Finding out they were ‘in care’ upset the children dreadfully, and, perhaps predictably, they felt it must be their fault. No matter how much Mike and I tried to reassure them this wasn’t so, they kept coming up with arguments that meant it was.
‘It is, Casey,’ Ashton told me that evening. ‘Granddad told us. He said it all the time. If we didn’t keep the house clean, the social worker lady would take us away!’
‘Mummy was poorly, see,’ Olivia added. ‘An’ he was right. We was big enough to know better.’ Her eyes were red raw from all the crying she’d been doing earlier. ‘I wish we’d of knowed how to clean a bit better!’ She threw herself into my arms then, sobbing loudly.
‘Shh,’ I tried to soothe them. ‘It’s not your fault at all. Little girls and boys don’t know how to do all that stuff. And that’s not why little ones get put into care, anyway. There’s always lots of reasons, but they’re to do with the grown-ups. You mustn’t blame yourselves, okay, because it’s not your fault.’
Ashton shook his head. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said, and his voice was very firm. ‘That’s not what the social worker lady said. She told Mummy off for the house being all dirty, I heard her. She said, “You’ve got enough kids. They should help.”’
I felt so sad for them. All these words – all these essentially throw-away little comments – all stacked up and stored and remembered so clearly. I knew I would have a hard time convincing them otherwise.
And I did. They’d now developed a real paranoia about cleaning. Any time I pulled out the mop or the vacuum cleaner, Olivia, particularly, would fly into a blind panic.
‘Who comin?’ she would cry. ‘Who comin’, Casey?’ Then she’d fling herself against my leg until I could convince her there was no-one coming; no social worker hell-bent on dragging them all away. It was heartbreaking. ‘Do it proper, Casey!’ She would chant at me. ‘Do it nice, else the social will take us!’
In the end, I had to make the difficult decision to do all my bouts of cleaning only when the children were all at school. And it was a pretty grim regime to have to adopt. I truly hated having to not clean at weekends. And the rest of the family, who obviously knew me inside out, found it highly amusing to watch my frustration.
‘God, Mum,’ said Kieron the following Sunday. ‘It’s like watching an addict drying out! Take a chill-pill – you can sniff the bleach again tomorrow!’
I smiled, of course, but, actually, I didn’t find it funny. Even less so when I overheard Mike on the phone to Riley. ‘Honestly,’ he was saying, ‘she reminds me of Monica from Friends. And it’s crazy because the house will stay fine in any case, because none of us dare move anything anyway!’
God, I thought, slinking away. Was I really that much of a tyrant? They were right, though. Come Monday I felt like I had a new lease of life. Perhaps abstinence was good for a clean-junkie like me because once the children were both in school again I set to with a vengeance. I don’t think I’d enjoyed a bout of housework so much in years.
But where we’d at least sorted the matter of the kids’ anxiety about ‘the social’, there was a dark strand of behaviour now increasing instead. Good as it was to have the children becoming settled, it seemed the more at home they felt, the more they felt able to be themselves. And in this case, it meant some pretty worrying behaviours. They would come home from school and get changed – all very normal. But then, sitting at dinner or watching TV, they would think nothing of reaching out and grabbing one another’s genitals, or indeed, putting their hands down their pants and touching their own. And when I tried to put a stop to it, I always got the same confused look. It was almost as if they were angry at me too; frustrated that I couldn’t seem to understand.
One day, after I’d told Olivia not to touch Ashton ‘down there’, she grabbed him by the hand, shook her head in my direction, and said, ‘C’mon, Ash, let’s go to my room to do it.’
Talking seeming futile, my words falling on deaf ears, I just picked Olivia up and took her out to play in the garden. I was at a real loss to know what to do with them.
I wasn’t surprised, therefore, when a week or so later I got a concerned phone call from a fellow foster carer, Mandy Ellison. She worked for the same agency as we did and was caring for the three youngest siblings. If I had my work cut out, so did she.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Casey,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t know who else to phone.’
‘What is it?’ I said, instantly alert to her anxious tone.
‘Well, I just wondered how you were getting on with your two. My little ones … well, the only way I can describe it is that they keep, well … simulating sex with each other … and I wondered if yours were doing the same. The implications … well, you know what I mean, don’t you?’
I was horrified. Her three were only babies! Two, three and five, as far as I could remember. How on earth could they have learned to do such things? But in my head, I immediately answered my own question. There was basically only one way of doing that, wasn’t there? The implications, as Mandy, said, were clear.
‘Do what I’m doing,’ I advised her, once I’d confirmed what mine were up to. ‘Pass everything on to John Fulshaw. We both need to push this. There’s clearly a jigsaw taking shape here, and someone needs to be putting the pieces together.’
But if I was shocked by what I’d seen from the kids so far, I was about to find out they could take the shock factor to a whole other level. A few days after taking the phone call from Mandy, I was in the kitchen, dishing up tea for the family, and chatting to Lauren, Kieron’s girlfriend.
