The Silent Witness. Casey Watson

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СКАЧАТЬ hearing Marley Mae giggling.

      Still, once bitten, ever vigilant – and we’d certainly had our scares down the years. None of us would ever forget the day when Flip, a young girl we’d had with foetal alcohol syndrome, had taken it upon herself to give us a post-lunch break and take Marley Mae off for a walk in the local woods. So when over an hour had passed and neither had reappeared, Riley and I exchanged a ‘Let’s one of us just go and check what they’re up to’ expression. I was just rising from my chair – being the closest to the door – when my granddaughter marched in and made a beeline for the tree, below which her own sack of presents still sat.

      ‘Oh, hello,’ I said, glancing behind her to see no sign of Bella. ‘So, what was the outcome? What did Bella get?’

      I was rewarded by Marley Mae putting a finger to her lips and emitting the sort of self-defeating high-decibel ‘Shhhh!’ that was her trademark. ‘She’s going to sleep,’ she whispered, falling to her chubby little knees to dig around among her haul.

      ‘And she’s sad about her mummy,’ she added, turning around, having produced a cuddly toy; the cuddly snowman, from the film Frozen, that she’d been hoping for so much. ‘So I’m going to let her borrow Olaf.’

      Riley and I rose as one to go up with her, both first agreeing to the ‘You must be quiet!’ order she issued before agreeing to lead the way.

      We trooped up, a little battalion, led by our diminutive general, and followed Marely Mae into Bella’s bedroom through the now wide-open door.

      And it was to find a room totally transformed. Everywhere – all over the carpet, the bed, and on any and every horizontal surface – was what looked like confetti, but made out of wrapping paper. Which I immediately recognised as the paper Bella’s presents had been wrapped in. Only it had now been transformed into a million tiny pieces.

      Bella herself appeared to be asleep. She was curled in an S shape, a tiny form on the bed, with both the rabbit we’d bought for her and her Dobby close beside her, while further down the bed was the ‘iPodge’ Marley Mae had been alluding to, together with other presents: some sort of nature annual, what looked like a folded hoodie, a pair of jeans and a jewellery-making kit.

      ‘We torded it,’ Bella whispered proudly, before tip-toeing theatrically across the carpet and gently placing her precious Olaf close by Bella’s blonde curls. A holy trinity of stuffed animals to chase the nightmares away. ‘There,’ she mouthed silently, with admirable restraint, before turning back to us, placing a finger to her lips again and shooing us outside.

      I pulled the door to, while Riley picked Marley Mae up, and as she now announced that she needed a wee we all trooped into the bathroom.

      ‘You made all that confetti yourselves, did you?’ I asked her, as Riley helped her with her pants.

      ‘It’s not confetti,’ she told us. ‘It’s snowflakes. Bella liked making snow and she let me help her. I was good at it.’ Then she frowned. ‘But then she was sad,’ she said. ‘She cry-ded a lot when we were doing it. I tolded her you wouldn’t be cross about the snow, Nanny, but she still cry-ded.’

      ‘But I bet it looked pretty when you threw it everywhere,’ Riley observed. ‘And, oh, the joy of Hoovers,’ she added to me drily.

      I pictured the scene. Bella’s distress. The emotional meltdown of seeing it laid bare. Of seeing it laid bare with an over-excited Marley Mae, who’d known no such devastation in her happy young life. Seeing the presents from parents who weren’t with her – or each other – opened the gaping hole where the spirit of Christmas should be.

      ‘Whose idea was it to make the snow?’ I asked Marley Mae. ‘Was it yours?’

      She shook her head. ‘Bella liked it.’ She mimed a ripping motion. ‘She likes making snow. And then she throwed it, like this –’ She thrust her arms up and outwards. ‘But she’s sad now. She said. So I said I’d get Olaf for her to cuddle.’ All done, she held her arms up for Riley to scoop her up again. ‘You shouldn’t cry on Christmas Day, should you, Mummy?’

      I glanced in, as we passed, to our poor, anguished visitor, lost in dreams – good ones hopefully, please let them not be nightmares – beneath her blanket of multicoloured snow.

      No, I thought sadly, you shouldn’t.

       Chapter 5

      It’s impossible to predict how a child will respond to extreme stress unless you know that child very well. And even then it’s an inexact science. Even with more than two decades of mothering my own two under my belt, I could still find myself surprised by how they reacted in adversity, sometimes astonishing me by their fortitude and stoicism under pressure and other times collapsing under the strain of something apparently minor. Every one of us really is unique.

      Which is why, with Bella, as with any child, I assumed nothing. Yes, I’d make assumptions about what she might or might not be feeling, but how those feelings played out in terms of how she coped with her current lot was something no one could predict. She also came to us without much back-story, which would have enabled us to get a better feel for her, and which was in contrast with several of the children we’d previously fostered, such as Justin (he of the bulging, six-year, thirty-failed-placements file) and little Georgie, who was autistic and had been in care, and therefore monitored, for almost all of his life.

      Three days in, therefore (we were by now in the lull before New Year, the bedroom ‘snow’ gone and forgotten), and I felt almost as clueless about Bella’s emotional make-up as I had when she’d arrived on Christmas Eve – the moving scene on Christmas night notwithstanding. She’d clearly got something out of her system, which was obviously going to be A Good Thing, but she’d spent almost all of Boxing Day – which was a quieter one, with the little ones gone, and the day lazier – withdrawn and uncommunicative. And though she’d come out with us on a trip to town, to have a nose around the German Christmas market, she’d simply done as asked, like a biddable elderly relation almost, putting her coat on, doing the buttons up, donning the gloves I’d found for her and then trailing along, hand in mine, but completely disengaged. The most animated she’d been was eating a doughnut. And she’d only managed to eat half of that.

      Two days later, and she was still saying almost nothing to any of us bar Tyler, and what she did say – the odd ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘thank you’ – was always in response to something said to her. For much of the time, and I didn’t push it, she had her nose in the Harry Potter book we’d given her. Reading, it was becoming clear, was her main refuge.

      So today’s masterplan (which wasn’t any sort of masterplan, really; I was leaving that for John to organise once everyone was back in their various offices) was for the pair of us to go wedding-dress shopping with Riley, while her David stayed at home to mind the kids.

      I had promised my eager-beaver daughter that I’d fit some time in in the New Year to go dress hunting, but with Mike back in work – to cover sickness; there’d been some grim virus going round – and Tyler off to spend the day with Denver, I figured today was as good as any to make a start, not only as it would stop the four walls of the silent house closing in, but also, despite the inevitably fraught nature of competitive sale shopping, it did mean we had at least a fighting chance (fighting being the operative word) of bagging a bargain. And since Mike and I were footing the bill, that would be a major bonus.

      It СКАЧАТЬ