Groomed

by Casey Watson

  Keeley looked from one to the other of us as if she’d been talking into a vacuum for the past fifteen minutes. ‘Steve Burke? I told you –’

  ‘As in your foster father?’ Mike said. ‘As in him? Just to be clear. As in it was him who you met today outside college?’

  Keeley nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Who else?’

  Steve Burke? What on earth would he be doing turning up at Keeley’s college without us knowing about it? What on earth was going on? Unless …

  ‘Why?’ I said, already growing fearful of the answer.

  ‘To give me money,’ she said flatly. The line she’d been avoiding saying all along? ‘He’s a stinking filthy pervert and he was bringing me money. “Hush” money is what I think you call it.’

  I saw anger flare again in her. I squeezed her shoulder. ‘Why?’

  ‘Same reason anyone gives someone hush money. To keep me quiet about him,’ she said, ‘because that’s the deal we made. I keep quiet. He pays me.’

  How glad was I that we weren’t in my perfect festive living room right then. I imagined being in there, while the fairy lights went through their programme. First twinkling slowly, then fading, then flashing, then pulsing, then twinkling again. I imagined them providing a pretty contrast to what I knew was going to be the sort of story that would make anyone’s blood run cold. I really didn’t want the two things connected in my memory. This was bad. If it was true, this was very bad indeed.

  Mike looked at me and then at Keeley. Looked sternly. ‘You’ve made an allegation about Mr Burke before,’ he said slowly.

  She nodded and sniffed again. ‘I know.’

  ‘And then retracted it,’ I said. ‘Was that why?’

  She nodded and sighed again. And out it all came then, in one long anguished torrent, about how he’d started trying it on with her not long after she’d gone to them, almost five years ago. Only in small ways at first, she said. After all, she wasn’t yet eleven. Just being a bit more ‘touchy-feely’ than she’d expected. Which was his way of putting it, apparently, when he cuddled her. And he liked cuddling her a lot.

  And, at the time, she explained, it wasn’t that big of a deal for her. Used to the violence and casual cruelty of her mother’s many boyfriends, and the visiting ‘uncles’ she’d been encouraged to be sweet to, and to charm, living in a happy family, headed by a man who was apparently the polar opposite, it wasn’t like being cuddled by him even bothered her, not really – even if, instinctively, she felt uncomfortable under any man’s touch. Little by little, that changed.

  She didn’t remember a particular day when he started trying to do more to her. Just that at some point – she was twelve by now, going on thirteen – he’d started physically avoiding her, which confused her at first, till he’d start doing stuff like offering to give her lifts to places, to meet friends, to go to the youth club, and would suggest they go for a ‘little drive’ on the way home.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ she said. ‘He’d just, like, chat and that, wanting to know what I’d been getting up to. And sometimes he’d ask me about stuff, like, at my mum’s. About the men. And saying how I was lucky to have escaped them. And he’d buy me stuff – just bits and that. Tights. I remember tights once. I wanted these patterned tights everyone else was wearing. And he got them for me, and he was, like, “Ooh, can I help you put them on?”’

  I must have winced. Mike glanced across at me. ‘And?’ he said, his face a pallid mask of disgust.

  ‘And I told him he could fuck off,’ she said. And neither of us were about to pull her up on it.

  ‘But you said nothing. To anyone else, I mean.’ My words weren’t a question.

  She shook her head. Pointed out that she’d have to have been insane. She was in a family. Had a new sister – one who she’d by now grown close to. Had someone. Had a standard of living she’d never have even dreamed of. ‘And after the shit I’d already been through, why on earth would I ruin all that? Be back in care, bounced around, all on my own again. Why would I?’

  ‘Because of what he was doing to you?’ Mike suggested.

  Keeley shook her head. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ she said, almost as if she couldn’t quite believe that. ‘Compared to some of the bastards my mum had coming round, and the sort of things they did to us’ – her voice broke slightly – ‘Steve was nothing.’

