Читать книгу A Boy Without Hope - Casey Watson, Casey Watson - Страница 11

I woke up the following morning in an irritable, scratchy mood. Which is par for the course when you’ve barely slept a wink, obviously, but still unexpected, since the child currently residing in the spare room was apparently medicated to ensure that he did sleep.

But he hadn’t. Though that likelihood wasn’t obvious initially. In fact, after the fun and games in the front garden when he’d arrived, Miller had appeared to have accepted his new reality. I wasn’t naïve about first impressions. I was too long in the tooth for that. But, for the moment, it seemed he was happy to play ball. He’d come down in his pyjamas (Lego Batman ones, which, unlike the clothes he’d had on, fitted), eaten his supper without complaint and taken his pills. Upon which, I had kept my promise, and given him the WiFi password, so he could spend an hour playing his game before going to sleep – something I had a hunch had no small bearing on his cheerful demeanour.

He was also happy for Tyler to accompany him back upstairs to set everything up. Though it was only a matter of some ten or fifteen minutes before Ty reappeared in the kitchen, arms spread wide in wonderment, shaking his head.

‘I tell you what, Mum,’ he said, ‘that kid is some kind of computer genius. I mean, seriously. I have absolutely no idea what he’s just done, but it’s, like, something I’ve never seen before. He’s opened up all kinds of new levels – levels I never knew even existed. It’s like he’s a hacker or something, I swear!’

I had several good reasons to be wary of what kids could get up to on computers these days, not least the teenager we’d most recently cared for, Keeley. It still concerned me that she’d been able to run a whole cottage industry – and of a kind that still made me blanche when I thought of it – out of nothing more than the smartphone in her bedroom.

Smartphones, generally, were becoming the bane of our working lives. As foster carers, we had always had a plethora of ‘training’ documents, one of which was obviously about online safety. But in recent years, recognising that a document produced a decade ago no longer applied in the fast-moving virtual world, we’d been expected to attend regular sessions to make good the lack. In truth, however, we had little hope of keeping up. The advice was sound enough: to teach children about how to stay safe online, to not give out personal information, to only accept ‘friends’ that they knew in the real world and to put parental controls on any device used by younger children. But modern kids are extremely savvy, and Miller was obviously no exception. They had ways and means to counteract many of the filters we put in place.

But by far the biggest problem today is that most kids of around the age of twelve, and often younger, already have their own smartphones when they come to us. Which they naturally keep private, even if they have nothing to hide, and if the phone belongs to them we have no legal right to remove them. So, both legally and practically, we have our hands tied. It’s a growing problem, and one social services are still struggling to cope with.

So I understood exactly what Tyler meant. You were a fool if you didn’t understand just how many streets children were ahead of you when it came to the virtual world these days. Whereas even being ‘online’ was an alien concept for those of us who grew up in the last century (and a science we had to learn, and keep learning), kids nowadays were around computers and tablets almost from birth; what was often extremely taxing for fifty-somethings like me and Mike was as natural to modern kids as breathing. It truly was a whole new world, and a changing one too – that this kid was twelve and apparently already knew more than a sixteen-year-old said it all.

I patted Tyler reassuringly. ‘Well at least we’ve discovered two things that he appears to like,’ I pointed out. ‘Gaming and dinosaurs. So that’s a positive, isn’t it? And who knows – perhaps him being able to teach you a thing or two about computers will be a great way to break the ice between you.’

‘Hmm,’ he said, looking decidedly unconvinced. ‘I mean, I know he’s clever and that, but I’m not sure we’re going to have much in common. Mum, he freaks me out a bit to be honest. He’s weird.’

‘Early days, love,’ I said, patting him again. ‘Early days.’

But clearly not early nights. Not without a battle of wills. When I popped back upstairs to let Miller know his hour was over, he didn’t even seem to hear me. He certainly didn’t take his eyes off the screen, or stop his thumbs flying across the control pad. ‘Ten more minutes,’ he said finally, when I asked him a second time. ‘I need to get these guys out of this warehouse first.’

I digested this, dithered briefly, but then shook my head. Yes this was his first night, but, knowing what I knew about his control issues, I felt it best that we start as we meant to go on. ‘No, Miller, I’m afraid you’ll have to pause it, or whatever it is you need to do, and finish it off in the morning. I told you we had a cut-off time, and this is it.’

Miller dragged his eyes from the screen long enough to look at me in astonishment and, if I wasn’t mistaken, contempt. ‘You can’t just pause it!’ he said, still tapping furiously on the control pad. ‘That’s not how it works. I need notice. If you didn’t want me to have ten minutes at the end, then you should have given me ten minutes’ notice. Don’t you know anything?’

I hadn’t noticed Mike follow me up, but he now appeared in the bedroom doorway. ‘Okay, lad,’ he said, before I could. ‘I’m sure you’ve lived in enough houses to realise that each family has their own rules. In the morning we can go over our house rules with you, but for now the one that matters is that electronics go off at bedtime.’ A short pause. ‘So go on, do as Casey says. Switch it off, please.’

