Breaking the Silence

by Casey Watson

  When Riley arrived, minutes later, she climbed out of the taxi and signalled that she wanted me to come out and give her a hand. She had Jackson in her arms and needed me to help her get the buggy out of the boot, and then put it up so she could lay Jackson down in it.

  ‘Oh, my –’ I began.

  ‘Shh,’ she said, putting finger to her lips as I approached her. ‘He’s only just gone off,’ she explained, once I’d put the buggy up so she could lay him down. ‘He didn’t have the best of nights last night, and he’s been a right grump since he was up. He’ll be in a much better mood once he’s had an hour of kip, I’m sure. And so will I,’ she added, grimacing. ‘So will I.’

  The taxi driver paid, she pushed the buggy down the path and I followed. ‘I was going to say,’ I began again, ‘that your hair looks … erm … nice.’ Though the more accurate word might have been ‘arresting’. She’d dyed it – in fact, presumably bleached it, then dyed it – so that, rather than her usual raven black, same as mine was, it was now a show-stopping shade of flame red.

  She turned and pulled a face as she tipped the front of the buggy up over the doorstep, then gently parked a sleeping Jackson in the hallway.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said, grinning. ‘Thanks for the compliment, Mum. I don’t think!’

  ‘I do like it,’ I rushed to reassure her. ‘It was just a bit of shock, that’s all. I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Are you pleased with it? It certainly looks nice and shiny.’

  ‘I love it,’ she said. ‘I just get sick of being so dark all the time. I fancied a change.’ She smoothed it down. ‘So I went and got one.’

  I was just about to agree – because, in fact, I was already getting used to it – when Georgie appeared in the hallway, flushed from his bout of Jenson-style football training. And I was just about to ask him how it had gone when I realised he was beginning to be distressed about something – he had flattened himself against the far wall in the hallway and was rigid, staring fixedly at the ceiling.

  ‘You all right, love?’ I asked him, confused about what was wrong with him. ‘Look, here’s Jackson, come to see us. He’s just having a little sleep, then he’ll probably want a play with you. I’ll get the bricks out in a bit so you can build him one of your towers, eh?’

  Georgie, quite naturally, I supposed, loved building towers. He would arrange bricks and blocks with such precision that you could take a spirit level to them, and no angle would be anything less than perfect. And, strangely – he was such a conundrum, in so many ways – he didn’t seem to mind that the little ones would then send his creations skittering all over the floor. He’d just gather them up, one by one, into little piles, and stack them up all over again.

  But he didn’t seem interested, and I suddenly realised my mistake. What had I been thinking? I should have told him that Riley was on her way over. What a klutz! If I’d done that one simple thing he wouldn’t be in the tizz he was now. That was all that had been needed, that simple bit of preparation, so that Riley’s arrival didn’t come out of the blue.

  I motioned to Riley to go into the kitchen and, as she walked past him, I noticed Georgie visibly wince. ‘It’s all right, love,’ I reassured him. ‘I should have told you they were coming, shouldn’t I? But we’re going into the kitchen now. Why don’t you go back into the garden with Jenson and play, eh? Or into the living room, perhaps. Shall I put Countdown on for you?’

  Neither option seemed to appeal – he shook his head violently at both suggestions – so, in the end, I decided it would be best if I just got out of his face. He didn’t look close to having a full-on freak-out or anything – just unsettled by this unexpected event happening in his day. If I left him for five minutes I felt sure that he’d calm down. He just needed to get back on track again. He did accept a gentle hand steering him into the living room, at least, so that’s where I left him, safe on the sofa, waiting for the security of Mike’s return and the trip to football.

  ‘He must be a handful at times,’ Riley observed quietly, once I joined her in the kitchen. ‘But I guess at the same time you must be learning such a lot.’

  ‘Something new every day,’ I agreed. ‘Literally, every day. Because there’s no one definitive set of “rules” with autism spectrum disorders. Every child is so incredibly different, and complex.’ And I was just in the middle of elaborating for Riley – explaining the reasons for Georgie’s discomfort on seeing them – when I was interrupted by the sound of a cry.

