by Casey Watson
‘Oh, love,’ I said, scooping her up and settling her on my knee. ‘How could anyone not like you two?’ I said, cuddling her. ‘You’re both beautiful. And funny and sweet and, well – you know how special you are to me. Anyone would be proud to have you go and live with them.’
Separately, of course, which thought made my stomach do a flip. I hated that they didn’t know that was happening. But Anna had been firm that we mustn’t prepare them. And she was right. It wouldn’t help. Better to leave it till the last minute than have them distressed before they needed to be.
Olivia looked up at me, sniffing. ‘Casey, from now on pwomise, okay? I pwomise that’ll I’ll be the bestest girl ever, so’s the fost’ring people like me an’ want me.’
‘Me too,’ said Ashton firmly. It broke my heart.
I called Anna the following day to see what progress was being made. The children’s deterioration, since Jackson had come along, was a bit of a worry. I was keen to see them settled, however much I’d miss them, but the last thing I wanted was for some potential foster families to be found, only to refuse to take them because of this dip in their behaviours. But there was little to report anyway, which was what I’d half-expected. But at least they had pretty full profiles compiled for the children now, which were going to the social services panel on a fortnightly basis. It was the panel’s job – being a team of experienced professionals within social services – to try to best-match potential carers with children. Now they were formally ‘on the case’ (which had been a long time in happening), it really was only a matter of time.
None of this meant anything to the children, of course. And there was no point in bringing the subject up, either. They lived in the here and now, which was how it needed to be. The only thing was that the here and now was in a state of mild chaos, as a result of their unsettled state.
And it was beginning to spill out of the house now. It was the following Saturday, a day I’d earmarked for some serious Casey-style cleaning, when I heard the doorbell ring, not once, but three times. It was one of our neighbours – one we didn’t have much to do with – clutching the jumper of a fraught Olivia, who was wriggling frantically, trying to escape his grip.
‘Oh!’ I said, completely fazed by what was happening.
‘Oh, indeed! I’ve just caught this dirty little oik in my front garden!’
Whatever the misdemeanour, his tone was horrible. ‘Can you let her go, please?’ I asked him crossly. ‘You can see she’s frightened, can’t you? There’s no need to man-handle her, whatever it is she’s done!’
‘Oh, that’s right, is it?’ he responded, equally crossly. ‘You’d like me to squat down and take a shit on your front lawn, would you?’
I’m not sure I heard right. Or made sense of it, anyway. ‘I beg your pardon,’ said. ‘What the hell are you on about?’
‘This one!’ he barked. ‘Just pulled her fucking pants down and had a crap on my front lawn!’
If he’d been a touch less aggressive I might have apologised a touch more fulsomely. No, it wasn’t a very nice thing to happen to anyone, but this was a small frightened child and my hackles had risen. ‘Well, I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘and I shall come and deal with that for you, but right now, I’ll take things from here, thanks.’ I shut the door.
Once it was closed I turned around. ‘What on earth were you thinking of?’ I asked Olivia. ‘You know not to do that! You know you mustn’t do that!’
She had no answer, of course. Just stood trembling there in front of me, twin streams of tears flowing down her pale cheeks. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Up to your room. Scoot. Go up there and think about what I’ve told you about pooing. In the toilet. Nowhere else. In the toilet!’
There was no point in saying anything else to her right now. Later, perhaps. But not now. God, I thought, contemplating the grim task that awaited me in next door’s front garden. Just how much worse were things going to get?
‘Ask a silly question …’ was the answer I got, an hour later. In the meantime I told myself to calm down. And give Olivia time to calm down a bit too, come to that, so I could sit down with her and try to have a rational conversation about why she’d felt the need to do what she’d done. Even with their lapses indoors, this was beyond my comprehension. I didn’t think for a moment that she’d needed the toilet so badly that she couldn’t make it home. Were that the case, she would surely just have soiled her pants. This was a deliberate act – God, when were these poor kids going to get some bloody counselling? – and that being so, just how much distress was she trying to convey, and how could we get her to find another way?
