Chapter 10
By the evening of New Year’s Eve I knew that I would not be able to endure the frivolity of the dinner dance that Robert had booked us tickets for at his hotel. I was exhausted beyond endurance and I feared breaking the news to him when he had gone to such lengths to try and bring me some relief in the most intolerable of circumstances.
I rang him on his mobile and tried to explain why I could not face the event and the added difficulties that I might run into some of the mothers at M’s school who had nearly all turned their backs on me since I had returned to the Island. I didn't know how they felt, but feared that they believed the old adage that "there is no smoke without fire" and that I must have done something terrible to M for him to now be in Care. Those who had written such wonderful testimonials to my good parenting had all vanished without a trace. Not one of them contacted me and some actively crossed the road or looked the other way if they happened to run into me which was inevitable on such a small Island.
I was beyond hurt, but couldn't worry about what they thought. I was so consumed with grief that the slights and snubs I encountered were the least of it. Soon after this, I decided to give up my membership to the gym where I had been forcing myself to go to try and thrash my pain out by pounding up and down the pool, but having been snubbed so many times in the changing rooms, I gave up one of the few things that had been holding me together and helping me keep some semblance of strength. It was not a wise decision but it was the only one I felt capable of taking. Whereas prior to Christmas I had often got up at seven to try and get there before anyone else arrived and swim solitary lengths up and down the pool, in the hope of relieving the constant stress, I now had neither the energy nor the inclination to even try. I was slipping further and further away from life through the thin cracks of my world – cracks that were fast becoming ravines into which I feared I may one day descend never to emerge again.
Robert did not take my decision not to go to the dance, well, despite Dad offering to pick him up instead to go for a bar snack and a drink somewhere local and more low key. Why should he? He had, in good faith given up Christmas with his family and flown to the Island, arranging things to give me solace and diversion, only for me to fail him. Who could expect anyone to understand my pain? And it would have been impossible and quite unreasonable not to expect him to be angry.
Later that evening he sent me a text which indicated that what we had was now well and truly over. I was too numb to feel any sense of further loss. I was consumed with guilt for bringing him over, but also a sense of relief that the pressure of trying to sustain any kind of relationship at such a horrendous time was now gone. It was sad because I feared that our friendship may have gone too and I had few friends left.
I didn’t see the New Year in that night. Instead I got under the covers and stared blankly at the television absorbing nothing. New Year went the same way as Christmas had, in a black void. All I saw were flickering images until sleep thankfully took me into the darkness of the back of my mind.
The next day Robert wanted to be left alone, understandably. He refused an invitation for lunch with my old neighbour and my father and chose to stay at the hotel. Dad and I shared a New Year's drink with my former neighbour instead, a sweet older lady with whom I had developed a close friendship since we had moved to the seafront - no pressure, instead of feebly trying to resurrect a relationship that had died a death some twenty years earlier. Could I say if things would have been different between Robert and I, had we not been enduring this horrific nightmare? - I don't honestly know. Nothing had any sense of reality any more. Robert returned home though, with barely a goodbye.
The next hurdle to face was M’s birthday. I had been given no direct contact on the day but would see him two days later. I was allowed a ten minute phone call on the actual day and again the foster carer’s allegedly "forgot to call."
Once again we spent a frustrating morning worrying about M and trying to track down the duty Social Worker. I eventually got to speak to him at lunchtime. He sounded very low. He'd not been allowed the football party he had requested and which the social workers had cruelly agreed to and then withdrawn. He was left with a new friend who lived near the Foster Carers coming for a sleepover as his only consolation. I had fought hard to try and get them to allow him to have a proper celebration of the kind he was used to, but they blamed the lack of party on the fact that they still considered me a flight risk, which seemed absurd. How could I possibly have got M away again? Dad and I were being followed constantly by the police and I had no passport for myself or for M. The Ports were on alert and the suggestion with all those measures in place, not to mention my fifty grand bail condition, made their excuse ludicrous. In all probability the Foster Carers couldn't be bothered to organize such an event, but I had no doubt that M would be told it was my fault that he could not have what to most children, was a normal birthday treat. I had offered to both fund it and stay away, but that was not good enough. Instead they punished M by denying him something that might have brought him some small comfort and sense of normality during his ordeal and an opportunity to at least spend the day with his school friends.
During my short call with M, he told me he had received another gift from his father - this time, an electronic photo frame. It seemed an odd gift to give a child for his eighth birthday, but I suspected it would be filled with pictures of his father to try and force a relationship between them. M told me about it without enthusiasm and offered to give it to me as he didn't want it. I told him he should keep it and tried to show enthusiasm for his present. I could do nothing else, as had I shown any displeasure, they would say that I was hostile to his father and that this somehow proved I had coached him.
