Mummy's Little Helper

by Casey Watson

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, because I’d wondered that myself. ‘Where do they go?’

  Chelsea sipped her own drink. ‘God! How do they make this stuff so spectacularly grisly? What, you mean, in the short term? Well, off an acute medical ward, for starters, otherwise there’d be no beds left free for anyone. To nursing homes, often, to shuffle around with all the octogenarians. Can you imagine? But if they fulfil the criteria, or have the means to finance it, ideally to a dedicated rehab facility.’

  I tried to imagine being in your thirties and having to move to a nursing home. Or a rehab facility, for that matter, though the latter sounded marginally better. ‘What, as a live-in patient?’

  She nodded. ‘For a period of weeks, usually. Occupational therapy, physio, nutrition, the whole rehabilitation package. Till they can cope again independently, if that’s possible, of course. With a lot of MS relapses, there’s a critical period when they have a decent chance of regaining some function – miss that and you’re scuppered, basically. Though in Sarah’s case they’re still thinking about that clinical trial first, aren’t they? Which’ll mean keeping her here for at least the next couple of weeks – they need close monitoring, of course. The drugs are pretty heavy duty.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, growing anxious now about how much she was telling me, and realising that she thought I was privy to a lot more than I was. ‘All I know is that I’ve got Abby for as long as she needs to be with me.’ I frowned. ‘Which from what you say is looking like it might be for a little longer than originally thought.’

  I could see Chelsea’s face turning a definite shade of crimson. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘I thought … I mean, I hope I haven’t been indiscreet here. I assumed you knew about all this.’

  ‘Not a great deal,’ I admitted. ‘As a foster carer you don’t usually have very much contact with the birth family, for obvious reasons. Certainly nothing like this. It’s an unusual case for us. But don’t worry. I’m not in the habit of blabbing. And, trust me, the last thing I want is for Abby to know all this. Right now she’s waiting patiently for her mum to get better. Thinking she’s going to is what’s keeping her going. As and when that changes – well, we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.’

  ‘God,’ Chelsea said with feeling. ‘That poor mite.’

  For all that it wasn’t my business, I brooded about what Chelsea had told me all the way home. Having got her outburst out of the way, Abby seemed in better spirits. Well, if not in particularly good spirits, exactly, at least she seemed calmer for having vented her frustration at her mum, so perhaps it was all to the good that she’d got it out of her system. She badly needed an outlet for her doubtless myriad emotions, and, with no family or friends to draw on, she sadly lacked one.

  But knowing what I now knew, I felt out of my depth about how to play things. Should I go along with the whole ‘mum will get better’ line? I’d already asked Bridget about that and her response had been unequivocal: no point in stressing Abby about the future till we knew just how bad things were likely to be. But wouldn’t some preparation help? Wouldn’t opening her mind to a number of possible scenarios be a useful way of drip-feeding the reality into her head? Given how her anxiety was affecting her – the obsessive cleaning, the terror of germs, the increasing social isolation – might it not be better to address the reality sooner rather than later? Perhaps I needed to call John and talk it over with him in the morning – after all, he might not even be up to speed with the medical developments.

  And that ‘perhaps’ was soon to be upgraded to a ‘definitely’. After a quiet tea during which Abby spent most of her time pushing her uneaten food around her plate and tapping her knife against her plate rim, I suggested she head up to bed, snuggle down and watch one of her new DVDs, which she seemed keener on doing than sharing the sofa with me. It was a treat to watch TV in bed in our house – particularly on a school night because, for the kids I usually had on the programme anyway, time watching DVDs or TV was a privilege they had to earn as part of the rewards system. It was a key component of the behaviour modification approach.

  But an hour in I was still concerned about how poor Abby was feeling. However good it had been to clear the air with her mum, I knew she’d probably still be unsettled and upset. That was the problem when children were expected to be carers – the terrible guilt they felt for having perfectly reasonable feelings of resentment about having to take on such an onerous responsibility at such a young age. Her little rant at her mum would surely still be playing on her mind.

