The Wild Child

by Casey Watson

  Cheerfully, and oddly. ‘What, now?’ Connor said, looking at Mike and me in turn. ‘Now this minute? Like, for deffo? Where are you taking me?’

  ‘To the seaside,’ John said equably. ‘Well, not me personally, obviously. But that’s where you’re headed. I’ll be able to tell you all about it on the way.’

  ‘What, now?’ Connor asked again, as though he’d not heard him the first time. ‘But what’s the rush? Why does it have to be today?’

  Once again, he looked at me and I struggled to look back at him. He looked as young and vulnerable as a five-year-old, and also close to tears. I felt my resolve slipping down into my boots. Well, my slippers.

  ‘I’m sorry, son, but yes, it does have to be today,’ John said gently. ‘I can see you’ve enjoyed your time here, but everything’s arranged now, I’m afraid.’

  Mike moved towards him. ‘Come on, lad,’ he said. ‘How about I come up and help you get your bits together, eh? And a couple of toys to take with you,’ he added, glancing at me. ‘How about that?’

  Connor went with him, exiting the kitchen on very obviously reluctant legs, and no sooner was he headed upstairs, with Mike right behind him, than the door went again. This time is was Denver.

  ‘I’ll just get off, then,’ Tyler said, the lightness in his legs as he went to grab his case reflected in his voice as well. ‘No need to come to the car, Casey,’ he said. ‘I’ll just leave you to sort everything out.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ I said, rushing after him and catching up with him on the path. ‘You really think you’re getting out of here without a hug?’ I duly gave him one, while simultaneously waving to Denver’s mum, who was sitting in her car. I then inspected him carefully. ‘Are you okay?’

  Tyler grinned. ‘More than okay. Definitely more than okay. Now – please – let me go, woman!’

  ‘Not so fast,’ I said. ‘You’ve not put in your tea order for Wednesday.’

  ‘Meatballs and spaghetti, please!’ he yelled back, before jumping in the car. ‘Just like normal!’ he added through the open window.

  Having waved the car round the corner I hurried back inside, my mind at sixes and sevens. ‘So where exactly are you taking him?’ I asked John, who had been watching me from the kitchen window.

  ‘A place in Kent,’ he said. ‘Another semi-secure unit.’ He must have seen my face fall. ‘Casey,’ he said, ‘you have actually read the information you were given, haven’t you?’

  I nodded. ‘Read it and digested it but, oh, John, he’s only eight.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But it’s not like the picture I know is in your head. Only three other children ever in place there at one time – so we were lucky. Two staff to each child, and a very strict regime. One designed to set firm boundaries and try to prepare children like Connor for living within the confines of a family. A task and a half, but one that’s proved to be just the ticket in the past. He’ll soon get used to it.’ He smiled. ‘He’ll have to, won’t he? Casey, I don’t even know why I’m telling you all this.’ Then he narrowed his eyes. ‘Or – hmm – do I need to tell you it all again?’

  But there was no time. Connor was back down and clutching a box Mike had found for him. It was full of toys and games but, from his expression, you’d have thought they were snakes.

  ‘Tell her what?’ Connor asked, his cherubic face now set and angry.

  ‘All about your new home, mate,’ John said brightly. ‘As I was just telling Casey, it sounds lovely. Just the ticket. Anyway, we’d better press on. I think you know the fellas who are going to be driving you down there.’

  Connor looked appalled. ‘Not them gayers!’ he exclaimed, huffing. ‘I’ve already put the hard word out round about them three. An’ that dark one better watch out ’cos I’ve got a flick knife in me bag.’

  John smiled as he put down his coffee mug. ‘Okay, mate. Whatever you say. Say goodbye, then. It’s time we hit the road.’

  Connor duly turned to Mike and me. ‘Laters, you two,’ he said. ‘Never wanted to be here anyways with you pair of old farts!’

  On which note, he was escorted out of the front door by John, marched down to his car, helped inside and belted up. We followed them down the path, Mike trying hard not to laugh, while all I could think of was that, sometimes, you did have to laugh about stuff like this happening. Or you’d cry.

  John walked around the back of the car and opened the driver’s door, smiling at us both over the roof.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘You know, turning up unannounced so early.’

  ‘It was certainly a shock,’ Mike said, glancing at me. ‘We were expecting a call from EDT first.’

  John met my eye. ‘Jet lag, like I said,’ he explained. Or rather didn’t explain, because actually, he didn’t really need to. ‘Let’s just call it – let me see, now – an “executive decision”,’ he said, dipping down and climbing into the car. He then started the engine and buzzed down the passenger-door window. ‘As me laddo in the back here says, laters!’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what all that was about?’ Mike asked as we headed back up the path.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Well, once I’ve figured it out myself. Which might take some time.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Mike agreed. ‘Still, as they say in Memphis, it would appear that Elvis has left the building.’

  As had superwoman. That much I did know.

  Epilogue

  A few days after Connor had left us, John Fulshaw popped round, as he does, for a coffee, and explained that, as I’d presumed, he had indeed opened and read my late-night email, and, to use his words, ‘could read between the lines and see a disaster in the making, clear as day’.

