‘Bullying?’
Kate shrugged slightly. ‘Her teacher didn’t use that word, but that’s what it sounded like to me.’
Alice frowned. ‘Poor little thing. What’s your take on it?’
Kate took a deep breath. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘the mother’s approached us, so we have to follow it up. I don’t think there’s any doubt that she’s finding things tough. Money’s obviously tighter than it used to be, which doesn’t help matters. But in my view, moving the child from her family home would be deeply traumatic, especially if she’s having difficulty at school. I think it should be avoided.’
‘I’m assuming you have no reason to believe the child is in danger. No signs of abuse?’
Kate shook her head. ‘As I say, she’s a very retiring kind of girl. It’s difficult to get much out of her. I wouldn’t say she’s the happiest child I’ve ever met, but no, I wouldn’t say she’s demonstrating any of the warning signs.’
‘Do you think we need a supervision order?’
‘I’d say it’s early days for that.’
‘OK.’ Alice looked at Kate and Andy. ‘Kate, you need to keep tabs on the family – keep an eye out for any deterioration. But are we agreed that it’s in the child’s best interest for her to stay where she is?’
‘Absolutely,’ the two social workers said in unison.
‘Good.’ Alice smiled at them. ‘Well, I guess that wraps everything up.’ She scraped her chair back and stood up. ‘Have a good weekend, you two. I’ll see you both on Monday.’
Dani Sinclair had dark brown hair, pale skin and clear brown eyes. She was small for her age, though close up you could tell that she was almost a teenager. When she cried, the tears would collect in her lower lids like water swelling against a dam; but the dam would eventually break, and the tears would suddenly wet her cheeks profusely. It happened a lot. Dani was a tearful little girl, not robust like some children, and she found it difficult to stop herself from crying when she started to feel the tears coming.
She felt them coming now as she sat at the meal table with the two younger ones. It was fish fingers for tea.
Dani didn’t really like fish fingers – didn’t like the way the fish oozed a kind of milky sap against the orange breadcrumbs when they were warm. But she never said so because the other two – James and Rebecca – loved them. Instead, she pushed the little pieces around her plate, occasionally summoning up the courage to eat a mouthful. She knew that they just got worse as they grew colder, but that didn’t make it any easier to eat them up when they were hot.
At the other side of the small kitchen, their mum clattered around at the sink. Dani would be in trouble when her mum saw that she had barely eaten any of the food, and that thought spurred her on a bit. She stuck her fork into a piece of fish finger, put it in her mouth, chewed and swallowed. She shivered as the food went down.
‘Finished!’ Rebecca shouted loudly.
‘Me too!’ James chimed in.
Their mum turned from the sink, suds dripping from the yellow washing-up gloves she was wearing. She walked to the table and picked up the two empty plates, before looking down at Dani’s.
Dani returned the look and steeled herself for what was to come.
‘You’re a fussy little beggar, Dani,’ she snapped. ‘Why can’t you eat the food I give you? Why can’t you be more like your brother and sister?’
Dani kept quiet, and endured the smug stares coming from the younger children.
‘Go on,’ her mum said waspishly. ‘I’m sick of the sight of you. Go to your room.’
Silently Dani got down from the table, left the kitchen and trudged up the stairs. ‘And when your Auntie Rose comes round, you make sure you don’t have that surly bloody look on your face!’ Mum’s voice carried up the stairs.
‘Dani never eats her dinner, does she, Mum?’ she heard Rebecca saying from the kitchen.
‘Shut up, Rebecca,’ the little girl was told.
Mum wasn’t her real mum. Dani had known that for as long as she could remember. But she hadn’t always been like this. In Dani’s earliest memories, things had been happier. There had been a man in the house, for one thing – the man she called Daddy. He had been kind to the children, and to Dani in particular. One day, however, he wasn’t there any more. Dani asked any number of times where her Daddy had gone, but she never received a straight answer from her mum. It was left to her to piece things together from half-heard conversations between grown-ups not intended for her ears. Conversations about things she didn’t really understand.
Dani opened the door to her bedroom. The other two children shared a room, but having a room to herself was not intended as a treat for Dani – she knew that well enough. It was because Rebecca would rather share with James than with her. Their room was nice and big; Dani’s was tiny, with room for only a small single bed and an old chest of drawers. But she didn’t mind. No one ever really disturbed her in here. It was the one place she could go and be sure of being by herself. She sat on the bed, hugged her knees and rested her head against the wall. The wallpaper was pink; her dad had put it up for her before he left and nowit was looking a bit old and tatty – in one corner it was coming away from the wall. There wasn’t any point mentioning it to Mum, of course, any more than it was worth mentioning the trouble she’d had at school that day. She would probably just shout at her, so she kept quiet about it.
Downstairs, she heard the television being switched on. Dani would have liked to have gone down to watch it with the others, but she chose not to – not with Mum in the mood she was in. Much better, she had learned, to keep herself to herself. She put her thumb in her mouth, closed her eyes and gently rocked herself. It would be bedtime soon. Bedtime was all right. When the lights were out, she could lose herself in her own little world and pretend things were better than they really were.
In truth, she knew, they could hardly be worse.
It had been several months ago that Mum had first told her she didn’t want Dani to live with them any more. Her words rang in the little girl’s head more clearly than anything anyone had ever said to her. At first she had persuaded herself that it was just a joke, that she didn’t really mean it; but when she kept repeating it in moments of anger, Dani wasn’t so sure. The arrival of the social worker had confirmed it for her. She was a nice lady called Kate, who had come to talk first to Mum and then to Dani herself. The grown-ups didn’t know that Dani had listened in on their conversation, however; they didn’t know she had heard her mum beg the social worker to take her away. ‘I can’t cope with her any more,’ Mum had said. ‘She’s going off the rails, always fighting other kids and bullying her brother and sister.’
Dani had blinked. She didn’t recognise herself in that description at all. But she knew that she would have to try very hard to make her mum want her again. It was difficult, though. Dani never seemed to be able to do anything right. Anything at all. She was always being shouted at, complained about. One time, Mum had even hit her – not hard, but hard enough to bring those tears to her eyes that always seemed to enrage her mother even more.
The very thought of it made her want to cry now.
She was woken from her reverie by the ringing of the doorbell and a little fluttering of apprehension in her stomach. That would be Auntie Rose. Dani couldn’t decide what to do. If she stayed here in her bedroom, she would be told off and accused of being unfriendly; but if she went downstairs, no doubt they would find something to complain about. Dani sat still, paralysed by indecision for a few minutes, before finally deciding to leave the safety of her