We talked about what he was doing and it remained that he spent most of his time playing computer games, a far cry from the sociable, activity filled days playing outdoor healthy sports and painting pictures crouched on the living room floor of our little cottage – the same cottage I still had not been able to bear to return to, even for a minute.
I spent the rest of M’s birthday absorbed in baking him a football cake that he could take to school and share with his friends. This was no mean feat as I am not much of a pastry cook. In the past, I would have bought a shop cake which we would have chosen together or had one made, but this time it seemed important to put as much of myself into my efforts as possible. I hoped then, too, the foster carers would see that I was a dedicated mother and maybe doubt the validity of his being in their care.
Somehow making the cake made me feel closer to M and at least I felt I was doing something for him. I spent hours painstakingly creating a football pitch with two teams, little goal posts and icing for the markings. I knew that he was due back to school the day after I would see him and hoped the cake would be preserved by the Foster Carers until then and kept somewhere cool.
I had to say, I was pleased with the results. It had come out better than I had expected, but I longed for the days when birthdays had been something of an extra hassle to organize, to come up with new ideas for the children to entertain them and to avoid the overuse of "Colin the Clown" whose sad tired act had done the rounds for years. The last party I had organized for M had been a football party, but I had organized Santa themed parties, balloon water fights in winter and cracker making. M being born so close to Christmas gave us fewer options than the children who had birthdays in the summer, but I had always done my very best to make the day a happy one and whether our parties were small affairs at home, or larger affairs at venues, they were always fun. Now, I was left with just a square cake, which an afternoon’s effort had lovingly gone into and I wouldn't even get to see him blow out the candles.
The following day, I found a large container for the cake and carefully placed it in the boot of my old Mercedes. I set off for the contact centre with a car full of activities with which to occupy M. Each week I had to try and think of something we could do inside one small room or
in a tiny back yard that had a picnic table stuck in the middle. We had tried to play football and catch, in that tiny space until the weather had become too bad. It resembled an exercise yard where prison inmates might walk ten paces, for you certainly could walk no more and they treated me like I was a mass murderer, rather than a concerned mother who had tried to protect her son from harm.
M was thrilled with the cake and agreed to take it to school. I had brought along two further gifts that had only just arrived – games for his various consoles and DVDs that had been ordered online. They rummaged through my bag to check I had not included any surreptitious note. The Contact Centre staff policed as hard as the Social Workers and seemed to have been hired for their ability to bully. They soon noticed the extra gifts. I explained that these were late arrivals and I was allowed to give them to M, but from their expressions I could see their eyes light up as they saw an opportunity to get me into trouble for this infringement of a new “Agreement" - a second decree that I had been asked to sign, but had refused – the rules of which were barbaric and inhumane and allowed them to even police my facial expressions.
M showed less interest in the gifts, than he did in seeing me as usual. He had never been a materialistic child and I had raised him to expect gifts only on special occasions or by way of reward. Now I had no other way to keep a connection with him whilst we were apart as I could only give him objects of my affection to help ease his pain. What I wanted to give him most was my love and time and endless hugs – he would have swapped every single gift for having me back and I him.
There was a visible change in M around this time. It was subtle and may not have been picked up by anyone other than me. He had reverted to a babyish way of speaking and from the odd remark he had let slip. I got the impression they were now pushing hard to reintroduce M to his abuser.
I had no way of knowing what was going on outside the bleak dark room where we spent our precious hours together, crouched on the floor over a Monopoly game, drawing or making things.
I packed the time we had together as full as I could, but an active little boy who has just been to school does not want to then sit on the floor and play board games, he wants to run off steam. I decided that as they wouldn't let us do anything normal like go to the park or indeed go anywhere, then I would have to try and bring the park to him. I armed myself with as many indoor games as I could find – baseball, cricket, Boules and Skittles were all played on the wooden floor of a room not much beyond eighteen feet, with a cot stuck at one end, two settees, a table and two armchairs to navigate. Somehow we managed it and even got the more humane of the Contact Centre staff joining in. There was hilarity as we tried hard to bring outside inside and real life into purgatory. It was not much, but it was something and I know that M appreciated how hard I tried to make our time together as upbeat as possible.
Outside the Care Plan was gaining momentum using a mixture of carrot and stick with M. He had been told to say thank you to his father for the Playstation by phone and being a well-mannered child, he had done so. He had then been told his father would bring it to the house and he could thank him in person. M believed that all he had to do was accept the console and then his father would leave.
I didn't find out what was going on behind the scenes, until the next Family Court date when I was given the shocking news that contact had suddenly been re-established and was described as "going well." I didn't believe for one minute, that it was as described, but I was not surprised to hear they had achieved it. There was never any doubt that they would use fair means or foul until they forced the relationship into existence and kept myself and my father as much out of his life whilst they did it.
