‘So there’s no chance of him going back to where he’s coming from then?’ I finished.
‘Sadly not,’ she said. ‘But we’re already looking at various options. Don’t worry. We’ll have him fixed up by the time Monday comes around. Oh, and I’ll email his files over so you can read more of his background. Well, if you’ve time. If I make the call now, he’s not going to be long. On which note, will it be okay if I give the home manager your mobile number so he can give you a ring and have a chat with you as well?’
There was never a situation in fostering when extra information was a bad thing, so I agreed to that, too; after all, the home manager would know Connor extremely well. Then I hung up and headed off into the kitchen.
Tyler’s friends had all arrived while I’d been talking and the decibel level was through the roof, with Mike in the midst of it, wielding the fish slice, asking for orders. Calming and low-key it wasn’t, and I was glad our temporary charge wouldn’t arrive till the boys had headed off to training.
Mike put the fish slice down and pointed to a fat bacon sandwich he’d just made for me. It was stuffed with crispy bacon and oozing ketchup, just the way I liked it.
‘All sorted?’ he asked, as I joined him cooker-side to eat it.
‘All sorted,’ I said. ‘He should be with us in a couple of hours. Coming in private transport apparently.’ The rest I could (and perhaps should) leave till later on. No point paving the lad’s route to us with negativity.
Mike raised his eyebrows. ‘No expense spared, eh?’ He then checked his watch. ‘We might well be back from football by then, too.’
‘Yes, do try,’ I said, and then glanced around at the scattering of black and white striped football jerseys. ‘But just you and Tyler, please. I think that’s best, don’t you? I think this little lot would be a bit too much as a welcoming committee given the circumstances.’
Mike grinned. ‘I think this lot would be a bit much given any circumstances. You can almost smell the testosterone in this kitchen!’
I licked ketchup from my lips and pretended to sniff the air. ‘At least it’s better than the smell after the match.’
As soon as my house was male hormone-free I made a quick call to both my kids. Both adult now and with their own families (Kieron had not long had his first baby) it was odds on that either or both would pop round at some point. We had a bit of an open-door policy in that way, and what mum doesn’t like seeing her grown-up kids?
Today, however, it made sense to ask them not to call round, so that I could give Connor a chance to settle in. And if that went okay, we could all get together on the Sunday. In my experience, something like a big family picnic was one of the best ways to take a troubled child out of themselves – fresh air and exercise being two of the best medicines around.
That done, it was time to go and power up my laptop so I could see what might have fetched up in my inbox. And something had. And it made interesting reading.
It seemed Connor had been born in south London. In his early years he’d lived there with his mum – who was called Diane – and his dad, Connor senior, together with an older brother and sister. These older siblings were, according to the notes, Connor’s polar opposites, in that, while they were model kids (if such a thing exists) he’d been labelled a ‘problem child’ early on; screaming all day for no apparent reason, and violent from the moment he could walk. He had been excluded permanently from every school he had attended in his short life (including nursery, where he was already deemed too aggressive to be around other kids), and by the time he was seven he’d already been tagged ‘streetwise’.
I continued to read with a sense of depressing inevitability. Though it seemed no one had commented on or suggested reasons for Connor being such an apparently difficult toddler, one thing leapt out as a factor that might exacerbate the problem; that his father had been in and out of prison all his life. Connor senior was quite the criminal, it seemed; something not usually conducive to family life, and when Connor was five his wife left and then divorced him.
Then came the nugget that I couldn’t help but home in on. That she’d left him, taking only two of her three children. She simply left for some village in the north-east, close to Scotland, and as it coincided with a period when Connor senior was at liberty, she left little Connor behind with his dad.
I couldn’t help but sigh. I could never do such a thing. I struggled to understand how a mum could leave her kids at the best of times – in all but the most extreme of cases – but to take two and leave one with a jailbird husband? How much more completely could a child be rejected? I read on. It seemed Dad had been happy enough to keep him, but within six months he’d received yet another prison sentence and at that point five-year-old Connor had been taken into care. He’d been part of the system ever since.
It was dreadful reading – starts in life don’t come much worse – and I felt genuinely moved, not to mention slightly sickened, thinking of where he’d come from and just how damaged he must be as a consequence. I wasn’t alone; various social workers and carers had made similar observations, one noting only recently that, at the age of just eight, Connor truly believed himself to be ‘properly grown-up’, had seen enough of life to know ‘exactly what was what’ and that half the adults he’d encountered ‘didn’t have a clue’.
I closed my laptop. Bye bye weekend. This clearly wasn’t going to be an easy one. Though I already knew that – mine was a job that required me to know that – I also knew instinctively that I now had to make a choice. Not about hanging on to Connor – our next long-term placement would be decided in consultation with John Fulshaw – but about how I – or, rather, we – approached the next two days.
I had two choices. I could fill the time with fun things to do, keep Connor happy and act like he was just with us for a little holiday, or I could choose to try to help in some way. That would mean touching on some very painful areas for Connor and ‘interfering’ in his life, and I knew doing that was tantamount to creating all kinds of trouble. But to opt for simple containment would leave me feeling that I wasn’t doing my job. And that, admittedly to my own detriment at times, simply wasn’t in my nature.
John Fulshaw was still away, of course, but I could hear him like Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder. He’d have looked at the notes and advised against this particular bit of respite, for sure. I could actually hear him telling me not to take it on, saying that since we’d decided to take on Tyler permanently we needed to take a break before embarking on our next quest. Yes, do a bit of respite, perhaps – for quiet, biddable children who happened to find themselves in unfortunate circumstances – but save our emotional energy for our next long-term challenge; not take on a kid with a dossier of escapades that made for more eye-popping reading than James Bond’s.
John would probably have been right, but I’d committed to it now, so it was up to me to advise me, and I told myself sternly that I should play things by ear. Much as my instinct was to cast myself as a mixture of superhero and avenging angel, the best thing to do would be to see how things went. In any case, half the day would be gone before Connor even got to us; I’d never been to Swindon but I knew it was at least a couple of hours’ drive away, probably more. And he’d be tired, he’d be shaken, he’d be scared; hopefully he’d be contrite. Which thoughts showed just how much I didn’t know.
Mike and Tyler arrived back from football at one o’clock, exactly the time I expected to receive Connor, so I hustled them in, ordered them both to the bathroom with a command of ‘Get those filthy sweaty things off!’ and flew around with a can of air freshener. Only then, with my home feeling fit to receive