by Casey Watson
Bless her, I thought, as she began stacking them up. ‘I know you will, love,’ I reassured her. ‘So as far as I’m concerned, the subject is now closed. And look – enough space in here for everything, I think. Do you want me to help you put things away?’
She nodded at me shyly. ‘Yes, please.’
‘Great,’ I said, seeing the CD player which was now in her hand. ‘And perhaps listen to music! Seeing as Roman’s fast asleep downstairs, how about we have some on while we unpack, eh?’ I reached for one of the CDs she’d begun to stack on the chest of drawers. ‘This looks good. Hey, we can dance while we work!’
In common with many a teenager before her, Emma looked horrified at this thought. She looked at me, then at the CD, and then back at me again. It was the sort of look I knew well. It said ‘Whaaattt?’
‘Only kidding,’ I reassured her, passing her the rap CD and laughing. ‘My days of dancing to this sort of thing are long over. If indeed, I ever had them, truth be known. But put it on anyway, eh? Or something else you like. I don’t mind which. Just be nice to help you start to feel at home.’
But as I spoke, and Emma duly took the proffered CD from my hand, I noticed this small but distinct furrowing of her child’s smooth, unworried brow. And as I was something of an expert in the non-verbal communication habits of teenagers, I could tell right away what it meant, too. It meant ‘Home? You stupid woman. What’s “home”?’
‘So, what do you think?’ I said to Mike, once I’d come back downstairs. I’d made a start helping Emma put her bits and bobs away, as promised, but then left her to it, telling her I’d check on Roman for her. I was conscious that perhaps she’d like a little space.
My big hulk of a macho husband, who’d come home from work early, just before Maggie and Hannah had left, was peering into the pram with a big soppy grin on his face.
‘About this one?’ he whispered, glancing up at me. He stepped away, but kept his voice low as he spoke. ‘He seems like a good ’n. Not been a peep out of him since you’ve been up there.’ He motioned towards the ceiling with his eyebrows. ‘And how about his mum?’
He’d spoken to Emma only briefly so far, having only had the chance to say hello to her really, straight after Maggie and Hannah had left.
‘So far, so pretty much what I’d have expected,’ I told him. ‘Fair bit of attitude, particularly towards Hannah – you know, the blonde one you met? She’s Roman’s social worker. But then I suppose that’s understandable, given what her role is.’ I looked into the pram too. ‘And by all accounts she’s been lucky. So far, at any rate. It would have been so much more difficult if he hadn’t been such a placid little thing – which he has, by all accounts, so Hannah tells me.’
I looked again at the little bundle of life nestled beneath the covers, and, as if on cue, he opened his enormous eyes and seemed to consider me. He really was the most beautiful little boy. His eyes were so dark that they seemed almost black, and his skin was a lovely olive colour. His head was sprigged, more than covered, in little chocolate-brown tufts, and thinking about Emma and her pale colouring I wondered about his father and what he might look like. I said as much to Mike, too, in what I hoped sounded like a casual sort of manner, though, in truth, it was anything but.
Seeing this tiny infant and wondering what the future might hold for him, I couldn’t help thinking back to Justin, the first boy we’d fostered, and how never knowing who his father was had eaten away at him. And even though, when he did find the man, the outcome wasn’t quite a happy ever after, just knowing he was there had gone such a way to heal that wound. I remembered his exact words to me. He said he just felt ‘more whole’.
Mike frowned and shook his head. ‘Typical you,’ he said. ‘Casey,’ he then warned, ‘don’t even go there, love. I thought we agreed we wouldn’t go down that road – not unless we have to, at any rate.’
‘I’m just saying,’ I said, tutting. ‘Just wondering, that’s all.’
But Mike was having none of it. He straightened up and made for the door. ‘I know what you’re like, love, once you get to “just wondering”. And you know as well as I do where it can lead.’
