Daddy's Boy

by Casey Watson

  I led them through to the dining room, trying to process what had just happened. The child had just spoken to me like an angry, petulant teenager. Where had his vocabulary come from? It just felt so incongruous coming from someone so small. And could a five-year-old child even think like that?

  John started helping him out of his little jacket. ‘Remember what we said about not being rude to grown-ups, Paulie?’ he was saying gently. ‘What you just said to Casey was very rude, wasn’t it? So now you need to say sorry to her, don’t you?’

  John used the gentle, calming tones of a man long used to dealing with challenging, traumatised children. And this was clearly one such. He looked anxiously towards me. ‘Am I going to get a smack?’ he asked. ‘Is the lady going to hit me?’

  I could see Tyler shaking his head out of the corner of my eye, clearly as bemused as I was. ‘Don’t be daft, Paulie,’ John said. ‘Remember, we talked about that too? Grown-ups don’t smack children.’

  ‘Some do. My mam does. My stepdad does.’

  ‘But Casey doesn’t. Of that, you can be very, very sure. But you do get into trouble if you’re rude to her. Of course you do. I think Casey has a naughty step in this house,’ he said, glancing at me. ‘Isn’t that right, Casey?’

  I didn’t, as it happened. I was from the wrong generation. But Riley certainly did, and I knew how she used it. As time out for naughtiness, upsets and transgressions in pre-schoolers. And I remembered the rule, too; one minute for each year of a child’s life.

  I nodded. ‘Indeed, I do,’ I said. ‘Though I don’t need to use it very often. And I hope I won’t have to while you’re with us, Paulie.’

  Again the look. The adolescent-seeming sneer. The expression of derision. ‘I’m not going on no fucking naughty step!’ he shrieked at me. ‘I’m not going on no scary fucking step!’ Then he burst into tears.

  Wow. I really could not believe my ears. I’d been around kids from every walk of life, with all kinds of problems. But, try as I might, I could not recall a time when I’d heard such words coming out of so young a mouth. Yes, I’d seen behaviours in children who weren’t a great deal older – early sexualisation, from being groomed practically from birth – but I’d never seen a child so young use such language in anger. They might be able to parrot the words, but this felt different; this really did feel like an older child trapped in a younger one’s body. It felt too bizarre to be true. But true it most certainly was. This angelic-looking, tiny child was right here in my dining room, yelling obscenities at me as if it were all normal.

  John looked as helpless as I felt, but was clearly disinclined to pick him up or otherwise physically comfort him. Knowing almost nothing about the ground on which I was treading, I followed John’s lead. ‘Tyler,’ he said calmly, ‘Paulie likes cartoons. Do you think you could get him settled in front of the telly for ten minutes while me and Casey talk?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Tyler, nodding his head towards the snivelling Paulie, whose sobs, it seemed, responded well to this news. He certainly showed no hesitation in meekly taking Tyler’s outstretched hand.

  Within moments, he was installed on the sofa, apparently happily, with control of the remote and a cushion to cuddle, with Tyler – for the moment, at least, since he’d be leaving in half an hour or so – remaining close by in case he was needed, bless his heart. So far, I thought, so bizarre.

  ‘What on earth?’ I whispered to John as I led him into the kitchen and set about making him a caffeine fix – he was as manic a coffee-addict as I was. ‘Come on then, what’s his story?’ I smiled. ‘And, trust me, nothing you could say now would surprise me. What a singular kid!’

  John shrugged off his own jacket and ran a hand through his hair. ‘It’s hard to know where to start really, and most unusual. You’re right. He’s a funny kid.’

  ‘Funny doesn’t even cover it. Perhaps I’m out of touch,’ I said, conscious that I was of pre-naughty-step vintage, ‘but I can honestly say I never realised there were five-year-olds who could speak like that.’

  ‘It’s obviously all he knows,’ John said. ‘It seems completely second nature, doesn’t it? I honestly don’t think he has any idea that the language he uses is inappropriate.’

  ‘Which begs the next question – what sort of world has he come from?’