  ‘Hardly nothing,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Casey, he was. He was harmless then. And he was also shit-scared of me grassing him up. Obviously.’ I saw a spark, then, of the Keeley who’d first arrived on our doorstep. Cynical. Hard-faced. Too knowing. ‘Which meant he’d buy me stuff.’ She shrugged. ‘You know how it goes,’ she added flatly.

  Mike stood up abruptly. ‘I need coffee,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go down and put the kettle on.’

  Which I knew was shorthand for not wanting to hear any more. Plus I knew he knew that Keeley could be more frank with only me listening. ‘So when did he stop being harmless?’ I asked her as Mike left the bedroom.

  ‘That came much later,’ she said.

  ‘His abusing you?’

  ‘No. It was never like that. I’d never let him. Not in a million years. I mean – ugh. Like I’d ever do something like that with someone like him.’ She picked at her fingernails in her lap. ‘I’d just let him, you know, watch me doing stuff. Like painting my toenails. Stuff like that. Putting my tights on, like I told you. It was all he ever wanted anyway. Like I said, he’s such a perve.’

  ‘And he’d give you things to keep you sweet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’ And I did. So she was already becoming quite the young entrepreneur. And why not? She had come from a far nastier place. In her skewed adolescent mind, she held all the power. Or at least had weighed the odds and, all the while the situation was manageable, decided it was a case of ‘better the devil you know’. And, depressing though it was to even consider it, she might have been right – the world wasn’t exactly bristling with carers willing to take in hard-bitten fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, was it? She’d more than likely end up in one of the few remaining children’s homes, where she’d be rubbing along with kids as challenged as herself. No fairy tale. Well, unless the fairy tale was ‘The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe’.

  ‘But something must have changed, Keeley. Something must have happened, to make you decide to run away. This had been going on for years, now, by the sound of it. So why did you run away?’

  She looked at me. ‘Because I found out just how sick he really is.’

  Recalibrating your assessment of a person or a situation sometimes happens slowly, with an input of mind-changing information, but other times it happens just like that. It happened now. I no longer had an iota of doubt that every word Keeley was saying to me was the truth.

  The harmless Mr Burke fitted the brief with depressing accuracy. We’d been on courses, Mike and I, sat through lectures about it. As with all forms of pornography and ‘deviant’ sexual behaviour, little by little, he’d become habituated to the stimuli he’d had available, so, as night followed day, he would want – and need – more. And in Keeley, a girl who wasn’t shocked by male sexual behaviour, he’d found someone he could so easily groom to give it.

  I felt the warmth of the slim but strong body on the bed beside me. How arrogant he must have been. Either that or deluded. To think this girl – this girl who’d already been through so much – would be so malleable, so his for the taking.

  I tried not to think about those early, tender encounters between them, because they sickened me most. Just as Mike couldn’t stand to hear another detail, so thinking about how he had so emotionally bamboozled her made me rage to the extent that if he’d walked into the bedroom I would have leapt up and punched him in the face.

  It was so shocking, what he’d done, her so innocent, so traumatised, so uniquely receptive to being shown physical affection in the black hole of the loss of her brothers and sisters.

&nb
sp; ‘So what happened?’ I said. And prepared to be disgusted. And was. It was Mr Burke who’d first introduced her to the commercial potential of phone sex. By having her talk dirty on her mobile to him at work. (On the bells and whistles smartphone she’d always had on contract. I couldn’t help wonder: what had Mrs Burke thought about all that?)

  But next up on his agenda was a visual set-up. Could he perhaps install just a tiny little camera in her bedroom?

  ‘I told him no way,’ she said. And it was a good six weeks later that she realised he had already done exactly that. ‘And I freaked,’ she said. ‘I really freaked. Just to think he’d done that. That he’d been watching me without my knowing. Spying on me. It just …’ She groped for words to try and articulate how it made her feel. ‘Like I was … I don’t know … like he’d taken something from me … like, my privacy … but worse than that …’

  ‘Like he now had power over you?’

  She nodded. And I think I understood. That she no longer called the shots. That she no longer had control.