I knew exactly what he was talking about. I knew exactly who he was talking about – a girl we’d looked after the previous year, Abby. Abby’s mum had MS and told everyone she was all alone in the world – not a single relative to call on – but I knew there was more to it than that. There was actually a sister; an auntie who was desperate to support both of them, but with whom Abby’s mum had fallen out. Of course, I couldn’t help but poke my nose in, and I’d paid the price for it. It had resulted in an official complaint against me and a really stressful investigation; an experience I would not want to repeat. But him mentioning that was like a red rag to a bull.
‘Mike,’ I chided, ‘that’s so unfair. It was my “wondering” and all my digging that reunited their flipping family!’
Which was true. And I’d been exonerated, and Abby’s mum had apologised to me, profusely. But it might have worked out differently, as we both knew.
‘Yes, but it also might have reunited you with your last P45 too, love,’ Mike reminded me. ‘And, don’t forget, this ex-boyfriend sounds like he’s a wrong ’un. Perhaps that little man there is better off without him in his life. Anyway, I’m off to put the kettle on. Coffee?’
I nodded, and turned my attention back to the baby. I had just been wondering. I wasn’t about to go sleuthing. I had no intention of lifting the lid on that potential can of worms. Emma was right to be reluctant to name the baby’s father; after all, technically, he’d committed an offence just by being the baby’s father, given Emma’s age. Mike was right. Best not to even go there.
‘So we won’t,’ I whispered to Roman who was now properly stirring, stretching his little limbs and blinking, fixing his gaze once again on me. I smiled at him – how could anyone not automatically smile at a baby? – and reached into the pram to pick him up. He gurgled as I nestled him gently against my shoulder and breathed in his distinctive baby scent. I loved sniffing babies; they always smelt so good, even if this one, at this particular time, had another smell going on – one that wasn’t quite so attractive as baby talc.
I wrinkled my nose as I carried him to the foot of the stairs, thinking I’d call Emma downstairs to change him. But as soon as I got there I could hear the thump of the music overhead and realised there was little chance she’d hear me.
‘No worries, little man,’ I whispered into the baby’s ear. ‘Auntie Casey will change your bottom for you, eh?’
I took Roman back into the living room and grabbed a blanket from the pram to lie him down on. So much for Riley’s dismissive ‘you won’t need to buy baby stuff’ – there’d been no sign of a changing mat amongst Emma’s things that I’d seen. Still, I thought, as I lay him down, we could soon see to that. The thought made me smile. I was quite looking forward to going baby shopping again.
I was just reaching for the bag that was hanging on the pram handle when Mike returned, brandishing two coffees.
‘Casey,’ he asked pointedly, ‘should it be you who’s doing that?’
I waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, it’s fine, love. Just for today, at any rate. Emma’s still busy putting her thousand and one possessions away upstairs, and she’s got to get the bedding on the cot too, don’t forget. Better I do it this once than have her break off when she’s busy moving in properly. Don’t worry – I won’t be making a habit of butting in. I’ll make sure she does it from tomorrow on.’
Mike put my coffee down on the table behind me. ‘I wasn’t just thinking of that, love. I was thinking of Emma. Don’t you think she might have issues with someone else doing these things for her? You know what my sister was like – wouldn’t so much as let anyone breathe near little Natalie. How d’you know Emma won’t feel the –’
He stopped then, and I turned to see why. Emma’s ears must have been burning, because she was now standing in the living-room doorway.<
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‘Hello, love,’ Mike began. ‘Did you find everything you needed upstairs okay?’
‘I hope you don’t mind, sweetheart,’ I added, as I quickly finished changing and re-dressing Roman. ‘Only he needed changing and I thought it best to let you get on.’
I made to hold him out to her, but she glanced at Mike and then back at me, making no move to take him. Instead she nodded. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I only came down to get a glass of water. If you want to play with him for a bit more, I don’t mind. I can finish our room off then, can’t I? You know, if you like.’
‘Oh, of course,’ I said, snuggling the baby back against my shoulder automatically. ‘He’s such a good little boy; no trouble at all. You get yourself a drink and get finished. Mike and I will mind him.’
