by Casey Watson
‘It’s Spencer,’ he said, confirming it, as I pressed the answer button. ‘I’m so, so sorry to ruin what’s left of your weekend, but you’re going to need to go and pick him up from the Pembertons.’
‘Oh, no,’ I said, feeling my joie de vivre drain away. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’
‘What hasn’t is more about the size of it, apparently. He’s caused havoc, I’m told, and they really want him gone.’
‘Shit! But what’s he done? I can’t believe this …’
‘I know. From what I can gather, he decided to try and drive their tractor. Unsupervised. He’s knocked down a wall, or so I’m told, and …’
‘Is he hurt?’
‘Oh, no. He’s not. But some of the animals are …’
‘Did he run them down? Oh, my lord!’
‘No, not at all. That’s completely separate, they tell me. He’s been terrorising the animals all weekend, apparently.
Scaring the chickens, worrying sheep – whatever worrying sheep means … Even kicking one. One that was already injured, Glenn tells me, and –’
‘Okay, John. I get the gist. We’ll get dressed and be on our way.’
‘So?’ asked Mike, brows raised, having heard my side of the conversation.
‘So, bye-bye happy weekend,’ I said miserably.
Chapter 8
It was almost an hour before Mike and I arrived at the farm, and as we pulled into the entrance I braced myself for a frosty reception. She’d seemed really nice, Mrs Pemberton, when I’d spoken to her on the phone on the Friday, and I felt guilty that, while I’d warned her about Spencer’s light-fingered antics and tendency to run off, at no point had I said – because it had never occurred to me in a million years – that he’d cause the sort of havoc he apparently had.
‘I bet they’re not too happy with us,’ I told Mike as he parked the car.
‘They’ll be fine,’ he consoled me. ‘It’s hardly our fault, love, is it? And anyway, they’re foster carers too, so it’s not like they’re not used to it. They’ll understand. You’ll see.’
The farm was large, and clearly a working one. As we walked from the car we could see pigs, cows and sheep dotted in the patchwork of surrounding fields. The house itself was huge – it looked more like a mansion than a farmhouse. What a wonderful place for any foster child to end up. I thought back to little Olivia, one of the pair of siblings we’d last fostered. She’d gone to a family who lived on a farm and I knew she’d already settled really well there. Spencer, however, clearly hadn’t embraced the outdoor life. I gritted my teeth as Mike reached to press the doorbell.
It was Mr Pemberton who answered, and though he smiled warmly enough the strain showed in his face. ‘Quite a little handful you’ve got there, haven’t you?’ he said in hushed tones as he showed us in. ‘He’s in there,’ he said, nodding his head towards a half-open door into a living room. ‘With my wife, Catherine. Go on. Go right in.’
We walked into the room Mr Pemberton indicated to see Spencer sitting in a rocking chair, being spoken to by Mrs Pemberton, in what appeared to be firm but quite reasonable terms. But when he saw me, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. He jumped from the chair so dramatically, he nearly upended it in the process, and flew towards me with tears streaming down both his cheeks. Once he got to me he launched himself at me, sobbing. ‘Oh Casey, oh Mike!’ he wailed. ‘Please take me home to yours. It’s rubbish here. I promise I’ll never be bad again, honest. Honestly – I swear on me mother’s life!’
‘Spencer, love, come on,’ I soothed, rather startled at his distress. I felt torn between comforting him – in front of the rather bemused-looking couple – and taking him to task about all the things he’d done. Mrs Pemberton particularly, however, didn’t look too impressed at his histrionics, and I decided that rather than pick over the apparently lengthy list of misdemeanours, a ‘least said soonest mended’ policy might be the best one.
‘I think we’ll head straight off. Leave you in peace,’ I said to the Pembertons, glancing at Mike for corroboration. He nodded. ‘Give you a ring in the morning, if that’s okay,’ I added.
Spencer’s sobbing at this comment grew to a wailing. ‘Don’t send me away again,’ he pleaded, clearly concerned that this obviously wasn’t the end of it. ‘I’ll be good from now on, Casey. Honestly I will!’
