by Cathy Glass
The occasions on which Dawn sleepwalked varied but it was still happening at least twice a week. Sometimes John and I could spot something that had happened during the day that might have triggered her disturbance, as on Sunday, when she had seen her mother. But at other times there appeared to be no root cause, or none that we could see at least. We consoled ourselves that, as with all Dawn’s other disturbing behaviour, it would be addressed when she started therapy.
The promised appointment to see the psychiatrist arrived at the end of the following week, in a letter addressed to Mrs Cathy Jennings (Dawn’s and her mother’s surname), which suggested the hospital had made a complete mess of inputting our names and contact details on their computer. When I opened the letter, I found the appointment was for 3 August, two months away. It seemed a ridiculous wait for a teenage girl who had tried to commit suicide, but I guessed she was on an NHS waiting list. I made a note of the date in my diary and, when Dawn returned home from school, I told her of the appointment.
‘Good,’ she said, and I wasn’t sure she was referring to the fact that the appointment had at last arrived or that it was so far ahead.
Dawn completed a full week at school, so she was allowed out on Friday and Saturday evenings. As usual we didn’t know where she was going, but we guessed her evening’s activities centred around hanging out with her mates. She returned at 9.30 p.m. on Friday and I praised her. On Saturday she went out again, but this time she didn’t return. John and I waited in the lounge, anxiously watching the clock. We were not only worried for Dawn’s safety but also frustrated and angry at her apparent total disregard for everything we had said, and by her hollow promises.
At 10.30 p.m. I phoned the duty social worker. ‘Wait until eleven o’clock,’ he said, ‘and if Dawn still hasn’t returned, report her missing to the police.’ Which I did – spending ten minutes in a call waiting system and then half an hour giving details of Dawn and the circumstances in which she had gone missing. Apparently each time a person went missing it was treated as a new case and the details weren’t retrieved from any previous instances. However, I now had a photograph of Dawn, which I took out of the album, ready for when the police arrived. And after the last time John and I knew better than to go to bed, for the police could arrive at any time during the night to search the house.
At nearly 12.30 a.m., as we were dozing in the lounge with the television on low, the door bell rang.
‘At last!’ John said, and heaving himself out of the chair, he went down the hall to answer it. I heard the front door open and then John’s surprised voice – ‘Dawn!’
I immediately went into the hall, to find Dawn and two uniformed officers stepping in from the porch. Quite clearly Dawn was drunk. She was giggling and trying to hang on to one of the officer’s arms. The officers didn’t look impressed by Dawn antics.
‘Hi-John-n-Cathy,’ she slurred. ‘Hows-ya-been? I’m-sorry-I’zz-late, suppose-I should-ave-phoned-ya.’ We had told Dawn that if she was delayed for any reason she should phone us so that we wouldn’t worry.
‘It’s a bit late for that now,’ I snapped.
Dawn snuggled her head against the officer’s arm, looked up at him and grinned. ‘Szz-nice-of-ya-to-’elp-me,’ she slurred; then she hiccupped and took a deep breath.
‘Dawn, you’re not going to be sick, are you?’ I said. Stepping forward, I drew her away from the officer.
‘Sss-no, I’m-good,’ she said, and she hiccupped again.
‘Can we have a quick chat?’ asked the officer whom I had just rescued from Dawn.
John showed the officers through to the lounge, while I steered Dawn in the same direction, with her grinning inanely and apologising. ‘Sooo-sorry. I’zz sorry I’zz late,’ she giggled. As we entered the lounge she burst into song: ‘What-shall-we-do-wid-da-drunken-sailor …’
‘Sit down, Dawn,’ John said sharply. I eased her on to the sofa and then went into the kitchen for the plastic bucket, which I positioned at her feet just in case.
‘Izz-not-sick,’ she slurred. ‘Izzz-happy – h-a-p-p-y.’
‘Enough!’ John barked.