  ‘How did you find out?’

  She managed a smile then. I hugged her. ‘I lost a false eyelash. Would you believe it? You know, a strip of them. I was just putting them on, and I dropped them, and I was looking around under the dressing table, feeling around on the carpet, and I saw this tiny pile of powder on the top of the skirting board – you know, like, plaster dust? Like someone had drilled a hole? I knew what it was because I remember the council coming in and doing something to the electrics in our flat, and I remember them drilling and the dust they made then. And I knew what it must be before I even looked up. Because he’d said, hadn’t he? And there it was. This tiny hole, with something in it. You know, a camera.’

  I nodded. ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I finished getting ready and I asked him if he’d take me round my friends – I was supposed to be going over for a sleepover. And I think he knew straight away.’

  ‘What about Mrs Burke? Zoe? Where was she?’

  ‘Oh, just there, like always. Watching telly. Away with the fairies, like she always is. Like she can’t even see what’s right under her nose.’

  I wondered if a big part of Keeley’s disdain for Zoe Burke was precisely because she couldn’t see what was right under her nose. Because some part of her wished that she hadn’t had that power. That, however much she’d turned it to her advantage and exploited it, subconsciously she’d wanted the burden taken away from her. Where she doubted she’d be believed if she made an accusation about Burke (for me, at least provisionally, he’d lost that ‘Mr’), if Zoe Burke had been the whistle-blower everything would have changed.

  ‘So he took you,’ I said.

  ‘And I told him in the car. You know, that I’d found it. And that I’d covered it in Blu Tack. And that if he didn’t get rid of it I was going to tell Danny about him. I’d really lost it with him by now. I was just so angry.’

  ‘And how did he react?’

  ‘He pulled the car over. We were fuck knows where, anyway by now – sorry – nowhere near where I was supposed to be going. I think I’d frightened him, you know? Anyway, he hit me. Slapped me. Bloody hard, too. And that’s when I ran away. He tried to stop me but I got out and legged it down some alley, where he couldn’t go in the car.’ She looked up at me and another thin smile formed on her lips. ‘He must have been shitting it.’

  I removed my arm from round her shoulder so I could give my arm a stretch. ‘And then you went to the police, made the allegation – almost as an afterthought, according to the officers who found you – then ended up at ours. Why didn’t you tell them all of this?’

  ‘Because by the time they picked me up I’d thought it through a bit. I decided if I could just get away from him that would be okay. I knew I was old enough to look after myself and I just thought they could put me up somewhere till I was old enough to go into supported lodgings – I’d already been talking about all that with Danny anyway. But they were having none of it. As far as they were concerned there was nowhere else for me to go, and they were going to take me back there, no arguments. And you can’t argue when you’re not sixteen.’ This I knew to be true. ‘And it hit me that the only way I could stop them taking me back there would be to tell them he’d tried to touch me up. So that’s what I did. And bingo. They brought me here.’

  I acknowledged this with my own smile. ‘Indeed they did,’ I said. ‘But then you changed your mind and retracted it. Why on earth did you do that?’

  Again that look of surprise that I hadn’t grasped the obvious. ‘Because it was a complete waste of time, wasn’t it? You saw – no one believed me. I knew no one would believe me. Yes, it got me out of there, but you have no idea how good he is. Everyone loves him. Everyone thinks he’s such a hero. And he’s right, isn’t he?’

  ‘He is?’

  ‘In what he told me. That everyone knew about my background, how I’d done stuff with Mum’s boyfriends. How I’d come out of this shithole and was always flirting with him and everything, and how I was being malicious because he wouldn’t give in to me – you know, let me do what I liked, usual teenage stuff and so on. And how kids from places like where I’d come from were always making allegations about their carers just to make trouble.’

  It happened. I knew that. It happened depressingly often. You could never be complacent. I remembered all the seminars.

  ‘And he said he’d cut my phone off. And I wouldn’t have any money. And he said if I told them I’d lied to them about him, I could still have both. And I needed both, didn’t I? So I did.’