Mike had taken Ashton to watch a vintage-car rally that morning, and would be back within the hour, and I wanted this dealt with before they got home. I’d have a coffee, I decided – give it another fifteen minutes – then I’d go up and see how Olivia was doing and try to get her to open up to me about it. I was just pouring it when I became aware of some noise from upstairs; intermittent banging and scraping sounds and then, suddenly, an ear-splitting scream.
Banging the mug down, I raced up the stairs two at a time, but was then stopped in my tracks on the landing. It was the smell that hit me first, the whole upstairs smelled of faeces, so strongly that I even started gagging.
Placing my hand over my nose and mouth, I then entered her bedroom, taking in the scene found there as if watching some insane movie. The first thing I saw was the wall above Olivia’s bed, on which was written in huge uneven letters, in red felt pen: ‘AM EVUL. EVERY WON HAYTS ME.’ Olivia, all the while, was screaming, trying to pull out her own hair. She looked like some cartoon version of a mad professor, plaits yanked out, hair sticking up everywhere. She had her favourite doll in one hand and was bouncing on the bed, screaming ceaselessly and rhythmically whacking her doll’s head against the wall. And with some force, as well. I flew towards her.
She went stiff as I grabbed her and, ignoring the stench, wrapped my arms around her as tight as dared to. Then I rocked her, very gently, till little by little, her body loosened and her screams turned first to howls and then to whimpers, before finally subsiding to sobs.
And as I sat there on the bed with her, I took in the devastation. She’d ripped up books and strewn them everywhere, she’d torn down her curtains, and I could see what looked like a puddle of urine on the carpet; it was already seeping into the bottom of my sock. Leaning slightly forward I could also see into the waste-paper basket, where she’d obviously just done another poo. It was smeared all over it, I could see now, both inside and out, and I realised that, in the absence of any paper, she’d used her hands to do it, as well. Further investigation confirmed it. She was covered in smears of faeces. So, I slowly realised, was I.
It must have been a mark of how strangely the human mind works under stress, because my first thought – my only thought – as I sat there and held her was, Great! Why hadn’t she finished it in the bloody neighbour’s garden!
My gentle probing, after the event, long after I’d cleaned her and cuddled her and reassured her she wasn’t evil, gleaned nothing. Nothing at all. So all I could do was what I had been doing from Day One. Log it in my journal, for the record.
But it wasn’t just Olivia who was giving me cause to worry increasingly about the kids’ fragility. Ashton too was regressing very badly. Only a few days later, while Mike and I were dishing up tea, we heard a huge commotion in the back garden. Both kids – I could clearly hear Ashton yelling – and Bob, too, it seemed. He just wouldn’t stop barking.
We both flew outside to find the children in a tangle on the muddy grass, while Bob stood nearby, a spectator. They were going at it, fighting like a pair of caged animals, kicking each other, punching each other, pulling out tufts of hair. It took Mike, big as he was, to fully separate them.
I was shocked. I’d never seen them fight like this before. Bicker, yes, throw the odd punch, the odd slap, but not this. ‘She’s a fucking skirt!’ Ashton was yelling, half deranged with anger, his face scar
let. ‘She’s nothing but a filthy fucking skirt!’
‘He called me a frigid bitch!’ Olivia screamed back. ‘And a hate him! An’ a skirt! You heard him, Mike! He said a skirt!’
It was a full fifteen minutes before we had them both calm enough to be sat down at the table to wait for their tea, but, once again, there was nothing to be learned from them by asking. Every question about what they were fighting about so violently was met by a brace of rueful shrugs.
It was only later, when I was tucking Olivia into bed, that I thought I might try one more time.
‘What’s a skirt, love?’ I asked her mildly. ‘It really seemed to upset you, Ashton calling you that. What’s it mean?’
She pulled a face that confirmed what I’d already suspected. ‘He’s horrible. It means I’m one of Gwandad’s whores. So I shud’n be frigid. Hate Ash. He’s mean.’
