‘Miller!’ I called up. ‘Please don’t use that language in this house. And you have three minutes left to play your game, so finish up, okay?’
I waited for a reply but all I could hear was the din from the PlayStation. I tried again, ‘Miller! Answer me, please!’
‘God!’ came the reply. ‘What is it now? I’m busy!’
I took a deep breath. Start as you mean to go on, Casey. I pushed my sleeves up, and thundered up the steps to his room and, since the door was wide open, I went in.
He was cross-legged on the floor, in front of the TV screen, with his back to me. ‘Miller, I told you. We have to go out. We are going out. Now put down the controller and get yourself dressed. Otherwise, I’ll have to switch off the internet.’
There was a heartbeat of silence and stillness. Clearly, though he affected not to, he was listening to me. And, as a consequence, to my surprise, he didn’t bother giving me more lip. Simply threw down the controller, scrabbled to his feet and launched himself at his unmade bed, where he burrowed under the duvet and rolled himself up, Swiss-roll style. Completely, from head to foot. He then started to howl – not like a child would, but like a wolf. ‘Ahhhoooooo! Ahhhoooooooooo!’
It was, as Tyler might put it, interesting. Quite unlike anything I’d heard before. I’d heard all kinds of noises coming out of kids’ mouths over the years, but this one definitely had an unusual repertoire. And, since he showed no sign of stopping – perhaps he was waiting for a reaction? – I crossed the room and placed a hand on the squirming mound. ‘Stop being silly, love,’ I told him. ‘Just come out from under there and get dressed, please. It’s such a lovely day out there, and you need some fresh air.’
He twisted away from me, with another howl. This time one of pure anguish. ‘Nope!’ he shouted. ‘Nope, nope, nope, NOPE!’
He sounded more like a toddler having a tantrum than a twelve-year-old, but while a part of me still felt an almost overwhelming urge to grab one side of the duvet and simply unroll him, I reminded myself that this wasn’t a normal twelve-year-old. This was a kid with a whole lorry load of deep-seated problems, most of which I hadn’t the first clue about beyond the various prophesies of doom that came with them. And who now appeared to be having a major meltdown. Cursing myself for agreeing to take him without first demanding the tools to enable me to understand him, let alone help him, I took another deep breath and quietly walked out of the room – time out for both of us, while I read Libby’s email.
I was halfway down the stairs when I heard the sound of laughter. Then his voice, light and calm, came floating down the stairs.
‘Miller, one,’ he called out. ‘Hah! Casey, nil.’
Ah, I thought. So that was how it was going to be.
Difficult to like. Those had been John’s words, and as I headed back downstairs again they nagged at me. I’d fostered many a child who had fitted that description – it sometimes felt as if it went with the territory. Kids who’d been in care for a long time often fell into that category, simply because they so often displayed long-entrenched behaviours that would challenge the patience of a saint. This was almost always because they had profound psychological problems, and sometimes, in addition, because they’d created a mental ‘loop’ – bad behaviour got them attention, so it was self-reinforcing, and, in addition, because that attention was negative in nature, it then confirmed their highly negative sense of self. This led to more self-loathing, and, even if it was subconscious, it almost invariably led more bad behaviour.
Breaking the cycle, therefore, was, in part, about re-programming a child’s ability to control themselves – getting them to realise, through the use of a strict regime of consequences and rewards, that they had choices in how they handled a situation, earning points for good behaviours (obviously geared to their age and relative maturity) and losing privileges when they fell short of what had previously been agreed.
It was the cornerstone of the programme Mike and I had been trained to deliver, and once negotiated and agreed upon, usually as soon as practical at the start of a new placement, it was simply a question of sticking to it, and rigidly. I’ve said it a million times but it wasn’t exactly rocket science. Basically, you did your homework, so you had an idea of what a child liked to do. Then, based on that, you’d decide what rewards were suitable reinforcements to offer in exchange for good behaviour and completed tasks.
A child might want a cinema visit, for example, or a weekly trip to the leisure centre. Or they may enjoy having a particular takeaway meal, or like a certain weekly comic or magazine. In order to get these things they would have to earn points for doing chores, or getting off to school on time, or keeping their rooms clean.
But this all assumed I had an idea of what ‘inducements’ might work for Miller, and since all I knew for sure was that he liked to park himself in front of a computer game 24/7, it would require a huge upheaval to adopt a new regime where his access to that reward became something he’d need to earn rather than assume was his right. In short, I badly needed to know what I was dealing with, and, ideally, before the pattern set in. Three days was one thing – a period of acclimatisation was obviously necessary – but more than that and we would be making rods for our own backs.
So when I opened my laptop and saw Libby’s email had arrived, I decided to leave Miller to bask in his ‘one–nil victory’ for the moment, and try to find out what else made him tick.
The body of the email told me little. It was really just a bullet-pointed summary of the dozen or so attachments that ran like a blue ribbon along the top of it. But at least there was plenty for me to read. So I plunged straight on in, clicking on and opening the most obvious. The one marked ‘Initial Care Plan Reports’.
As the name suggests, this was the first report, logged when he’d entered the system, which, as John had said, had been almost seven years ago. So Miller would have been four or five. Only just school age. Still a baby. And if I knew anything about warming to a ‘difficult to like’ child, it was that it helped to be mindful of the journey they’d been on, and to remember the child they might have become, had their circumstances, and their life chances, been different.
The report had been written up by the first social worker on the scene – presumably whoever was on call with the emergency duty team. It was a simple Word document, dated, but with no other details in terms of time and location; clearly just the notes they’d written up after attending the scene.
The day that changed one little boy’s life forever. I scrolled down and got stuck in. The report began:
Having received numerous phone calls from passing motorists, two police officers drove to where it had been reported that a young boy was playing dangerously close to a railway line. It had also been reported that he was dressed in nothing more than a nappy, and people were obviously very fearful about his welfare.
When the officers arrived, it was to find the child – who’d presumably slipped underneath a fence – was about fifteen metres below them, down an embankment. Initially, though he saw them, he didn’t respond to their calls, so, given the danger the child was in, the female officer climbed part of the way down to the embankment, and eventually persuaded the child to climb up and join her. He still didn’t speak, answering questions with unintelligible sound and gestures, and appeared to be agitated and afraid.
As the child was reluctant to take the officer’s hand, the other PC went down to help, but when the male officer attempted to grab him to pull him up to safety, he began hitting himself repeatedly on the side of the head, and kicking out when they tried to restrain him.
He then ran away along