Four Waifs on Our Doorstep (27 page)

The next day I went into her room to put her laundry away and there, scrunched up on her bed, was the £70 denim skirt, with a wide ragged strip cut off, so that it was now shorter than a
pelmet.

I picked it up and took it away. My first thought was to confront her with it immediately, but something told me to hang on to it for a few years, for the day when she was earning her own money
and would understand the value of it. Perhaps then she would realise how disappointed I was.

Jamie had never stolen from us, or from anyone as far as I knew, since his food-stealing days were over. I don’t believe he lied much either. His main Achilles heels had
always been his anxiety and his anger.

However, as a teenager he became more and more obstreperous, and by the time he was fifteen Jamie was in total rebellion, running away for odd nights at friends’ houses, not telling us
where he was, getting up to all sorts of things we didn’t know about. But he always turned up within twenty-four hours. Until one day.

We had found out that he was now smoking weed and drinking alcohol, though goodness knows where he got it all from. School maybe, or the youth club.

Thinking about it now, I suppose it takes a lot of guts for someone like me to ring up Social Services and say ‘I’m struggling with this.’ But that’s what I did. I
didn’t want to go blundering in and get it wrong, but I knew we had to deal with this as a family. We couldn’t just overlook his drug and drink problems, but I wanted some advice about
the best way to approach it.

‘Well, Mrs Merry,’ said a detached voice at the other end of the phone. ‘Why didn’t you stop this before it started? Why haven’t you talked it all through with him
and engaged him in other things with you? Why don’t you—?’

‘Hang on, hang on,’ I said, exasperated. ‘Who will look after the other three, all of whom have their own individual needs, while I spend all my time with Jamie?’

‘Well, how long have you allowed him to be on drink and drugs?’

‘No, you’ve got it wrong. We haven’t allowed it. We’ve only just discovered he’s doing it.’

‘You should have stopped him doing it.’

‘If I tried to stop him, just like that, he would kick off and run away for good, so how would that help him? Anyway, we couldn’t stop him if we didn’t know.’

‘Why didn’t you know?’

‘Look,’ I said, as calmly as I could, ‘all I want to do is find the best way to help him now. Do you have any suggestions?’

‘Get a therapist,’ she said.

I don’t think I had ever felt more alone than I did that day, with no useful support from anyone, except of course Mike and my adopted family. The authorities just didn’t have either
the expertise or the money to help and being an adoptive parent is a lonely place when you can see it all crumbling in front of you.

I talked it through with Mike that evening and we decided what I would say when I broached it to Jamie. So the next day I sat down with him at the kitchen table while Mike took the others out to
walk the dogs. But he seemed very wary and I think he knew. As soon as I started to speak, he flew into a rage and stormed out of the house.

That was it. He just went and, of course, we didn’t panic. He’d come back like he always did. He might be a bit the worse for wear, but hopefully with no real harm done.

However, this time he didn’t come back.

The following day we had a phone call from a woman with a raspy voice called Mrs Edwards.

‘Jamie’s staying here, Mrs Merry. He’s told me all about it.’

‘Right, OK.’ I was so surprised that I didn’t really know what to say. God knows what he had told her, so what could I say? I wasn’t about to argue with a stranger about
whatever accusations he might have made about us.

‘You should never have children if you don’t know how to look after them,’ she admonished me. ‘You’ve got to understand them. He’s very unhappy, you know.
He’s in the same class as my grandson, and I’ve adopted my grandson, so I know all about adoption and how it works.’

‘Do you?’ I asked, with a mixture of irony and indignation. ‘And if you want me to get in touch with Social Services, I will do that as well. They will need to know, Mrs
Edwards, because Jamie is under sixteen and you need to have a CRB check, and you would need to inform me officially if you are thinking of fostering or adopting him privately. I would want to know
that everything is done properly and the local authority needs to be fully involved.’

‘Oh, I knew this would be your response,’ she said in a superior voice, with more than a hint of annoyance, as she hung up.

A couple of days went by, and she called again. This time she spoke in a very irate voice.