  I wasn’t about to query Keeley’s notion of ‘need’. Who was I to do that? Her perception of what she needed to survive had been forged in a foundry I’d thankfully never entered. ‘So now,’ I said, fearing hearing what I feared to be true. ‘You’ve been meeting up with him –’

  ‘I’ve always been in touch with him, Casey. All along.’

  ‘But physically meeting him – that’s new.’

  She nodded. ‘I had to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s started on Jade. On his own daughter!’

  ‘You know this for a fact?’

  She looked appalled. ‘You think she’d joke about something like that?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, putting my arms around her again. ‘So she’s told you.’

  ‘I mean, can you even believe that? I mean, yeah, with me, I get it. I’m like nothing to do with him, am I? But, God, she’s his kid!’

  Adopted kid, obviously. But I was no more inclined to make that distinction than Jade was. She was right to be appalled.

  As if the word ‘appalled’ even came near.

  Chapter 22

  It was the strangest thing. We’d been an hour and a half sitting up in Keeley’s bedroom, and it had long since become dark, and when I came downstairs, leaving Keeley to get changed into her joggers and wash her face, it was as if I was stepping into another world. Just coming down the fairy-light-flanked stairs, into the warm glow of our Christmas living room, it was as if I was seeing the result of the day’s labours properly for the first time. And it looked so otherworldly, so at odds with the world that lay outside the front door, almost as if it hadn’t even been me who’d done it – as if the work had been done by an army of tiny elves.

  The magic was shattered by an explosive grunt, which seemed to come out of nowhere – there were no lights on, just the ones on the tree – but soon revealed itself to be Mike, who started as if stung, woken up by the volume of his own snoring.

  I switched on the main light, and he came fully awake – he’d been flat out on the sofa, presumably shattered after his day at work – and the tang of vinegar led my nose to where his empty plate sat on the coffee table, and I felt a rush of emotion; simple gratitude for the uncomplicated life we led.

  Well, largely uncomplicated. In a professional capacity, it was often anything but. And right now, it was as far from ‘uncomplicated’ as it was possible f
or it to be. I could already see the ripples heading outwards from where the stone had hit the water. So many lives would be changed beyond recognition by this.

  Mike sat up. I went and joined him, perching on the edge of the sofa.

  ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘Uurgh,’ I said, putting my face in my hands momentarily. ‘It’s pretty bad, love,’ I said, as I rolled my stiff shoulders – as much as anything else, I knew I’d pay for the decorating bonanza tomorrow. A tomorrow which looked like being a very different kind of tomorrow than I’d imagined a couple of hours ago. And then some.

  I ran by the rest of what Keeley had told me with Mike, and by the time she came down we were in the kitchen making coffee, and a plan for what we needed to do next. Given Keeley’s disclosures about what might be happening with Jade, it was imperative we act right away.

  Keeley accepted a coffee and we regrouped round the kitchen table. ‘So,’ Mike said, ‘what we need to know from you, love, is what happened today. What was your plan when you met him outside school?’

  She nodded towards the phone. ‘I was going to try and record him. Get something on there that would incriminate him. Otherwise he’d only deny it, I know he would. He still will. That’s why I didn’t want you to know anything about it till I’d got some evidence.’

  ‘What, of him confessing to you?’ I asked. ‘You really expected him to do that?’

  Keeley shook her head. Then she began looking sheepish as she described what her plan had actually been. I don’t know if she’d been watching one too many episodes of Crime Scene Investigation with Tyler, but she’d certainly given the matter a lot of thought, and had decided that her best bet would be to trap him into admitting to what he’d been up to.

  ‘Do you even know what he’s been up to?’ Mike asked reasonably enough. ‘I mean, for sure?’

  ‘No. That’s the thing. Not what he’s been up to since I’ve been gone, obviously – not that he couldn’t easily wriggle out of,’ Keeley admitted. ‘And Jade’s not actually found anything that would incriminate him. He’s too clever for that.’