Any humour in the situation now vanished as one of the officers began to speak. ‘We picked Dawn up half an hour ago after a 999 call. She was outside the Queen’s Head.’ The Queen’s Head was a pub on the edge of town with a notorious reputation for fights and affrays. It featured regularly in our local press as the residents had been campaigning for years to get it shut down. ‘Two lads are now in hospital,’ the officer continued, ‘having their faces stitched up after being bottled outside the pub. We found Dawn in the crowd of onlookers. She wasn’t involved in the fight, but she was cheering them on. It’s not the best place to go for entertainment,’ he added dryly.
I was shocked and immediately felt responsible for Dawn being there. ‘She was supposed to be home by nine thirty,’ I said. ‘And she’s no business being anywhere near a pub at her age, let alone the Queen’s Head.’
The officer looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and warning. ‘We’re clamping down on under-age drinking and the last time we picked Dawn up from the pub we told her to stay away.’
‘Last time?’ John said, horrified.
‘It’s a regular haunt of hers, isn’t it, Dawn?’ Dawn nodded and hiccupped.
I shook my head in dismay. ‘So is that where you’ve been going on Friday and Saturday evenings?’
‘Sometimes,’ she slurred.
‘Well, don’t!’ John said, then addressing the officers, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than bring home drunken teenagers.’
The officer who was doing the talking nodded stoically. ‘Will Dawn be going back to live with Barbara?’ From his familiar use of Barbara’s first name I assumed the police knew Dawn’s mother quite well, presumably from having regularly returned Dawn to her.
‘We don’t know yet,’ I said.
The other officer’s phone crackled loudly and a message came through. ‘Unit five to Dusmore Close. We’ve received a report of a disturbance in the street.’
‘That’s us,’ he said. Both officers stood, and so did John and I. ‘We’ve told Dawn that if we pick her up again she’ll be cautioned,’ the office said. ‘And she doesn’t need any more of those. Do you, Dawn?’
Dawn smiled and hiccupped, and then shook her head playfully. John raised his eyebrows in warning. We followed the officers out of the lounge, leaving Dawn on the sofa trying to control her hiccups and giggling in between.
‘Make sure you use the bucket if you’re sick,’ I said as I left the room.
John paused before he opened the front door. ‘How many formal cautions has Dawn had?’
‘Too many,’ the officer said, clearly unwilling or not at liberty to give details. ‘And there won’t be many more before they start charging her.’
With what? I wondered. What exactly had Dawn been cautioned for? But the officers were out of the door and on their way to answer the next call. John and I returned to the lounge, where Dawn was still hiccupping and giggling. She hadn’t been sick but we took the bucket with us anyway as we manoeuvred her upstairs and into her bedroom. John placed the bucket beside her bed then left the room. I cajoled and helped Dawn out of her clothes and into her nightdress. It was like trying to undress a very large baby, although I usually had more cooperation from Adrian; she giggled and hiccupped the whole time. As I pulled off her jeans, I saw scars on her – not one as I had anticipated but four bright pink parallel lines, about two inches long and equally spaced. The last looked very recent.
‘Dawn! You’ve been cutting yourself again,’ I said, horrified. ‘You told me you had stopped.’
‘Sorry,’ she slurred in much the same tone as she had been apologising for everything that night. ‘I couldn’t kick the habit.’
‘Habit! But when did you do it? You haven’t said anything to me, and there’s been no blood on your clothes.’ I continued to stare in horror at her leg.
&nb
sp; She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs dangling down. Leaning forward, she began pointing to the scars one at a time, telling me when she had made each cut as though they were achievement badges she had collected. ‘That one was when Mum was horrible to me,’ she said pointing to the top scar, which was halfway down her left thigh. ‘That one was when Mike called me an interfering bitch,’ she said moving her finger to the one beneath. ‘That one you know about already. It was when Natasha wouldn’t be my friend and I got blood on the pillow. And this one,’ she said arriving at the fourth, ‘was the other week when you and John grounded me and I wasn’t allowed out.’
I started with shock, and could have wept. ‘Because you were angry with us? But Dawn, couldn’t you have just accepted the punishment? It was reasonable. Other teenagers are grounded for not doing as they’re told.’ Yet while I felt we had been justified in punishing Dawn’s truanting, it didn’t help the guilt that was now welling inside me.