  ‘A complicated one,’ John said. ‘That much I do know. Though, in truth, we need to know so much more.’

  ‘So what do you know?’ I asked him, keen to form a picture. ‘Like, how come he was brought to social services by his mother?’

  ‘How come indeed?’ he said, then explained that it had been something of a drama – that she’d brought him in, kicking and screaming and crying, and all but dumped him on the floor of the reception. ‘She was certainly a bit hysterical, by all accounts,’ he told me.

  ‘And just dumped him? But look at him! He’s hardly more than a baby! A baby with a potty mouth all right, but still a baby.’ I shook my head. ‘It beggars belief. Does she have other kids?’

  John nodded. ‘Just a couple,’ he said, his tone slightly sarcastic. ‘Three girls, aged – I think I remember right – 14, 12 and 11. Then Paulie. Then an 18-month-old baby boy.’

  ‘Okayyy …’ I said, finding the picture forming all too easily. ‘And Dad?’

  ‘Dads, plural,’ he corrected. ‘Dads in triplicate, in fact. The girls are the children of a partner who died in a motorcycle accident seven or eight years back –’

  ‘Oh, that’s so awful,’ I said, immediately regretting the thought that had only just formed.

  ‘I know. Then it’s Paulie, who she had with her next partner – who’s apparently ex-forces. And the little one – Alfie – is the child of her current partner. So as you see, complicated.’ He grinned. ‘You keeping up?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I think so. Well, sort of. So it’s obviously not the Waltons, but that still doesn’t explain why she’s flipped out over the little man’ – I indicated with my head – ‘sitting in there.’

  ‘I’m not sure we’ve gotten to the core of it ourselves, even. The only thing I know for sure is that she’s adamant there’s something seriously wrong with him; that he’s different from her other kids –’

  ‘Well, he would be. Different fathers.’

  ‘Yes, but more than that. She thinks he’s psychologically damaged. Well, “brain-damaged” was apparently her term. And there would seem to be some corroboration of that, as he was apparently asked to leave his nursery school a couple of months back. For aggression. Fights various. Meltdowns. You know the sort of thing. Since which, he’s been at home full-time, and she doesn’t know how to cope with him any more …’

  ‘’Specially when she’s already coping with a toddler.’

  ‘Exactly,’ John said. ‘But the reason it’s such a problem – more of a problem than it should be – is that she’s absolutely adamant she doesn’t want him back.’

  ‘What – never?’

  He shook his head. ‘Apparently not.’

  I sat back, trying to get my head around that. And couldn’t. Then a thought came to me. ‘Perhaps she’s suffering from depression? Post-partum psychosis or something? Not thinking straight?’ I was speaking my thoughts aloud. ‘Perhaps she’s anxious that she’ll lose her rag and hurt him, perhaps. Something like that?’

  John shrugged. ‘Perhaps all of it. I just don’t have the facts yet. We’ll be digging – well, social services will, and will report back to me as soon as they have anything more to tell me – but in the meantime, that’s pretty much all I can tell you. Except for one thing – I got this from the sister this morning – that this has all been brewing for a very long time. Since he was born, or so the sister says; always crying, always a handful, always at odds with his siblings … She doesn’t know all the facts, but her take on things is that he’s out for his baby brother. He’s attacked him more than once and, if I were to put money on it, I’d say that was probably the crux of it – that an attack on the little one was
the straw that broke the camel’s back.’

  I tried to digest it all. A simple case of sibling rivalry gone mad? ‘And all this from such a tiny little thing,’ I said at last. ‘Anyway, so what’s the plan? Mike and I have him for a couple of weeks while you do all you can to get him home again?’

  John nodded. ‘That’s about the long and short of it, Casey. I can’t lie to you – I suspect he really will be a handful, so I won’t pretend it’s going to be easy. But as you said yourself, he’s only five, so I’m sure there’s nothing he can throw at you that you won’t have already dealt with a million-fold.’

