated, albeit entirely by accident I assure you. I have left her, and I am still completely baffled as to how it happened. I became a completely different person, literally.
The only cloud that hung over us was the vacuum of our childhoods. It wasn’t as if anything specifically terrible happened to us, except during those two years after we discovered each others’ love and were separated for it. It was more an overall sense of absence from our lives, a lack we only fully comprehended once we had been bringing up our own children for several years and could appreciate the emotional riches that surrounded them each second that they breathed. We were delighted for them, of course, but thrown into mourning for ourselves, for the deprivation in our lives that had never been fully addressed.
We were grieving our early dormant years before we willed ourselves, and each other, alive.
Our mantra is that the care home (or homes, in Chrissie’s case) wasn’t really that bad. Yes, it was an emotional pressure cooker of seriously disturbed children crammed together and often tormenting each other either physically or, worse, psychologically. And yes, there was even some mild sexual abuse. I was once held down by five other boys and fiddled with in an attempt to make me ejaculate all over my clothes. These things happened. The environment was a relentless manhunt where there was always a victim in the process of being torn apart by the rest of the pack. The identity of the victims could change at any time, like in a game of tag, but they tended to be drawn from a narrow repertoire with some, such as Brian Spooner, being ultimately hounded to death. Yes, there were several suicides that took place in the home too.
