by Casey Watson
Chapter 7
Paulie left our lives almost as quickly as he’d come into them. Within two hours of my putting down the phone to him, John Fulshaw was due back on our doorstep to collect our small visitor, who’d slept for a full two hours after Cathy had put him down, almost as if to give me the wherewithal to deal with the hours of distress I was braced for when he finally awoke.
As it was, he awoke teary and sad and washed out, but Cathy had been right when she’d said he had no fight left in him; he seemed just like a rag doll from a children’s playgroup toy box – if not happy, at least accepting that his role, for the moment, was to play dead, so to speak, and let events and words wash over him, and to submit to whatever miseries all the strangers had planned for him. He had, in short, gone into his shell.
Which made it all sadder still, because I knew about the next stage; the stage when a looked-after child, abandoned and bewildered, shuts down all their emotions, increment by increment, as a way of making themselves less vulnerable to emotional attack.
But I also felt hopeful. Just the tiniest bit hopeful, admittedly (I was still a realist), because the ranting of Paulie’s father, however awful the prior violence, had held a note of sincerity that I reckoned couldn’t be faked. And those tears. Those tears had also been real.
‘So you see, you are going to be able to see your daddy,’ I told Paulie, as I helped him put on his army trousers, hoping passionately that I wasn’t speaking out of turn. I had bathed him and dried his hair, and we were all but ready for when John came. ‘Not right away, because things have to be organised,’ I explained. ‘Things have to be worked out and everything. But it will happen soon, sweetheart. And then, well, I’m told you should be able to see him regularly, too.’
Paulie had tears tracking down his face as I spoke, but they were silent tears; less an explosion of emotion than a kind of seepage, as if expressing all the hurt he was carrying around inside him, but more a simple release than anything else.
And as I’d spoken, I’d seen his expression change – hope had crept in and filled the space his tears had left. ‘So will it be all right in the end, Casey?’ he asked me, as I held the tongue of his trainer back for him to wriggle his foot in.
I thought of all the older children I’d had these sorts of conversations with. How much I always agonised over every single word I uttered. How hard I tried never to resort to platitudes and false reassurances. How much it mattered that, in a world full of them, it was my job not to lie. I knew I could give Paulie no guarantees on that score. But, then, could anyone? Ever? Without a crystal ball?
But he was five. A boy of five. And he needed just one thing now. ‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘I think it will.’
Epilogue
When Tyler returned from football camp on Friday evening to find Paulie already gone, his first utterance, perhaps naturally, was ‘How did it go?’ and his second, also naturally (because he had eyes in his head), was, ‘Mike, what the hell happened to your face?’
We were a long time round the tea table that night.
Riley’s naughty step dictated that an errant or out-of-control child’s time out should run to one minute for each year of a child’s life. It didn’t escape my notice that we’d managed a similar sort of regime with Paulie – for every year of his life we’d taken care of him for a day, and though it was anyone’s guess whether those five days made any difference, I knew they were numbers that would remain in my memory whenever naughty steps were mentioned again.
We found out some facts – John’s always brilliant at keeping us updated – and they all made a welcome kind of sense. It seemed Paulie hadn’t intentionally killed the family’s rabbit. The facts were pieced together down the line by a counsellor who began working with him, when it emerged that he had an extremely high IQ. Paulie, in fact, had accidentally slammed the hutch door on the animal’s neck – having been sent outside to feed it he’d acted too quickly when the pet made a bid for freedom and he’d tried to bang the door shut. He’d then incurred the wrath of his stepfather, who, all too ready to believe it had been an act of murder (perhaps unsurprisingly under the circumstances), laid into the child for a confession, and, of course, duly got one.
As Paulie explained to the counsellor, he decided it would be ‘better to say I purposely deaded it, because if I did, they’d send me to go and live with my daddy’. Except he wasn’t. He was whisked into care, and then off to our house. And, interestingly, no mention of a rock or stone was ever made by him. It was perhaps just a ‘figment of the stepdad’s imagination’, if one wants to be charitable.