‘They’ve settled so well, Casey,’ she was telling me, as she helped me dish up. ‘You must feel so good about how much they’ve changed since they came here.’
I smiled at Lauren but took a moment before answering. In my own mind, we hadn’t really accomplished much at all. It always surprised me when people noticed changes in kids in our care. But perhaps that was because we saw them every day, so it wasn’t so obvious to us.
‘Well, I suppose they are calmer,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s still a struggle most days …
‘No,’ Lauren said, mashing the potatoes. ‘Trust me. They have changed.’
Reassured, I handed plates out – an enormous roast dinner. One thing, I conceded, was that they were really good eaters. No fads about veg, no ‘I’m not going to eat that’. I suppose that, having been so hungry for so long, all food was good food to these two.
But I was abruptly reminded that food wasn’t the main issue, as was Lauren.
‘You all right, Olivia?’ I said, noticing she was playing with her food, and not tucking in with her usual gusto.
She shook her head, but said nothing.
‘Something happen at school?’ I asked her gently.
She shook his head again. ‘No. It was Ashton,’ she eventually answered, sticking her lower lip out. ‘He’s mean. I give him his go with his pee pee okay, then he tells me I don’t get my go.’
I was instantly alert for what might come next in this tale. As were the rest of the adults. Conversation ground to a halt.
‘Your go?’ I asked her.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s not fair!’
I turned to her brother. ‘Ashton,’ I said. ‘Can you enlighten me?’
He sighed a world-weary sigh. ‘She’s talking about this morning, that’s all.’
‘This morning?’
He turned to his sister now. ‘Livs, why you splitting on me? I told you this morning! I overslept, okay? You can have your go tonight. Like I told you!’ He gave her a stern glare. I glanced across the table, hardly daring to enquire further, because looking around the table I didn’t like what I saw. Kieron’s expression, particularly, was now one of horror.
‘Yeah,’ Olivia went on, as if squabbling over a board game. ‘Yeah, you say you will, but I know you. You’ll jus’ make me do you again, like you always do.’
‘No, I won’t,’ Ashton protested, his expression as sulky as hers was. ‘Now stop moaning. Just shut up and eat your tea.’
A second glance around the table confirmed what I’d expected. That while the children continued bickering irritably between themselves, the colour had drained from my whole family’s faces. Mike caught my eye, his expression one of mortification.
I put down my knife and fork. ‘Ashton,’ I said. ‘Is this true?’
‘What?’ he said, almost as if he’d moved on to a new topic, and wasn’t sure what I was on about. Then the penny dropped. ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah,’ he said, realising. ‘But I will do her, honest. I promise.’
I heard Lauren’s voice – a whisper. ‘Oh. My. God,’ she was mouthing. ‘Oh my GOD.’
Later, I probed further and found out some more. It wasn’t hard. These two seemed as happy to talk about touching each other sexually as they would be about discussing the rules of a parlour game. Which, it was becoming horribly apparent, was exactly how they did see it; as something they just did, to have fun.
I remained silent through the telling – the matter-of-fact recounting, by Ashton, that despite what I’d told them about touching one another, they still played with each other’s ‘pee pees’ when they got up most mornings. It was family, he said again. So it was fine. Only today he was in a hurry and didn’t want to miss breakfast, meaning Olivia, as she’d complained, missed her ‘go’. In fact, so mortified was I that when I put them both to bed, my need to get into the garden wasn’t just about having a cigarette – I physically needed a good lungful of fresh air. And it seemed Mike felt the same. He was already out there.
‘These kids have been badly abused, Case,’ he said. ‘It couldn’t be more obvious. This stuff is learned. They’ve learned it from some bastard member of their so-called “family”.’ Mike rarely swore, but when he did, he really meant it. Once again I thought of the all-powerful seeming character of ‘Gwandad’. What sort of monster might he be?
I agreed with Mike. ‘They need some help. They badly need to get some counselling. This needs action. It’s been way too long without any, as it is.’
But it looked like it would be a bit longer. When I spoke to John the following morning, his first question, as expected, was whether I’d asked them any leading questions. In our role as foster carers it was an important central tenet that we did not take on the role of counsellors ourselves or, as would be the case if we initiated certain conversations, did anything that could be construed as ‘leading’ the children’s thinking; getting them to say things which might be untrue. Instead, we were trained to use ‘active listening’, and, rather than use leading questions when a child began to disclose something, use phrases such as ‘And then what?’, or ‘How did that make you feel?’ Neutrality was key; we must remain opinion-free.
I reassured him that I hadn’t ‘led’ any of what they’d told me. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll get straight on to Anna. See if we can get her up to you for a visit. God,’ he said, his sigh heavy. ‘It really doesn’t bear thinking about. Doesn’t matter how many years you do this job, does it? It still sickens me to the core when I hear something like this.’