‘Mrs Merry, Jamie tells me he has no clothes, so I’m going to have to go out and buy him some.’

‘Oh, don’t do that,’ I replied calmly. ‘I’ll bring his clothes over to you.’

She gave me her address and I went upstairs to Jamie’s bedroom to pack some of them up for him in black bags, so that I could carry them straight out to the car.

Now, this lady lived in a narrow street at the back of Church Road, just round the corner from where we lived when the children first came to us. I pulled up outside her tiny Victorian cottage,
and went to knock on her front door.

‘Hello,’ I said in a cheery voice as she opened the door a crack. ‘I’m Jamie’s mum.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, opening the door wider. ‘Have you brought Jamie’s clothes?’

I nodded and went back to get out the first black sack, which I brought to her door and popped it down just inside.

‘Thank you,’ she said with evident resentment.

‘No, that’s just the first bag,’ I said calmly as I went back and brought two more black bags, then two more, and two more.

Her eyes widened with every delivery. ‘What’s all this?’

‘Oh, that’s the contents of Jamie’s two wardrobes,’ I explained. ‘I haven’t emptied his chest of drawers yet. I’ll bring all that tomorrow.’

‘I can’t have all this,’ she said, running her fingers through her thin grey hair. ‘He told me he had no clothes.’

‘Well, as you can see, that wasn’t quite true.’

True to my word, I took almost everything else round to her the following day.

She looked horrified. ‘I can’t take all that in,’ she wailed. ‘I haven’t got room.’

‘Well, I’ll just leave them on your doorstep then, I said, trying to keep a straight face. ‘Now, what do you want me to do with his weekend cases?’ I asked her.
‘And all his gadgets and other stuff?’

‘Don’t you bring them here, Mrs Merry, whatever you do. I can’t take any more.’

‘Well, perhaps this might teach you a lesson,’ I said, as kindly as I could in the circumstances. ‘Please do not believe everything disgruntled teenagers tell you.’

‘Well!’ she huffed.

I didn’t hear anything for a while, but at least I knew where he was, and when I checked with the school, he was still going there, so I thought I’d let him come to his senses and
perhaps he would eventually come back as if nothing had happened.

But a few weeks later, I had another phone call from Mrs Edwards.

‘I don’t know whether you are aware, but your Jamie is smoking stuff.’

‘Yes, we knew that he was drinking and smoking weed. That’s why he left, when we tried to broach the subject with him. That’s what all this is about, his act of rebellion,
staying with you, not contacting us and everything.’

There was a short silence at the other end. ‘Well, I don’t want my grandson to be involved in this,’ she said.

I don’t know whether she turfed him out or whether he just left, but soon after that I discovered that this lady’s grandson was the dealer Jamie had bought the drugs from.

Throughout this time, I texted him once a week, saying ‘Are you OK?’. If he wanted to reply he did, but I didn’t push him. A couple of times he rang me out of the blue.

‘Shall we go for a coffee?’ he would ask cheerily.

I found out that he spent the next few weeks sofa-hopping, and then finally went to the YMCA. But that didn’t last long as they have rules and Jamie has never been one for rules.

‘If you go out in the evening, you must come back by eleven,’ they said. ‘You’ll be kicked out if you don’t.’

Well of course he didn’t come back and they threw him out. He did some more sofa-hopping, wheedled his way back into Mrs Edwards’s house for a couple of nights, got back into the
YMCA and finally joined a house-share in the city, which he could just about afford on his housing benefit.

The one good thing amongst all this was that he kept going to school. They excluded him permanently, about three months before his GCSEs, for his disruptive behaviour and telling the teachers
what to do, but they let him go back and sit his exams.

‘Hi, Mum,’ Jamie rang me with a cheery voice. ‘I’ve just finished all my exams.’

‘Well done, Jay.’ I was relieved he’d managed to go back for that. He must be maturing a bit.

‘I think I surprised everybody when I turned up on time, clean and sober, for all my exams! I thought you’d be proud of me.’

‘Yes, that’s great. I am proud of you for taking your exams and even more because it took some guts to go back to school to do them after you’d been expelled. So well done. How
did the exams go?’