  ‘You hear that?’ Riley said.

  I nodded. ‘It sounded like Jackson.’ But at the same time it sounded odd. We both went and put our heads around the kitchen door.

  It took a moment, since the buggy had been parked facing away from us, but just as the pair of us realised it was empty the act was confirmed by another cry – coming from upstairs. And then more of a scream. It was Jackson. We both looked automatically towards the stairwell, and then, putting two and two together, towards the now empty living room, before thundering, almost as one, up the stairs.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Jenson wanted to know, now clattering up behind us, having obviously heard Jackson’s cries as well.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Riley was saying. ‘What’s he done with him? God, if he’s hurt him …’

  My heart leapt into my mouth. We had previous in that regard, and I was all too aware of it. Previous foster kids who’d given us similar scares with the little ones. So what had possessed me to think it would be perfectly okay to leave Jackson in his buggy in the hall with Georgie close by and so obviously stressed? What had I been thinking?

  An unpalatable image rose, unbidden, into my mind. Of that day, early on, when Georgie had attacked Jenson. Oh, God. But he couldn’t. Surely he wouldn’t – why on earth would he want to hurt Jackson? And more to the point, I thought, as we ran into his bedroom, scattering half his entrance stones, where the hell was Jackson? Where had Georgie taken him?

  It had only been a matter of minutes since we’d left them. No more than that – and we’d only been a few feet away. Yet where was he now? All we could see was Georgie, sitting cross-legged on his bed, hugging his collection tin close to his chest and rocking violently.

  I could tell Riley was struggling to keep her composure, yet she still did an admirable job. ‘Georgie,’ she said softly. ‘Where’s baby Jackson? Where’s the baby gone, sweetheart? Can you tell me?’

  Georgie flinched with every word she spoke to him, his teeth clenching, and I realised we were heading towards that freak-out after all.

  I stepped closer, and was just about to try to speak to him myself when we all heard a soft but distinct whimpering. And it took less than a second to work out where it was coming from.

  ‘The wardrobe!’ Riley exclaimed. ‘He’s shut Jackson in the wardrobe! Oh, God …’ She rushed across to yank it open.

  Except she couldn’t. And it didn’t take a brain surgeon to realise why. He’d locked the door and taken the key out.

  Once again I berated myself. The key! The bloody door key! Why hadn’t I thought to remove the door key when we moved Georgie in there?

  ‘Georgie,’ I said, trying to keep my voice calm and level, as Jackson’s whimpers began increasing in pitch and volume. ‘Where’s the key, love? You need to tell me where the key to the wardrobe door is …’

  Riley was still trying to force the door, increasingly anxiously. ‘It’s okay, baby,’ she tried to soothe a clearly terrified Jackson. ‘It’s okay, baby. Mummy’s just got to get the key. Everything’s okay … Georgie!’ she barked then, turning to him. ‘You must tell us where the key is! We have to get Jackson out. Can’t you hear him? Listen. See? He’s terrified!’

  But Georgie could hear nothing. That much was obvious. All he could do was rock and, once again, seeing Riley, flinch and cower. Which made no sense to me at all. Where had this all come from?

  But there was someone in the room with us who’d clearly seen something I hadn’t. Jenson, who I had almost forgotten was even standi
ng there, now stepped past me and sat down on the bed beside Georgie. Not too close – not so close that it might traumatise Georgie further – but certainly close enough to get his attention.

  ‘Georgie, mate,’ he said, pointing to my, by now, almost crying daughter. ‘You are so clever, mate. You really are. Good boy,’ he added. ‘Georgie’s done good here. Good boy for protecting Riley’s baby.’