Miller continued to tap away, and this time he didn’t look up. ‘And I suppose bedtime is just whenever you say it is, right? And that’s because you’re a grown-up and I’m a kid. Nothing to do with it being correct or anything. Anyway, I only need five minutes now, so it’s not like the end of the world, is it?’

There was no aggression in his tone. Just an invitation to keep the discussion going. Where no discussion should be happening in the first place. I knew a stalling tactic when I saw one.

But Mike wasn’t in the mood to play games, so he didn’t answer. Simply took two strides and switched the TV off at the plug socket.

‘Why did you do that?’ Miller yelled. ‘You complete idiot! Now I’ve lost everything!’

‘Rule two,’ Mike added mildly, ‘is that we do not speak to each other like that in this house. We don’t scream and yell and we certainly don’t call people idiots. Now I strongly suggest you get yourself into bed. I will then put the television back on for you – quietly – but not the console. And you will try to get some sleep. And then we will start afresh in the morning.’

Which seemed to be the end of it, even if he was cross about it, which he was – throwing the controller down, jumping into bed and burrowing under the duvet, huffing noisily as he rolled himself across the bed to face the wall. Which we took to be a signal for us to leave, so we did.

And silence reigned then, and continued to, when we went to bed ourselves, both agreeing that first nights were, more often than not, difficult. That we’d all sleep on it. Regroup. That tomorrow was another day.

But a day that would be a very long time coming.

It was just before two when I was awoken by the sound of banging. And as I sluggishly dragged myself from sleep into alert mode I soon worked out it was coming from Miller’s room. I lifted the duvet back and padded across the landing to investigate, only to find he was bouncing up and down on his bed, fully upright, as if practising for a trampoline tournament. He giggled like a toddler when he saw me.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked him.

He grinned at me. ‘I’m bouncing.’

‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘But, love, it’s two in the morning. Come on, back into bed and go to sleep.’

‘I can’t sleep,’ he said. He continued to bounce.

‘Well, you have to try,’ I said, reaching a hand out to stop him. ‘Come on, into bed, before you wake the whole house up.’

‘But I can’t sleep,’ he whined, as I took hold of his wrist.

‘But you have to,’ I told him, taking his other wrist and stilling him. ‘Everyone needs to sleep.’

‘I don’t,’ he said.

‘Well, in that case, you must at least get into bed, and be still now. I can’t have you making all this noise. It’s the middle of the night.’

‘Boring,’ he said, but he didn’t try to fight me. Simply whumped down on the bed, harrumphed and let me straighten the covers over him. His eyes gleamed in the darkness. ‘I won’t sleep. I don’t sleep.’

‘Then stay awake. But stay there,’ I said firmly.

And, to my surprise, he did as he was told. Well, for an hour, at least. I was woken again at 3 a.m. – this time by a different noise, which turned out to be the sound of a tennis ball being thrown repeatedly against his bedroom wall.

He was kneeling on his rug now, his suitcase open at the side of him, throwing the ball and catching it, putting me in mind of that iconic scene in The Great Escape. But this was no German camp and he was no prisoner of war.

‘Miller, what on earth are you doing?’ I asked exasperated, eyeing the case and its spewing contents. What other diversions did he have in his box of tricks, I wondered?

‘I told you,’ he said. “I don’t sleep. Not ever. So I have to find stuff to do because I get so bored.’

I sat down on the edge of the bed, still fuzzy with sleep myself. He, in contrast, couldn’t have looked more wide awake. ‘Well, I’m sorry, love,’ I said. ‘But the rest of us do sleep.’ I pointed towards the tennis ball, which he was now throwing into the air and catching. ‘And you doing that is keeping us all awake. So if you really can’t sleep – and I know it’s hard when you’re in a place you’re not used to – then you’ll have to find something more quiet to do. How about reading?’ I nodded towards the books I’d put on top of the chest of drawers. ‘There’s some Harry Potter books, and a couple of David Walliams ones too. D’you like David Walliams?’

‘Ish,’ he said. ‘I’m not really fussed about reading. I’d rather watch Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. But I can’t get it on that telly,’ he added scathingly. ‘It needs tuning into the internet. But it’s not.’

I looked across at the TV, which couldn’t have been more than a year old. What? What did ‘tuning the TV into the internet’ mean? Every time I thought I was just about up to date with technology, some new thing came along to confound me all over again. I made a mental note to ask Tyler what that meant in the morning.

I stood up then, and plumped his pillows, then beckoned him to get back into bed. ‘Well, I’ll get Mike to look at it tomorrow,’ I said. ‘But for now, Miller, I’m afraid it has to be reading or nothing. I need you to be very quiet so that I can get a couple of hours’ sleep.’

‘Ok-ayyy,’ he said, tossing the tennis ball back into the suitcase, and, again, to my surprise, meekly doing as he was told.

And again, at four, when I had to go in and tell him to stop singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and then at five, when I heard him fiddling about in the bathroom. ‘Told you I don’t sleep,’ he pointed out as I chivvied him back to bed a fourth time.

But once again, he let me lead him back to bed without arguing and, by six thirty, when the scent of coffee roused me reluctantly from my slumbers he was, of course, sleeping like a baby.

