The meeting was adjourned soon after, and everyone started preparing to leave, but John, I noticed, didn’t put on his jacket.
‘Couple of things to tell you,’ he said, as everyone filed back out through the front door. ‘Any chance of another cup of tea?’
We went back into the kitchen, John carrying the tray of crockery, and I set about re-filling the kettle.
‘I’ve tracked down one of Justin’s previous social workers,’ he said, joining me at the sink and transferring cups and saucers to the dishwasher for me. ‘He’s retired now, so I went and paid him a visit personally. Just to see if there was anything else I could dig up.’
I rinsed out our mugs ready for a fresh brew. Him tea, and me my drug of choice, another coffee. ‘And?’ I said.
‘And I think the consensus is that Justin’s been telling you the truth. It’s pretty much the exact same thing he told this chap back then. Back when he was … oh, about six or seven.’
‘But that wasn’t on his file,’ I pointed out.
John shook his head. ‘No, you’re right, it wasn’t. Seems this chap at the time pretty much dismissed it.’
‘Dismissed it? What, all that stuff about performing oral sex on the drug dealer? About the dog? About setting the house alight? He was five. Why would he lie about something like that? God, could there have been a greater cry for help?’
‘I know.’ John frowned. ‘But apparently – and I quote – he just “thought he was being fanciful”. Told me he was always lying. And used to say a lot of stuff that was obviously untrue, like when – aged 5 – he beat up his mum’s boyfriend with a pool cue, and how he used to smoke cannabis and so on.’
I tried to picture Justin the little boy and this notion of him ‘always lying’, and how risky a business it was to just assume something like that. I wasn’t naive – I knew better than to believe everything children said, but, still, there is a difference between a kid telling you that he beat someone up in a fight, and the other kinds of horrible things that Justin had disclosed. It didn’t take a genius to realise that a child of five wouldn’t know such things. Not unless he had actually witnessed them.
I was so sad. How different might his future have been if he’d been properly listened to when he was still young enough to benefit from someone actually believing him? Instead, it seemed, it hadn’t even been recorded. He’d already, it seemed, been given up on. ‘But I’m still on it,’ John promised, as the kettle boiled. ‘I’ll keep you posted.’
And John had obviously meant what he’d said, for there was more. That lunchtime, not an hour after he’d left, an email came through:
Casey, just thought you should know I have located some more old files relating to Justin. They had been boxed up and stored away on one of the occasions that he was living back with his mum. It seems that when he was taken back into care, the old material, for some strange reason, didn’t appear with his new records!!! Honestly, heads should roll for this but probably won’t. Anyway, when Justin was seven he was placed with a single carer in her 30s. Coral Summers. She had two young children of her own, a girl of 5 and a boy of 6. Justin had been with them for just two months when Coral requested that he be immediately removed. Apparently he had taken a lighter and got the six-year-old to help him hold down the little girl whilst he started to burn her. Coral heard her daughter screaming and found the three of them in Justin’s room. I don’t want to alarm you but as I delve further into this, I am beginning to think that this lighter thing is starting to look as though it is a common thread throughout his past, which would seem to further corroborate what I said further. I will let you know if I uncover anything else. Speak to you soon, JF
This new information, strangely, didn’t faze me at all. If anything, it simply cemented my determination to stop this damning cycle – this business of everything Justin said about the horrors of his early childhood seeming to fall on deaf ears. Challenging though he must have been to deal with – I recalled again those twenty failed placements – I simply couldn’t understand why there’d been no continuity in caring for him. Except perhaps it wasn’t so difficult to understand why. He’d been shunted back and forth, from care home, to foster home, back to his mother’s home, endlessly, and it seemed that at no point had anyone taken responsibility for addressing the root of his problems. At no point had anyone even heard alarm bells, and stopped to ask themselves why.
Justin was damaged because of the things that had happened to him when he was too young to make any sense of them. Then damaged further by an assumption – be it for whatever reason, perhaps no reason – that the problem, at every stage after that, was him.
Well, no more, I thought. From here on in, no more.
When Justin got home from school that afternoon I had already prepared a tea of crumpets and hot chocolate – his favourite – for us both. And as I boiled the milk and toasted the crumpets I told him about all the new things the agency had decided to put in place. How he’d have a couple of new friends to take him out for treats and new activities at the weekends; how, because he’d started doing so well at school (both in terms of behaviour and schoolwork, the incident notwithstanding) that they’d set him new, more challenging, targets and, most importantly, because he’d been doing so well with his points – the recent outburst again, notwithstanding – that Mike and I were setting him new targets too.
From now on he’d earn points by doing more complex things, because the day-to-day things that seemed challenging when he came to us, such as behaving nicely at mealtimes and making his bed, were no longer things any of us even thought about any more. From now on he would have to think harder about earning points.
‘How?’ he wanted to know.
I sat down beside him with the buttered crumpets, and showed him the new list I’d made up that afternoon.
‘No more exclusions from school, obviously, is at number one,’ I said. He smiled ruefully at this.
‘And then there’s no TV till you’ve done whatever homework you’ve got, okay? Three chores around the house every week – but without being asked, which is what makes it harder – and being polite all the time, to everyone, both in and out of the house.’ I went down the complete list for him as he finished his first crumpet. ‘What d’you think, then? You reckon you can manage all of those?’
‘Easy,’ he said, picking up his mug and grinning at me over it. ‘Easy, that lot are, Casey. Piece of cake. Does this mean that my pocket money goes up too?’
I grinned back at him. ‘Well, let’s just see how you go with your new points first, then me and Mike might have a chat about that.’
I put a second round of crumpets into the toaster to start browning. He seemed genuinely excited about both the new targets and the new provisions. And why wouldn’t he be? There were clearly people in the world who genuinely wanted to make his life better. It wasn’t rocket science, was it? Of course it pleased him.
In any event, he seemed to have forgotten all about being angry with me. Long may that state of affairs continue, I thought.
Chapter 10
The end of the week saw another email arrive from John Fulshaw:
Hi Casey, I received a call this morning from my manager. He has written to J’s last two social workers asking for information to be forwarded urgently. He is waiting for this, but in the meantime he has managed to find out about a couple who fostered Justin two years ago. They are still fostering for us and I have an appointment to see them on Tuesday. I will let you know how that goes when I visit you at the end of the week. Speak soon, JF
I was so pleased that John seemed to be making such an effort to discover all the details of Justin’s past for us. It really seemed to me that this was crucial to making further progress with him; it was a cliché, but I felt understanding where he’d come from was the key to helping him find a brighter