I always say that you can tell a lot about a foster child by the possessions they bring with them, and the fact that Paulie had a little teddy bear in the bag John brought in for him gave me hope. Call me fanciful, but I chose to believe that a teddy bear signified something good; it meant that somebody, somewhere, loved, or had loved, this child. It could have come from his parents, his aunt or someone else altogether – perhaps a grandma or grandad. The whys and wherefores didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was cherished, which was why he had brought it with him. And by extension, in most cases, it meant the person who gave it mattered to him too.
The teddy also told me that Paulie, scared, angry child that he was, was capable of giving love as well. This was important, even if it was only to a soft toy, because it meant that underneath the glares, the bad language and the attitude, there was something in this child that I could work on.
It was with this very much in mind that I spent the next couple of days trying to get beneath Paulie’s surface, grabbing at any opportunity to tease out what made him tick. Yes, it was true that he was only going to be with us for a few days, but if I could return him even one tiny bit happier, and more able to function than when he’d come to us, then that was what I’d set out to do. At the very least, I could try to help him to understand that there were ways of interacting with other people – particularly grown-ups, particularly those in authority – that would serve him so much better than his current modus operandi, which obviously wasn’t serving him well at all, not given that he’d been asked to leave nursery and his own mother had delivered him to social services.
Of course, it could well be that there were things going on in Paulie’s life that I couldn’t possibly know about. Indeed, there almost certainly were. But that was true of almost every child we’d fostered, and it changed surprisingly little; however tragic or evil or destructive were the influences on a child, all that child had to fall back on, in the end, was themselves. And it was how they chose to handle the future that mattered more than anything.
‘Gawd, you’re not off philosophising again, are you?’ Mike moaned, for the second night running, as I ran through my training notes, and plundered the internet for insights into aggressive, disrespectful, precocious five-year-old boys. Because, in reality, I’d not got much further with Paulie, except to establish that I alternated between being a ‘stupid woman’ and ‘nice Casey’, depending on what his needs were at any given moment. He really was a strangely mercurial little thing – more like a two-year-old or a 14-year-old.
All I had established with any certainty in the first 36 or so hours was that there seemed to be only one love in Paulie’s young life, and that was his father. His biological father, who was apparently no longer around.
There was nothing unusual in that, of course – children whose parents have split up do sometimes do that: cast the absent parent in the role of much maligned hero, to some extent, while the one close to hand bears the brunt of the flak; all complex psychological territory in itself. But it was becoming clear that in Paulie’s case this was happening to a massive extent – he talked about him endlessly – causing me to wonder if, with a young brother taking his mum somewhat away from him, he’d focused on his biological father even more.
Everything certainly seemed to revolve around him, even though I hadn’t managed to establish whether he even saw anything of him. ‘Come on, sweetie,’ I cajoled as I tried to get him to eat the scrambled eggs I’d cooked for lunch that Wednesday. ‘You just said you liked eggs. That’s why I cooked them.’
‘Not these eggs!’ he ranted. ‘I want eggs like my daddy cooks! Real eggs with yellow on them! Like they do in the army!’
He pushed the plate away, sending half of if bobbling across the kitchen table, like a load of runaway yellow marbles.
I removed the plate from the table and Paulie to the newly inaugurated naughty step, which he accepted without argument because, to use his own phrase, he wanted to get away from my stinking kitchen anyway.
And as I cleared up blobs of scrambled egg, I wondered about fried eggs. Would fried eggs be what he meant? Probably. Which made me ponder about the army. And the father. And the mother. And the stepfather. And the whole ‘complicated’ nature of it all. I also considered what a curious business it was having children come and live with you whom you knew so little about. It just made every tiny thing so, well, complicated.
And, much as I was warming to at least some aspects of our little tyrant’s personality, I found myself hankering after our next placement already – the sort of child that came with a file half as thick as a phone book. Which was, by any yardstick, just a little bit bonkers, because such files usually spelt just one thing: trouble.
But for all my surmising and pondering and wondering, I probably couldn’t have anticipated the contents of John’s email, which came in that same afternoon.
He couldn’t phone, he explained, because he was in a place without a signal, but once I’d had a read-through of what he’d established – and this had all come from the mother’s sister again – he’d be happy to chat to me later.
And as I started to read, though my interest was piqued, my expectations were low, as it was really only expanding on what I already knew. I certainly didn’t think I’d need to phone him. It seemed Paulie’s biological father was indeed retired from the army. But what we also now knew was that he was retired SAS and had been discharged early on ‘medical grounds’. It also seemed it had been something of a quick liaison, Paulie’s mother and he having apparently met only months after her bereavement, with her falling pregnant very quickly. Things hadn’t worked out, though; according to the sister, the father – who was called Adrian but known as Adi – had had ongoing mental health issues (ah, those kinds of medical grounds) and it seemed taking on a mother, her three daughters and a new baby son was all too much – another proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
So that had been that. The couple split, and in time she found someone new. And although contact between infant son and father still happened sporadically, according to Paulie’s aunt (who, John had noted, thought very little of Adi), a new home was established and a further child born; the Alfie for whose safety they now all feared.
And then something else. A something else that made me prick up my ears. The crisis apparently came, the email finished, just before the assault on the baby. It appears it was directly related to an incident the previous week when Paulie had killed the family’s pet rabbit by bludgeoning it to death with a rock.
I know! John had signed off, echoing the words on my very lips. I can hardly believe it either. We’ll talk later. J.
Him and me both. As I’d been party to this bombshell for a good couple of hours before Mike returned home from work, by the time he arrived it was all I could do not to jump up and down and bundle him off into the utility room, so badly did I want to tell him this new information. But, of course, I couldn’t – not till Paulie went to bed.
Though, ironically, it had been an uneventful afternoon in the end. Once both the fried eggs and the email had been digested, I was too full of pent-up energy to contemplate having a quiet afternoon in, so I’d suggested that Paulie and I take a walk to the park at the end of the road to feed the ducks, and, once there, he’d seemed to enjoy himself. But all the while I kept hearing the word ‘bludgeoned’ in my head. Forget the bad language – that had suddenly become something of a side issue. How could such a tiny slip of a child do such a thing?
Oh, I wasn’t stupid; I’d seen kids lash out at siblings, playmates, animals. Toddlers mostly, in that unthinking way that toddlers do – and woe betide the mum who lets them wield the ‘bash-the-shape-into-the-slot’ game’s wooden mallet. But this wasn’t a toddler. This was a child who was sentient and articulate. What kind of things could have possibly been going through his head to make him capable of such a barbaric act?
But keen though I was to address all these questions to Mike, it would have to wait a bit because, as had been the case the previous night (something I could now see fitted a pattern) seeing Mike was the highlight of our young visitor’s day. And as I watched him clamour to be picked up, to be tossed around, to be talked to in a deep masculine voice, I wondered if in Mike he saw something of the father in whose shadow it seemed his stepfather must live.
Not to mention his mother; Paulie clearly didn’t have much time for women either. And though he tolerated me – thrown together as we were, he pretty much had to – he so obviously bonded with Mike so much more. Which was interesting in itself, but suddenly not quite so interesting as what I’d read about in John’s email. Bludgeoned, I kept thinking, as I watched Paulie and Mike playing. He’d bludgeoned the rabbit to death.