Little Prisoners

by Casey Watson

  His chat to me was as short as the assessments had been long because he couldn’t, he explained, tell me anything concrete till he’d studied the results in greater depth. He did corroborate what we knew about the extent of Olivia’s learning difficulties, though, on a positive note, remarked that she was fundamentally quite bright.

  ‘So with the right support, the right environment,’ he said, ‘there’s potential for great improvement. It’s Ashton’s results, however that most intrigue me. As you know, I have analysed his mother at some length, and Ashton’s profile, in terms of the nature of his various problems, is almost identical in every way.’

  ‘Well, she is his mother,’ I commented.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘This sort of result is almost always only found in siblings. If I’d seen this blind,’ he said, speaking even more accurately than he realised, ‘I’d think the two of them were brother and sister!’

  I thought then of that poor, damaged little boy, and his heritage. And what that did to a person’s head, God only knew.

  Chapter 21

  It wasn’t that I wanted to label the children – God knew, I’d seen how being flagged up as having problems could chip away at a vulnerable child’s self-esteem. But I felt a weight had lifted from me after the psychiatrist had seen Ashton and Olivia. It not only represented the first step to getting them psychological support; it also meant I’d get more insight into their poor troubled minds. It didn’t even matter that they might leave us in a matter of weeks. It was just comforting to know that they would get the right help, at last, from the right people.

  Our ‘normal’ wasn’t like most kinds of ‘normal’ these days, but as much as it could be called that, that’s exactly what it felt like in the weeks following the psychiatrist’s visit. There were still the day-to-day challenges surrounding toileting and sexual impropriety, but they went off to school each day in mostly sunny spirits, and returned having not – well, as far as I knew, anyway – caused any problems while there.

  Indeed, the tone of life settled into such a relaxed and calm pattern that I would catch myself sometimes having to recall the reality that these two were deeply traumatised, badly abused kids, ripped from the only home and loved ones they’d ever known and whose future was not yet at all certain.

  But there were two other children in my life who, in the middle of so much upset, I had not had nearly enough time for.

  ‘You’ll regret saying that,’ observed Riley, on the Saturday before Easter, when I commented how much I’d been missing them. It was gloriously springlike, we’d had no frost in days, and with the sun beckoning, it was almost as if the daffodils beneath my blossom tree were nodding their cheerful heads in agreement. I’d brewed coffee and followed her outside into the garden.

  ‘Not in a million years,’ I replied, scooping my newest grandson up for a much needed cuddle. Well, much needed for me. His grizzling soon made it apparent that what he most needed was not to be fussed over by nanna, but left alone, in his pram, for a nap.

  Riley parked the pram and took her coffee, then shook her head. ‘Yes, you will, Mum. I’m finally learning first hand, believe me, why the terrible twos are called exactly that. He runs me ragged most days, little scamp. And I’m soooo tired.’

  ‘Then it’s my turn,’ I said. ‘Or, by the look of it, Bob’s!’ Our poor mutt. He’d been out on the lawn, having a post-breakfast doze on the patio, but was now the one who was being run ragged, by a distinctly over-excited Levi, who was chasing the poor thing all round the garden.

  ‘Hey, little man, just calm down!’ Riley called, to no effect. ‘I’m trying to get your little brother off to sleep!’

  ‘Why don’t you wheel him inside, love?’ I suggested, popping him back in his pram again. ‘Wheel him into the dining room. It’s nice and quiet in there. He’ll soon drop off.’

  Poor Riley, I thought, remembering when Kieron was tiny and how she seemed to have the energy of half a dozen kids. So different from when you have your first child, I thought, when you could just grab a chunk of sleep when the baby did. Not so with a two-year-old, for sure!

  ‘So where’s Ashton?’ Riley asked once she’d come back out into the garden – or rather the conservatory, as she still wanted to be able to keep an ear out.

  ‘Gone to football with Dad,’ I said. ‘To watch Kieron play. Learning young, you see, that the secret of a happy male Saturday is to get out of the house before any babies arrive! So we’re all girls together, today –’ I put my head round the kitchen door now. ‘Eh, Olivia? Looking after the little ones.’