Aged just seven, I thought. Childhood? What childhood?
Chapter 20
I grew more convinced, with every passing day, that these children had not been regularly abused by only a family member. I felt sure it went deeper, and wider than that. Every time either of them mentioned a relative – particularly ‘Gwandad’ – I got this uncomfortable knotted feeling in the pit of my stomach. Gut instinct, I guess was what you’d call it.
By the time John arrived for our next meeting with Anna, at the end of February, I was surer than ever that what we were dealing with was a much bigger thing than perhaps had been thought. So I’d prepared. I’d updated all the recent logs for the children, and also refreshed my memory of the disclosures they already made.
‘Morning!’ he said cheerfully, as he followed me into the dining room. ‘Do I smell coffee?’
‘What do you think?’ I said. ‘Help yourself.’
He did so. ‘But, seriously,’ he went on, as he sipped it, ‘I hear you’ve been having a bit of a difficult time of it just lately.’
‘You could say that,’ I answered wryly. ‘But what else would I expect?’ I reminded him of how he’d reassured me, back when we were looking after Justin, that with the end on the horizon, kids routinely played up and regressed. ‘Except when these two regress it’s a lot more than just swearing and shouting, believe me. It’s bodily functions. And in all their grisly glory, as well.’
John winced. ‘I understand,’ he said.
I wanted to say ‘Do you?’, but I didn’t. How could he know what it was like to live with? So I shouldn’t berate him. He was a friend, being supportive, and there was nothing wrong with that.
The doorbell rang anyway, heralding Anna’s arrival. Which meant the meeting could get properly under way.
‘Come in and join the party!’ I said, taking her coat from her and leading her into the dining room. I also noticed, right away, that she didn’t smile at my quip. Indeed, she looked just about as serious as I’d seen her at any point since we’d met her. ‘Oh, dear,’ I said. ‘You look very much like a bearer of bad tidings.’
‘That’s because I am,’ she said simply. ‘Truth be told.’
I panicked then, slightly. Exactly how bad were these tidings. Had something changed? Had they given up on finding permanent foster carers? I thought about the alternative: leaving us for separate children’s homes, and despaired inwardly. But Anna must have noticed my expression.
‘Oh, it’s not about the little ones,’ she reassured me. ‘Well, in so far as it doesn’t affect them. Not now at least, for which we should all send up a prayer. No, it’s the family, and what’s been uncovered about them. It doesn’t make for edifying reading.’
I poured her a coffee while she emptied her big bag of its contents. There seemed an awful lot of paperwork all of a sudden. ‘Honestly, she said, ‘it makes me so angry, it really does. There’s so much more in the archives that I didn’t know about when we started. But, no, it’s just drip, drip … Should have known about all of this before.’
John and I, like-minded, exchanged a surreptitious glance. Boy, we knew more than anyone how that felt.
‘Oh, dear,’ John said, ‘that sounds a bit ominous. Do we need to sit and brace ourselves, ready?’
Anna smiled, though without humour, and pulled out a thick manila envelope. ‘Twenty years worth of info is what I have here,’ she told us. ‘After the court case and the allegations from both the aunt and from Ashton, there’s been something not dissimilar to an archaeological dig. And our searches,’ she went on, ‘have led us down all sorts of avenues, deep within the family, the extended family, and even family friends. And it seems social services have had long dealings with a great number of them, going back, as I say, twenty years.’
‘To when the kid’s mum – Karen, isn’t it? – was tiny, then,’ said John.
Anna nodded. ‘And Karen is key here. There were all sorts of accusations, allegations and investigations, the last of which was when Karen – and this was before she first fell pregnant – confided to a friend when she was 14 that she’d been having sex with her father for a number of years. Her younger sisters too, allegedly.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me in the least,’ I said. ‘But, God, it brings you up short to hear this, doesn’t it? That this has been going on, right under social services’ nose, for generations.’