‘Thanks,’ Emma said, disappearing into the kitchen to get her water. ‘Oh, and by the way,’ she called back through, ‘have you got one of those adaptor thingies?’
‘Adaptors?’ Mike asked. ‘What kind of adaptor?’
Emma came back in, holding a glass of water. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘So you can plug a few things in one socket at the same time. Only I need to charge my phone because I’m, um, expecting a call later, and there’s already the bedside lamp plugged in there. Well, the CD player right now, obviously, but I just wondered for, like, later. Unless there’s another plug somewhere? I didn’t see one.’
‘There’s another socket behind the bed,’ I said. ‘You can plug the bedside lamp in there if you like. I’m sure it’ll reach.’
‘Sweet,’ she said. ‘Great. Okay.’ She glanced at Roman. ‘Okay, I’ll be down in a bit then.’
I knew what was coming as soon as Emma had gone back upstairs. I’d answered automatically, but not without it flipping a mental switch with me. There were protocols for dealing with such things. As Mike well knew too.
‘A phone?’ he said, frowning. ‘In her bedroom and unsupervised? And a call from who exactly? She seemed cagey about that, didn’t you think?’ He sighed. ‘I can see this becoming complicated, can’t you?’
I knew what he meant, but didn’t share his anxiety. She hadn’t seemed cagey to me. If she’d wanted to be cagey she would have just plugged her phone in anyway, and made do with not having a bedside light, surely? Teenagers were notoriously obsessive about their privacy, but there was nothing in Emma’s tone that made me anxious about letting her have her phone, even if we did need to be clear on what the protocol was.
And there was always a protocol. There were protocols for everything in our line of work. Mike was right – with a young teenager like this we’d normally prohibit the use of a mobile up in their bedroom – and for obvious reasons. The children we looked after weren’t in any way the average; they often had dark and difficult pasts, and all the dark and difficult associations that kind of background tended to throw up. In some cases there might be family members wanting to snatch them back, even, which was why communication with families had to be supervised and managed, and our home address guarded as if it were a state secret. The risk to us, from some of the families whose children we took in, was very real and could not be underestimated. Though this was different. Well, as far as we knew, anyway. Emma’s mum had always put her in care voluntarily. And she was only with us now because of the baby. This wasn’t one of our ‘last chance saloon’ troubled kids, where violence and criminality were family norms.
‘Leave it with me, love,’ I said to Mike. ‘I’ll check with Maggie tomorrow morning. I know we wouldn’t normally allow it, but perhaps it’s not the issue it normally is in this case. Plus she might feel more secure having her phone close to her.’
Mike wasn’t convinced, though. ‘Or to conduct a whole life that we’re not privy to, more likely. You know what teenagers are like, love – always good at giving you the edited highlights of what they’re up to.’
Yes I did, and I’d known a fair few of them too. But that had been in my last job – not when it came to the ones we fostered. And that was precisely because mobile phone use was controlled. I still thought he was being just a little over-cautious, and we also mustn’t forget that Emma was a young mum – she had adult responsibilities now so we should at least grant her a few adult benefits. But I’d call Maggie anyway, just to put his mind at rest. Even if I knew he was worrying about nothing.
But it turned out that Mike was perhaps a little more perceptive than I was. It was in the small hours, around two, when I woke up that night. Woke up with a start, moreover, confused by what I was hearing. Was that a baby crying? Disorientated by the sound, I thought I was imagining it for a moment, and then my brain caught up – of course it was. We had a baby in the house now, didn’t we?
I didn’t stir, however, because my brain registered another thing as well – that the cry had come from downstairs, which meant that Emma had taken him down there, presumably to warm up one of the bottles she’d made up for him before going to bed.
But something was wrong. The crying wasn’t stopping. I lay in bed listening for what seemed like several minutes, at first smiling wryly at the memory of those interminable night feeds – both mine and Riley’s – but gradually becoming more and more agitated. How long did it take to warm a bottle? Not this long, surely. I glanced at the display on the alarm to find that it was approaching two-thirty. What on earth was she doing down there?
