by Casey Watson
Jenson scowled, but at least managed to produce a grudging nod, though I was once again concerned that it was only because he’d already decided to do another runner back home. ‘Anyway,’ I continued briskly, ‘you will in all probability be able to see Mum today, so that’s good, isn’t it? So be sure to be ready when I come to collect you this afternoon, because if you are seeing her today I will be driving you to go and see her. Down in town –’ I made sure to emphasise that bit. With any luck, that should discourage him from absconding.
‘And as far as Georgie goes,’ I finished, handing him his backpack, ‘I’d be grateful if you don’t say anything to him about what’s happening, okay? Because he doesn’t know yet, and it will make him agitated, you understand?’
Jenson shouldered his backpack and regaled me with one of his less lovely expressions. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘There’s no way I’ll be speaking to him – because he’s a freak!’
Great, I thought again. And a very happy Monday to you all.
I was at least partly reassured after visiting Andrea Cappleman. It may or may not have been as a result of Jenson absconding from school on the previous Friday, but when she promised me she would ensure Jenson and Georgie didn’t come into contact with one another before the end of the week I knew I could trust her to see to it that they didn’t. Though I still felt another stab of anxiety. If Georgie was viewed as dispiritingly as he obviously was in some quarters, there was still a fair chance he’d get wind that something was going on. Much as I wished I could feel differently, I had enough experience around kids to know that Jenson would find it almost impossible not to share his news with all his peers – which meant it would probably be all around the school by lunchtime.
But I couldn’t dwell on that; my job was to deal with the fall-out later. And in the meantime I had things to do myself.
John was apologetic that he hadn’t twigged about the schools being the same. But I wasn’t hard on him anyway, because it didn’t really make a difference. And, actually, I thought, as I disconnected from him, being exposed more intimately to Georgie might prove a useful learning tool for young Jenson. So much prejudice stems from fear – that was a well-documented fact. And who knew? Perhaps exposure to a ‘different’ child like Georgie would form the basis of a useful bit of personal development.
If a short-lived one. My next call was to Marie Bateman, and I was pleased to hear that Jenson would indeed be seeing his mum.
‘Not today, though, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Which I know is going to disappoint him. But I just can’t squeeze it into my schedule this afternoon. I wish I could, but you just can’t get a quart into a pint pot – and you know the sort of workloads people like you and I have all too well! Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow after school.’
‘What do you want me to do then?’ I asked, understanding where she was coming from re the workload. I felt for her. At least I didn’t have to spend my days in interminable meetings these days.
‘Oh, nothing. Nothing at all,’ she said. ‘I’ll come and pick him up after straight after school, if that’s okay.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You sure? That would be brilliant. It would give me a chance to get some paperwork done. Not to mention start preparing the spare room ready for Georgie.’
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Though would that you could. No, that’s the point. Until things are sorted, they have to be supervised contact visits. Couple of things have come up that need to be gone into. So they’ll be doing a full assessment of both Karen and the boyfriend.’
‘Anything I should know about?’ I asked, my ears immediately pricking up, recalling ‘all that business with the little one’. I was used to fostering policies, and information being given to us on a need-to-know basis, but it was often the case that social workers assumed I already knew something from my link worker and vice versa.
‘Nothing we can talk about yet,’ she answered guardedly. ‘We just need to dig a little deeper on a couple of matters so that we can satisfy the court’s criteria before sending the kids home. We’ll keep you informed, of course.’
‘But you’re still expecting that they’re going home?’ I asked her.
‘I’ve not heard anything to the contrary,’ she answered, equally vaguely.
Oh well, I thought, as I put down the phone on her. Let’s just hope they get it sorted out sooner rather than later. And in the meantime I’d just have to deal with whatever challenges this novel situation decided to throw at me, wouldn’t I?
I just hoped I wouldn’t need a crash helmet …
Chapter 9
Jenson was like a cat on hot bricks the following afternoon, waiting for the social worker to arrive. He’d been so excited at the thought of seeing his mum again that he’d even been effusive about letting me know how good he’d been in not saying anything to Georgie.
‘I saw him today again and everything,’ he said. ‘Coming into the dinner hall with his special teacher woman, an’ I never said a word to him, Casey. Not nothing. I just turned my head away an’ ignored him.’
For all that I noted how he managed to make ‘special’ sound like a dirty word, I was really pleased to hear this. He obviously could be a good boy – though I pointed out that Georgie’s special teacher woman would have actually been a teaching assistant, and that lots of kids got help from these kinds of teachers, so that they could get the best out of what the regular teachers told them.
And when Marie’s car pulled up, it was all I could do to stop Jenson flying straight out of the house without a backward glance.
‘Oh, God!’ he moaned, as I clamped a restraining hand on his shoulder. ‘We’re gonna be late if she starts gabbing with you, Casey!’
‘Less of the cheek,’ I admonished, as Marie walked up the path. ‘All set to go?’ I asked her. ‘I certainly know someone who is.’
Marie nodded. ‘I’ll have him back in a couple of hours,’ she promised. ‘Is that all right?’
