‘I have more news,’ he said, without preamble, as I showed him in. ‘Though brace yourself, because it’s not very edifying, I’m afraid.’
‘Go on,’ I said, as we went into the kitchen. ‘I’m pretty much braced for anything, to be honest. I take it it’s not the kind of information you’d have been thrilled to pass on before we agreed to have him?’
‘You got it,’ said John. ‘Hit the nail on the head, Casey.’ And it turned out he was right. If we’d known it, we might well have acted differently.
He’d been to see the couple earlier in the day, as he’d planned to, and it turned out they’d had Justin for six months a couple of years back; at the time he left them Justin had been nine. They told John that for the first few weeks things had been fine, that they’d all got on and that he’d settled very well.
The placement had followed a period when he’d been living back with his mother, truncated when she’d decided to place him back into care so she could ‘concentrate on her new boyfriend’. I felt my hackles begin to rise as John recounted what had happened. How could a mother do that? It was one thing to be in extremis and not coping; quite another to pick up and discard your own flesh and blood just because you decided they were annoying you. But she’d been able to do it that first time, hadn’t she? And if you’ve done something once, however shocking that something is, you get acclimatised; it’s not quite so shocking the next time, and little by little, in this case, it seemed, she had perhaps come to see social services and voluntary care orders, in a drug-addled way, as simply an extended form of childminding.
But at the same time, for Justin, this was a brutal betrayal. Hurt and rejected, he had refused to have contact with his mum following this, perhaps (to my mind) to punish her for sending him away, perhaps in the hope that she’d change her mind. But after three months he relented and asked his carers if he could see her again, and she agreed on two hours every two weeks. Two whole hours – what a generous mother she was, I thought grimly.
It was around now that his mood took a turn for the worse; he became sullen and defiant and withdrew into his shell, telling the couple that his mum loved him and wanted him back but that social services wouldn’t let her have him.
Once again, I felt my anger rise as John recounted what they’d said; that when they investigated, Janice did confess that that was what she’d told Justin, because she didn’t want him ‘knowing that she didn’t want him back’.
I’ll bet. I thought grimly. Need a scapegoat to let you off the hook? Try social services. They’ll be happy to carry the can.
‘So what happened next?’ I asked John, as I poured milk into our drinks. ‘Was he told the truth in the end?’
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding. ‘Several times, over the years, I believe. But Justin, of course, refused to believe it. On the couple of occasions when he did confront his mother it would, I’m told, invariably end up in a screaming match, with her inevitably insisting that all social workers were liars, who only wanted to split up families. She’d then come grovelling to social services, apologising for it, but still maintaining that she’d done it because she didn’t want to hurt him by telling him the real truth. Bloody awful either way, don’t you think?’ He sipped his coffee. ‘And Justin’s subsequent behaviour on this occasion – understandably, I’d say – got worse and worse, culminating in him being excluded from his primary school. He apparently went wild one morning, completely out of the blue, and ended up smashing two computers. It took three staff members to restrain him. And then Janice decided she’d had enough of him too, and suspended contact again, for two months.’
‘That poor boy … and this was meant to teach him a lesson?’
‘Exactly. And, as you can imagine, when his foster mother broke this news, he took it very, very badly; she’d expected that, of course, but not quite the extent of it – not at all. He went into a complete rage and attacked her with a screwdriver, apparently, hitting her with it and threatening to stab her.’
‘Oh, God …’
‘I know. Bloody wretched, isn’t it? Anyway, they never managed to get the relationship back on track again and a couple of months later they felt there was nothing more they could do for him. So he was transferred back into a children’s home.’
He paused again, to munch on a biscuit.
‘God,’ I said, shaking my head as I let it sink in. ‘It’s just so heartbreaking, isn’t it? At every turn it seems to get worse. You really have to wonder if his life wouldn’t have been so much better if she’d just rejected him outright and allowed him to move on. Surely that would have been better in the long term than this repeated cycle of hope and then rejection?’ John was nodding. ‘But the poor kid,’ I went on. ‘Those two little brothers. It’s just so bloody wretched to think just how much he clearly loves those little ones, yet he’s been forcibly separated from them for more than half his life.’
‘You’re spot on, Casey,’ John said. ‘The word “damaged” really doesn’t do it justice, does it?’ And there’s more.’
‘More information?’
He nodded. ‘I tracked down another care worker this week too – Mona. She worked in a children’s home Justin spent time in. Still does, in fact. Anyway, he was there for a year or so when he was about seven.’
‘So just before he got fostered.’
John smiled ruefully at me. ‘Pass. There may have been another placement in between. I don’t know. Could have been back with his mum, even, for a time. But Mona said they were actually pretty close for a while. Well, she thought so; she said he struggled to make attachments to anyone, really, but she liked to think she’d broken through to some extent.
‘Anyway, seemed it all went pear shaped; there was this incident. Another child in the home – a boy, couple of years younger – complained that Justin had been burning him with a lighter. And as he had the burns to prove it, Mona obviously followed it up. Had to question Justin, naturally, and the thing that really got to her was his reaction to being questioned – apparently it really scared her. She said he may have been only a young child, but that there was something about his expression – well, you already know, Casey – you’ve seen it, and you’ve described it. Well, it worried her. Really made her uneasy. Anyway, he called her ‘a fat bitch’ and apparently challenged her to prove it, which of course, she couldn’t, and that was that.
‘Anyway, the upshot was that he never spoke to her again. Not once. Though she said he’d always smile sweetly at her in passing. She’d never forget him, she told me – and I think she’s feeling for you now. You know what her last words were?’
‘Go on, John – surprise me.’
‘That he’s a newspaper headline waiting to happen.’
John’s words – or rather Mona’s – stayed with me all day. Kept me awake that night and still sat on my shoulder the next morning. It had been a spine-tingling moment, sitting there in my kitchen with John. I’d always had that sense that Justin was the human equivalent of a simmering pot, always about to boil over. Had had it since the first time we ever met him, even before he came to live with us. Now, though, armed with all this new information, I didn’t just have my gut instinct confirmed, I also knew that when the explosions came, they were likely to be of more volcanic proportions.
But it wasn’t just a case of dealing with the straightforward venting of Justin’s simmering anger. The damage to him was deep and the manifestations of it were highly complex, as I was to find out, only a couple of days later, for myself.
We’d been really pleased, the following week, to see some evidence of Justin seemingly beginning to fit in more with his peers – he’d been talking a bit about a boy he’d befriended, whose name was Gregory and who apparently had some challenges of his own to deal with; he had learning difficulties, or so Justin informed us, and lived with his aunt, as his mother