  ‘Well, that’s certainly true,’ I agreed, glancing over into the living room. ‘So I suspect we’ll probably manage, don’t you?’

  And I believed it. After all, he was just a traumatised little kid. I just hoped he’d soon be back in the bosom of his family; that stuff could be put in place, a support package, to help them all sort it out. And in the meantime, it would simply be a few days of babysitting, of the kind Riley seemed to enjoy when she and David did bits of respite – a far cry from the profoundly damaged older kids we usually had, even if with the side order of four-letter words. No, I told myself, we’d be fine. Why ever would I think anything else?

  Chapter 3

  I always say that you can tell a lot about a foster child by the possessions they bring with them, and the fact that Paulie had a little teddy bear in the bag John brought in for him gave me hope. Call me fanciful, but I chose to believe that a teddy bear signified something good; it meant that somebody, somewhere, loved, or had loved, this child. It could have come from his parents, his aunt or someone else altogether – perhaps a grandma or grandad. The whys and wherefores didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was cherished, which was why he had brought it with him. And by extension, in most cases, it meant the person who gave it mattered to him too.

  The teddy also told me that Paulie, scared, angry child that he was, was capable of giving love as well. This was important, even if it was only to a soft toy, because it meant that underneath the glares, the bad language and the attitude, there was something in this child that I could work on.

  It was with this very much in mind that I spent the next couple of days trying to get beneath Paulie’s surface, grabbing at any opportunity to tease out what made him tick. Yes, it was true that he was only going to be with us for a few days, but if I could return him even one tiny bit happier, and more able to function than when he’d come to us, then that was what I’d set out to do. At the very least, I could try to help him to understand that there were ways of interacting with other people – particularly grown-ups, particularly those in authority – that would serve him so much better than his current modus operandi, which obviously wasn’t serving him well at all, not given that he’d been asked to leave nursery and his own mother had delivered him to social services.

  Of course, it could well be that there were things going on in Paulie’s life that I couldn’t possibly know about. Indeed, there almost certainly were. But that was true of almost every child we’d fostered, and it changed surprisingly little; however tragic or evil or destructive were the influences on a child, all that child had to fall back on, in the end, was themselves. And it was how they chose to handle the future that mattered more than anything.

  ‘Gawd, you’re not off philosophising again, are you?’ Mike moaned, for the second night running, as I ran through my training notes, and plundered the internet for insights into aggressive, disrespectful, precocious five-year-old boys. Because, in reality, I’d not got much further with Paulie, except to establish that I alternated between being a ‘stupid woman’ and ‘nice Casey’, depending on what his needs were at any given moment. He really was a strangely mercurial little thing – more like a two-year-old or a 14-year-old.

  All I had established with any certainty in the first 36 or so hours was that there seemed to be only one love in Paulie’s young life, and that was his father. His biological father, who was apparently no longer around.

  There was nothing unusual in that, of course – children whose parents have split up do sometimes do that: cast the absent parent in the role of much maligned hero, to some extent, while the one close to hand bears the brunt of the flak; all complex psychological territory in itself. But it was becoming clear that in Paulie’s case this was happening to a massive extent – he talked about him endlessly – causing me to wonder if, with a young brother taking his mum somewhat away from him, he’d focused on his biological father even more.

  Everything certainly seemed to revolve around him, even though I hadn’t managed to establish whether he even saw anything of him. ‘Come on, sweetie,’ I cajoled as I tried to get him to eat the scrambled eggs I’d cooked for lunch that Wednesday. ‘You just said you liked eggs. That’s why I cooked them.’

  ‘Not these eggs!’ he ranted. ‘I want eggs like my daddy cooks! Real eggs with yellow on them! Like they do in the army!’

  He pushed the plate away, sending half of if bobbling across the kitchen table, like a load of runaway yellow marbles.

  I removed the plate from the table and Paulie to the newly inaugurated naughty step, which he accepted without argument because, to use his own phrase, he wanted to get away from my stinking kitchen anyway.

