Broken: A traumatised girl. Her troubled brother. Their shocking secret.. Rosie Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ out from the excitement of the day, Megan was asleep by 7 p.m. From what Joan had said I suspected that bedtime for Archie and Bobbi might not go quite as smoothly. Most people found it difficult to settle in a strange bed, so I anticipated an unsettled evening. What followed, however, took me by complete surprise.

      As Archie was quite a bit older than Bobbi, I gave him the option of staying up to read or watching TV. He seemed pleased with the offer and, after showering, went downstairs to watch You’ve Been Framed. The sound of his laughter drifting up the stairs as I ran a bath for Bobbi made me smile, but it had the opposite effect on his sister. ‘Why can’t I watch it?’ she howled, stamping her feet on the tiled floor. Her cheeks were puce, her eyes red and goggling.

      ‘You know why, Bobbi,’ I said, keeping my voice even. While many of the children I have looked after have been largely ignored by their birth parents, they’ve also rarely been taught what the word ‘no’ means. Kneeling on the bathmat, I leaned over and swished some bubble bath around in the water. ‘I warned you that there’d be no more television today if you bit Archie again.’ I hadn’t seen it happen, but Archie’s yowls had reached me while I washed my hands in the bathroom. He had defended her again, claiming that it hadn’t hurt much, but the welts on his arm where she’d bit him were red and angry looking, and his eyes were glassy with tears. I turned to face her. ‘Besides, he’s much older than you. It’s right that he stays up a little bit longer.’

      After only a few hours in her company, I already had a strong suspicion that she wasn’t going to take any sort of discipline lying down. She stamped her foot again. ‘I am going down to watch it!’ she growled, rocketing out to the stairs.

      ‘Your bath is nearly ready,’ I said, staying where I was. I preferred to avoid chasing her around the house if at all possible. ‘I have some special toys here somewhere. Now, where did I put them?’

      I leaned over and opened one of the low cupboards, sensing that she was back, somewhere behind me. I made a thing of rummaging through the bottles of shampoo and tubes of toothpaste. ‘They’re there!’ Bobbi screeched from the doorway. ‘Right there!’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘There!’

      ‘Oh right!’ I pulled them out. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

      She giggled, her eyes settling on the water pistols, ducks and little sail boats in the box I was holding. Relieved, I closed the door behind her.

      ‘No-o-o-o-o!’ she bellowed, spinning around. ‘I’m going to watch the telly!’

      ‘I think we have some bubbles here somewhere.’

      She let out a growl of fury and banged her fists on the door, pummelling with all her might. Lots of children in the care system struggle with an overwhelming, almost pathological need to be in control. I suddenly thought of Taylor, a ten-year-old girl I had cared for about a decade earlier. The witnessing of severe domestic violence against her mother by her abusive father had left Taylor desperately anxious. She was so badly affected that she wouldn’t even leave school at the end of the afternoon; even when the building was empty and the cleaners had finished doing their rounds. Though frustrated by her behaviour at the time, I came to realise that Taylor was clasping onto the only things in her life that she had any control over, because everything else was falling apart. As the months passed and her trust in me grew, she allowed me to take over the reins and mother her. She’s a grown woman now and sometimes when she writes to me she mentions her ‘sit-ins’. They’re a standing joke between us.

      Some people remain convinced that the relatively new diagnoses of pathological demand avoidance (PDA) and oppositional defiance disorder (ODD) are invented labels demanded by ineffectual parents who are simply incapable of providing consistent boundaries. You mean they’re just not doing as they’re told is a common response to any conversation involving PDA and ODD.

      When I first started out as a foster carer it was a view I shared as well. Having cared for chronically inflexible children though, I’ve become convinced that trauma, both pre- and post-birth, has a profound impact on the brain. In recent years, scientific evidence involving the use of brain scans has confirmed altered brain functioning in children who have been abused or neglected in early infancy.

      ‘Hey, come here, sweetie.’ I crawled until I was alongside her then wrapped my arm around her back, holding her close to my side. It was a non-violent resistance (NVR) technique designed to promote a feeling of solidarity rather than confrontation. ‘I know you’re upset about missing out on TV, but if you come and have a bath nicely we can watch some in the morning, okay?’

      Naming a child’s feelings sometimes helps to take the sting out of their tantrum, but with Bobbi it only seemed to fan the flames. With a roar of fury she shook her arms loose. ‘I WANT TELLY NOW!’ she screeched, ramming home the message by whacking me on the top of my head.

      I couldn’t help but cry out and she stilled, watching me intently. Her eyes shone and her lips twitched. So much for solidarity, I thought.

      ‘Kind hands, Bobbi,’ I warned, but she lashed out again, catching my cheek with one of her nails. Her survival mechanism had kicked in again; the ancient safety net that programmes us to react to perceived threat in a fight, flight or freeze mode. This little girl, it seemed, was going to fight.

      I felt a flare of annoyance but I swallowed it down. There was no sense in matching her anger with my own – trying to regulate a child’s emotions while in a dis-regulated state was like ironing clothes using a pack of frozen peas – it was never going to work. I cuddled her close, fending off her blows with my arms.

      It took a while, but slowly she relaxed, her small body slumping against mine. She allowed me to undress her without further complaint and what followed was the quickest bath I had ever supervised. Her eyelids grew heavy afterwards, when I wrapped her in a warm towel, but when I switched on the hairdryer to dry the damp ends of her shoulder-length hair, she flew into alert, her eyes goggling with distress. I did my best to towel dry it and tucked her into bed, passing her the soft rabbit she had taken to earlier. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ she asked suddenly, her chin wobbling.

      ‘She’s at home, sweetie. You’ll see her soon.’

      She blinked as I covered her with the duvet, then rolled onto her side and closed her eyes. As I stroked some blonde strands behind her ears, I noticed for the first time the picture she had drawn earlier, now stuck on the wall between the bunks. I felt a prickle of unease. It was a childish drawing of several men and women, but what unsettled me were the angry expressions on their faces and the private parts drawn in graphic detail between their legs.

       Chapter Four

      ‘Do I have to go to bed now?’ asked Archie when I walked into the living room five minutes later. He was sitting on the sofa, Mungo resting contentedly at his feet. A few feet away the credits of You’ve Been Framed were rolling across the television screen.

      ‘What time do you usually go to bed on a school night?’ I asked distractedly, still unsettled by the sight of Bobbi’s drawings. Mungo nuzzled my hand as I joined Archie on the sofa. I stroked his head and gave myself a mental shake. It was perfectly possible that the drawings were entirely innocuous. Children with older siblings often demonstrated behaviour that was beyond their years.

      Jumping to conclusions was one of the pitfalls of fostering that I tried to avoid. Like social workers, when СКАЧАТЬ