  Olivia, who was sitting at the table, colouring, looked up and nodded. Then went back to her endeavours, which she’d been absorbed in for ages. It was one of those books with lots of really intricate abstract patterns inside, which required many felt pens and a lot of concentration. And for all her problems, Olivia was bright, and also turning out to be quite the perfectionist. If she went over the lines even once she could get in a complete state, and the picture would be ‘ruined’ and often the afternoon with it.

  So engrossed had she been, in fact, that it never occurred to me that she’d leave the table. It wasn’t until Jackson cried out, half an hour or so later, that I realised she was no longer there. Riley and I had been engrossed too, of course, sitting chatting about babies and routines and the exasperating ways of men generally, and we’d both presumed Jackson was asleep.

  Even now I didn’t connect the two things. Riley looked at her watch and groaned, then got up to go and see to him. ‘Obviously not that sleepy,’ she commented ruefully.

  I got up and followed her. Somewhat deprived of my little grandson lately, I was more than happy to take over the rocking and pacing duties that were such a big, tiring part of having a young baby in your life.

  It was only the fact that, when we got there, the door to the dining room was shut that made me wonder where Olivia might be. Riley had left it ajar. I remembered her saying so. So that she could hear from the conservatory if he stirred.

  Even without my quite knowing why, my heart lurched. And then my brain caught up, flashing up an image that still upset me, of Olivia and how she had to give her dollies their ‘internals’. And even as the horrible thought entered my conscious mind, the door was opened by Riley, and there she was before us, crouched in front of Jackson’s pram, both of her hands inside his nappy.

  She jumped up, red-faced and clearly startled. ‘I ain’t done nuffing!’ she shouted. ‘I swear it, Casey, honest! I was just havin’ a check to see if he was wet!’

  Riley let out a sound that was almost a howl, then leapt forward and grabbed Jackson from his pram. ‘Not again!’ she barked. ‘Christ!’ She pulled the baby to her chest, while Olivia just stood there, hands on hips, looking strangely defiant. ‘I ain’t done nuffing!’ she insisted, glaring at Riley.

  I felt my heart lurch. I knew all too well what Riley meant. A year back, when accidently scrammed at by an 18-month-old Levi, our last foster child, Sophia, had slapped him, very hard, across the leg. It had been horrible to witness and had upset me for weeks. I kept thinking that I should have seen it coming. Been more observant, because we knew by then just what a sick child she was. Mentally unstable and prone to dramatic bouts of temper, she had lashed out at him before our very eyes.

  And now this. And once again I felt mortified. Mortified that my own grandson wasn’t safe in my own home. ‘Go to your room please, Olivia,’ I said evenly and slowly. ‘And stay there till I come up to you, okay?’

  This seemed to galvanise her. Edging warily past Riley, as if she might get a cuff around the ear, she did as I’d told her, hurrying up the stairs as quick as her little legs would take her, leaving Riley and I alone with Jackson.

  Thankfully, he seemed happy enough, gurgling merrily to himself when Riley laid him down on the sofa, so it seemed there was no apparent damage. But for all that I didn’t doubt Olivia had no intention of hurting him, we were still shocked, neither of us knowing
what to say or do.

  ‘Mum,’ said Riley finally. ‘What do you think she was doing to him? I mean, I know she wasn’t doing what she said she was. And so do you.’

  I shook my head. ‘I know, love. What can I say? We just don’t know. But I don’t think for a minute that she meant to hurt him.’

  ‘Just have a quick fiddle, then, was that it?’ Riley’s accompanying look was withering.

  This is how it starts, I thought. This is how it starts. This would have been the sort of thing that happened to Olivia and all her siblings. Regularly. Unashamedly. Normalising everything. Making the unspeakable routine. Making a child’s private body parts public property within the family. So that as they grew they knew no different and so it carried on. And then, one day, those same children would hit puberty. Have sexual feelings. And by then, of course, the damage would have already long been done. It made me shudder.