When the baby’s cries were so plaintive I could almost feel his distress personally, I flipped the duvet from over my legs and dragged on my dressing gown, before shuffling out of the bedroom and trudging downstairs. Perhaps she was having a problem with the microwave or something.
The crying was coming from the front room, however – not the kitchen – so that’s where I headed, and as I took in the scene I felt a wave of pure maternal anger. The baby was in his pram, screaming, kicking his little legs in frustration, while Emma, the sound conveniently muffled by a pair of earphones, was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, tapping away on – no, my eyes hadn’t deceived me – my laptop! And at her side, I belatedly noticed, was a large measuring jug, half full of water, in which a bottle of milk was bobbing, presumably cooling after having been heated up too much.
Presumably now cooled, in fact. I snatched it up, wiped it on my dressing gown and placed the teat in Roman’s open mouth, and while he sucked lustily – I held it in place for him as he fed – I turned my attention to Emma, who seemed almost completely oblivious. She’d seen me come in, of course – she’d even glanced at me – but she was doing that oh-so-teenagerish thing of finishing whatever she’d been doing – the furious typing of what was presumably some vital message – before deigning to pull out her earplugs and give me her full attention.
I stopped myself from picking up the baby. And it was hard. Though his hungry cries had by now been reduced to gulping sobs, this was no way for him to feed – he’d be gulping in as much air as nourishment – and it was only the insistent voice in my head, reminding me just how young and clueless (not to mention motherless) his mother was, that stopped me rounding on Emma in anger.
‘Emma,’ I said instead, keeping my voice low but firm, ‘what’s going on here? Surely you could hear Roman screaming? Even through those.’ I gestured pointedly to the earphones.
She looked up at me, completely without guile. And then at her baby, as if nothing much was up with him. ‘Oh, was it cool enough? I didn’t realise. It takes for ever to cool down, milk does. And I know he fusses, but, look, he’s fine now.’ She paused then, as if unsure quite what to do with me, since it didn’t look as if I planned on going anywhere any time soon. And then she seemed to decide I needed mollifying. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, seeing me still standing by the pram, feeding him. ‘If you just roll his blanket up into a ball and prop the bottle up, he’ll be fine. He can practically feed himself, that way.’
I was flabbergasted. He wasn’t even five weeks old! Practically feed himself? ‘Emma,’ I said sternly, ‘this bottle is almost stone cold. And a b
aby of Roman’s age needs to be held while he’s feeding and, equally to the point, what are you doing on my laptop at this hour of the night? What are you doing on my laptop at all?’
I could see from where I was that, as I’d thought, she was on Facebook, and was also aware that even now I didn’t have her full attention. Her eyes kept flicking back to whoever she was messaging on screen.
‘Emma!’ I hissed again.
She sighed, betraying a distinctly adolescent irritation at the interruption. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you chill, woman?’ she fired back at me, causing me to be even more flabbergasted. ‘I came down and warmed his bottle for him, didn’t I? And would have fed him, too, if you hadn’t come in and beat me to it. He’s not going to die, you know, having to wait a few minutes. He’s –’ and then she stopped, abruptly, and burst out laughing.
Heaven knew, the last thing I wanted to sound like was the prissy Miss Jean Brodie character Kieron used to accuse me of sounding like whenever I used to tick him off, but that’s exactly what I heard in my voice when I asked Emma quite what it was she seemed to find so funny.
But she evidently didn’t. ‘Oh, it’s my mate,’ she said, with one eye still on the screen. ‘She’s off her head on vodka, and she’s having this major row with these two geeks on here. It’s funny as.’
Words really did almost fail me now. But not quite. ‘Well, I’m afraid I don’t find anything about any of this remotely funny, Emma. This isn’t a very good start, is it? Now kindly log off my computer, and come and sort your baby out, please. In the meantime I am going to switch the internet off, and you and I are going to discuss this in the morning.’
It nearly killed me to leave the room without picking up the baby, but I held firm and, as Emma watched me with the sullen eyes I absolutely expected, I left the room, climbed the stairs and crept as quietly as I could back into bed.