It was more than all right. It was already Tuesday afternoon and I hadn’t yet made any preparations for Georgie’s arrival. He was due at teatime on Thursday and I’d not even made a start on his room yet. After phoning Mike and asking if he’d bring some fish and chips home for tea, I decided to go up and attack it with my Marigolds.
The pink room wasn’t ideal but, as I’d already explained to John, it would only be temporary. Once Jenson had left, I’d simply move Georgie into the blue room. Still, I did chastise myself a little for acting in such haste over the colour schemes. I thought I’d been quite clever at the time. After all, my reasoning had gone, it would always be one or the other: they’d either send me a boy – blue room – or they’d send me a girl – pink room – so at the time it seemed the perfect way to go. That it had never occurred to me that I might be sent a pair of brothers or sisters now seemed quite loopy – I’d had siblings before, hadn’t I?
But no matter, I thought, as I trotted up the stairs with my cleaning things – he’d be okay in there for a short while – might even want to stay in there, in fact. Given the way his mind worked, he might not even care about such things.
Looking at the extreme pinkness, however – particularly of the curtains and bedding – I did toy with opting for the other spare room instead. But that made no sense. It had a double bed, for starters, which was useful if family came to stay, so it would be a shame to limit that option, and it also looked a bit fusty, dominated, as is was, by a gigantic oak wardrobe that we had somehow inherited from my grandmother. My parents had stored it for us for several years (it was apparently too valuable a family heirloom to put on eBay) but since our move six months back they had decreed that since we now had room for it they could finally get shot of it, to make way for something more modern.
No, the pink room it had to be, so I set about stripping the bed and replacing the butterflies-and-daisies duvet cover with something more neutral.
That done, I then sorted out a few toys, books and games and then, after giving th
e room a quick buff and polish, went downstairs to print out all the information John had emailed me about Georgie, so I could have a good read with a cup of coffee while it was quiet.
While there’s no single behaviour that is ‘typical’ of autism, there are several behaviours that are more frequently found than others. And it seems Georgie had several of these. For example, he had something called echolalia. This basically meant the parrot-like repetition of words and phrases he might hear. He might come out with a string of sentences from a television programme, for example, or continually repeat something a teacher or parent might say. Almost always, these speech patterns would be non-contextual, too, i.e. they would come out completely randomly, often far removed from where he heard them, which was why – and this was true of my experience of autistic kids in school – children like Georgie would become such easy targets for bullying.
He also apparently – again like lots of kids with autism – had a marked lack of empathy. This meant he struggled to perceive the emotional state of others, which, again, made relationships with peers challenging.
Other aspects were pretty much as I’d expected them to be. A long list of likes and even longer list of dislikes. And with the latter, it wasn’t just a case of a simple dislike – if something happened or was given to him that was on the list of dislikes, it could provoke an extreme emotional reaction.
I was on surer ground with all his rituals – since, to a lesser degree, that was something important to my Kieron – but I sighed to see it emphasised how much he found human contact painful. This would be a child who’d react adversely to that most basic human drive – to cuddle, to hold hands, to be kissed better.
It was all quite sobering food for thought. When I had worked with kids like Georgie in the past, it had been in a school setting; a place consistent in its own rituals, rules and routines. Which made it straightforward, and also, in terms of human contact, not all that stressful – in school there was a distance; a fair degree of personal space. But in a home setting – a place of warmth, spontaneity and affection – such boundaries would feel very strange.
At the bottom of the notes were some contact details for Georgie’s social worker – a Mr Harry Bird. And also a note to say he’d be getting in touch by phone on Thursday morning, just to talk through final details, answer any of my questions, and tell me what I could expect when Georgie first arrived.
‘It all sounds terribly serious,’ I told Mike over the promised fish and chips an hour later. ‘Like we’re taking temporary responsibility for some rare species of animal, or a crucial component for some space rocket or something.’
Mike laughed. ‘It’s just a child, Case,’ he said. ‘Just another kid. You’ll be fine …’
‘I’m not so sure,’ I said, dousing my chips in vinegar. ‘I think it’s going to be a lot more difficult than we imagined. It’s certainly going to take a lot of patience.’
‘Calm,’ Mike said.
‘Calm?’
‘Calm – that was our watchword, remember? When Kieron was little. D’you remember how we used to say it all the time? Like the paediatrician told us?’ He chuckled again. ‘Though, fair point – there is young Jenson to consider. I’m not sure Jenson knows the meaning of the word calm.’
I acknowledged this with a frown. Of course Jenson didn’t do calm. My impression, brief though it was, was that calm was a commodity in short supply in his life. If we were choosing ‘c’ words, chaos seemed to fit better.
‘Impossible,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Mike.’ Not impossible, love. Not for a super-mum like you. Just challenging. And how many times have you told me how much you relish challenges?
He was grinning. ‘Shut your face,’ I told him sharply.
When Jenson arrived home he was full of smiles and full of beans. Which was gratifying to see. You never knew with parental contact visits. Sometimes they panned out. Very often they were a disaster. And given that there was still no date fixed for him and his sister to return home, seeing his mum might have actually proved distressing.