  Armed with a glass of milk in one hand and a sandwich in the other, I couldn’t knock on the bedroom door when I got up there. Instead I called out a ‘hi’, and pushed it open with my backside. The room was in flickering darkness, the bedside lamp off – Abby would no more leave an unnecessary light on than fly – and the only light was coming from the television. And though the film was a musical and the volume quite high, I wondered, from the mound under the covers, if she was already asleep.

  I crossed the room to put the drink and sandwich down on the bedside table, but had to make space for it: there were half a dozen other DVDs stacked up there, and – to my great surprise – my kitchen scissors. For an instant I froze – how had she got them? Why had she taken them? What had she done to herself? I had seen enough damaged children for it to set alarm bells ringing in my head. I quickly put down the glass and plate and turned my attention to the bed.

  ‘Abby, love?’ I began, starting to lift the covers that concealed her, but just as I did so, the game obviously up, she stopped feigning sleep and pushed them off herself. She was busy trying to yank down the sleeves of her dressing gown, and I looked anxiously for any grisly signs of injury.

  I could only see wetness on her face, however, and reached across to switch on the bedside lamp. ‘Sweetie,’ I said gently, sitting down on the bed, ‘what are you doing?’

  Abby swallowed before answering, her throat clearly catching. Judging by the look of her eyes, which were red and puffy, she’d been crying hard for some time. I reached for the milk. ‘Here sweetie. Have a drink of this,’ I said. And it was in passing it to her that I noticed some bits of fabric in the bed with her.

  I reached for one. It looked familiar. Like part of a sock. ‘What’s this, love?’ I asked her. Fresh tears welled in her eyes.

  ‘I was just making bandages,’ she whispered, gulping back further sobs. Once again, I heard alarm bells.

  ‘Bandages?’ I asked, confused. ‘Why? Are you hurt?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Where?’ I said. ‘Where did you need the bandages?’ I remembered the way she’d hastily pulled her sleeves down. ‘On your arms? Is that it? Can I see?’

  Abby was a good girl, who came from what was clearly a disciplined, loving home, however dysfunctional it might be. There was no part of her that would let her deny such a request from an adult. She duly rolled back one of her sleeves, the tears plopping onto the back of her hand as she did so.

  ‘Shhh, it’s all right, sweetheart. Don’t cry …’

  ‘I have to wear them.’ She gulped the words out. ‘To keep my bones safe.’

  ‘Your bones safe?’

  ‘Or they might go like Mummy’s.’

  She’d now pulled the sleeve up sufficiently for me to see that – to my relief – she’d not harmed herself at all. Quite the contrary. She’d cut the toes out of some school socks to wear as ‘arm bandages’. She had also cut the feet out of some woolly tights, she explained, which she was wearing under her pyjama bottoms, to ‘protect’ her leg bones from breaking.

  ‘I’m sorry I took your scissors,’ she said, sobbing. ‘I wasn’t going to steal them. I would have put them back, I promise. It’s just that I couldn’t bear it …’ She took the milk I again proffered and drank thirstily. ‘My proper ones are at home, you see, and I can’t bear it. I can’t sleep without my bandages. It makes me so scared. And I just lie in bed awake all night lo
ng, thinking about everything. And now Mummy’s so wobbly … and I just knew it would happen. And now it has happened. It’s happened to her, just like I knew it would. And now she’s smashed all her bones and she can’t even walk …’

  ‘Oh, love,’ I soothed, putting my arms round her and trying to still her once-again heaving shoulders. ‘Don’t worry about the scissors. But I wish you’d told me. We could have had them fetched for you, couldn’t we? We still can. Promise me you’ll tell me if there’s anything else you need, won’t you? But you know, what happened to Mummy, that was just one of those things. She fell awkwardly, that’s all. And you’re young and you’re strong, and you really don’t need to worry about your bones. Your bones are fine. They won’t go wobbly.’ I looked at the empty glass. ‘Not with all this milk you’re drinking, eh?’