  Riley reached for her bag of baby paraphernalia, which was hanging from the handle of the pram. ‘I might as well change him now we’re here,’ she said, carefully unfastening his nappy. ‘Could you do me a favour and check on Levi for me, Mum?’ She looked up and smiled; a smile designed to make me feel better. ‘Just be sure poor old Bob is surviving under the stress?’

  I nodded. ‘And I’ll pop up to Olivia as well,’ I said. ‘Strike, as they say, while the iron’s hot.’

  What I didn’t say, as Riley hadn’t been privy to the extent of it, was that I was worried this episode could soon cause another. And another bout of self-abuse, not to mention scrawling on her walls and defecating in her rubbish bin, was exactly what none of us needed today.

  But when I got upstairs, Olivia was merely in hiding. She was hiding in her bed, huddled in the corner by the wall, beneath the duvet. I pulled back the covers and sat down, noticing but not mentioning the large wet stain that had spread across both her jeans and the bottom sheet.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ I said gently, ‘I need you to tell me what it was that you were doing. Now I know that little girls sometimes need to know what their dollies – their baby dollies, especially – have in their nappies. They need to know that, so they can change them, if they’re wet. But was it that, love? I need you to tell me the truth. Were you really checking to see if Jackson had had a pee pee?’

  I waited while she seemed to wrestle with her emotions. And then slowly, almost imperceptibly, she shook her head. She started to cry then, and I pulled her close to me, feeling an unexpected wave of tenderness for her, despite what had happened. It wasn’t her fault, for God’s sake; it was the fault of those bloody monsters. She didn’t know why she had done it, did she? How could she? If you asked her to explain, on pain of death, why she’d been rootling in his nappy, the poor mite wouldn’t be able to tell you in a million years. It was just what she’d seen and had done to her all her life. It was normal. ‘Family’ life. It made my blood boil.

  But there was hope too, I realised, in all this. She was beginning to realise it was wrong. That it was not at all normal. That it upset people.

  ‘Riley hates me now, don’t she?’ she mumbled into my jumper.

  ‘No, love,’ I said. ‘Not at all. She doesn’t hate you. But she’s a mummy, and you know what it’s like to be a mummy, don’t you? They get upset when they think someone might have harmed their baby.’

  She pulled back so she could look at me, ‘I wasn’t hurting him! I swear! I was just ’aving a feel. Just a tickle, that’s all.’

  It was at that moment when Riley herself appeared in the bedroom doorway, holding Jackson. ‘Olivia,’ she said, without anger or malice. ‘You are seven years old. A big girl now. And I know you’ve been told all about good touching and bad touching, haven’t you? And that was bad touching, wasn’t it? You know that. And that’s why you’re feeling so bad at this moment. Because you know.’ She let this sink in a moment, never taking her eyes off Olivia, then said, ‘So what I want you to promise me is that you will never do that again. Can you do that?’

  Olivia looked stricken, unable to answer. Then pushed her face into the wool of my jumper once again, crying, ‘I’m sorry, Riley! I’ll kill myself if you want. I really will!’

  ‘Olivia,’ said Riley,’ that’s the last thing I want. All I want is for you to promise me, that’s all.’

  I stroked Olivia’s hair. ‘You can do that, love, can’t you?’ I whispered.

  ‘I pwomise,’ she mumbled, between sobs.

  For all that it pretty much put the lid on our carefree Saturday, when the evening came and I sat down to write up the incident, it occurred to me again there had been progress made here. For the first time I had a clear sense that not only did Olivia know she’d done something to make the grown-ups cross, but actually had a real sense of why. Riley’s words had been spot-on. It was the fact that Olivia knew she’d done wrong that had caused her so much upset and self-loathing. It was a horrible process for her to have to live through and learn from, but learn she must. Her whole psyche essentially had to be recalibrated; she had to reject the norms of her early childhood – already hard-wired into her – and replace them with the morals of the society in which we lived. Such a very big thing for such a very little girl. But it was necessary; the alternative prospect was so much worse. Abused children often only realise that they’re being abused once their own sex hormones, and greater knowledge of their abuser’s sick motivation, begin to kick in. And, as countless tragic testimonies prove, by that time the damage runs horribly deep.