‘You should have woken me up,’ Mike said, when I regaled him with the extent of my nocturnal activities. ‘I’d have gone in to have another word with him.’

I reached for the coffee in much the same way as a drowning man would grab a passing lifebelt. ‘I’m not sure it would have done any good, love,’ I told him. ‘It’s almost like his body clock’s set to nocturnal. I don’t know about Lego Batman – he’s like a flipping bat! He wasn’t even tired. Not remotely. He was buzzing. So much for the sleeping pills he’s been taking.’

‘But a challenging day for him, don’t forget. Perhaps he was just over-stimulated.’

‘I wish I thought that, love, but I don’t. I got this impression that last night was pretty much as per. And with him not going to school, you can see how that might happen. And what’s the point of him popping pills if they’re not helping? It’s clearly something we’re going to have to address as a matter of urgency. Direct with the GP if need be.’

And his former carers, for that matter. Had this been true for them too? If so, it was a habit that needed breaking, and fast.

For the time being though, I was too tired to start, so once Mike went to work, and Tyler headed off to school, I did some housework, drank coffee and fired off a couple of emails, in the hopes of at least getting some sort of medical history. And all the while, our ‘non-sleeping’ nocturnal house guest slept on.

I also decided to try and speak to Miller’s previous foster carer, Jenny, to get a better sense of his routines and habits. No, he’d not been there long, but, from their point of view, anyway, clearly more than long enough. Was it the lack of sleep that had pushed them to the brink with him?

After flipping through the little paperwork I had, I found her number and punched it into my mobile. If Miller did come downstairs unexpectedly, I could easily take myself off into the back garden. And perhaps take him out there later, too, in an attempt to tire him out.

‘Oh, hello!’ Jenny said. She sounded happy. Like a woman, it occurred to me, who’d had a decent night’s sleep. ‘I would have called you but I was going to give it until tomorrow so you weren’t inundated with endless calls,’ she said. ‘I know what it’s like when you have a new placement.’

I almost laughed. Did we even work for the same fostering agency, I wondered? When I had kids delivered, all I ever seemed to be inundated with was a big, noisy silence – the parcel, and the problem, passed on. ‘I haven’t heard from anyone,’ I told her. ‘That’s why I was calling. He’s been up half the night. Is he always like this? I was hoping you might have a few tips for me.’

‘Ah,’ Jenny said. And it was a very telling ‘ah’. ‘I wish you all the best with that, I really do.’

My heart sank to hear my fears so swiftly confirmed. ‘So it’s not a one-off, then? I was hoping it might be just a first-night thing.’

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I wish I could tell you it was but, to be honest, we didn’t have an unbroken night the whole time he was with us. It’s one of the main reasons we had to let him go. He’s hard enough to cope with at the best of times, but when you aren’t getting any sleep … And with the hours my husband works … well ...’ She sighed. ‘Look, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the whole thing’s been a bit of a nightmare, if I’m honest. No point me sugar-coating it, is there? I’m sure Libby’s already told you, bless her. I mean, we’ve had our fair share of challenging kids, some of them long term, as I’m sure you have. But this one …’

‘So it’s not just the sleeping …’

It was hardly a question, as I already knew the answer.

‘No, it wasn’t just the sleeping. If it had been …’ Another pause. Despite what she’d just said, I could sense she was reluctant to be too candid. As would I have been in her shoes, since it was another carer she was talking to – and, in this case, the one to whom the baton had now been passed. ‘Well, perhaps we could have coped better if he had slept,’ she said eventually. ‘But the truth is that he’s sneaky. Manipulative. And clever. You’ve probably already noticed that yourself. He’s also methodical. And ruthless – knows exactly how to push your buttons. Though did Libby tell you? After all that – after pushing us way beyond our limits – he carried on as if leaving us was the end of the world. So much crying and begging and refusing to go. She literally had to drag him away. And only then because we promised he could come back and stay with us on respite from time to time. That was a lie,’ she finished, bluntly. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that, but it’s true. But we didn’t know how else to get –’ She stopped abruptly. Had she been about to say ‘rid of him’?

‘Well, thanks for filling me in,’ I told her. ‘I appreciate your honesty. I’m going in blind here, pretty much, and forewarned is forearmed.’

Though it was worrying, to say the least, that she had been so candid. That she was talking about him as if he was a little demon, not a child; an evil force that she was only too glad to have expunged from her life. ‘I tell you what,’ she said. ‘Let me gather my thoughts and set everything down in an email. You know, anything that comes to me that I think you need to know.’ Then she laughed – actually laughed. ‘So expect a long email! Seriously, and this is strictly between you and me, if you value your sanity don’t agree to take on this kid lightly.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I said. And I meant it. ‘I won’t.’

Miller obviously couldn’t know it, but his timing was impeccable. Because it was only moments after I’d rung off that he appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was tousle-haired, sleepy-eyed, barefoot and shyly smiling. And a great wave of guilt mushroomed up in me from nowhere. Because no child was a demon. He was just a child who had demons. If I refused to try and help him how could I look myself in the eye?