The Boy No One Loved and Crying for Help 2-in-1 Collection. Casey Watson

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СКАЧАТЬ – can you credit it? – and how he’d immediately lunged at her – by all accounts – and called her “fucking slut” and a “dirty whore”.’

      I shook my head, listening to all this. ‘Pregnant?’

      ‘So she said. Anyway, she told me she hit him back when he said that, and he apparently hit her right back again, threatening to punch her in the stomach.’

      I couldn’t take it in, even though it was perhaps exactly what we should have expected, given the history. ‘Oh, God,’ I said, with feeling. ‘What a mess.’

      ‘Oh, but there’s worse. He then “purposefully” – though how you can do that I don’t know – threw up all over his unopened Christmas presents and then told her she could stick them all up her arse. The little ones were apparently crying and begging him to be nice to her, but his response, or so she tells me, was to start on them too – telling them that their mother was a slut and both their dads were junkies. And so on and so forth till we got the call.’

      ‘Where was Justin while she was telling you all this? Did he have his own version?’

      ‘No. Not with us. He was already by the car. He had run out ahead of her when I first pulled up. He was just sat in the road, against the wheel, on the far side, crying his bloody eyes out.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it, Case. Really, I can’t. How could the woman be so bloody insensitive that she had no idea – and she didn’t, you could see that pretty clearly – how much she’d hurt him by what she’d said to him. Tell you what, I could have happily smacked her myself.’

      ‘So did Justin tell you much when you set off?’

      Mike shook his head. ‘He was wretched, Case, really wretched. He said the first thing she told him was that they’d already done Christmas the day before, and that the second was that she had a surprise for him. And, I mean, if you say that to a kid …’. He shook his head again, and I could see the whole thing had really got to him. ‘But the surprise, of course, was that she was going to have a little girl. He said she really seemed to think the idea was funny – I think it’s bloody criminal – and that she told him this girl of hers was going to be a princess and be spoiled and have everything. And be special. Not a “lunatic like him”, those were his exact words’. He sipped his coffee and sighed as he set the mug down. ‘And then he slept. All the rest of the way home.’

      We went to bed heavy of heart, around three. How could any mother in the world say such wicked things to her own child? One thing was sure: if we had even the smallest chance of helping Justin, there was so, so much more that we needed to know.

      Chapter 5

      One of the main things Mike and I had to do as foster carers was to keep a log of anything and everything that happened during each placement: a comprehensive record of progress and pertinent information that could be placed on record in a child’s file. In Justin’s case, his file being something of a black hole up to now, I felt it was doubly important that I get everything down while it was fresh in our minds. I was also anxious to press John Fulshaw for more facts about Justin’s mum and what exactly had been happening between them these past years. Twenty failed placements. I kept returning to that stark fact. If we wanted to help him we needed answers to so much. What had happened with this child? What had gone so badly wrong in so many placements? And we needed to know not just what had happened to him but why.

      One thing was crystal clear. That Justin was struggling to hold it together. He was hurting a lot and, from what Mike had witnessed at his mother’s house, with very good reason. And there was something else, too. Since returning from there, he seemed to have decided, consciously or unconsciously, that he needed to take what his mum did out on me. Me and all women, perhaps.

      Since Mike had pointed out the similarities between Janice and myself, I started to wonder if Justin sometimes found it difficult to separate his mother and me. It wasn’t too far fetched an idea, I thought, not with all the trauma he had suffered in his short life.

      ‘What you doing the cooking for?’ he asked Mike, when he was in the kitchen preparing lunch the next day. ‘You don’t have a dog and bark yourself.’ Surprised by that sort of comment coming from a child of eleven, Mike explained that not only didn’t we talk like that in our house, we didn’t believe it to be true, either. There was no hierarchy in our house, he explained. No order of importance. We were equals and in all things we worked as a team. If a meal needed preparing, then someone would prepare it. There was no law that said that someone had to be me. But Justin was adamant. ‘That’s women’s work,’ he said. And though Mike then explained that there was no such thing as ‘women’s work’, he wouldn’t have it. ‘You won’t ever catch me doing women’s work,’ he said firmly.

      Later that day, he came down from where he’d been playing on his computer in his bedroom to find me, Riley, David and Kieron playing Scrabble.

      ‘D’you want to join us?’ Riley asked him. Justin looked shocked that she’d even spoken to him. ‘Now, why would I want to do that?’ he said. He then, very pointedly, turned to Kieron and David. ‘Do you two want to play footie outside?’ he asked them. ‘We could set my new net up if you like.’

      Riley set her Scrabble tiles down, her face fixed in a grimace. ‘I was only trying to be friendly!’ she snapped at him. ‘And you can see perfectly well that they can’t play “footie”. We’re in the middle of a game, if you hadn’t noticed, so –’

      ‘It’s okay, Riley,’ I interrupted, conscious of the sudden tension. ‘I’m sure Justin didn’t mean to be rude. How about you stay and watch who wins this round, eh, Justin? Then maybe the boys will have a kick about with you after.’

      ‘Yeah,’ added David, grinning. ‘Stay and watch us annihilate these girls, yeah? Then we’ll play footie.’

      I loved David. He was such a great partner to Riley. Cheerful and funny, and also a rarity: a match for our very strong-willed daughter. Mike and I had both known him for longer than she had, as he was the son of a good friend of ours. I still didn’t think Riley realised quite how big a hand her mum and dad had had in having them ‘bump into’ each other so often.

      But like many men, he didn’t see the signals the way us girls did, and got a scowl from his girlfriend for his well-meaning comment, made, I didn’t doubt, to try and lighten up the situation. Justin sniggered, too, which annoyed Riley further. ‘You don’t think much of women, do you, Justin?’ she observed sharply.

      ‘You don’t think much of women, do you, Justin?’ he parroted. ‘Nag nag bloody nag.’ Upon which he turned on his heel and left the room.

      The boys still seemed largely oblivious to what was going on here, but Riley and I weren’t. Quite the opposite. We were seeing a pattern. And also a symptom, I thought – of a child trying hard to provoke a reaction.

      ‘I definitely think he’s trying to make you pay for what his mum said to him,’ Mike suggested, confirming my own thoughts, when we had a few moments alone together later.

      ‘Me and Riley,’ I said, nodding. ‘It’s that whole black-haired woman thing, I’m guessing.’ I sighed. ‘I wish he’d actually sit down and talk to me, instead.’

      But that wasn’t happening. And there was more to come, too. It was obvious that we were really only scratching the surface of how much pain Justin was really suffering. The following morning I came down to find him sitting at the table, his empty breakfast dishes beside him, reading a magazine.

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