  Even so, it was frustrating when things like this happened. Why couldn’t progress with these kids be more linear? We’d make some, then just when I thought we were winning, there’d be a reminder that there was still such a long, long way to go. I was fretting more, with each passing week, about their potential new placements. The kids needed to be seen as manageable prospects. We’d seen it all before, of course; our remit was to foster the ‘unfosterable’, but the vast majority of foster carers neither wanted, nor were experienced in handling, such challenging kids.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Mike, bringing me a welcome dose of caffeine. ‘The trouble is, you can’t see the wood for the trees. You’ve worked miracles. You’ve worked magic. You’re just too close to it to see it. You’ve taken two broken kids and you’re slowly but surely putting them back together. So stop beating yourself up, love, okay. You’re doing brilliantly.’

  It didn’t feel that way to me, but as words went, they were pretty nice, and very timely ones. And that was all we could do, really. Just keep on doing what we were doing. Just teaching these poor mites how to live, basically, before we had to let them go, all the while crossing our fingers behind our backs.

  Chapter 22

  Just as had happened at Christmas, Easter passed almost unnoticed by the children. Though Mike and I did our usual mammoth Easter egg hunt – planting scores of brightly wrapped Easter eggs all around the garden – it was, perhaps predictably, only our big kids, plus little Levi, who fully engaged with the process.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ I said to Mike as we stood in the conservatory doorway, watching our two grown-up children, plus little Levi, dashing from bush to bush, possessed. ‘Look at those two, will you? Twenty and twenty-two, going on eight or nine. And then those two –’ here I pointed towards Olivia and Ashton, who both had a look of faint bewilderment. ‘Doesn’t matter how much grim information we hear about the family from social services, I still can’t get my head round the fact that this is all so alien to them! I mean, surely they must have been in supermarkets around Easter time. Surely they watched telly. Surely they made Easter cards at school!’

  Mike shook his head. ‘You know, Case, the more I think about it, the more I think you were right in what you said the other day. Yes, they went to school, but as for the rest, I think that’s just it. I wonder if perhaps they really were prisoners in their own home. I mean, if you are systematically abusing all the children in the family, then the last thing you’d want is them out of your sight, mixing w
ith other people, perhaps letting things slip. Far better to keep them in, I’d say, wouldn’t you?’

  I watched Ashton and Olivia, trying their best to join in. Tragically, I suspected Mike was right.

  But the past was done and dusted and as the summer term got under way, I felt the longer days and welcome sunshine helped me focus on the here and now, and when I received a call from Dr Shackleton, telling me he’d got the reports back from the psychiatrist, I felt a renewed sense of sleeves-up, can-do.

  I made an appointment to go down and discuss them with them the following day and no sooner had I disconnected than the phone rang again. This time in was Anna, and she was about to rock my world.

  ‘Hi,’ she said brightly. ‘I’ve got some really great news!’

  ‘Well, that would certainly make a pleasant change,’ I said, wondering what it might be. ‘What is it?

  ‘We think we’ve found some carers to take Olivia!’

  It was as if I’d had a stone dropped from a great height, into my stomach. I was gutted. And what’s more, I felt shocked that I was so gutted. All this time I’d spent badgering social services about placements, and now Anna had come good, it had hit me so hard. I was silent for some seconds. It was actually hard to catch my breath.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said eventually. Was I hoping she’d say, ‘Actually, no, it was just a joke’?

  ‘Well, obviously not quite sure,’ she chattered on happily. ‘Nothing will be concrete till they’ve met her, as you know. And of course first I’ll have to visit you, so I can tell you all about them, and then Olivia will have to meet them, and … Casey, is something wrong? You don’t sound very happy. I thought you’d be jumping for joy!’

  I’d grown quite fond of Anna, as it happened. Our professional relationship should have lasted only a few weeks, but as things had worked out, almost nine months had passed now, and in that time, though it was sometimes exasperating dealing with social services, I’d come to trust that she was as committed to these little ones as we were; that they weren’t just one caseload in a file among many. That she was emotionally engaged with Olivia and Ashton. And that she understood just how much I was. So her breezy comment brought me up short. Like it was really that simple? That I could simply disengage? Just like that?