  And, of course, he’d been right. There was no way we could hang on to Connor, because we had to make a choice and our choice had to be Tyler. Sometimes you have to accept that you really can’t be all things to all people – all children. So I was very grateful for John sweeping in like a one-man SWAT team that Monday morning and taking that difficult decision out of my hands. As I’ve always said, sometimes my agency link worker knows me better than I know myself.

  When I think about Connor – when I think about fostering generally – I am oddly reminded about a really sad poem I learned as a child. It’s by Edgar Guest and called ‘A Child of Mine (to All Parents)’, and it spoke about the fact that children are only on loan to us for a while. Although this poem has been used over the decades in the most unfortunate of circumstances – often at funerals and memorial services – when children come and go in and out of our doors and our family, the sentiments in it always come back to me.

  Mike and I both realise that the children who come and live with us are ‘borrowed’ children. Their stay may only be brief, but however fleeting it turns out to be, we have a duty to try to have some positive impact on their young lives. I can’t lie to you and say that this is always easy, and I can’t swear that we can instantly fall in love with every child. We can’t. What I can tell you honestly is that we try our best, in whatever time we have, to make their life a little more bearable, and to ensure that they have somewhere warm, safe and loving to hole up until it’s time for them to move on.

  That’s why it hurts if a child – in this case, a child called Connor – has to leave us and we feel we haven’t done quite enough. Even when we know we’ve tried, if we have to hold our hands up and admit that we are stumped and can do no more, we feel inadequate. I suspect that’s human nature. It’s also difficult because it’s like someone has torn the final chapter from a favourite book before we’ve finished it, before we’ve had a chance to find out how the story ends.

  Happily, for Mike and me, these occasions have been rare, and even on the odd time it has happened, we’ve been lucky enough to have John on the case and to eventually find out what happened next. Connor’s story is still being written, of course, and with it out of our hands all we can hope for is that the next place he stayed managed to do good things w
ith him and that one day soon he will be placed in a family unit. Who knows? It might be happening as I speak.

  As for us, well, I’m still beating myself up about Connor. Irrational, I know – that’s what Mike tells me, anyway. Because I’m not superwoman. Never was. But writing about Connor has been cathartic and helpful. And if it helps anyone understand the complex world of what we do even a little better, then it’s been worth it.

  Here’s to a much brighter future in prospect for that little boy with such a terrible past.

  Casey Watson

  May 2015

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  Flip, a little girl with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome, has been rejected by her mother and excluded by her school when she arrives at Casey’s house. But she’s desperate to be loved.

  Chapter 1

  The long school summer holidays. Who’d have them? We were only three weeks into them, so not even quite at the halfway point, but already that thought was uppermost on my mind several times a day. It was certainly the number one thing on my mind as I attacked the washing up and surveyed the scene of devastation that was supposed to be my garden.

  More to the point, why had I always been such a staunch advocate for them? Silly me, I thought ruefully – that one was pretty obvious. It was because I used to work in a school, and those six precious weeks were like a gift from the gods. A vital pause between stints under the tyranny of the school bell. Fickle, fickle, fickle, that was me.

  I raised a soapy Marigold and rapped hard on the open kitchen window. ‘Tyler!’ I barked. ‘Denver! Please! Not so rough! And watch my flowers!’ I added hopefully, though without much optimism that either boy would. Though they smiled and waved back at me, they also completely ignored me, chasing each other round the garden with their water blasters just as manically as they had been for the past half hour. My poor windows were going to get it next. I just knew it.

  Not that in normal circumstances I’d have much minded the devastation. Tyler had only been with us for a little over a year, but since we’d asked if we could keep him permanently – well, till he was ready to fly the nest – it almost felt like he’d been with us for half his life. And, in truth, I could never be cross with him for long. Well, except when I had to be, obviously. It had been a huge decision and we’d not yet had cause to regret it; now he was in a loving, happy home, he was blossoming.

  Which was more than my flowers were being allowed to, however. This was probably par for the course when they were constantly being attacked by an almost 13-year-old boy and his boisterous sidekick. That’s not to say that my flesh and blood family weren’t partly to blame. Riley and Kieron, my own two, had both passed their quarter centuries, but Levi and Jackson – Riley’s boys – were already following enthusiastically in the footsteps of their uncle Kieron, in that, if they saw grass, they immediately thought ‘football’.

  Now eight and six, perhaps it was a blessing that they weren’t around to play today, as they were equally skilled at kicking a ball into a rose bush and creating a mud slick out of a previously lush patch of grass. Still, at least Riley and David’s third child had been a daughter, and though my little grand-daughter Marley-Mae was only 16 months old I could already tell she was going to be a proper little lady.