Paulie is currently with a long-term foster family, and is likely to remain there for the foreseeable future. He’s also in school, and being well supported, having been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum – something that has now been identified as probably having played a bigger part in his challenging behaviour than anyone had previously realised.
Sadly, this seems to have made little difference to Paulie’s future when it comes to his mother. Tragic though it is, it seems he was always destined to be rejected by her, having been the product of a short, and probably ill-advised, liaison – not to mention being affected by the bitter acrimony that followed their split. He was damaged, to put it mildly, by association. The better news, however, is that he has regular contact with his father. It’s still supervised at present, while Adi works through his own issues, but sometimes includes, to their joy, Paulie’s grandparents.
So, all in all, it’s still very much a ‘watch this space’ situation, but, increasingly, it’s looking like the picture is slightly rosier. Oh, and one of the things that needed to happen before Adi was officially allowed to make his case to social services was that he properly displayed remorse for his actions on the day Paulie left us – the memory of which Mike has stashed away in a mental file marked ‘When moaning about going back to work and that your wife has all the excitement, be extremely careful what you wish for!’
We still have Adi’s letter.
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Read the first chapter now
Chapter 1
Working in a school, or so my thoughts ran, I should really love words, shouldn’t I? Words are good, after all. Words are a brilliant way of communicating with one another. Words are one of the best ways invented for expressing how we feel. But as I looked down at the word that had appeared on the screen of my mobile, I could think of a fair few more I shouldn’t even be thinking, much less typing out furiously in response to it.
The word that had been texted was ‘whatever’. Which was to be expected, as it was the word that was my daughter’s current favourite, in reply to pretty much anything I said. Except she spelt it ‘whateva!’ Which was another thing.
I’d had the last word that morning, which had been no kind of victory, because when you’re a mum and you start the day by having words with your teenage children, you spend the rest of it feeling miserable, even if you’re in the right. Which I was, about that one thing she’d promised to do but ‘couldn’t’, but that didn’t make me feel any better.
And now the text, just to rub it in. Just to make her point. I flipped the phone shut, shoved it into my bag and headed into school. Better not to answer it. Not just yet.
Also better to put it behind me and focus on work. Everyone has one of those days sometimes, after all. But there are some days that you really don’t want to be one of those days, aren’t there? The first day of term being one of them.
Which would have been the case anyway – first days of term tend to be complicated at the best of times – but it seemed that today I wasn’t even going to be allowed the luxury of licking my wounds a bit while easing into it.
‘Ah, Casey!’ Julia Styles called, marching down the corridor towards me, bristling with efficiency and thick manila files. ‘Brilliant. You’ve saved me a journey.’
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br /> Julia Styles was the school SENCO, or special educational needs co-ordinator, and it was her job to oversee everything special needs-related. It was also her job, in conjunction with the other relevant senior staff, to act as gatekeeper of where I worked – the school’s behavioural unit.
‘I have?’ I asked her, as we reached each other, wondering why she’d been in search of me anyway. The first day of a new term usually involved me heading to her office, for a sit down and a chat about my latest bunch of pupils, as well as a catch-up about the holidays over a mug of coffee or two.
But not today, it seemed. Julia linked an arm through mine and swivelled me around. ‘We’re off to a meeting in the meeting room,’ she explained, leading me back the way I’d come. ‘All a bit last minute, I know, but I decided we all needed to put our heads together. Donald’s already up there. Gary’s coming, obviously. I’ve sent Kelly off to hunt Jim down as well.’
Donald was the deputy head, Gary the school’s child protection officer and Jim was my alter ego; we both did similar jobs. We had the same job title, too – the rather fierce-sounding ‘behaviour manager’. Even though neither of us was very fierce at all. Kelly Vickers, who’d just gone off to find him, was one of the twenty or so teaching assistants in the school, and was these days pretty much my number 2.
