The soiling, however, wasn’t Mike’s main concern that evening. Nor was it mine, because, though my hunch was that she wouldn’t need to go again (not in that way), I watched Flip like a hawk. As did Tyler and Denver, with a kind of appalled fascination, as, once John and Ellie had been dispatched (the latter promising to return on the Friday to catch up and see how things were going), she darted from kitchen to conservatory to garden to living room, all the time chatting thirteen to the dozen to Pink Barbie, and seemingly physically unable to stay in one place, or engaged in one activity for more than five minutes at a time.
I’d had several children in my care who suffered the symptoms of ADHD, so the mile-a-minute behaviour and tendency to be easily distracted weren’t unfamiliar territory. What did strike me, and struck Mike as soon as he’d spent half an hour in her company, was that, very much unlike the majority of children we’d fostered, little Flip seemed not the least concerned to find herself in the company of complete strangers.
‘It seems like almost the opposite,’ he remarked, once we were flaked out on the sofa, half-watching Tyler’s favourite soap. ‘I’ve never seen a new kid so pumped up with excitement about being here. Weird.’
It was probably adrenaline, I’d decided. And it had clearly worn her out. When Flip had crashed, she had crashed good and proper. Having wolfed down her plate of bangers and mash – of necessity, it had been a cobbled-together kind of tea – she announced that Pink Barbie was tired and needed to go to bed and she thought it would be a good idea if she went with her.
We’d tried not to smile at Tyler’s fist pump (we knew how he felt) and, as Mike and he dealt with the dishes, I took her upstairs and found her some pyjamas from my stash, upon which she was in bed and fast asleep within a matter of minutes, Pink Barbie in her own pink pyjamas tucked in the crook of her arm.
‘She’s weird,’ Tyler observed now. ‘She’s like a loony, isn’t she, Casey?’ He glanced at Mike, then, presumably to check that the use of the word ‘loony’ was acceptable. Which it wasn’t, of course, but, as he already knew that, Mike didn’t press it. This was an adventure, and a challenge, that was going to involve him as well, after all.
‘She’s certainly one of a kind,’ Mike agreed, diplomatically. ‘And I’m sure she’s going to keep us all on our toes.’ He turned his gaze away from the television and leaned forward so he could look at Tyler properly. ‘But you and me are well up to that job, aren’t we, kiddo? Because I think Casey here’s going to have a lot on her hands, don’t you?’ He accompanied his words with a wink and raised a hand, with the palm towards Tyler. ‘Deal, kiddo?’
Tyler slapped the palm with his own and grinned. ‘Deal!’
I could have kissed Mike for that. There I’d been, getting increasingly stressed about whether Tyler potentially might find it all much too difficult to handle, and with a scant half dozen words Mike had him completely on side: we were Team Watson and we were in this together. I knew there would be flashpoints and disaffections – I’d be mad not to expect that – but I also felt confident we could rise to them; especially if Flip went to bed at a reasonable time every night, giving us all that precious space to recharge.
And we would need to recharge, if today had been indicative. Ellie had assured me Flip had been given her morning Ritalin by the respite carer, and I’d given her a dose at teatime, but if that was her dosed, I could only wonder incredulously what she might be like unmedicated. She was like a Duracell bunny as it was.
‘You’re telling me I’ll need back-up,’ I confirmed, nudging Tyler and grinning. ‘She’s only got one speed setting, hasn’t she, Ty? Billy Whizz.’
He looked confused. ‘Who’s Billy Whizz?’
‘He’s out of a comic,’ I explained. ‘One I used to read when I was Flip’s age. It’s called The Beano and Billy Whizz was a boy who went everywhere super-fast. You’ve heard of Dennis the Menace?’ Tyler nodded at this one. ‘Well, he’s a character from the same comic. I’ll have to pick you up a copy some time.’
Mike chuckled. ‘And with a bit of Minnie the Minx thrown in for good measure, by the sound of it.’
‘Or Flip the Fast and Furious,’ Tyler suggested, pretty sagely.
Later, once we were all in bed and Mike was snoring under the duvet beside me, I sat up and properly read the notes John had left for me, which fleshed out the picture he’d already sketched. It was the same depressing scenario as I’d come across many times before, both as a foster carer and, prior to that, running a behaviour unit in the local comprehensive school. Little Flip (little Philippa; how had the name Philippa come about, I wondered) had her potential in life stunted before she’d even been born, due to being born brain damaged as a result of her mother’s addiction.
I thought back to Tyler, whose early life had been so tragically blighted by his own mother’s addiction to heroin, and sent up a silent curse to the forces, and in Tyler’s case more specifically to the dealers, that saw young women trapped in that same desperate downward spiral that not only meant their own lives were blighted, often permanently, but that also led them to the reckless sexual behaviours that saw them bring children into the world.
It also struck me that, in one sense, Flip had had it tougher. Though Tyler’s mum’s poison had killed her when he was a toddler, it had left no long-standing physical mark on him. Yes, he’d suffered horribly, psychologically, in a zillion other ways, but he was young, fit and strong now. He could grow up and be and do anything he wanted.
There would be no heady potential for Flip, as far as I could tell, because – damningly and cruelly – alcohol had poisoned her too. And once I’d refreshed my knowledge of the damage FAS could wreak, I was reminded that there were things that could not be reversed; that the damage to her brain was going to be permanent.
I tried not to judge. To be a foster carer and be judgemental is a fool’s game, and often inappropriate, as well. Though revulsion at abusers is a normal human reaction, there are many cases where the parents who’ve had their children removed from them are very much victims themselves. But as I read, I still felt a stirring of something like anger. There were apparently grandparents. There was a brother. This was a child who did have family. Just a mother unwilling or unable to conquer her addiction and an extended family that didn’t seem to want to know her.
I read the previous social worker’s lengthy set of notes with care. John had been right when he said mother and daughter had been known to the authorities for some time; the notes went back to when Flip had been little more than a baby, one who hadn’t been reaching her developmental milestones.
There was no father’s name recorded on Flip’s birth certificate, but it seemed social services had had some contact a long time back with the maternal grandparents, who were both in their seventies, and apparently not in the best of health. Their daughter Megan was the younger of two children – there was also a brother, but he was a soldier who lived in Germany and was recently divorced. Hardly knowing his niece in any case, he apparently wanted no involvement.
Neither, it seemed, did those very same grandparents – well, at least according to the most recent note about it, which was a few years old now. This was another sad state of affairs. They had apparently tried hard to help out their daughter when Flip had been a baby, but when they practised tough love and stopped helping Megan financially her retaliation was swift and decisive. She refused to have anything more to do with them, in protest.
And it seemed that they’d long since given up on both daughter and grand-daughter – washed their hands of the pair of them, despite entreaties by Megan’s then social worker to try to build bridges. ‘It’s difficult,’ she’d noted in an email to her manager, ‘because Flip has so little in the way of attachments; with the best will in the world, it’s hard to appeal to their better natures when Flip herself seems to have not the slightest affection for them, while professing to love people she has only just met. One of the many frustrations of dealing with