by Casey Watson
And it did feel pretty pointless. Sticking to the rules put us in the ridiculous situation where whatever misdemeanour Spencer had been responsible for could only be punished by him failing to earn peer time, and, knowing how things worked, he could use his single night of grounding to earn sufficient points that he could play out again the next night, and so the crazy cycle would continue.
Not for the first time, I questioned the efficacy of the system. Yes, for a child struggling with impulsive and destructive behaviours the actions/consequences and rewards model worked really well, giving that child a sense that they could take control of their own lives – in most cases, with kids who’d been ‘controlled’ by the system, or a difficult home life, this was key to building autonomy and self-esteem, and so to making progress.
But when a child understood the points system, and was determined to play it to suit their own ends, it became pointless. All Spencer was learning was that if he earned sufficient points he had autonomy to do what he liked.
‘It’s mad,’ Mike observed, as he shut the living-room curtains one Saturday afternoon, having just called Spencer in to have a bath before tea. It was the back end of November now – we were rushing headlong towards December – but I didn’t feel Christmassy at all. Not with Spencer’s future still undecided and hanging over us. Pointless was exactly how the whole situation felt. Now that we’d had it spelled out that there was to be no positive outcome for him, it was as if we’d become more like prison guards than carers hoping to help him. And I was sure he felt this too. When Spencer was in, he behaved impeccably so that he could earn the points he needed, but because of his behaviour once he was out – mostly naughty – it was as if Mike and I had been put in charge of the exercise hour in a maximum-security prison – we were constantly on edge, waiting for the next bout of trouble.
‘I know, love,’ I said, ‘but what else can we do? It’s –’
‘Uh-oh,’ Mike interrupted me. ‘What’s all this, then?’
I joined him at the window to see a police car had pulled up, and had also disgorged two officers, who seemed to be inspecting the local cars. Seemed like we were about to find some more.
Mike was at the front door before the policemen – two uniformed officers – had finished walking up our front path. It had become almost instinctive. Get them inside quickly before too many people realised that the patrol car up the road was anything to do with us.
I braced myself for the worst as we invited them in. ‘Is this about Spencer?’ Mike asked as we ushered them into the living room, closing the door behind us so that Spencer, up in the bath, wasn’t alerted.
The taller of them nodded as he sat down. ‘Does the lad own a slingshot?’ he wanted to know. Mike and I glanced at each other, puzzled. ‘Not that we know of,’ I answered. ‘What’s happened?’
He frowned. ‘I suspect he might have,’ he said. ‘Because we’ve had a number of complaints from several of your neighbours, and they all report it having been fired from a top window in your house.’
And causing quite a lot of damage, by all accounts. ‘Damage to parked cars, in the main,’ the other officer told us, which explained their earlier inspections. ‘That your car out the front?’ He asked. ‘The dark-green one?’ Mike nodded. ‘Because one of your neighbours seemed to be under the impression that he’s been firing stones at your car as well.’
Mike leapt up. ‘What? The little … God!’
It only took a couple of minutes to confirm it. If what the policemen said was true, Spencer did indeed have a slingshot, and had been entertaining himself with it for some time. Was there no end to the ways he could find to live up to his label? It was as if he’d decided there was just no point in doing otherwise any more.
‘What I’d suggest,’ the other officer said, after I’d explained a little of our situation as Spencer’s foster carers, ‘is that you bring him down and that we speak to him. And, with your permission, get just a little bit heavy. Eight years old, you say? Well, then, I’d suggest that if we put the fear of God into him we might nip the actions of our little Dennis the Menace in the bud.’
We both agreed. This wasn’t unusual. We’d plenty of experience with these sorts of tactics. Sometimes boys with a tendency to go off the rails could be reined in successfully using nothing more drastic than just a scary dressing down from someone in a uniform.
