‘Curry or pizza or Chinese – what’s your preference?’
It was the following Saturday morning and Mike and Kieron were off to football as per usual. It had been a quiet sort of week since all the revelations and rearrangements, but, even so, I felt shattered and not at all like cooking a big family dinner. Tonight I had a date with a take-away and the telly and someone else would definitely be doing the washing up.
‘Curry!’ Mike, Kieron and Justin all said together, though Justin’s contribution came from the behind the PlayStation controller that he was, as ever, feverishly playing on. Indeed, today, having only just got his privileges back, he was even more obsessed with it than usual. One day, perhaps, we’d get him off to football with the boys, but today wasn’t the day, I thought, to push it.
It had been much colder than usual, with a bitingly chilly wind, and I was actually happy to spend the day indoors myself, my scheduled mooch around the shops with Riley having been cancelled a little while back because she’d been feeling a bit off-colour. I did miss my daughter, though, and felt a little redundant as I dragged the mop and bucket out from the cleaning cupboard.
She’d said she might pop round later and, if not, I might stroll down to hers, but it was probably a good thing for me to catch up with a bit of housework and cleaning in the meantime; I’d forgotten, and had been forcibly reminded by having Justin, that having an extra person in the house created a lot of extra dust. And I definitely couldn’t be having that.
‘That’s a shame,’ I said, grinning. ‘Because I fancy Chinese …’ I pushed my sleeves up. ‘Only kidding. Now get out from under my feet. And you, Justin,’ – I paused here, to look at my watch – ‘have only forty-seven minutes of TV time left before I stage a takeover of the sofa and remote!’
I’d planned, as is my slightly obsessive way with housework, on making a circuit of the upstairs bedrooms, stripping beds as I went, before embarking on a big upstairs dustathon. And since Justin’s was the first door on the left once up the stairs, it seemed logical to tackle that room first.
It was, as it had been for a little while now, a mess, but in a good way. Since the last time he’d stripped it back to basics, he’d now got most of his belongings out again. There was dirty washing piled up in a heap behind the door, DVDs and cases strewn around the floor, and the carpet was actually a small sea of toy soldiers, which looked like they’d originally been set up in ranks but were now, given that they were mostly lying prostrate all over the place, in the last throes of some important battle or other, during which almost all of them had been slaughtered.
I crossed the room, casually dispatching a further couple of gallant heroes, and pushed my sleeves up, ready to get stuck in. As I approached the bed, however, something caught my eye immediately. On it was Justin’s memory box, which, along with his photo album that he kept in it, was open.
We’d learned about memory boxes during our training. Lots of kids in care have them apparently. In an uncertain world and with, very often, equally uncertain futures, they are encouraged to keep a tangible store of cherished memories, so they have touchable reminders of happy times. As well as photographs of loved ones, greeting cards and letters, a box might also include things like ticket stubs from the cinema or a sporting event, programmes, souvenirs, postcards – anything, really, with something meaningful about it, that they could look through when feeling sad or lonely.
I had seen Justin’s memory box several times already, but he had always been looking in it and, invariably, he would close it if anyone approached. Where he kept it, I didn’t know, because he secreted it away, and though I’d been through his room thoroughly when I’d tracked down his stash of socks, I hadn’t seen it, and, in any case, hadn’t wanted to intrude. These things were clearly private, and I respected that, obviously, though I was very keen to have him open up to me more, and things like this would prove very helpful. I had asked him a couple of times if he wanted to go through the box with me, but he’d always shaken his head and gone, ‘Nah, there’s nothing in there. It’s just crap’, or something equally dismissive. And though he would sometimes bring photographs from the box to show us, the actual box always stayed put.
Yet here it was now, just sitting on his bed, wide open, almost as if he’d put it there specifically for me to find. Engrossed as he’d been on the games console when I’d left him, he knew perfectly well that I was coming upstairs to clean bedrooms.
It just seemed way too much of an open invitation to resist, particularly since the incident with Gregory – so, spurred on by the knowledge that the more I knew about him the better I could help him, I sat down on the bed and placed it on my knees.
It was a shoebox, that had been transformed by being encased in black faux-leather, and was covered in Bart Simpson stickers. In the centre of the lid there was a small photograph of Justin aged around eight years old, though it was difficult to make out as the box and lid had obviously been reinforced often; both were criss-crossed with many layers of Sellotape.
Inside was a menu from a Tex Mex restaurant, some birthday cards, a brochure from a theme park and a football programme, plus a number of different kinds of sea shell. There were also lots of photos, some of children – who I assumed were his little brothers, because I could see a definite family likeness. Not that I knew just how much of a family likeness, because, as with Justin, their paternity was unknown, none of her ‘boyfriends’ sticking around for long enough to lay claim to them. Justin had asked his mother, apparently, some years back, but had been simply told not to be nosey.
The photos also included ones of a variety of women, all of which (not just the dark-haired ones, this time, I noticed) had had their faces stabbed with something sharp and their eyes carefully removed. It looked like it had mostly been done with scissors. Most heartbreaking of all was that so many were crumpled; the ones of his mother particularly badly, as if they’d not only been stabbed at repeatedly, but then also been screwed up in distress many times.
And then – and I felt my eyes smart at this – smoothed out again. At least, in so far as they could be. It was a record of the many times in his young life he’d felt unloved, and then loved, and then abandoned, and then hopeful. It was very, very difficult to look at.
And it seemed I wasn’t the only one looking.
I don’t know how much time had passed when I first became aware of it, but while I was sitting there deciding I must press Justin to talk to me about this, I suddenly had that feeling that I was no longer alone. I looked up then and, sure enough, he was standing in the bedroom doorway.
He said nothing at all, just crossed the room towards me, took the box, closed it and calmly placed it under his pillow.
For all his silence and his uncharacteristic lack of histrionics, I could feel his anger thrumming in the air. I felt a wave of embarrassment and floundered for a moment, feeling I’d been caught redhanded doing something naughty. ‘Justin, love …’ I began. I … I … was … well, it was just there, and –’
‘You were looking at my private stuff,’ he said calmly.
‘I was cleaning love, that’s all. And it was there, open, on your bed.’
He stared at me for a moment before shrugging his shoulders ‘Don’t matter anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s only a load of old crap.’
I stood up, then made myself busy smoothing the duvet. ‘I’m so sorry, love,’ I said. ‘It’s your personal things. I really had no right to …’
‘It’s fine Casey,’ he said, and his tone was light, even dismissive. ‘I’m just gonna stay in here now, though, if that’s okay. And watch a DVD.’
‘Yes,