‘Quite a gathering, then,’ I said, as Julia and I mounted the stairs up to the room in question. ‘What’s brought all this on? Something happened?’
‘Oh, don’t look so worried,’ Julia reassured me. ‘Nothing bad’s happened. Well, not yet, anyway.’ She grinned. ‘No, you know what it’s like, Casey. I just had one of those eureka moments. As you do. No, we’ve got a couple of potentially rather complicated children joining the school today, and since they’re the sort of kids who are going to require input from all of us I thought “I know! How about I take the bull by the horns and get all of us together, then?” So I did! Seemed to make a great deal more sense than trying to organise half a dozen separate meetings on the hoof, as usually happens. Means we’ll all be on the same page before we start working with them, won’t it?’ She pushed the door to the meeting room open and smiled again. ‘I believe it’s called “joined-up thinking”. Something jargon-y like that, anyway. Ah, Gary, Donald. Hi. You got my notes, then. Thanks so much for coming.’ She threw her files down on the big table that dominated the space. ‘Quite the party, eh? Ah, and here are Kelly and Jim. So that’s almost all of us. Who’s brought the bubbly?’
That’s another thing about the first day of term, particularly when it’s the first term of the academic year as well. For those of us who work in schools, it’s a bit like the first day of January. The ‘happy new year’ we’ve all anticipated over the long summer break. Some with an element of dread (or so I’m told; that never applied to me personally), and some with a degree of manic energy and enthusiasm that would have everyone else wondering what they’d slipped into their cornflakes.
And that was all to the good, because if you didn’t start the school year full of optimism and energy, there was a fair chance you’d be burnt out by Christmas. ‘Come and sit by me,’ Gary Clark said, pulling out the chair beside him around the other side of the table. ‘Come join me in the naughty corner so we can whisper and pass each other secret notes.’
I slung my bag down on the seat next to him, gratefully spying the kettle and jar of instant on the desk on the corner. ‘Need a coffee first,’ I told him. ‘Can I get you one as well?’
Gary shook his head. ‘Coffee?’ he asked, nodding pointedly in Julia’s direction. ‘No way. I want a slug of whatever she’s having.’
That’s the thing about those sorts of days as well, isn’t it? That they always seem to have an infinite capacity to get worse. Though once we were gathered around the table, that was the last thing on my mind, because Julia went straight to work on her short but important agenda so that we could be finished before the children started ‘hunting us down’.
Her terminology wasn’t far off the mark, either. While mainstream school went about its business, most of the people currently in the meeting room were a hard-to-pin down sort of bunch, because that was the nature of the roles we all played. While the head, Mike Moore, oversaw his flock from the calm, tidy-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life environs of his huge office, Donald Brabbiner was invariably fire-fighting somewhere or other, while Julia and Gary, likewise, were out of their offices almost as much as they were in them. Jim Dawson, too, had a peripatetic schedule, his job being similar to mine, but also quite different, in that he roamed the school, also firefighting where needed, but mostly monitoring those kids who might, for whatever reason, need to be pulled out of lessons and come to me for a spell.
In fact, I was the only one in the room who stayed pretty much where I was most days – in the little ground-floor room that had been both my classroom and my office since I’d begun working at the school. Which meant I was easier to find, yes, but also that I was something of a magnet for all the kids who, strictly speaking, weren’t my responsibility any more, and who I regularly had to shoo back to their lessons.
Right now, however, ex-Unit kids were the only kind of kids I had, my last bunch having finished their stint with me at the end of the previous summer term, most to go back to mainstream lessons, one because she was done with school now, and one, rather distressingly, because her life had imploded and she was now in foster care a long way away. Her name was Kiara and she’d been on my mind a lot over the summer. I wondered how she was doing and hoped she was okay.