It was only a small gesture. But I saw Mrs Pemberton roll her eyes. We shuffled out. No point in prolonging the agony.
Spencer continued to cry all the way home. Every time we tried to discuss what had happened to him, he just dissolved into shoulder-racking sobs, pleading with us not to talk about it. Just kept promising over and over that if we didn’t send him away again he’d be a good boy from now on. I felt bad. I clearly shouldn’t have arranged the weekend respite. It had been too soon. It had also been just after the last incident, and he clearly saw it as some sort of punishment. Was that why he’d played up and done all those dreadful things? I could have kicked myself. Because now we had to deal with the fall-out.
‘Look, Spencer,’ I tried, as we got close to home, ‘I know it’s difficult, being reminded about things you did that aren’t so nice, but we have to talk about it, love, otherwise it’ll be like they never happened. But they did.’ I turned around to where he was huddled in the back seat. ‘Do you understand? You did wrong and you can’t just expect it to go away.’
He buried his head in his hands, like a small child might do: If you can’t see it, it no longer exists. ‘Look, I don’t know all the ins and outs, Spencer,’ I went on, ‘but what I do know is that you tried to drive a tractor – and could have really hurt yourself – and that you also did some very unkind things to the Pembertons’ animals. Spencer, you’re eight, quite old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. Look at me, Spencer. What on earth were you thinking?’
He lifted his head. ‘That sheep was stupid!’ he said. ‘An’ it was mean. It was going to bite me!’
I’d never seen a sheep bite someone unprovoked in my entire life and I said so. But it fell on deaf ears. ‘I know it was,’ he persisted.
‘Spencer, the Pembertons told me it was injured. You shouldn’t have been harassing the poor animal in the first place …’
‘I hate farms!’ he burst out – and, in cutting across me, confirming it. ‘I hate farms and I hate the Pembertons. They’re old and they’re stupid. They wouldn’t let me do anything!’
‘Which is not a reason to take yourself off trying to drive tractors and being unkind to animals, is it? Well, is it?’
Spencer, without an answer to that, fell silent once again. No one spoke for the remainder of the journey home.
* * *
Spencer was contrite and subdued for the rest of the day, and I hoped that he was starting to reflect on what he’d done. I felt sorry once again that I’d been so quick to send him off to respite, and wondered if it had undone what little good we’d achieved so far. Totting it up, it really didn’t seem much. And after dropping Spencer at school the following morning, and calling Glenn, it seemed even less progress than I’d imagined. Glenn told me the Pembertons thought him an evil little boy, a cruel and vicious child who had no thought for anyone or anything but his own amusement. They’d said they certainly wouldn’t be offering to do respite for him again, and had also, for good measure, told Glenn that, because of having him, they would no longer look after children in his age group.
I was a little piqued at this, feeling a small flare of loyalty for the little boy who’d come into our lives. As foster carers, couldn’t they be a little more understanding? But then I reflected that Mike and I probably weren’t the same as other carers, in that we’d actively chosen to take on kids like Spencer – the ones everyone else had given up on.
Yet Spencer was different again. If he’d come from the care system – from a children’s home, or from a neglectful, at-risk sort of family – then his lack of boundaries and empathy would be par for the course. Spe
nding a long time being passed around in care or coming from a chaotic or abusive home obviously took its toll on a child. Over time, and lacking those two vital ingredients – love and boundaries – they invariably developed challenging attitudes and behaviours – it would be strange if they didn’t.
But Spencer didn’t fit that mould at all. Yes, he’d spent a little time with a temporary carer, but, to all intents and purposes, he’d come to us straight from a family home. Which meant from a family – a mum and dad, bunch of siblings, all together, no previous history – that was unusual in the very fact that, superficially at least, it did have those ingredients. So how come he seemed so very damaged? I pondered this aloud to Glenn, who agreed.
‘Well, you might get more of an inkling next weekend, as it happens,’ he said.
‘Oh, really?’ I said. ‘How come?’
‘Well, assuming it’s okay with you, and that you don’t have a prior engagement that precludes it, you’ll be taking Spencer for his first home-contact visit then. I was due to be calling you to confirm it. You beat me to it.’
