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As soon as the control panel was at eye level I heard – and felt – her sigh. ‘You’ve got this set too late,’ she said, tapping the panel with a finger.
‘Have I?’ I asked her, as I let her back down to the floor. Despite the gravity of the situation, this was such a surreal moment that I struggled to keep the smile off my face.
Her own expression was deadly serious. ‘It’s winter,’ she pointed out. ‘So what I expect you’ve probably done is forget about the clocks having gone back, when you moved in. Did you check it? Because I think it’s set to come on an hour too late.’
I couldn’t help but be impressed by her logic. That and the fact that she’d remembered that we’d not long moved in. ‘Are you cold?’ I asked her, because despite that I wasn’t really sure why it was bothering her anyway. I certainly wasn’t cold. I rarely was. I went at my domestic chores with far too much energy to feel chilly.
Abby shook her head. ‘No, no, not me,’ she explained. ‘I’m at school all day, aren’t I? It’s you. This really needs to come on at around three o’clock.’
There wasn’t much to say to that really, other than that I wasn’t cold, and only tended to put the heating on before teatime if I had my little grandsons round and it was a particularly cold day. Which I did, but as soon as I’d done so, and explained that it was obviously different for her mum – she would feel the cold, of course – she seemed even more agitated than she’d been in the first place.
So when we came back downstairs – after she’d changed out of her uniform, and also changed her dolly – I decided I would just go with the flow. Which I’d clearly need to. As soon as I wondered out loud what we could have for tea, she was once again looking stressed and asking questions.
‘Don’t you know what you’re cooking tonight?’ she asked me. ‘Don’t you have a chart?’
‘No, sweetheart,’ I explained, remembering what John had told me earlier. ‘Not really. I mean, I do have a rough plan – some things to choose from. But I generally see what I’ve got in the fridge and cupboards, then just cook what we most fancy having.’
I was reminded then of Justin, our first foster child. Compared to Abby, his background couldn’t have been more different. A veteran – aged only eleven – of twenty failed placements (foster homes and children’s homes), he’d come to us in such a state of emotional distress and anger that there had been times when Mike and I had despaired of ever being able to even reach him, let alone do anything to help him.
Abby was so different, on so many levels, yet it seemed we had exactly the same issue in the kitchen; that, like Justin, she needed a very clear set of rules – to know, as he had, exactly what we were eating on which day, and when. So, in terms of strategy, perhaps they weren’t going to be so different after all. At least, not in this respect. I smiled at her.
‘But now you’re here,’ I said to her, ‘I’m happy to do things your way – it will be such a treat not to have to think what to cook, I can tell you. So. What would you like for tea?’
This seemed to be exactly the right thing to say because she immediately looked happier, putting a finger to her lips, and tapping them as she consulted the chart she obviously had in her head.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s Wednesday, which is normally scrambled eggs and beans on toast day. If … um … that’s all right with you,’ she added politely.
‘Of course it is,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got plenty of both.’ I was just about to add that she could help me make it if she liked when she rolled up the sleeves of the hoodie she’d changed into. ‘Right,’ she said brightly. ‘I’ll get started, then.’
Of course, one of the things I was aware was in our brief was to gently re-train her to accept that she was a child and, as such, needed to reclaim a childhood. Which obviously meant accepting the normal child–adult roles, which, on the evidence of her first twenty-four hours in our company, was going to be something of a challenge.
But it was early days, so I decided I would let her have a degree of autonomy. For today at least. I told her we would prepare everything and cook it together, ready for when Mike got home from work.
‘And you should have seen her,’ I told Mike, after we’d finished our tea and I had the chance of a quiet few minutes upstairs with him, while Abby sat and wrote in her new scrapbook. ‘There was nothing she couldn’t do. She knew how to crack the eggs, whisk them, open the bean tins, and use the correct bowl for them, work out the microwave – absolutely everything.’
Mike grinned. ‘And it tasted good too! Sounds like we’ve lucked out with this one,’ he joked. ‘A dream, by the sounds of it, certainly compared with young Spencer! More like a housekeeper than a foster child, given half a chance!’
It obviously was a joke, and she certainly wouldn’t be given that half a chance, but even so, I was struggling to see where the challenge in this challenging child lay. Yes, she would have all sorts to deal with in the coming weeks, but compared with the sort of kids we usually looked after, this just didn’t seem to be even on the same scale.
But as later that evening we sat and watched her pulling strands of hair out again, a part of me – the rational part – knew better. She was also, we noticed, clock watching – or watch-watching, more accurately. Checking the little pink watch on her wrist again and again and again; looking at it, tapping the face, then pulling her sleeve back over it, then looking and tapping and covering it again. What she was watching for, what precise timing was being monitored, we didn’t know: when I asked why – if there was something she needed to remember to do – she coloured. Yet she continued to do it, right until the time she went to bed.
No. I knew better. However benign, compared with other kids’, her problems seemed to me, she was with us for a reason, as John had pointed out.
And we’d find out the extent of it soon enough.
The visit to see Sarah, Abby’s mother, had been arranged for around four the following afternoon and, having seen Abby off to school, I spent much of the day wondering what I was going to find when I met her.
Meeting family members in my role as a foster carer was something I’d learned I could never second-guess. It was such a singular and unnatural situation. In some circumstances, of course, you never got to meet the birth parents of a child you cared for, because all contact had been stopped by social services. Other times the relationship was civil, even if tense. Sometimes a parent was angry and downright hostile – we’d had a baptism of fire in that regard, for sure.
You never knew what to expect. Each situation was different. I’d been sworn at, I’d been threatened, I’d been genuinely scared, often, but the experience that had left the most lasting impression had been a couple of years back, with our second foster-child, Sophia, who had come to us after her mother had fallen down the stairs, and ended up in hospital, in a coma.
Like Sarah, Sophia’s mother had been on her own, with very little in the way of family, which was why Sophia, after a period of being looked after by an uncle, had finally had to come into care. Visits to Sophia’s mother, by the time she had come to live with us, meant СКАЧАТЬ