Nowhere to Go: The heartbreaking true story of a boy desperate to be loved. Casey Watson

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СКАЧАТЬ then,’ I said, rising from my chair. ‘I’ll be off, then. See you soon, Tyler, yeah?’ I added, moving towards the door again. There was no response but as I turned before going through the doorway the movement of his hood told me he was watching me go.

      And what was he thinking? I wondered. About his ‘witch’ of a stepmother? And about me? Something about frying pans and fires? I would certainly figure. I did have long black hair, after all.

      ‘Erm, so what happened to the “Oh, it’s great having all this time to spend with the grandkids” malarkey?’ Mike wanted to know four short hours later, after I’d recounted the details of my strange day.

      Strange, but also curiously uplifting, all things considered. Because by now, it had to be said, I was buzzing. Dad had come round and was doing great, apparently, Mum had stopped worrying and was looking after him (well, getting under the nurses’ feet, more likely, bless her) and the prospect of taking on the lad I’d met earlier had gone from being a possibility to a probability to a cast iron certainty – well, in my head, at least. I still had to convince Mike.

      Who was still on the same track. ‘And what happened to the “Let’s take a few months out from fostering” for that matter? You have a very short memory, my dear …’

      It was true. I had said all of that. And when I’d said it, I’d truly meant it. But the very fact that Mike was teasing me about it was a Very Good Sign Indeed. If he’d been set against it, he wouldn’t be teasing. He’d be frowning. As it was I knew I wouldn’t have to work too hard to convince him.

      ‘Oh, shut up!’ I said, throwing a cushion in his general direction for good measure. ‘And, anyway, it’s been almost a year now. If we leave it much longer we’ll probably have to do retraining. And we don’t want to have to go through the faff of all that, do we?’

      I didn’t actually know if we would have to retrain – but it seemed a fair bet we would in some way, shape or form. At the very least in some aspect of health and safety. You couldn’t turn around for new health and safety initiatives, after all, could you? So it was less ‘little white lie’ and more ‘overemphasising the negative’ because I knew it was something that would get him. And I’d been right – a look of horror began spreading across his face. Big and assertive and managerial as he was, my husband was cringingly shy when it came to things involving group participation. And that was something the fostering training process had had in spade loads: lots of role play with fellow trainees and lots of speaking in public. It would be his worst nightmare to have to do it all again.

      He dried his hands – he’d been just finishing off the last of the drying up – and now came to join me on the sofa.

      ‘Okay, so what’s this kid like, then?’ he asked. ‘The real, unvarnished truth, mind. And when were you thinking of him moving in?’

      I took a moment to try and think how best to convey my first impressions, and though I could think of lots of ways to couch ‘stabbed his stepmum’ in such a manner that it would sugar the pill slightly, I realised it was probably best to prepare for the worst and then work upwards. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, love,’ I said. ‘He looks like he might be a proper little handful, to be honest. He swears like a trooper and had a bit of a temper on him, too. One that …’ To say or not to say? Yes, say, Casey. ‘Well, remember when Justin first came to us?’

      Mike nodded. Slowly. ‘Oh dear.’

      ‘Well, yes, you say that,’ I countered, turning to face him on the sofa and swinging my legs up beneath me. ‘I mean, he turned out to be such a lovely kid, didn’t he? And look at him now! Imagine if we hadn’t given him that chance? And, well, was it so difficult, really, looking back?’

      Mike gave me what my mum would call an old-fashioned look, and perhaps not without very good reason. Justin had been our first ever foster child and his horrendous background (and, boy, it had been a grim one) had caused him to not only build a wall right around him but also the mental equivalent of a roll of barbed wire – he had a tendency to lash out at anyone who tried to help him. His behaviour had been so bad that one previous carer had been moved to point out that he was ‘a newspaper headline just waiting to happen’ – and not one about the Queen’s Jubilee.

      For almost a year Justin had turned our lives upside down – and not just Mike and my lives either; the whole family had been involved, particularly our youngest, Kieron, then still in his teens. But it had worked out okay. We eventually got to the root of everything. And Justin had turned out to be like any other kid; hurting and sad and abandoned and alone, and, once he had some love and stability, he responded positively. He blossomed before our eyes, and he grew.

      And Justin, fully grown now, was still in our lives, testament to the fact that love and stability had a lot to be said for it. Love and stability, in most cases, worked.

      And we could offer that to this lad, though I sensed I didn’t need to bang on about it.

      ‘You’re right, I suppose,’ Mike agreed – though he might still have had half a mind on ‘Pretend you’re the foster dad and that Mrs Potter is this young girl who is coming on to you …’ Either way, I could tell we were on. ‘And if it turns out to get a bit lively, well, I suppose it keeps us on our toes, doesn’t it?’ he added. ‘Keeps us young.’

      I laughed at that, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. ‘Young’ was one thing we weren’t. I was 47 now and Mike was a year older. And though that didn’t make us old, it did make me rational. There were lots of ways of defining the word ‘lively’, after all. And given the sort of kids we had tended to foster so far, I reckoned our definition probably wasn’t the same as most …

Chapter 3

      Because the respite carers were off on holiday within a couple of days of Tyler joining them, we didn’t have much time to get organised. Which was nothing new – we were used to taking in children at short notice – but, given the length of time since our last stint of fostering, ‘getting organised’ this time wasn’t just a case of making a bed up; it involved making a bed visible in the first place. It didn’t matter how many times I pointed out the meaning of the term ‘spare’ room, we were all guilty (even our grown-up kids who No Longer Lived With Us) of using the ones we had – three of them now, all told – as a free branch of Safestore.

      But I was happy enough to roll my sleeves up and get stuck in, not only because it gave me something physical to do – always a great stress-buster – but also because I felt the familiar buzz of excitement that always accompanied saying yes to a new child. It was the thrill of the challenge; the anticipation of finding out what made them tick.

      That this one needed a temporary loving home was obviously a given, but apart from that we knew very little else, due to Tyler’s social worker being away on maternity leave. Not that John hadn’t tried. He’d at least managed to establish a couple of facts.

      ‘Or, rather, problems,’ he’d corrected, when he’d popped round the day before and I’d asked him what facts he did know – over and above the parents’ names, anyway, which were apparently Gareth and Alicia. ‘He’s been with them since he was three and there’ve apparently been problems pretty much since the start.’

      ‘And before that?’

      ‘Before that he was with his birth mother, now deceased. Died of a drug overdose. He’s been with dad and stepmum ever since.’

      I СКАЧАТЬ