And these two clearly had as well. After bringing Spencer down – and, in Mike’s case, the anger which accompanied this wasn’t embellished for effect, either: he was furious – I had to keep reminding myself, as they laid into him about his behaviour, that, as far as they were concerned, anyway, this was all for his own good. And though privately, initially, I had my doubts about that (this was no ordinary eight-year-old) as they railed at him about law breaking and how likely it was he’d end up in prison, I found myself getting quite upset, as they clearly were getting through to him; after ten minutes, his face wet with tears, he actually buried his head in my lap, and, try as I might, I could not prise it back up again.
Sensing he was having the desired effect, the angry policeman took a step closer to Spencer’s ear. ‘And if you think this is bad,’ he hissed, ‘just wait till you see what happens next time, my lad.’
I was shocked, then, when Spencer slowly did lift his face, and even more so when I realised he hadn’t been crying at all – he’d actually been laughing. He even smiled at the policeman as he drew his own conclusion. ‘I’m too young to fucking prosecute, you muppet!’
To his credit, the astonished officer hardly paused to draw breath. And this time his fury was genuine. Wrenching Spencer up by his pyjama collar he virtually roared into his face. ‘You look at me when I’m speaking to you, boy! You hear me? Don’t you dare try to speak to me like that! Now, I don’t know where you’ve got your information from, but just you try me. Let’s just see who’s right and who’s wrong about that, shall we? Because’ – and here he shook Spencer, just a little, but enough to wipe the smile from his face – ‘if I have to come back here – and you can definitely take this as a warning – for any reason whatsoever, trust me, I will arrest you. And I’ll sling you in a cell!’
Finally, I thought. Finally, he’s scared and he’s listening. Finally, the policeman seemed to be making an impression. ‘Now get out of my sight,’ he snapped. ‘Go on, get to your room and stay there! How dare you treat these good people with such complete disrespect? Go on, hoppit, before I change my mind and arrest you now after all.’
Spencer didn’t need any prompting to make good an escape; he was up the stairs like a whippet, and for a moment the four of us just stared after him. And then stared at each other, and I think we were all thinking the same thing. If he was like this at eight, and given the tragic start he was having, what did he have the potential to become once he’d got a couple more years under his belt?
There was no point in giving the two officers chapter and verse about the grim future that was already being mapped out for him. Instead, we let them go thinking they’d gone some way, anyway, towards truncating at least one life of juvenile petty crime.
But we knew differently, and it turned into a sombre Saturday evening, Mike, in a foul mood about the dents in his car, and me preoccupied with typing up yet more incident reports which I would then forward to John and John would forward to social services and which would just add to the growing pile of evidence, already weighty, that this was a child for whom nothing very much could be done. Just born evil. End of. And in the system.
I was normally a great one for saying ‘tomorrow’s another day’ but when I woke on Sunday morning my usual ‘sleeves up and crack on’ mentality had seemed to desert me. Instead the pointlessness of our current situation with Spencer seemed to hang over the household like a pall of left-over firework night smoke.
Not that there had been any more fireworks. I had gone up to take Spencer some sandwiches and a drink, half-expecting him to have packed a hankie on the end of a stick and d
isappeared, like some sort of pantomime runaway. However, he was very much present, and very purposely turned over in his bed to face the wall, clearly in no mood for a chat. In the end I simply left the tray on his bedside table without saying anything, because I was really in no mood to chat to him either. Better, I decided, to leave him to his own thoughts and digest what the policeman had told him. But I didn’t get any satisfaction from seeing him so chastised. All states were temporary with Spencer, as we’d seen before. He’d keep his head down, act contrite, and then return to his default – his new default, now he knew he wasn’t going to be going home, of doing what he liked and to hell with the consequences. And what could I do for him? What could I do to try and change things? What miracle might happen that would change the trajectory of his life?
Make breakfast, in the short term, I told myself grimly. Make breakfast and then see what could be salvaged from the wreckage of the weekend. So, leaving Mike showering, I went down to cook bacon and sausages.
That done, and with still no sign of either Mike or, indeed, Spencer, I called up the stairs. ‘Mike, love, can you knock Spencer up, please? I’m ready to put some eggs on.’
But my hand was still poised over the frying pan, egg in hand, when Mike called back down to me.
