Читать книгу Nowhere to Go: The heartbreaking true story of a boy desperate to be loved - Casey Watson, Casey Watson - Страница 12

Meeting Will, and hearing first hand about Tyler’s early childhood, was just the kick up the backside I think we needed. Yes, we’d already committed to him and, heaven knew, we’d had enough training, hadn’t we? Enough training to have ‘It’s the behaviour that’s bad, not the child’ mentally tattooed on our foreheads. But the image of that traumatised three-year-old, all alone with the body of his dead mother, was one that stuck firmly to the forefront of my brain.

‘And you know what always strikes me?’ I told Riley one afternoon the following week. ‘It’s that he doesn’t even seem to realise that he’s been handed such a bad hand.’

Tyler being out for his first trip with Will – they were off to the local bowling alley – we were round at Mum and Dad’s, enjoying a bit of family time with the baby, which only served to remind me how random a child’s birth circumstances were. Some babies were born into loving, stable homes. And some weren’t. Some had everything stacked against them from the outset.

‘Life’s been so tough for him,’ I went on. ‘I don’t think he really appreciates just how tough. Or that it’s the adults in his life that are responsible for how he now feels. He just doesn’t seem to have processed that. Turns everything on himself. Seems to feel it’s perfectly appropriate for people not to like him. It’s like he just accepts that he’s angry and wants everybody else to as well.’ I sighed. ‘I just wish I could find a way to get him to talk to me about it. But it really is like trying to get blood out of a stone. I only have to look at him in a certain way and I can see him squirming. I swear he has some sixth sense that tells him when I’m about to corner him and try and talk to him. Perhaps he’s like a dog – he can smell a heart-to-heart on the horizon like they can smell fear.’

Riley clapped her hands together. ‘Love it, Mum!’ she laughed. But she then moved on to her serious face, clearly thinking about the problem. At 27, she was the polar opposite of Kieron, though. Where my son would see everything on the surface and immediately have a practical solution or suggestion, Riley was a deep, thoughtful thinker. Like me, she always tried to look beyond what you could see. She was good at it, too, and until taking a bit of a break after having had Marley Mae she and her partner David had been fostering as well – providing respite care for the same agency that we worked for.

Passing the baby across to my mum for a cuddle, she smiled at me. ‘Well, you know what to do about that, Mum, don’t you?’

I raised my eyebrows as she continued to fuss over my youngest grandchild. ‘I do?’

‘Course you do,’ she said. ‘Do what you used to do with me and Kieron. Trap him in the car. Take him off for a drive somewhere and drone on at him while he can’t escape.’

‘God, you make it sound like a form of torture,’ I said, shaking my head at my amused mother.

Riley laughed. ‘It was! Felt like that sometimes, at any rate. I swear, sometimes me and Kieron used to sweat at the jangle of your car keys.’

‘Oh you do exaggerate, Riley,’ I admonished. She was right, though. I did remember doing just that. And she was spot on; sometimes it probably did feel like a kind of torture – especially if the subject matter was at all sensitive: affairs of the heart, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, sex …

And it worked. Even if you didn’t always see the evidence at the time, there was a lot to be said for putting kids in a position where they didn’t have to make eye contact with you. It made it easier for them to talk. And it made it harder for them not to listen.

I still did it, too, with foster kids – albeit almost unconsciously these days. And Riley was right. I’d not yet thought about it, but it was exactly what I should do with Tyler. Because if I was to help him, I really needed to understand better where all that rage and hurt and self-loathing had come from.

And it didn’t take a brain surgeon to reach the conclusion that the relationship with his stepmother was probably key. Though I had nothing to go on bar the rather vague detail on Tyler’s file that ‘relations had broken down’ with his father’s partner, I was itching to get an inkling of what form this breakdown had taken. More to the point, when had it started? Had something specific prompted it? Something Tyler had done? I was particularly intrigued by what sort of conversations must have happened early on, between the father who’d been told he had a son who he’d never known existed, and the partner with which he’d had another son in the meantime, and who might have had her own ideas about the situation in which – through no fault of her own – she now found herself.

I tried to relate it to me. How would I have felt if Mike had come home from work one evening and announced that he had another child I hadn’t known about? What would my reaction have been if he then told me I would have to welcome it into our family and raise it?

I didn’t know. That was the honest answer. I didn’t have a clue how I’d have reacted. First, I’d have to accept that he really didn’t know anything about it, and then … well, and then I’d have to do a great deal of soul-searching, wouldn’t I? About my capacity to not only accept this sudden cuckoo-in-the-nest into my home but to commit to loving it and cherishing it to the best of my ability; to bringing it up as if it were my own.

Of course, I wanted to think that, yes, I would be able to do that. After all, falling in love with the kids we fostered was both my blessing and my curse. It was emotionally draining every time, quite apart from anything else. So, yes, on balance, had it been Mike, and had the circumstances been the same ones, I wanted to think that I would embrace the child – because it would have been his child, and a half-sibling to his other children too, which would have meant I would have no hesitation. It would be the right thing to do.

But this wasn’t me, was it? And life was rarely that simple and rosy. With her own child just a toddler, was this Alicia coping okay anyway? Could it be that, actually, she was managing, but that she really didn’t want to take on any more? Was she pressured by Tyler’s father to take him in? Pressured by social services? Pressured by knowing that if she didn’t agree to have him, she would feel like a bad person for the rest of her life? Not the best reason to take on another woman’s child.

What with dashing around to help my mum, and life being so busy generally, it was to be another week before the ideal opportunity presented itself. It was almost the end of term now – the long summer holidays looming provocatively, close on the horizon – and as I watched Tyler mooching out of school one afternoon, deep in conversation with another lad, I was idly wondering how it must feel to be him. He’d been with us a few weeks now, and we were managing – just – to keep a lid on his behaviour, but, as for getting close to him, progress was proving slow. There had been so many times when I automatically reached out to connect with him physically, but he’d always shrink back, stiffen slightly, send out unambiguous signals. Had this kid ever been hugged in his young life? Perhaps yes, by his real mother, but since then? I decided probably not.

And Will had reported much the same. Not that he was offering to cuddle him, but though Tyler had pronounced him ‘cool’ and better than the previous ‘bossy old bag’, Will himself still felt that sense of distance, of careful guardedness in Tyler; that he was only chipping, bit by tiny bit, away. Time, we’d both agreed – that would be the key. Time and patience. He’d surely let us in eventually.

I watched him now and wondered, though. What went on behind those big brown eyes? Under that mop of inky hair? I wondered something else, too. I wondered what it must feel like to be his stepmother. That, I felt, was key to understanding how we’d got to where we’d got – to her taking what by any yardstick was extremely drastic action – taking her own son’s half-brother to court. I would probably never know that, I realised. It wasn’t my business to know that, anyway. But it seemed that I was about to get an inkling.