Dawn had been accepting and almost nonchalant about her cutting when we had first talked about it. Now drunk, she was flippant and dismissive. ‘It’s no problem,’ she said with a smile. ‘Don’t worry. It’s my leg and I like to cut it. It helps.’
‘But it’s dreadful, Dawn, upsetting. I just don’t understand.’
‘It’s not your fault. Don’t worry,’ she said again; then, drawing up her feet, lay down, and curled up into bed. Within seconds her eyes had closed and she was asleep. I looked at her for a moment, then switched off the light and came out.
Downstairs I told John what I had discovered and he was as shocked and horrified as I was. ‘What are we supposed to do?’ he said, equally frustrated. ‘Never tell her off? Or stop her from doing what she wants because she might harm herself? It’s emotional blackmail.’ Except of course it wasn’t, because Dawn hadn’t used her cutting as a weapon against us – she hadn’t said, ‘If you ground me I’m going to cut’ – any more than presumably she had used it against her mother, Mike or Natasha. She had appeared to accept the sanction and then gone away and slashed her leg. How we should deal with it I’d no idea, and once again I clung to the belief that when she started seeing the psychiatrist in August he would be able to help. I dearly hoped so, for I didn’t know what else I could do.
Chapter Twenty
Added Violation
Dawn managed to get to school three days the following week and two days the week after that. The school secretary phoned each time Dawn failed to arrive, and when Dawn came home at 3.45 p.m. I told her off and lectured her. But my telling off and lecturing were starting to sound as hollow as Dawn’s apologies and promises not to do it again, for we had both said it all so many times before.
‘I do try, Cathy,’ she said, ‘but something just takes over when I leave the house.’
‘I know, love,’ I said exasperated. ‘But how can we stop it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged.
Neither did I!
It was now nearly the end of June, and John and I had booked a holiday – a week in south Cornwall – for the beginning of July before the schools broke up. We had made the booking in December, when we hadn’t had Dawn staying with us. But it was a self-catering cottage which could sleep five, so with only John, Adrian (who would be in the cot) and me there would be plenty of room for Dawn. I thought a holiday was exactly what Dawn could do with – a relaxing week away from the area where all her problems seemed to stem from. John thought so too. But it would mean Dawn missing school for a week, and on top of all the days she’d already missed I wondered if her social worker would agree to Dawn going. Without mentioning the prospect of a holiday to Dawn, I phoned Ruth and asked if Dawn could come with us.
Ruth readily agreed. ‘Yes, if she wants to. It might do her good.’
There was no doubt in my mind that Dawn would jump at the chance, if for no other reason than it meant a week off school. But when John and I asked her that evening, both of us excited and looking forward to a family holiday, Dawn shook her head.
‘It’s nice of you, but I don’t want to miss any more school.’
John and I looked at each other, flabbergasted; then we looked at Dawn. ‘But you hardly ever go to school,’ John said. ‘You spend more time playing truant than you are there.’
‘I know. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. And we’ve got end-of-year exams in two weeks, so I need to revise.’
‘You can take your books with us,’ I said. ‘There will be time to revise in the evenings or even on the beach.’
‘I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. You go and I’ll stay here.’
‘Absolutely not,’ John said.
‘You’re too young,’ I added. ‘Ruth would never agree.’ And neither would we, I thought, but didn’t say.
John and I spent the entire evening trying to persuade Dawn to change her mind, pointing out all the attractions that the south coast of Cornwall had to offer, but Dawn remained adamant that her studying had to come first and she couldn’t afford to miss more time from school. Call me a Doubting Thomas, but I had the sneaking suspicion that Dawn’s sudden conscientious enthusiasm towards her school work had more to do with not wanting to be out of the area and away from her mates – going out on Friday and Saturday evenings was the highlight of her week.
Clearly Dawn refusing to go was not only disappointing for John and me but also going to cause a problem: where was Dawn going to stay while we were away? Certainly not alone in the house, as she had suggested. I phoned Ruth the following day and told her that Dawn didn’t want to come with us and we couldn’t persuade her otherwise.