M was also having, what I can only describe as “brainwashing” sessions with the Guardian and psychologist who had originally supported us, then done a volte face - the man from Lancashire. It seemed that he was now coaching M to think differently about what his father had done and to distort the facts in his mind - technically this is known as Factitious Syndrome - also referred to a Munchhausen's by Proxy- a label given to mothers or fathers who convince a child that they are ill, for example, when they are not - but it was an appropriate label for what was happening to M at that time.
Around this time I was asked to renew M’s Club Penguin membership and also enrol him to a children’s social network called Moshi Monsters. I was suspicious as to why they would ask me to do this as there was no reason that the foster carers could not set this up or indeed his father. I resisted and made these points as I felt this may be a trap of some sort. They insisted, however, that I do this but as both sites had been joined using the Foster Carers details and email address and they now wanted me to upgrade M to full paid membership, I found I couldn't as obviously my details didn't tally. I went back to contact the following week and explained the difficulties to the key worker, Miss Whiplash but again she insisted I try and wrote down M’s password and user name on a piece of paper and gave it to me - another impossible hurdle to jump.
M was desperate to have his membership as he was still spending most of his time playing computer games.
I had given him a laptop for his birthday that I had bought in the US after he was taken. I would not normally have given him something like this until he was considerably older, but it was something I felt that would help him in Foster Care, as he was so restricted in what he was allowed to do.
M had been delighted with the present and on a whim I had registered a Skype address for him, giving him a user name that he would recognise but they would not. I didn't know whether he would remember using Skype in America to communicate with his grandfather. I trusted though that being a resourceful bright child, there was slim chance he would figure it out.
About a week after I had given him the laptop, I was on my father’s computer when a message popped up on Skype that I had two missed calls, both from M’s pseudonym. He had tried to ring me and my heart leapt with joy that was quickly followed by fear that he would be discovered and us both be in trouble should I respond. I was unsure what to do. Responding was risky and certainly using the call aspect of Skype was too dangerous, but I sent a tentative message of love and the next day he responded. I had to be very careful not to put anything in writing that may, if read, be incriminating.
I always kept my messages to words of love and reassurance, but one evening we managed to both be online at the same time. I needed to check that it was really M and not someone pretending to be him. I asked him a question that only he would know the answer to and that was the name of the boy he had befriended in America who lived next door. He confirmed the answer correctly, so I knew M had found a chink in the wall and had slipped through.
We had a few conversations on Skype for a couple of evenings. I had managed to discover that he was usually in his room at around seven O clock and I would wait patiently to see if he would come online, sometimes he did and sometimes not. Often the messaging would end abruptly and I would guess that someone had come into his room. He was careful and brave and I was proud of him for discovering a way of contacting me, but as quickly as this means of communication had begun, it ceased. Whether he'd become afraid of discovery or whether discovery had already happened, I didn't know, but I then lived in fear of any consequences for M or indeed myself that may result. None came and our small exercise in finding a chink of light in the chains that surrounded us, came to an end.
It took many phone calls and emails to get Moshi Monsters up and running but in the end I managed to succeed. I sent a couple of test messages to M to ensure it was now working – these were nothing more than a few X’s. Sadly as I had suspected, it was a trap and as soon as I had done that, I was in a great deal of trouble. I was accused by the Department of breaching my bail conditions. This came to nothing in the end but it caused me considerable anxiety and fear of re-arrest. It also brought M’s account to an end and had him stopped from using it. There was no limit to the ways that they would control and bully
myself and my child. It was a Fascist regime with government paid henchmen getting their kicks from destroying our lives.
Whilst Club Penguin did not have the same level of communication as Moshi Monsters and the most it was possible to do was to send pre-written postcards which contained childish innocuous messages such as “Happy Puffles” or “You're my best friend,” M was also prevented now from using that. I guess they hoped that M would blame me for the new restrictions and at a time when they were promoting his father as hard as possible, it was all engineered to break the bond between us and cement one with his abuser. They had not reckoned on the love that bound M and I together and which nothing could break. M was bright and intuitive and I am sure he knew only too well their devious games, but he was as powerless as was I.
The new Family Court barrister, Tom, flew over with Brian at the end of January to meet me for the first time. I collected him from the airport with my father. My first impressions were of a rather arrogant young man. He was young, blunt, clearly had a very high opinion of himself and was not prepared to believe me without first putting me hard to the test. I realised that unlike Gabby who needed no convincing of the reality of our situation, this man would need a lot of persuading. I also got the impression that my slim, blonde looks were a problem to him. It would be much easier to gain sympathy had I weighed a hundred and sixty pounds and been very unattractive. One wondered what issues with women he may have had himself. However, I couldn't change the way I looked and hoped he would not judge me on appearance but the sincerity of my love for my child.
Mummy Where Are You? (Revised Edition, new) Page 15