  But it was another little lady that was causing me to fuss and flap this morning. I’d had a phone call first thing from my fostering link worker, John Fulshaw, to inform me that he had something of an emergency on his hands – so could I possibly take on a young girl? In typical John style, he was fairly light on facts, operating according to his usual ‘I’ll tell you more when I get there’ routine. So all I knew currently was that she’d been taken into care following a house fire, and that her mother was still in hospital being treated. Oh, and that, like Riley’s Levi, she was just eight years old, and that though her name was Philippa she apparently only answered to ‘Flip’. Oh, and one more thing. That they (as in John, the little girl and the social worker allocated to her) would be arriving at my house in – hell’s bells – less than an hour.

  As timings went, it couldn’t have been much worse. I’d already agreed that Tyler’s friend Denver could spend the day with us, which meant I’d had two boisterous almost-teens running wild both in and out of the house all morning, wearing nothing but swimming shorts, splashing around in Marley-Mae’s little paddling pool and generally running amok in that way adolescent boys do, while my house, already messy after a Sunday spent with the very same grandkids, looked like a bomb had hit it.

  For a clean-freak like me, this was naturally torture. Or would be, if I’d allowed it to remain in that state, but such was my horror of admitting visitors if it was anything other than pristine, it would be a cold day in hell before I allowed that to happen.

  Which meant I needed to crack on fast. I popped the last plate into the drainer and peeled off my washing-up gloves. I’d need my heavy guns to come out for the rest of the chores that I’d be doing, so I went across to my cleaning cupboard to get tooled up: vacuum, duster, disinfectant and mop were my weapons of choice, and every speck of dust, or splash of dirty water, my enemy. The Blitz had nothing on me when I declared war on dirt and mess, and I was just preparing for battle when Tyler splattered into the kitchen, barefoot and grinning, not to mention dripping twin streams of water from the legs of his board shorts to the floor.

  ‘Any chance of an ice lolly, Casey?’ he wanted to know, accessorising his request with a smile that I knew one day was going to break some hearts in the same way he’d comprehensively stolen mine. ‘Only with all that running about, we’re Hank Marvin!’

  I had to smile at that. It had been a term coined by a previous boy we’d fostered, Jenson, who’d learned it, if memory served, from his mother’s latest boyfriend. It had since wormed its way into the family lexicon. It had probably been Kieron who’d passed it on to Tyler, who’d picked it up and run with it ever since.

  He shook his dark hair like a shaggy dog would in order to shake off the water, further messing up my already messy floor. ‘For goodness’ sake, Tyler. Stop that!’ I ordered. ‘And an ice lolly is going to stop you feeling hungry, is it? No way, mister. It’s almost lunchtime and I’m going to make a picnic for the pair of you. I’m sure you won’t pass out from malnutrition before then. Now, hop it,’ I added, swivelling him by the shoulders and frog-marching him back outside again. ‘John and the others will be here soon, and I still have lots to do, so how about you and Denver start clearing a space to sit and eat your picnic on, while I do so.’

  ‘Not even an ice-pop?’ he tried hopefully.

  I shook my head. ‘No. Oh, hang on, though,’ I added, reaching across and grabbing the sun spray from the kitchen windowsill. ‘Give each other another good going over with this before you do. You’ve probably washed off half the last lot with those flipping blasters of yours, and I don’t want the pair of you burning. Go on,’ I said, giving it to him. ‘Ice lollies after lunch, promise.’

  ‘Oh, Casey!’ Tyler grumbled as he took the bottle spray from me. ‘You’re such a fusspot. Look at the label. Look, here – where it says “once”, see? That means we only need it once. That’s why it says it! You’ve already covered us in it about a hundred times!’

  ‘Covered you with it twice, actually,’ I corrected. ‘And twice never hurt anyone. It says “once” on the paint tins as well, and we all know how well they work, don’t we? Go on, out with you! And put some more on!’ I added, to his departing back.

  I was mad, I decided as I surveyed my sopping floor. I was actually mad. Tyler was such a live wire, and had a best friend who was also a live wire, and yet not two hours back I’d gone and agreed to another temporary placement not with trepidation, but with an enthusiastic grin on my face, despit
e knowing almost nothing about the girl. But then if I was mad, then so was my husband, Mike, because when I’d phoned him at work to double check he was fine about us doing it, he’d agreed to it as well – and in an instant.

  ‘Well, we said we would, didn’t we?’ he’d pointed out when I asked him if he meant it. These weren’t light decisions to make, after all. But he was right; that had always been the deal. When we’d asked if we could be allowed to keep Tyler, we’d assured John that we’d still be more than happy to foster other kids who might need us – kids who could benefit from going on the specialist behaviour-modification programme we’d been trained to deliver. And this was apparently once such – though for what reason I knew not. But it was a little girl, and she was only eight, so there’d be no extra testosterone wafting around. No, it would be fine. It would work okay with Tyler.

  ‘So I’ll tell him yes, then,’ I’d said. ‘You know, assuming all seems well once they get here?’

  ‘Course!’ Mike assured me. ‘You’ve had it easy for long enough, love. Time to get stuck back in.’

  Cheeky sod, I thought now. I’d get him back for that later. Perhaps with a well-aimed water blast or two. Right now I had less than an hour – no, nearer 45 minutes – and, if not a mad woman, I was definitely a woman possessed. First impressions worked both ways, after all.

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