‘Love, you there? I think you’d better get up here.’
Oh God, I thought, for all my que sera attitude the previous evening. He’s not done a runner again, has he?
‘Where’s Spencer?’ I called as I headed into the hallway. Why wouldn’t he? He hardly had much to stay for now, did he? Even less if he knew what was presently being planned for him: a place that he couldn’t escape from. No, with social services not allowing us to screw down his window – which I had no choice but to accept, even though I wasn’t convinced it constituted a fire escape: we had plenty of other windows upstairs, after all – there was always an exit route for Spencer, if he really wanted one. He wasn’t in that secure unit yet, after all. Cross though I was, though, I still couldn’t help thinking, Okay then, to hell with it. If that’s what you want, so be it.
But I was wrong. ‘Oh, he’s right here,’ Mike answered. ‘Right here. I mean get up here and see what he’s done.’
Chapter 20
It probably said a lot about the sort of things I’d witnessed since we began fostering, but when I reached Spencer’s bedroom to find he’d completely trashed it my principal feeling was one of relief. I don’t know quite what I had expected to find – the body of another guinea pig? Something larger? A local dog? The sight of a small, hapless, terrified child, whom he’d kidnapped, tied up and was busy torturing?
Possibly not, but even so, I was relieved. I remembered back to previous kids we’d looked after and some of the things they had done; it was undeniably upsetting, knowing a distressed child had destroyed their belongings and their environment – not to mention annoying; this was wanton destruction, after all – but in the big scheme of things I had seen far, far worse; children whose pain was too great to be made better by hurting things – they had felt compelled instead to set upon their own bodies. This was not that, and I found myself grateful. So it was necessary to do a quick mental recalibration in order to change my expression to one that was more appropriate.
‘Spencer,’ I asked rhetorically, since it was obvious, ‘what have you done?’
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, absently stroking his Fluffy Cow puppet, who was on one hand, and glaring defiantly at Mike. Now he turned his head to face me, but his expression was blank. Well, almost. Isn’t that obvious?, it seemed to say.
I duly took in the scene. He had made rips in numerous items of clothing, including what looked like most of his school uniform and his cherished Aston Villa football shirt. Toys and games were strewn all over the floor, many of them obviously broken beyond repair, including his precious DS, which I could see was now minus its screen. The carpet was sprinkled with a pot-pourri of bits and pieces – jigsaw pieces, mostly, plus Lego bricks and various counters, along with countless pens and pencils which he’d clearly systematically snapped in half. He’d even snapped what looked like all his paintbrushes in half, which upset me the most. He was so gifted. Why would he do that? Because painting pictures felt pointless when you didn’t have adoring parents to tell you just what a clever boy you were?
But my eye understandably was drawn to the wall on which the picture – the one he’d created his hidey-hole behind – usually hung. It no longer did. It was propped against the opposite wall, while the space behind it, which Mike had so painstakingly re-plastered, was once again the site of a huge gaping hole, beneath which was a small mound of gouged-out paint and plaster.
What struck me most, however, was that he had done this overnight, and neither of us had heard a single thing. So this wasn’t the result of a child in a rage, busy venting his anger or distress. He’d done all this carefully, methodically, quietly. I wished I had the first idea what had been going through his mind. Was this to hurt us? The policemen? An act of defiance or one of regret?
‘Spencer?’ I said again. Once again he said nothing. Instead he leapt from the bed, pushed past us and thundered down the stairs.
I followed him out onto the landing. ‘Don’t you dare go out of that front door, d’you hear me?’ I shouted after him. ‘I mean it. You stay right there and wait for us to come down.’ He was hovering in the hallway, and, presumably because he was still in his nightclothes, seemed undecided about doing a flit in any case. Even so, I decided to press my point anyway. His winter coat was hanging only inches away from him, after all. ‘Because if you do,’ I said, giving my expression both barrels, ‘I will ground you for a month. No ifs and buts, no discussion, no totting up of points. Sod the bloody points,’ I added. ‘Got that?’
Evidently yes. He darted into the living room.