  I couldn’t quite make sense of what I was hearing, and I could see Riley hadn’t either. Where was this coming from? But Jenson was too busy to even notice my confused expression. All his attention was focused on Georgie, as well as his gaze, which was encouraging and direct. ‘Good boy,’ he said again, and now he did glance in my direction. ‘Good boy, because you’re spot on. It could have been a stranger. Except it’s not.’ He risked a light touch on Georgie’s arm. He didn’t flinch from it. ‘It could have been a stranger, but actually it is Riley. She’s just got some weird-coloured paint stuff in her hair. Which makes it red. But it’s still Riley, honest it is, mate. But you were good, ’cos if it were a stranger you would have saved the baby. That’s right, isn’t it, Casey? He would have saved Jackson, wouldn’t he?’

  I nodded firmly, still too stunned to speak.

  ‘So now we need the key, okay?’ he finished. He gestured to Georgie’s tin. ‘You got it in there?’

  I was gobsmacked. Which, with the things I’ve seen, is not something that happens to me that often. Our little hero! Where on earth had he developed the insight to work that out so cleverly?

  ‘Have you, Georgie?’ I asked him. ‘Is it in there? Is it in your tin?’

  Georgie didn’t respond directly, but he did move his hands across the tin lid for a few seconds. Then, finally, at Jenson’s gentle prompting, he removed it. He then pulled out the heavy antique key, complete with tassel, and, after staring at her hard, he passed Riley the key.

  ‘Clever boy, Georgie,’ she said, cottoning on, and taking possession of it, upon which one very fractious toddler was finally released. ‘Oh, you clever boy, Jenson!’ Riley said, as she scooped Jackson up from the pile of old bedding he’d been sitting on. ‘If my hands weren’t already full, there’d be no escape from my clutches, believe me. I’d be giving you such an enormous bear hug right now.’

  And though Jenson’s expression was suitably 9-year-old-boy horrified at that prospect, we could both see just how much he glowed with pride.

  ‘Blimey. You live and learn, don’t you?’ said Mike, once he returned from work, half an hour later, and Riley and I had filled him in on the latest drama. Georgie, completely fine now, was back in the living room, watching an episode of Countdown, while he waited to be taken to football, while a beaming Jenson took centre stage at the kitchen table. ‘How on earth did you work it out, lad?’ Mike asked him. ‘That’s some clever thinking!’

  ‘I was just remembering what I’d heard Casey saying about how Georgie understood meanings,’ he told him. ‘An’ about his pictures. How he looked at things to know what they were. An’ the hair. I remembered when me mum had her hair bleached once. And when I come home from school, and she was standing in the garden with our Carley – an’ how I didn’t recognize her – I really thought she were someone else.’ He shrugged modestly. ‘I just thought of all that, really.’

  ‘Well, you thought brilliantly,’ Riley said. ‘Brilliantly. So you should give yourself a medal – even if you did call it weird-coloured paint stuff – because I would never have thought of that in a million trillion years.’

  And she was right. And I was so pleased for him. So pleased to see him feeling so loved and valued. But it was bittersweet, because it also served to remind me of his reality. In his world, his own family – the world he would soon be going back to – that was so obviously, so painfully, not the case.

  Chapter 20

  The day of Riley’s red hair (or, rather, as it would always be known, her ‘weird-coloured paint stuff’) turned out to be something of a red-letter day for all of us, because it marked a turning point – one that we only really noticed as such in hindsight – after which everything seemed to be so different.

  And different in a good way. The last couple of weeks of term seemed to fly by, certainly. There were no bust-ups, no arguments, no incidents – either in school or out of it – and like the days, which were uniformly warm, dry and sunny, life trundled on entirely without drama. There was still the business of not knowing when Jenson might be returning home, of course, but with his twice-weekly phone calls from his mum to keep him going, even Jenson stopped asking when he might be heading back to her, and in one particularly fanciful moment I wondered if perhaps he felt more settled with his lot, to the extent that he was actually quite happy. He was missing his mum and sister, of course – something would have been badly amiss if he wasn’t – but kids in boarding schools coped with prolonged absence from family, didn’t they? And in America kids Jenson’s age were packed off to summer camp for weeks on end. So was Jenson seeing it like that, perhaps? Like some sort of extended holiday?

