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

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      Justin was damaged because of the things that had happened to him when he was too young to make any sense of them. Then damaged further by an assumption – be it for whatever reason, perhaps no reason – that the problem, at every stage after that, was him.

      Well, no more, I thought. From here on in, no more.

      When Justin got home from school that afternoon I had already prepared a tea of crumpets and hot chocolate – his favourite – for us both. And as I boiled the milk and toasted the crumpets I told him about all the new things the agency had decided to put in place. How he’d have a couple of new friends to take him out for treats and new activities at the weekends; how, because he’d started doing so well at school (both in terms of behaviour and schoolwork, the incident notwithstanding) that they’d set him new, more challenging, targets and, most importantly, because he’d been doing so well with his points – the recent outburst again, notwithstanding – that Mike and I were setting him new targets too.

      From now on he’d earn points by doing more complex things, because the day-to-day things that seemed challenging when he came to us, such as behaving nicely at mealtimes and making his bed, were no longer things any of us even thought about any more. From now on he would have to think harder about earning points.

      ‘How?’ he wanted to know.

      I sat down beside him with the buttered crumpets, and showed him the new list I’d made up that afternoon.

      ‘No more exclusions from school, obviously, is at number one,’ I said. He smiled ruefully at this.

      ‘And then there’s no TV till you’ve done whatever homework you’ve got, okay? Three chores around the house every week – but without being asked, which is what makes it harder – and being polite all the time, to everyone, both in and out of the house.’ I went down the complete list for him as he finished his first crumpet. ‘What d’you think, then? You reckon you can manage all of those?’

      ‘Easy,’ he said, picking up his mug and grinning at me over it. ‘Easy, that lot are, Casey. Piece of cake. Does this mean that my pocket money goes up too?’

      I grinned back at him. ‘Well, let’s just see how you go with your new points first, then me and Mike might have a chat about that.’

      I put a second round of crumpets into the toaster to start browning. He seemed genuinely excited about both the new targets and the new provisions. And why wouldn’t he be? There were clearly people in the world who genuinely wanted to make his life better. It wasn’t rocket science, was it? Of course it pleased him.

      In any event, he seemed to have forgotten all about being angry with me. Long may that state of affairs continue, I thought.

      Chapter 10

      The end of the week saw another email arrive from John Fulshaw:

      Hi Casey, I received a call this morning from my manager. He has written to J’s last two social workers asking for information to be forwarded urgently. He is waiting for this, but in the meantime he has managed to find out about a couple who fostered Justin two years ago. They are still fostering for us and I have an appointment to see them on Tuesday. I will let you know how that goes when I visit you at the end of the week. Speak soon, JF

      I was so pleased that John seemed to be making such an effort to discover all the details of Justin’s past for us. It really seemed to me that this was crucial to making further progress with him; it was a cliché, but I felt understanding where he’d come from was the key to helping him find a brighter future.

      And what a complicated past it was turning out to be. At the end of that week, when John came for the promised visit – we’d arranged for him to come back so the two of us could do a quick follow-up on the LAC meeting – his expression told me he’d more to impart.

      ‘I have more news,’ he said, without preamble, as I showed him in. ‘Though brace yourself, because it’s not very edifying, I’m afraid.’

      ‘Go on,’ I said, as we went into the kitchen. ‘I’m pretty much braced for anything, to be honest. I take it it’s not the kind of information you’d have been thrilled to pass on before we agreed to have him?’

      ‘You got it,’ said John. ‘Hit the nail on the head, Casey.’ And it turned out he was right. If we’d known it, we might well have acted differently.

      He’d been to see the couple earlier in the day, as he’d planned to, and it turned out they’d had Justin for six months a couple of years back; at the time he left them Justin had been nine. They told John that for the first few weeks things had been fine, that they’d all got on and that he’d settled very well.

      The placement had followed a period when he’d been living back with his mother, truncated when she’d decided to place him back into care so she could ‘concentrate on her new boyfriend’. I felt my hackles begin to rise as John recounted what had happened. How could a mother do that? It was one thing to be in extremis and not coping; quite another to pick up and discard your own flesh and blood just because you decided they were annoying you. But she’d been able to do it that first time, hadn’t she? And if you’ve done something once, however shocking that something is, you get acclimatised; it’s not quite so shocking the next time, and little by little, in this case, it seemed, she had perhaps come to see social services and voluntary care orders, in a drug-addled way, as simply an extended form of childminding.

      But at the same time, for Justin, this was a brutal betrayal. Hurt and rejected, he had refused to have contact with his mum following this, perhaps (to my mind) to punish her for sending him away, perhaps in the hope that she’d change her mind. But after three months he relented and asked his carers if he could see her again, and she agreed on two hours every two weeks. Two whole hours – what a generous mother she was, I thought grimly.

      It was around now that his mood took a turn for the worse; he became sullen and defiant and withdrew into his shell, telling the couple that his mum loved him and wanted him back but that social services wouldn’t let her have him.

      Once again, I felt my anger rise as John recounted what they’d said; that when they investigated, Janice did confess that that was what she’d told Justin, because she didn’t want him ‘knowing that she didn’t want him back’.

      I’ll bet. I thought grimly. Need a scapegoat to let you off the hook? Try social services. They’ll be happy to carry the can.

      ‘So what happened next?’ I asked John, as I poured milk into our drinks. ‘Was he told the truth in the end?’

      ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding. ‘Several times, over the years, I believe. But Justin, of course, refused to believe it. On the couple of occasions when he did confront his mother it would, I’m told, invariably end up in a screaming match, with her inevitably insisting that all social workers were liars, who only wanted to split up families. She’d then come grovelling to social services, apologising for it, but still maintaining that she’d done it because she didn’t want to hurt him by telling him the real truth. Bloody awful either way, don’t you think?’ He sipped his coffee. ‘And Justin’s subsequent behaviour on this occasion – understandably, I’d say – got worse and worse, culminating in him being excluded from his primary school. He apparently went wild one morning, completely out of the blue, and ended up smashing two computers. It took three staff members to restrain him. And then Janice decided she’d had enough of him too, and СКАЧАТЬ