Hearing this was really good news, and it cheered me up no end. Perhaps seeing his family again might be just the thing Spencer needed. Though it had not escaped my notice that it had been Spencer himself who’d asked to go into care, I felt surer than ever that this was not a real desire to escape them but a desperate cry for help, a way of saying, ‘Notice me. Show me love. Give me boundaries!’
And it seemed that the parents had readily agreed to the visit, too, which wasn’t always the case. Far from it. In fact, in my first experience of fostering, the opposite had been true. Justin’s mother had a long history of picking up and dumping her child, seemingly on a whim. In reality, it matched both her drug use and her love life; she’d have him home and then tire of him, then have him back … it went on for years, and the most heartbreaking thing was that poor Justin never gave up hope that the next time he went home it would be for ever. Of course, it never was and for me it was a depressing reminder that, in the main, children become ‘bad’ because they are treated badly. I so hoped Spencer’s family would serve him better.
So this news was very definitely a positive. And who knew? Perhaps they’d feel able to have him home sooner rather than later. I couldn’t wait to meet them and get some sort of handle on them.
It seemed Spencer felt the same. When I picked him up from school that afternoon and told him about the upcoming home visit, he couldn’t have been more excited. Indeed, it was almost as if he’d completely forgotten that it was him who had asked to be put into care. He spoke lovingly about his siblings and, as the week went on, really opened up to us, telling Mike and me all sorts of funny stories about antics they got up to together. There was one point, though, where I got that familiar Casey prickle – a sense of how things under the surface were far from okay. It was when I asked him – just as something that came up in conversation – who he looked most like, his mum or his dad. Unusually, Spencer had come without photos. The kids we took on came from lots of different backgrounds, but all so far, bar the siblings we’d just said goodbye to, had some sort of cache of photos and souvenirs. But Spencer had come with nothing – lots of clothes, but no mementoes. So I had no idea what any of his family looked like. And the question seemed to stop him in his tracks. He looked at me strangely before answering, ‘My mum.’
‘She’s got your lovely coppery hair, too, has she?’ I answered, still trying to read him as I ruffled his.
‘I look like my mum,’ he repeated. ‘That’s what my dad says. An’ I’m like her, too. That’s what he says. “You’re just like your mother.”’
It was strange, the way he said this. Not proudly, at all. Indeed, I was aware of a real edge in his voice now. But then he abruptly changed the subject, and I decided I wouldn’t push it. I had evidently touched a raw nerve.
Apart from that one slightly bizarre moment, however, Spencer’s excitement continued growing. So much so that, come Saturday morning, he was like a bottle of pop. ‘Oh, Casey,’ he said, as he punched his arms into his jacket sleeves, ‘bet they can’t wait to see me. What do you think? D’you think they will be dying to see me? I expect they’ll be so sad I’ve been gone from home so long!’ He laughed. ‘I bet you any money they’ll ask me to come home again. I’m gonna take Fluffy Cow, I think. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Won’t be a minute. I gotta take him because Harvey really loves him.’ With which he belted up the stairs, two at a time, to fetch him.
By now I was beginning to feel the first stirrings of unease. With such high expectations I knew we were heading for a fall. I stepped outside, where Mike was clearing all the rubbish from inside the car. Though I was borderline obsessive about keeping my house like a show home, I didn’t attach the same importance to the interior of the family runaround, and today’s haul was typical: crisp wrappers, empty soft-drinks bottles, stray carrier bags, baby toys.
‘Do you think we should prepare him?’ I asked Mike, as he stretched across to clear the back footwell. ‘I mean, just a bit of a reality check about things? I just feel that if we don’t he’s going to be so bitterly disappointed …’
Mike backed out, bearing a full carrier of rubbish, which he passed to me with an accompanying eye-roll. ‘Not sure you can, love,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Not without bursting his balloon, so to speak. And it’s probably pointless. In his current state I doubt he’d take it in anyway.’
At which point Spencer burst from the house, grinning widely, with Fluffy Cow mouthing his excitement for him, while he jumped up and down on the spot.
‘Are we going now?’ the glove puppet wanted to know. Mike was right. Best to just see what happened.