  He certainly seemed to be feeling at home now. Which was just as well, I supposed, because just a week into the start of the summer holidays I had a call from Marie to let me know that the latest child-protection conference about Karen had been cancelled. This would have been the one in which a final decision was made about both the kids returning home, but Karen herself had cancelled it at the last minute. Perhaps fearing she might not get them back, or perhaps because she was genuinely uncertain, she had told social services that she was in two minds about Gary continuing to live with them, as she wasn’t 100 per cent sure she would eventually be marrying him. This naturally changed her circumstances radically – and for the better. But until she decided one way or another – including telling him to leave, if that was her decision – no decision could be made about the kids.

  Although this all sounded very noble, assuming her motivation was genuine, which was what I wanted to believe, I still couldn’t shift my doubts about her. What if she was just stalling because she was enjoying a bit of freedom from the burdens of motherhood? It felt cynical to think it but I couldn’t get past the knowledge that the kids were now being burdened – as if they hadn’t been burdened enough already – with the knowledge that she wasn’t exactly fighting to get them back with her.

  And Jenson did feel it, I was sure of it. ‘What if someone tried to take me away from you and Mike, Casey?’ he asked me one evening, after tea. ‘You’d fight like a ninja to keep hold of me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Too right,’ I said, joking that I’d do my extra-special karate kick on anyone who dared try it. But it wasn’t a joke, was it? He badly needed to know that he was worth fighting for.

  And then there was good news, the following Thursday. Not news about Karen, but certainly news that would take Jenson’s mind off it. Mike came home from work that night clutching a bottle of red wine, and brought it into the living room after dinner, with a couple of glasses.

  ‘So what’s the occasion?’ I asked him, bemused. We weren’t really big on the drinking at home thing, and only on special days would we crack open the vino. Plus this was a Thursday. Which would be followed by a busy Friday.

  ‘I have a bit of a nice surprise,’ he said, pouring. ‘Well, I’m hoping you’ll think it’s a nice surprise, anyway. Remember when we borrowed my boss’s caravan for that holiday?’

  Of course I did. It had been an unforgettable holiday. We’d taken Ashton and Olivia, kids we’d had who’d had the most heartbreaking start to their young lives imaginable. That they had never seen the sea, never felt sand between their toes, never built sandcastles or gone rock pooling could only hint at the sort of barren lives they’d endured. It was also memorable because it had been there that Ashton had finally disclosed to me the extent of the horrible abuse he’d suffered.

  ‘We-ell,’ Mike continued. ‘How d’you fancy heading back there? He’s given me the keys, and –’

  ‘Given you the keys? For
when?’

  ‘For next week. Because I have the whole of next week off!’

  ‘What?’ I said, wide eyed. ‘How on earth did you manage that?’

  ‘Because there’s a big job coming up in September and I promised I’d do lots of overtime, and because the forecast is brilliant, and because I told him I know where the bodies are buried and … well, because he just thinks I’m wonderful, I suppose.’ He chuckled. ‘But mostly because we were chatting about the kids and he said it was free next week, and it’s fairly quiet at work, and I have a lot of holiday to use up before the year end …’

  I put the glass down that he’d passed me while he’d been telling me all this and threw my arms around him. ‘You know what?’ I said. ‘I think I’ll have to marry you.’

  So that was that. And I was thrilled, because I hadn’t been expecting a holiday. We couldn’t plan anything while we had everything so up in the air, and I’d contented myself with a few days in the sun once we had a couple of weeks without any kids in; as was mostly the case, going abroad with foster kids was often a no-no, simply because these kids rarely had passports.

  But with things as they were, who knew when that might happen anyway? So this was a gift. An absolute gift. Though we couldn’t simply pack our bags and head off on the Saturday morning. I had to figure Georgie into my thinking, and how he’d cope. I even panicked a little, once I thought about it. Could we even, in fact, go? Would he be able to cope with going away on holiday? Our Kieron had grown less and less enamoured of holidays as he’d got older, and once he was an older teenager he’d elect to have my mum and dad come and house-sit alongside him – he just hated being parted from all his routines and his things.