As I put the phone down, I mentally put the statement on its head. It would be pretty damned sickening if it didn’t.
Anna phoned the following morning, and seemed particularly animated. It seemed she had some info of her own to impart.
‘I have found a file,’ she told me, once we’d exchanged our expressions of dismay at the latest developments, ‘which will shed a bit of light on all this. But let’s not discuss it now. I’ll come at around one, if that’s okay with you? I’ll bring it with me and we can go through it all then.’
Riley, who was over with Levi, had her sceptical face on. ‘Is there a pattern here, d’you think, Mum,’ she said, ‘with all these kids you foster? It seems they hand them over, promising they’ve told you everything they know, then you and Dad find something out and, suddenly, it’s like “Ah, but as it happens, we do know more!”’
I couldn’t have agreed more. That was exactly what it seemed like. I couldn’t wait for one o’clock to come around.
‘Eventful week, then?’ Anna asked, as we sat down at the dining-room table, leaving Riley and Levi outside enjoying the September sunshine.
‘You could say that,’ I answered wryly, ‘what with the ADHD, the wetting, the soiling, and now this endless sexual stuff they’re up to.’
Anna smiled encouragingly. ‘But you know, Casey, you and Mike are doing an absolutely brilliant job, you really are. And all this stuff you’re recording is really going to help our case. It’s clearly imperative these kids aren’t returned to their family, and this constitutes some solid further evidence. In fact, because none of them have been in care before, what we have now is the best assessment possible. If they hadn’t found a place with you – been put in children’s homes instead – I doubt we’d have any of this stuff.’
So that was alright, then. ‘Well, that’s all well and good,’ I said. ‘But my priority is, How do we actually deal with it? I’m obviously thinking sexual abuse, as I don’t doubt you are, but as I’m not allowed to lead them to speak about it, I can’t help them, can I? So what do you suggest we do next?’
Anna nodded again. ‘I take your point, Casey. And I guess all we can hope for is that they continue to feel safe here. That, well, the more comfortable they get, the more inclined they’ll be to talk. We really just have to wait it out, I’m afraid.’
‘They can’t get counselling?’ My head was reeling. Just have to wait it out?
‘We are looking into that,’ she promised, still managing to make the likelihood sound distinctly unpromising. ‘Particularly in light of my new information.’
Ah, I thought. Finally. ‘So what new information do you have?’
It turned out that a new file had been put with an old file. Some mix-up when some papers were being cross-referenced, which led to a possibly pivotal bit of info being stashed in some archive, unread. So what was new? The paper documented an incident a couple of years back, when Olivia was four, when she’d complained of being ‘sore down below’. When questioned by the nursery teacher to whom she’d made the comment, she said it was because her Uncle Petie ‘raped’ her.
Given her age, she was asked what she took the word ‘rape’ to mean, and she described the act of oral sex, both performed on and by her. By this time, my dander was good and up. ‘God! So what happened?’
‘Well, obviously, we were called in, as were the police. She was taken to a special unit to give video evidence using dolls, but once there she was so frightened that she apparently refused to speak. So nothing further was done, bar the whole family being classified as “at risk”.’
I felt sick. Was this the way it worked, then? That if a child couldn’t bring themselves to speak about a crime, that crime was treated as having not been committed? ‘I’m sorry, Anna,’ I said. ‘But I just can’t get my head around this. Nothing was done? Nothing at all?’
‘Nothing anyone could do, not without Olivia talking about it. And that’s why it’s so important’ – she leaned towards me, her expression earnest – ‘that you record everything the children say verbatim. We can’t afford to miss another opportunity to get to the truth, can we?’
I couldn’t help feeling cynical. And wondering why the intervening period hadn’t seen a similar level of determination. ‘And the uncle?’ I asked. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Well, he was 15 at the time, and apparently living with the family. Along with – she checked the papers – ten cats, a couple of dogs, rabbits and God knows what kind of vermin. Honestly, Casey, I’ve been in there – it’s disgusting. Dog muck everywhere, maggots crawling over all the surfaces, pee and human excrement all over the carpets …’ All of which, to my mind, was old news. This was altogether so much worse. ‘Anyway, he’s not there now, by all accounts,’ she went on. ‘He’s apparently now living in a flat with some other cousins. And causing havoc on the streets, apparently.’
And on the bodies and psyches of other defenceless little girls?
After Anna had gone, I stood at the kitchen window for some time, just watching my daughter and grandson playing in the garden. What a lottery life was. What decreed the circumstances a baby was born into? What roll of the celestial dice saw to it that those poor children, currently residing in our family, ended up in such a hell hole as the one just described?
I went out into the garden to join them, and swept a giggling Levi up into my arms. I didn’t know. Would never know, I thought, as I kissed him. I just silently thanked God for our own lives.