  And as I cleared up blobs of scrambled egg, I wondered about fried eggs. Would fried eggs be what he meant? Probably. Which made me ponder about the army. And the father. And the mother. And the stepfather. And the whole ‘complicated’ nature of it all. I also considered what a curious business it was having children come and live with you whom you knew so little about. It just made every tiny thing so, well, complicated.

  And, much as I was warming to at least some aspects of our little tyrant’s personality, I found myself hankering after our next placement already – the sort of child that came with a file half as thick as a phone book. Which was, by any yardstick, just a little bit bonkers, because such files usually spelt just one thing: trouble.

  But for all my surmising and pondering and wondering, I probably couldn’t have anticipated the contents of John’s email, which came in that same afternoon.

  He couldn’t phone, he explained, because he was in a place without a signal, but once I’d had a read-through of what he’d established – and this had all come from the mother’s sister again – he’d be happy to chat to me later.

  And as I started to read, though my interest was piqued, my expectations were low, as it was really only expanding on what I already knew. I certainly didn’t think I’d need to phone him. It seemed Paulie’s biological father was indeed retired from the army. But what we also now knew was that he was retired SAS and had been discharged early on ‘medical grounds’. It also seemed it had been something of a quick liaison, Paulie’s mother and he having apparently met only months after her bereavement, with her falling pregnant very quickly. Things hadn’t worked out, though; according to the sister, the father – who was called Adrian but known as Adi – had had ongoing mental health issues (ah, those kinds of medical grounds) and it seemed taking on a mother, her three daughters and a new baby son was all too much – another proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

  So that had been that. The couple split, and in time she found someone new. And although contact between infant son and father still happened sporadically, according to Paulie’s aunt (who, John had noted, thought very little of Adi), a new home was established and a further child born; the Alfie for whose safety they now all feared.

  And then something else. A something else that made me prick up my ears. The crisis apparently came, the email finished, just before the assault on the baby. It appears it was directly related to an incident the previous week when Paulie had killed the family’s pet rabbit by bludgeoning it to death with a rock.

  I know! John had signed off, echoing the words on my very lips. I can hardly believe it either. We’ll talk later. J.

  Him and me both. As I’d been party to this bombsh
ell for a good couple of hours before Mike returned home from work, by the time he arrived it was all I could do not to jump up and down and bundle him off into the utility room, so badly did I want to tell him this new information. But, of course, I couldn’t – not till Paulie went to bed.

  Though, ironically, it had been an uneventful afternoon in the end. Once both the fried eggs and the email had been digested, I was too full of pent-up energy to contemplate having a quiet afternoon in, so I’d suggested that Paulie and I take a walk to the park at the end of the road to feed the ducks, and, once there, he’d seemed to enjoy himself. But all the while I kept hearing the word ‘bludgeoned’ in my head. Forget the bad language – that had suddenly become something of a side issue. How could such a tiny slip of a child do such a thing?

  Oh, I wasn’t stupid; I’d seen kids lash out at siblings, playmates, animals. Toddlers mostly, in that unthinking way that toddlers do – and woe betide the mum who lets them wield the ‘bash-the-shape-into-the-slot’ game’s wooden mallet. But this wasn’t a toddler. This was a child who was sentient and articulate. What kind of things could have possibly been going through his head to make him capable of such a barbaric act?

  But keen though I was to address all these questions to Mike, it would have to wait a bit because, as had been the case the previous night (something I could now see fitted a pattern) seeing Mike was the highlight of our young visitor’s day. And as I watched him clamour to be picked up, to be tossed around, to be talked to in a deep masculine voice, I wondered if in Mike he saw something of the father in whose shadow it seemed his stepfather must live.

  Not to mention his mother; Paulie clearly didn’t have much time for women either. And though he tolerated me – thrown together as we were, he pretty much had to – he so obviously bonded with Mike so much more. Which was interesting in itself, but suddenly not quite so interesting as what I’d read about in John’s email. Bludgeoned, I kept thinking, as I watched Paulie and Mike playing. He’d bludgeoned the rabbit to death.