‘God,’ said Mike, who was still sitting on the bed, looking world-weary. ‘What are we going to do with this bloody kid, Case? How long’s he been with us now? Four months? Nearly five now, isn’t it?’ He stood up, and went to inspect the gaping wound in the wall. ‘Talk about one step forward, two steps back … No. I take that back. Talk about no steps forward, period.’ He shook his head as he peered into the hole.
‘I know, love,’ I said, already wondering what I was going to send him into school in, in the morning. ‘We’ll talk to him. On the plus side, this is at least straightforward. He gets a rollicking from the police, he trashes his bedroom. Cause and effect.’ I stooped to pick up a favourite hoodie, which he’d managed to wrench the sleeves from. ‘Well, that’s his day mapped out, anyway. Bit of a job on, clearing this lot. Hey, close that window, love, will you?’ I said, as the blind inside the skylight starting banging against the dormer in the bitter wind. ‘It’s bloody freezing in here. Like an ice box.’
Mike stepped past me. ‘I’m going to see if I can fix this,’ he said, standing on the bed to reach up to it. ‘See if I can find some way of securing it without breaking any rules, like a safety latch, so that it only opens partly. Because when he opens it, he always …’ There was a long pause. ‘What the hell?’
I turned. Mike had his head sticking out of the window and could obviously see something I couldn’t. ‘What, love?’ I asked him. ‘What is it?’
He popped is head back inside. ‘I think I’ve just found Spencer’s latest hiding place. There’s plastic bags all along the guttering out here. All neatly tied up and …’ he was glancing around. ‘Pass me something up, can you? Just something I can reach down and hook them up with. I can almost reach, but … there.’ he pointed. ‘Grab me that, will you?’
I followed his gaze, and saw a fishing net on a bamboo cane. I grabbed it. ‘Let me see,’ I said, climbing up on to the bed too, as I passed him it.
‘Hang on,’ he said, feeding the cane out. ‘I’ll pass them in to you. Bloody hell, Case. Who’d have thought it? It’s like the checkout at Tesco out here.’
As Mike passed the wet, tatty bags bac
k in through the window, I began to open them. I went gingerly, at first, fearful that they might also harbour spiders. But I soon realised that no spider – not one with any sense, anyway – would make its home in the folds of a freezing carrier bag, in a freezing gutter, on a freezing roof.
They’d been well tied, too. The contents of all were clean and dry. And somewhat astonishing, and not in a good way. Pouches of tobacco – many full, cigarette lighters, packs of matches, items of jewellery, video games, CDs and DVDs … even a pristine pair of adult-sized trainers. I stared in confusion as, finally, Mike jumped back down. ‘What on earth does this all mean?’ I wanted to know.
‘I think we both know the answer to that,’ he said. ‘He’s been thieving again, hasn’t he? Up to his old tricks, that’s what. Jesus –’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a wonder he hasn’t slipped and killed himself, in this weather.’
A shiver ran through me, as an image of Spencer’s lifeless broken body on our front lawn leapt into my mind. ‘Oh, love, don’t say that,’ I said. ‘God, I can’t believe this, I really can’t.’
Mike shut the skylight and, in spite of everything, even managed a chuckle. ‘What? Love, I honestly can’t believe you said that,’ he replied.
Back downstairs, we found Spencer curled up in a small ball in a corner of the sofa, his arms wrapped round his knees and an expression of sullen defiance still on his face. It changed very quickly, however, once he eyed the dozen or so bags Mike was holding. His eyes widened, visibly, and his mouth opened. Not to speak, just to form a silent ‘uh-oh’. And at that moment I could practically see the mechanisms of his mind working. He started to blink and I just knew that he was wondering how he was supposed to get out of this one.
Mike crossed the room and dumped the bags on the floor in front of him. ‘No point in lying to us, lad,’ he said. ‘I need to know where this lot’s come from. Now. Come on lad, spill. You’ve lived with us long enough now to know this won’t be dropped till I get to the bottom of it, so you might as well save us all some time and energy by getting on with it. Well?’