In the end, I did manage to say something which I hoped would temper Spencer’s expectations. We spent most of the journey (at my suggestion, so I could hardly complain) listening once again to Spencer’s favourite, the Chipmunks. And a good way into it – it would be a three-hour round trip – he exclaimed that the track that had just started playing was one that he and his mum liked to sing along to together. ‘I could take it with me,’ he said. ‘Could I do that, d’you think, Casey? My mum would love that. We could play it. Would that be okay? Bet she’ll have missed that. Y’know. Playing with me an’ that.’
I turned around in my seat. ‘That would be fine, love,’ I said. ‘And you’re right. I bet she has missed you. Lots.’
‘An’ she might want me home, you know. Like now. Like straight away.’
I was about to answer, when he spoke again. ‘Cos I’m a changed kid, aren’t I, Casey? I mean, anyone can see that.’
I smiled and nodded. ‘In lots of ways,’ I agreed. ‘Yes, you are. You’re doing brilliantly. Though,’ I paused, ‘there’s still a plan we have to work to – you know, with social services. Which I think we do have to stick to. For the time being, anyway. But you know, if this visit goes well, then the next step will be that you’ll be able to have overnight visits, and then your mum – and your dad – will be able to see just how well you’re doing, won’t they?’
Once again, at the mention of Spencer’s dad I noticed this reaction. I couldn’t put my finger on what the reaction was, but it was there.
But it was soon gone. ‘Oh, we’re nearly here!’ he suddenly exclaimed, glancing out of the car window. ‘Look, Fluffy Cow! We’re nearly home.’
I glanced out as well. The family lived on a small estate that I’d been told was owned by a housing association, as was our own home. It seemed a perfectly nice, perfectly respectable area, and as Spencer pointed out all the places where he played with his friends I wondered again at how this boy had turned out to be so challenging; so bad that another foster carer called him ‘evil’.
‘An’ here’s the woods,’ he said, pointing to a fuzz of tree-tops behind the houses. ‘We make dens there, an’ there’s a stream there. We play lots there in the summer. One time, we even camped out. It was wicked.’
At just eight, this did surprise me. Had I
allowed my children to play unsupervised in such places so young? And overnight? But I knew better than to interrupt. You learned so much more by listening. And within seconds we were outside his house anyway, and he was busily gathering up his bits and bobs.
‘Home, Fluffy Cow!’ he chirruped, as he trotted in front of us, up the path, to where a woman who I presumed to be a grandmother was waiting in the open doorway.
‘Hi, Mum,’ Spencer said, however, shocking me. Though she was not so old as to completely stun me, seeing his mother did surprise me. She just looked so much older than I’d envisaged, with markedly greying hair and a weather-beaten complexion. She was painfully thin too, and looked worn out and drawn. No cuddles were exchanged either; she merely gave him a thin smile as he shot past her into the house.
She looked at Mike. ‘What time are you coming back for him?’ she asked. Mike looked at his watch. ‘About four o’clock, I thought.’ He glanced at me. I nodded.
‘Hi, I’m Casey,’ I said. ‘Kerry, isn’t it? Will four be okay for you?’
Her nod was almost imperceptible. ‘See you at four, then,’ she said, stepping back into her hallway.
Very odd, I thought, as we walked back down the front path. No ceremony, no small talk, very little in the way of anything. ‘So, what d’you think, love?’ I asked Mike as we climbed back into the car.
He put the key in the ignition. ‘Either very rude or very nervous about meeting us is what I think. Not decided which yet, to be honest,’ he finished as we drove off.
Although it was still only the end of September, we’d decided to use our time to do a little early Christmas shopping. We’d have a mooch around, a bit of lunch, and then maybe do a little more. I’d been looking forward to it, actually, once I’d found out where Spencer’s family lived, as there was a huge shopping mall only a short drive away. But now I was preoccupied. What an odd ten minutes that had been. No hugs exchanged, no sign of warmth – perhaps these were things I should have expected. After all, Spencer was in care for a reason. But I’d been shocked by his mother. Shocked by how different she’d been to what I imagined.