  I hugged her tighter, feeling absurdly relieved not to be dealing with what experience had shown me time and again I might well have been. I didn’t know how the notion had lodged itself in her psyche – something else she’d read? But no wonder, with her mother’s injury, that it was frightening her now, bless her. Nonetheless I was still relieved, because in the grand scheme of things her ‘bandages’ were harmless, just a form of comfort item really, such as a teddy was, or the corner of a blanket or a favourite doll. If she slept better wearing them, particularly at a stressful time, who was I to stop her? ‘But if you want to wear them,’ I reassured her, ‘that’s just fine by me, okay?’

  Once I’d settled her, I took the scissors back down, feeling at least reassured that it was out in the open. It had obviously been really bothering her since she’d heard about her mum’s fracture. And apart from anything else, she must have been chronically sleep deprived for years. No wonder she’d developed so many funny little ways. Classic anxiety symptoms, basically. I felt better, thinking it through. Perhaps, now she’d got new ‘bandages’, she’d find things easier to deal with.

  But, of course, that would have been way too simple.

  Chapter 10

  Being a foster carer requires lots of skills, obviously, parenting skills chief among them. And it was certainly true that my years dealing with troubled kids in the local comprehensive had given me some solid experience on which to build. And we hadn’t come into fostering blind, either. Mike and I had undergone several months of specialist training to equip us to deal with some pretty challenging children on our behaviour-modification programme.

  And, as Sarah’s occupational therapist, Chelsea, had pointed out, I’d already seen – and helped – my fair share of children with difficult behaviours. But I was about to discover a big gap in my knowledge, where children like Abby were concerned. It seemed I’d been going about everything all wrong.

  Along with the first flush of jauntily nodding daffodils in my pretty new garden, Monday morning saw me make a mental note to get in touch with John about Sarah’s condition, but before I’d had a chance to sit down and call him, it was worrying news about Abby that was first to reach my ears.

  ‘I don’t want to worry you,’ said Mr Elliot on the phone (which was why I knew I should), ‘but we’re becoming a little concerned about Abby.’

  I looked at the kitchen clock – it must have been just after playtime, and I wondered what his concerns could be; she’d barely been there an hour. And she’d trotted off happily enough, as far as I could see, having presumably slept a little better in her ‘bandages’.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing major,’ he reassured me. ‘You don’t need to come and fetch her, or anything like that. She’s fine. It’s just that we’ve noticed lately that she’s spending more time in the toilets than in the classroom – I’d made a note to give you a call this week in any case. She’s been popping to the loo, oh, half a dozen times or so per lesson. And it’s getting worse. I was chatting to one of my colleagues earlier, and it seems it’s not just lesson time, either – she seems to spend much of the break times in the girls’ toilets too. So of course our first thought was that perhaps she had some sort of stomach upset, or something. Or just – well, you know what girls this age can be like, I’m sure, what with approaching puberty and so on. And, of course, she’s always been solitary, as we’ve already discussed. But this seems to be all about washing her hands more than anything. It seems she’s developed some sort of real phobia about getting dirty – she confessed to my colleague that she worries about touching the backs of chairs, sharing crayons with the other children and so on, and it definitely seems to be getting worse. Have you noticed anything similar at home?’

  I told him I had, and recounted the tetanus anxiety. ‘And she’s certainly a clean freak,’ I added, ‘as I think I mentioned when we spoke before. Not really surprising, given what we know of the situation at home.’

  ‘I did wonder about that,’ Mr Elliot said. ‘And, given all the upset, whether this might all be anxiety related.’

  About which I definitely agreed. ‘I’m sure it is,’ I said. ‘She’s also become very anxious about touching doorknobs and so on.’

  ‘Yes, we noticed that too. And, of course, this morning …’

  ‘What actually happened?’

