Читать книгу The Boy No One Loved and Crying for Help 2-in-1 Collection - Casey Watson, Casey Watson - Страница 15

We’d been sitting there together for an hour by now. An hour in which I’d had to struggle to keep myself together as Justin talked. I knew it was essential that I do that, however. If I conveyed even a fraction of the rage and disgust I was feeling as he described the grim details of his early childhood to me – childhood, what bloody childhood? – I was sure he’d clam up and find it impossible to go on. These were dark secrets he was sharing and I knew from long experience that children who’ve been involved in such ordeals bore scars that, even with the best care and support in the world, would probably never really fully heal. Scars that ate away at their minds and hearts, like some horrible cancer, and muddied every aspect of their sense of themselves. Like any other child ever born, Justin would have felt guilty. Would have felt that in some way he deserved what had happened to him. Because that, tragically, was what children did.

I wiped the tears that were forming steady tracks down both of our cheeks now, wanting nothing more than to beat the living daylights out of all these monsters. I knew I needed to keep a professional head on at all times, and that, considered rationally, these ‘monsters’ were also probably just people who had been profoundly damaged themselves, but, at that moment, I didn’t quite know how to feel anything for them but utter fury.

What I did know was that anything in my power I could do to help Justin, I would do. He deserved so much better than the hand life had dealt him. He deserved happiness. Deserved nothing less. No child did. But also because not only had the adults in his life let him down, big time, but their cruelty and neglect had also sealed his fate with all his peers; causing him to be a target for bullies.

But now Justin, still for the moment, and close beside me, once again brought me out of my reverie.

‘That was the day,’ he said.

‘The day?’

‘The day I burned the house down.’

The day I burned the house down. I took this fact in. Not ‘the house burned down’ but ‘I burned the house down’. This was just heartbreaking to hear.

But I knew better than to react to it. Instead I remained silent and let him continue.

‘I got back there,’ he went on, ‘and my brothers were in such a state. She’d just left them! Just gone and left them! Can you believe she’d do that? And they were in such a right state. An’ crying. And wanting food. And I just couldn’t bear it. I had nothing to give them and I didn’t know what to do. And just thought …’

He trailed off. ‘That you couldn’t cope with things any more?’

I felt him nod against me. ‘I just couldn’t. Casey. I just couldn’t. And the dog eating their shit, and all their crying, and everything … I just couldn’t believe she’d do that. Can you?’

It took Justin another hour to recount to me the full horror of the events of that day. That day that had been described to Mike and I so dispassionately, so matter of factly. The neatly recorded detail of this five-year-old child who’d been playing with matches and, as a result, had accidentally burned the house down and then been placed in care. This five-year-old who was such a handful that his poor mother simply couldn’t handle him and had had no choice but to allow social services to take him. And who could blame her? After all, this was a child who, in all the reports written about him since then, was ‘trouble’, was ‘off the rails’, was a ‘bully’.

Except, perhaps all those reports weren’t true. Or wouldn’t have been, had his early life been different. There was clearly so much more that went on that day – and the days before it; the whole lifetime before it – that social services didn’t know anything about. I worked in the care sector. I had worked for several years in a big comprehensive with a very mixed intake, so I wasn’t naive. Yet I simply couldn’t comprehend that such things – such major things as a heroin-addict mother and the way she was failing her three tiny children – went undetected these days. Surely some neighbour or some friend of the family must have noticed? Surely anyone who had anything to do with the family, however briefly, must have known that things weren’t right?

Listening to Justin now – hearing exactly what did happen, and how the fire had been deliberate, not the result of any playing with lighters or matches – it seemed clear to me that something had snapped in him that day, taken him past the end of his tether. And no wonder. He was five and had been living in hell, and not a single adult had done anything to help him. The sexual abuse, the crying babies, the bullying – it didn’t matter which. What most mattered, from what Justin was saying to me now, was that in that instant of returning home, wet, cold, miserable and needing his mum, he just knew it would never get better, never change, and that this was one way to get something done. He couldn’t have known what – he was far too young to make such rational decisions. Cliché or otherwise, it had been a cry for help.

Justin had no explanation, and I didn’t press for one, for what made him do what he did. And how could he? He’d been five. Not this sad, damaged, self-harming eleven-year-old, that no-one had ever seemed to love, who was cradled in my arms now. But just five. Would he even have had an explanation? I doubted it. He just knew, seeing the dog licking the shit from his brother’s cot bars, that this was it. This was life. And he simply couldn’t cope with it any more.

‘I wanted Dylan to die,’ he told me, though I hadn’t actually asked him about it; I had only wondered, as I assume other people had before me, why he’d got his little brothers out of the house but not the family pet. But then, clearly, this was no sort of ‘family’ pet.

‘I hated him,’ Justin said. ‘I hated him because she loved him. He was her dog and she loved him better than us. She used to cuddle him and pet him. Do you know, she even had a photo of him on the front-room wall. Not of us kids. Oh no, just the dog. And he got food – she always seemed to be able to get food for him. An’ I wanted to pay her back. Teach her a lesson. And I did.’

I felt a new tightness in my throat as I thought about just how high a price that five-year-old boy paid for exacting that revenge. ‘I know, love,’ I said soothingly. ‘I know.’

It had taken some time for social services to track down Justin’s mother on the day of the fire. She’d been with her ‘boyfriend’, somewhere else on the estate, far enough away not to hear either the commotion or the sirens. It had been the next-door neighbours who’d called the fire brigade to alert them about the house fire, and they’d arrived to find both Justin and his little brothers all huddled beneath the duvet, in the garden, the little ones terrified, but Justin himself seemingly mute.

‘She didn’t want them to take me,’ he said, as I finally gathered my wits about me and began dealing with cleaning and dressing the cuts and gouges on his feet. He seemed so much calmer now he’d told me his story. ‘She didn’t want them to at all,’ he repeated. ‘She did love me an’ my brothers really …’ he paused here. ‘She did. But she had to, they told her she did. They said if she didn’t let them take me away she’d have to go to prison. So I had to go with them. Or else she’d have gone to prison.’

I bit my tongue, remembering John’s words when he’d first told us about Justin. Voluntary care order. That much was crystal clear. ‘I know, love,’ I said again. ‘It must have been horrible. Horrible for all of you. There,’ I finished, beckoning him to inspect his cleaned wounds. ‘It’s important we keep them clean now, so they’ll heal.’ I looked closely at him, realising just how much time had passed now. We’d been up here for hours. ‘You must be hungry,’ I said. ‘It’s way past your normal breakfast time. Shall we go down and I’ll get you something nice to eat?’

But he wasn’t hungry – a first – and also, for the first time since his arrival, he wasn’t bothered about the clock or the schedule either. He told me he just wanted to lie on his bed for a bit. Chill out and watch some cartoons.

‘You sure?’ I said, making to rise from the bed now. ‘I could make you some toast and bring it up.’

Justin shook his head, and then did something that shocked me to the core. He spread his arms and leaned in towards me for a hug. ‘I love you, Casey,’ he said, as I encircled him in my arms. ‘I do. I really love you, you know.’

Unable to speak now, for fear of breaking down completely, I simply nodded and hugged him tightly till he released me, then left the room.

By the time I was downstairs, my brain was whirring with it all. This was incredible progress. Progress, and also a real insight into more of Justin’s past. I must speak to John Fulshaw as soon as I could, I realised, while everything was really clear in my mind. At last I really felt we could do something to help Justin. But I got no further – my emotions were just too overwhelming to be tucked into a pocket in my mind, labelled ‘work’. So instead I just sat down and cried.