‘Allegedly,’ Anna corrected.
‘Not in my mind!’ I answered.
‘But that’s the truth of it, and what’s on record makes it clear why. It was Karen herself. As you know, she has quite severe learning difficulties, and was always thought of as slow by the local community. And she was also well known for making stuff up, to get attention, and would apparently often come up with fantastical tales. But for some reason, this particular girl’s mother believed her. And her father was arrested. But released without charge.’
‘What?’ John and I both squawked, in unison. ‘How did that happen?’ John went on. ‘Did she withdraw her statement?’
‘Anna nodded. ‘She returned to the station with her mother – Granddad’s then wife – who it seems, made a pretty convincing show of explaining that her little girl really wasn’t right in the head, and had said what she’d said only to cover up the fact that she’d actually been having sex with her boyfriend; having let slip that she was having sex, she panicked, apparently, and said it was her dad to protect the boy.’
‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘How the other half live, eh? But that’s crap! How could anyone fall for such garbage? It’s an allegation of incest, for God’s sake!’
‘They didn’t believe that, surely?’ John added.
‘Seems they did,’ Anna answered. ‘Wouldn’t today, I don’t doubt. But back then … you have to remember how taboo all this stuff was.’
‘And domestic,’ agreed John. ‘Which made one hell of a difference. Much more likely to be swept under the carpet than these days. You know – allegation withdrawn, least said, soonest mended, what goes on behind closed doors, in the family, and all that.’
‘So it’s all pretty pointless information, is what you’re saying?’ I couldn’t help but feel despondent. These people lived among us. Had always lived among us. Completely untroubled, or so it seemed, by any outside ‘interference’. As untroubled as they were about morality.
‘No, not pointless,’ Anna said. ‘Because this is the 21st century. And all my digging and delving has actually borne fruit.’
I smiled to myself at her choice of metaphors. Fruit of the kind you had to scramble underground for. It seemed apt.
‘In what way?’ John asked.
‘In that it’s brought to light the vast extent of it. A bit of joined-up thinking, this stuff being pulled together … well, in conjunction with the court ruling and, of course, Casey and Mike’s evidence, what we have is a clear picture of the whole extended family – and beyond it – systematically abusing over decades. The whole thing, every bit of it, is now with the powers that be in social services – the head honchos – the plan being that, once it’s all been properly collated, it will all be handed over
to the police.’ She turned to me, her expression one of grim determination. ‘Don’t you worry, Casey. However long it takes – and it might be a while yet – “Gwandad” will have his day in court.’
‘Makes my skin crawl,’ Mike said, over a late mug of coffee that evening. ‘To think how long this has been happening, how many children have been molested. And not a thing has been done about it. It’s unbelievable.’
‘And it all fits. All those strange adult things Olivia comes out with. God’s wrath, walls have ears and that … God, you can almost hear the bastard saying it.’
‘Not surprised. He’s had enough time to perfect his technique!’
‘Those poor children,’ I said. ‘Prisoners, that’s what they’ve been. Prisoners in the one place little children should be safe. But at least it’s over now, and it shed a new light on Karen for me. To think that when she was little – Olivia’s age, probably – she was already being regularly raped by her own father. No wonder the poor girl couldn’t cut it as a parent! What does something like that do to a person’s head, do you think?’
We were never going to know that, of course. Could only speculate, grimly. But at least for the kids there was help on the horizon as, a few days later, the promised visit from the psychiatrist took place. And he was well informed. He was the same doctor who’d prepared the court evaluations, both of the children and the parents; in the latter case, competency testing in order that the court would be able to make a judgment about the couple’s ability to parent their children.
It was a long, drawn-out process; Ashton was with him for an hour, Olivia for even longer. By the time she skipped out of the lounge, telling me ‘Casey, it’s your turn! The doctor wants you!’, Mike and I had already eaten our tea. ‘He’s very funny,’ she confided. ‘He plays games wif you an’ evryfink!’
I agreed it would be fun, and took my ‘turn’.