  ‘Oh, forgive me,’ he said. ‘Like I said, it’s nothing terrible. But we are concerned about it escalating further. The children were working with modroc this morning – it’s a kind of modelling material impregnated with plaster of Paris. You might have come across it – and she became so distressed about touching it – even going near it – that I had to take her out of the class in the end, just to calm her down.’

  ‘That fits,’ I said. ‘She really can’t bear to be dirty. But, as you say, there’s dirty and there’s dirty …’

  ‘Well, exactly. And once it starts interfering with normal school activities, of course … Anyway, I’ve just had a chat with the head, and we’re both of a mind. What with all the hand washing and her fastidiousness generally, we were wondering if it might be developing into some kind of obsession for her, and we thought we ought to let you know our concerns. Perhaps you’d like to pop in and discuss it with us at some point? And that it might be something you’d want to mention to her GP?’

  I knew that, in part, the school were probably keen to redress the balance after having been so, well, hoodwinked, for want of a better word, about just how bad things were at home for Abby, but even so I could tell Mr Elliot was genuinely concerned. And everything he’d said had struck a chord with me. Abby washed her hands endlessly. She was so stressed about being dirty … It was then that I had a small ‘eureka’ moment. Handwashing. Obsessions about handwashing … Of course! Wasn’t that the classic symptom in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder? That and – I dredged my brain for facts – worrying that the gas had been left on? I could have kicked myself. Why on earth hadn’t I connected the two? And the lights, it now occurred to me – Abby was definitely obsessive about lights. And now I was beginning to see it all differently. Was that what was happening? Was it more than just her anxiety about hygiene and cleanliness? Had it gone beyond that now – was Abby developing OCD?

  I didn’t discuss all this with Mr Elliot right there and then. I just told him I’d take some advice from social services and get back to him. Which I did need to do. If things were as bad as Mr Elliot was suggesting, I certainly needed to do something. I was due to be calling John Fulshaw anyway, and could perhaps call Dr Shackleton as well, though as Abby was presumably still registered with her own GP it might be better to go via Bridget – she’d presumably know who Abby’s own doctor was. I rang off and called John, but he was out of the office, so, in the meantime, I did what I usually do in such circumstances: I opened my laptop, updated my log and did a bit of Googling.

  Of course, as soon as I began looking at OCD websites, it seemed clearer than ever that Abby was showing signs of developing the condition as a result of her current stress. In theory, at least. I actually had no way of knowing whether this was a new thing or not. Given he
r home circumstances, it might have been a part of her make-up for a long time, just something that hadn’t been picked up on. The business with worrying about her bones going wobbly, for instance – that had clearly been a worry for her for some time. But, thinking back over the four weeks we’d had her with us now, the kind of symptoms Mr Elliot had mentioned were increasing. Again, understandable, given the uncertainty around Sarah’s illness. Abby had come to us expecting to be home before she knew it – but she wasn’t stupid; she could see perfectly well for herself that her mother wasn’t getting any better.

  When the phone rang, I was glad. I knew what I was like. I’d be trawling websites for hours if left to my own devices, and I had enough wisdom to know that, in almost all cases, a little knowledge, in the hands of an amateur, was often worse than none at all. Far better to get some sensible professional input than go off half cocked. I was also anxious to speak to John about this whole Sarah situation. If Abby was going to come home from school already in a tizzy, then I wanted a clear line on how I should speak to her about her mother. Answer her questions? Spell it out? Or just continue to reassure her? It was a difficult one to call, especially as I was in the dark myself.

  But it wasn’t John on the phone, it was Riley.

  ‘Jackson’s party, Mum,’ she began, without preamble. ‘We’re going to have to postpone it.’

  To my shame I’d not given my grandson’s party so much as half a second’s thought so far this morning, despite us having already made plans to have it the following weekend.

  ‘Why, love?’ I asked, pretending I had, obviously.

  ‘Precautionary measure,’ she said briskly. ‘No choice. One of Levi’s pals at nursery has gone down with MRSA.’