But today, as was the way of things, it seemed I was about to have my classroom repopulated – by three new kids, two of whom were new to the school as well. ‘And they’ve come with quite a hefty amount of baggage,’ Julia explained, opening the first of the files in front of her. ‘Which is why it seemed sensible for us to get our heads together before they get here.’
She began with a boy by the name of Darryl. Darryl, being eleven, was coming to us from his primary school, which was obviously a big transition in itself. But in Darryl’s case it was a little more complicated. He struggled academically, on account of having some learning difficulties, but also socially, because he had Asperger’s syndrome, which is a mild form of autism.
I knew something about this, because my own son, Kieron, had Asperger’s, so this was familiar territory. But there are degrees of difficulty faced by kids with Asperger’s and it sounded as if Darryl struggled more than Kieron – it seemed he was coming to us after a particularly fraught final year in primary, during which his behaviour and mood had gone markedly downhill.
‘He’s been badly bullied, by all accounts,’ Julia explained, not needing to glance at her notes, having doubtless already memorised the contents. ‘And he stresses about everything: crowded corridors, people touching him, loud noises, altercations …’
‘All of which he’s going to find in spade-loads here,’ Gary pointed out.
‘Exactly,’ Julia said. ‘He struggles with eye contact too. And he’s also developed several compulsions in the past couple of years apparently, which is going to make him a magnet for bullies here, from the outset. He has this thing about hair. Likes to touch it – needs to touch it – and not his own, either. Any hair in reach, according to what his former SENCOs passed on. It’s a self-soothing thing he needs to do when he’s anxious. You’ll have come across that sort of thing before, Casey, yes?’ I nodded. ‘Which, again, is going to mark him out and make life even more stressful for him. Which is why I thought – assuming you all agree, of course –’ she looked around the table – ‘he should start off splitting his time between learning support and the Unit, at least till he’s found his feet and his anxiety levels lessen. I was hoping you’d be able to work on his social skills, Casey.’
The kettle had boiled by this time so, having agreed, I went off to make a couple of teas and coffees; if an army marches on its stomach, a school definitely seems to run on its bladder – at least via the frequent applicat
ion of hot drinks. Didn’t matter if it was blowing a gale or, like it was today, still positively summery; the soundtrack of any room in school that the children weren’t actually in was the click of switches, the ting of teaspoons and the shouts of ‘Who’s for a brew?’ Oh, and the accompanying rustle of various biscuit packets being opened.
By the time I’d returned to the table, Julia had opened the second of her folders of notes, this one markedly fatter. ‘Cody Allen,’ she said. ‘Thirteen. So she’s going into year 9, and I think she’s going to need a good bit of support.’ She then glanced at Donald, who nodded. ‘Julia’s right,’ he said. ‘I’ve already met her. And had a meeting with her new foster carers yesterday.’
This made me prick my ears up. ‘She’s just gone into foster care?’ I asked, thinking immediately of Kiara, and just how painful a business it had been, however necessary, for her to be dragged away from everything she knew.
But Donald shook his head. ‘Not “just”,’ he said. ‘She’s been in care since she was four, by all accounts. Her current carers are the latest in a long line who’ve looked after her, sad to say.’
‘She’s apparently the strangest child,’ Julia said. ‘Very complicated psychologically. Her mum has learning difficulties and the reason Cody ended up in care was because she used to shut her up in a cupboard for long periods when she was little.’ She gestured to her notes again. ‘According to what’s here, almost as one would put away a doll.’
There was a silence while we all tried to digest this. Didn’t matter how much you read about, or heard about or saw, some images were still difficult to process.
‘Exactly,’ Julia said, articulating what we were all thinking. ‘So, as you can imagine, she’s not the most straightforward child. We don’t have all the reports from her last school yet but social services have been very helpful and what we do know is that she’s … well, the notes I have here say she’s convinced she’s inhabited – well, I suppose the more correct word’s “possessed” – by the devil, and that when she’s not being a poppet, which she apparently can be, she tends to frighten other children.’