But this was evidently not the case. He just seemed genuinely thrilled to have seen her. ‘She’s got a right tan on, Casey. You should see her! An’ guess what? Her an’ Gary only got engaged when they were in Spain! She said he fell for her hook and line and what’s the other thing, Marie?’
‘Hook, line and sinker,’ Marie finished for him. Then glanced at me. ‘So all’s well in Karen-land …’
‘Karen-land,’ Jenson quipped. ‘That’s cool that is. I’ll have to remember that for next time.’
I looked at Marie enquiringly.
‘Which will be Saturday,’ she clarified. ‘If that works for you. Pick him up around nine thirty. The plan at the moment is to go bowling. Then lunch – I think we decided on pizza, didn’t we, Jenson?’ Jenson nodded. ‘And then back to you around three, I imagine.’
I agreed that would be good for us – mainly it would give me a big chunk of time alone with Georgie – and while Jenson went off upstairs to change out of his school uniform I took the opportunity to ask Marie if he’d mentioned anything about the fact that Georgie was moving in.
‘Not a word,’ she said. ‘To be honest, he wouldn’t have had much of a chance anyway. That woman can talk for Britain – and it’s all about her, of course. How great her holiday was, how excited she was about her engagement … And you should have seen her – done up as if she was planning on going straight on to a night club. Skirt up to here, enough make-up to restock Boots – honestly, I know it’s unprofessional to judge by appearances, but between you and me I wasn’t very impressed. Barely a word about what the kids had been up to, or how sorry she was about the situation …’ She sighed. And, mentally, I sighed with her.
‘So sad, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You’d think, given the little time she had to spend with him, that she’d at least have made the effort to make a bit of a fuss.’
‘I know,’ agreed Marie, ‘but what surprised me most was that Jenson didn’t seem in the slightest bit bothered by it. He was just over the moon to be even in her company.’
Which was perfectly natural but felt even more sad. No child should feel so lacking in maternal love that they had to cling on pathetically for ever tiny morsel of affection that was on offer.
But both in my current job and also in the one before it I had come across a depressingly large minority of mothers who were so wrapped up in their own lives that they couldn’t see for looking where the trials of their children’s lives were concerned. It wasn’t rocket science to work out that there was generally a reason for kids displaying challenging behaviours.
Still, I thought, Jenson was in a good place at the moment, which was all we could ask for. I just hoped it would last.
Mike was able to leave work early in preparation for Georgie’s arrival the following afternoon, which I was grateful for. He’d worked for the same company for years, and had always been loyal and hard working, so, since we’d begun fostering, they’d always been great about those times when he needed a little flexibility. Which he did, as even though the house was entirely shipshape he knew I’d have my usual last-minute flap about dust. But when he walked through the front door I could see something was missing.
‘Mike,’ I groaned, ‘don’t tell me you forgot to get the flowers.’
I had texted him earlier to get some from the supermarket on the way home, but it seemed he’d forgotten.
‘Love, this is a 9-year-old boy,’ he argued reasonably. ‘You think he’s even going to notice whether there are flowers in the house?’
‘But they make the house smell nice,’ I whined as I followed him into the kitchen. ‘And, besides, I’ve never met this new social worker, have I?’
Mike laughed then. ‘Ah, of course,’ he said. ‘That’s what this is all about then, is it?’ He glanced out of the patio doors. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You put the kettle on. I’ll go down the garden and see what I can find.’
In
that respect, we’d been lucky. We’d moved into the house just before Christmas, with little idea what surprises lay ready under the ground. And we’d been rewarded, by first crocuses and daffodils and tulips, and now a wonderful array of perennial flowers – including peonies and lupins – and best of all, a couple of elderly but healthy rose bushes, all of which, by some miracle, had managed to avoid being beheaded by flying footballs.
I had just grabbed a vase for the half a dozen lemony roses he’d cut for me, when I spied a man and a boy coming up the path. The man – Harry Bird, I assumed – seemed exactly as I had pictured him: mid- or late fifties, greying hair, unfussy glasses, well-worn suit. He’d already called me that morning, just as he’d promised, with the reassuring news that Georgie seemed reasonably understanding of what was happening and had apparently taken great interest in the photographs. He’d been particularly mesmerised, Mr Bird had told me, with my black hair. The boy himself, who was wearing the same school uniform as Jenson’s, was clutching a round silver tin. He looked about average height and build for his age – a little more robustly built than Jenson – though I couldn’t see his face as he had his chin tucked firmly into his chest. I couldn’t miss his hair, though. He had the most beautiful, shoulder-length mass of blond curls. I’d never seen anything quite like it – well, apart from on rock stars. It was stunning.
Still holding the vase of flowers, I opened the front door to greet them. Harry Bird grinned and extended a hand to shake mine. As my right arm was still wrapped around the vase, I made a quick transfer. ‘Casey Watson,’ I said. ‘Sorry – excuse the roses.’
The little boy up to now hadn’t looked anywhere other than down, where he now seemed to be making a close inspection of my gravelled front garden. But now he raised his head and, looking at no one in particular, said: ‘Rose Marion Tyler, species: human, home planet: earth, 48 Bucknall House, the Powell estate, London SE15 7GO.’
