Skin Deep. Casey Watson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ room. So that’s positive, isn’t it?’ she finished brightly.

      I couldn’t help but laugh. This, too, was a part of the process. The business of ‘bedding in’ – with both the child and the social worker that came with her. And one of the key things that happened during every home visit was that the social worker spent time alone with the child privately. This was a necessity, obviously, because it gave the child a voice; a chance to share their own thoughts about the place where they’d been billeted – to comment on how they felt about aspects of their care.

      It was a dialogue that invariably had to be adapted to a child’s age and stage. An older child might well be able to articulate their feelings easily, but a little one might need a simpler schema to work with; a question-and-answer format that could elicit, say, a thumbs-up or thumbs-down response. And it wasn’t just valuable for the child. As a foster carer myself I knew what many of us were like. If given a thumbs-up, thumbs-down or halfway-between selection, we’d err towards the ‘up’ almost every time. That was the nature of the job – and perhaps the psychological make-up of the majority. You didn’t go into fostering if you were generally beset by negativity; that a person tended towards the positive was probably an essential to do the job. You definitely had to see hope where others didn’t.

      Which made us unreliable witnesses. Given the opportunity to tell it like it was, I knew for a fact that the majority of us didn’t. We’d make light of problems if we could, wanting to try to deal with them ourselves, and only when things got really bad did we want to ask for help. Silly, really, and definitely not in anyone’s best interests, but definitely also par for the course.

      Which meant that social workers, who didn’t always get a chance to see the extent of a child’s idiosyncrasies for themselves, sometimes failed to hear the full extent of them either. Today, however, Ellie was in luck because just as she was preparing to leave, having given me my pep talk, Tyler blew into the kitchen like the proverbial East Wind.

      ‘Casey, you best go outside,’ he said. ‘Go and see to her. I think she’s going Loony Tunes again.’

      ‘Tyler!’ I admonished, while Ellie slipped her files into her bag. ‘What have I told you about using expressions like that in this house? What do you mean, exactly? What’s Flip actually doing?’

      ‘Three guesses,’ he suggested as we both followed him out into the back garden. ‘Only much worse,’ he threw over his shoulder.

      He wasn’t wrong. Flip, who as far as we’d known had been playing in the garden with Pink Barbie while we’d chatted, was squatting on the grass, holding the doll above her, swooping it back and forth like a boy would do with an aeroplane. She was also singing. Singing lustily, at the top of her voice. But it wasn’t the song – ‘Under the Sea’, from The Little Mermaid – that stopped me in my tracks. It was the fact that her hair and face, and that of the doll, were covered in what looked like something I hoped that it wasn’t but which I feared, from Tyler’s tip-off, that it more than likely was. ‘Flip!’ I shouted. ‘Is that poo that you’re covered in?’

      Flip looked up as if surprised and then smiled and waved at me. She then put the Barbie – and I cringed – close to her ear. Then she spoke. ‘Yes, it’s Mummy, Barbie! Look! Wave to Mummy.’

      Barbie waved. Tyler wrinkled his nose. Ellie tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Erm, Casey,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a meeting I really shouldn’t be late for. So unless you need me – and just say, because it’s absolutely no problem – I think I’d better get going and leave this to you.’

      Would I do any different in her shoes? Probably not, I conceded. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘you get off. We’ve got this one covered. No problem.’

      ‘No problem?’ squeaked Tyler, sharp enough not to have missed my royal ‘we’.

      I turned back to Flip. ‘Come on, miss. Indoors, please. Time for a bath. Honestly, Flip, how many times?’ I added, as she ambled across the grass. ‘Why would you poo in the garden again? You know you must use the toilet. Come on. Inside.’

      Tyler stood back, making a big show of retching as he did so. ‘Urgh! You’re disgusting, Flip! Urrrrgh!’

      I shared his sentiments. Up close and personal the smell was indeed disgusting, encouraging Ellie all the quicker to say goodbye and head for the front door. I changed my mind then. Perhaps the bath indoors needed to be preceded by an al fresco soaking. It was another scorcher and we had the hose and paddling pool out, after all.

      ‘It wasn’t Flip, it was me, Mummy!’ she said in a squeaky voice, brandishing the doll. ‘It wasn’t Flip. Flip’s a good girl an’ she knows to go to the toilet. I’m sowwy, Mummy.’

      Great, I thought, ruing the fact that the other night I’d unwittingly given this diminutive plastic goddess a voice. I could see Tyler opening his mouth to offer his own take on the subject too.

      ‘We can talk about all that in a bit,’ I said to both of them. ‘Now come on over here, miss,’ I said, directing Flip towards the coiled hose with a carefully placed finger. ‘I think you and Pink Barbie need a bit of jet wash.’

      Tyler cottoned on then. ‘She’s not getting in the paddling pool!’ he shouted after us, his voice indignant. ‘I’m not fishing that stuff out as well as all the flies!’

      I had a re-think. ‘No, of course I wasn’t going to put her in the paddling pool,’ I lied, the words ‘creek’ and ‘paddle’ springing instantly to mind as I herded her across the lawn and told her to stay put.

      Tyler handed me the hose with an air of resignation. ‘I knew she’d be trouble,’ he sighed.

Chapter 5

      To say I was relieved when the start of September came around was a bit of an understatement. It wasn’t the fact that I had two full-on children in the house particularly; I’d obviously dealt with that many times before. It was that having our very own Minnie the Minx around – as Tyler had taken to calling Flip – was physically and emotionally draining, and I was exhausted.

      Flip simply didn’t seem to have an off switch. She chattered on ceaselessly, about anything and everything, from the minute she woke up to the minute she went to sleep. And if she had no actual human available to chat to, she chattered on to Pink Barbie instead.

      ‘Mummy, why is the sky blue? Mummy, what are leaves made of? Why do they taste nasty and peas don’t? Where do clouds live when they go home at night? Why has the daddy got silver bits in his hair?’ The stream of never-ending questions (not to mention the answering of them, which invariably threw up even more questions) was beginning to take its toll, even if it did at least point to a healthily enquiring mind, and even if the Mike-centred questions did make me giggle. Where we used to stay up until around 11 o’clock, we found ourselves clock watching from eight, when Flip went to bed, and would follow her and Tyler (who would be back to bed at nine on school days) as soon as we were confident they would be asleep – so keen were we to get our heads down ourselves. We knew we had to; the small-hours screaming sessions could start at any time, and seemed to be happening two nights out of three, and at least that way I was sure to get some sleep in before they started and I had to begin the laborious process of settling Flip back down again.

      No, she needed to be back in school, badly. Though I’d had a fight on my hands to get her placed where I wanted her, because Ellie’s СКАЧАТЬ