Ruth sighed. ‘I’ll have to try to find her other carers to stay with, which won’t be easy. Or perhaps she could stay with her mother for the week.’
I didn’t think the second option was a good idea, given the lack of concern or parental control Barbara seemed to have for or be able to exert over her daughter, not to mention the rejection Dawn would feel if her mother didn’t stay in. ‘Do you think Barbara will want Dawn to stay?’ I asked. ‘And I’m not sure Dawn will want to go, even if her mother agrees.’
‘Ask her,’ Ruth said. ‘And if Dawn says yes, I’ll approach Barbara.’
So I did. And Dawn’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes, I can stay at Mum’s! What a good idea.’
I didn’t think that Dawn’s excitement was because she had suddenly repaired her relationship with her mother; it was more that freedom loomed.
‘But your mum is hardly ever at home and she works until late each day,’ I said. ‘And what happens when Mike comes in the evening?’
‘I’ll go out with my mates,’ she said, barely able to contain her excitement.
With little or no parental supervision or control, an empty house, and Dawn coming and going as she pleased and hanging out with her mates, it was, I thought, a recipe for disaster. This was pretty much the situation that had led to her coming into care in the first place and, as far as I could see, nothing had changed. I asked Dawn again if she would like to come on holiday with us, pointing out that a week wasn’t very long and she could phone her friends.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I promise I won’t drink, and I’ll try to get back in at nine thirty like I do here.’ Clearly all thoughts of studying had now gone.
I phoned Ruth the following day and told her that Dawn wanted to stay at her mother’s, although I had concerns about what Dawn might get up to. ‘No more than she does when she’s with you,’ Ruth put in tartly; then she said she would now phone Barbara and run it past her. ‘It’s easier than trying to find another foster carer,’ she added, which I could have guessed.
Two days later Ruth phoned and asked to speak to Dawn. When Dawn came off the phone, she was delighted that her mother had agreed to her going to stay. And while, at one level, I was pleased that Barbara hadn’t rejected her daughter outright by refusing to have her, I could see only too clearly the problems looming.
The following week I helped Dawn pack her case and sch
ool bag, and John helped me pack for our holiday. I had told the school of the arrangements, and that if Dawn didn’t arrive they were to phone Barbara, as clearly we couldn’t deal with any problems, being 250 miles away. On Friday evening I gave Dawn her pocket money for the week and, kissing her goodbye, saw her into the car. John was taking Dawn to Barbara’s flat while I finished the packing. When John returned he said that her mother hadn’t been there, and Dawn had used the spare front door key hidden under the mat to get in. He said he felt concerned about leaving her alone in the empty flat, but Dawn had said she would be fine and that she was going out soon, which no lessened our concern. But we had to remind ourselves that Dawn wasn’t our responsibility now, and we couldn’t spend the entire week worrying about what she was getting up to. We had to put some trust in her and Barbara and hope for the best.
Nevertheless, although there was an element of relief in not having to worry about Dawn, and particularly her sleepwalking, which might have been an even bigger problem in a strange house, we were sad that we were leaving her behind. Despite everything that had happened, and the continual worry of Dawn’s behaviour and what she would do next, she was still part of our family and, if we were honest, we had grown very fond of her. ‘Hopefully she’ll come on our next holiday,’ I said, as I switched off the bedside lamp.
John agreed. ‘She’ll be in therapy by then and feeling much better.’
The cottage overlooked the small sandy bay of Gorran Haven, and because the schools hadn’t broken up there were only a few families on the beach with pre-school children. Adrian was in his element exploring the fine golden sand, which he prodded, rubbed between the palms of his hands, rubbed into his hair and then tried to eat. He had perfected crawling to an art form and was very fast scampering over the sand, and we had to keep a watchful eye on him the whole time. He was mesmerised by the sea, and John and I stood on the shoreline with him and, taking an arm each, jumped him over the small waves much to his delight and shouts of glee. It wasn’t only the moving sea which fascinated Adrian but everything it brought in, including the seaweed and shells which he tried to eat, and the little bubbles that the receding waves left behind which he poked and popped with his finger.