‘They weren’t too bad.’

‘Well, you probably missed a lot, with missing out on so much school.’

‘Yes, I know. But I think it was mostly revision the last few months.’

‘Well, at least you had a go.’

On the day the results were due, Jamie went in to collect them and phoned me from outside the school.

‘I made my head of year cry,’ he announced.

‘Oh no!’

‘Don’t worry, it’s all right. It was in a good way,’ he explained. ‘When I opened the envelope and showed her my results, she was so happy that she had tears in her
eyes.’

‘The suspense is killing me, Jay. What did you get?’

‘I actually passed four of them,’ he said. ‘Four grade Cs. Isn’t that great?’

‘Yes, after all your troubles, I reckon that’s a real achievement. Just wait till I tell Dad. He’ll be so glad.’

At around this time, Jamie met his girlfriend and they settled down together. He never came back to live with us, but he would often pop back for meals and family occasions, so
we were all back on an even keel . . . or so we thought.

23

T
he agency had grown to such a size that it was now almost running itself. Mike had long been retired and I wanted to join him. The children were
more demanding now than for quite a few years, and I felt it would help if I was free to spend more time with them and with Mike too.

Another successful fostering agency made a very good bid for ours and we agreed terms with them. Jane and our accountant dealt with all the paperwork side of things.

I don’t know how long it was happening before I realised for sure, but I often had less money in my purse than I thought. It was just ten and twenty pound notes to begin
with, and I couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t spent them myself.

But finally one day I knew, because I’d been to the bank and drawn out a large amount, three thousand pounds, for a particular reason. When I went to my bag the next morning and got out my
purse, the whole lot was missing. I was shocked. Could I not even leave my bag unattended in my own home? I had my suspicions, of course, but I didn’t want to risk doing anything hasty, just
in case I was wrong.

Meanwhile, some of fifteen-year-old Stacey’s secrets were surfacing, as the younger ones reminisced about our holidays for example.

‘Do you remember that caravan holiday?’ asked Carrie.

‘Which one?’ I said. ‘We had lots of caravan holidays.’

‘The one that was in Devon or near there. Stacey used to wait till you and Dad were asleep, then climb out of the caravan window and go into town with a very short skirt on.’

‘I never knew that!’

‘Yes,’ Stacey laughed. ‘I just wanted a bit of fun.’

Even then, Stacey, as well as being the funniest, was the most outrageous. I think there must have been a lot of things going on that I didn’t know about, but money was always the thing
that held her back . . . until she took the leap into larger scale theft and fraud.

The head teacher phoned us.

‘Mrs Merry, can you come up to the school, please? I think we have a problem.’

When I got to the head teacher’s study, there was Stacey, looking subdued, together with the head, the deputy, her form tutor and another teacher I didn’t know. Oh dear, I
thought.

‘Mrs Merry,’ said the deputy head. ‘Are you aware of the school rules about jewellery?’

‘Yes. I know it’s not allowed.’

‘That’s right.’ She turned to Stacey’s form tutor. ‘Mr Bailey?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This morning, at registration time, I noticed that Stacey had quite a large ring on her finger, a five-stoned diamond ring. Well, they looked like diamonds,
and I knew that it would be quite valuable if they were. So I had to confront her about it.’

I was shocked. An image of the antique five-stone diamond ring, left to me by my grandmother, came into my mind. I hadn’t worn it in years. I just kept it in my jewellery box. It was one
of two rings, the other with three diamonds, that I was going to give to Sally and Jane when they each turned forty.

‘What did Stacey say?’ I asked him, trying not to show what I was thinking.

‘She said: “My mum’s given it to me.”’ He paused. ‘Is that right, Mrs Merry?’

I hesitated to answer, but I looked at Stacey, and her unconcerned face.

‘No.’ I shook my head slowly, sadly. ‘I do have a five-stoned diamond ring. But I didn’t give it to Stacey. I’m hoping it’s still in my jewellery box at
home.’

‘Well, I wanted to show it to you, so that you could tell us if it was yours,’ said Mr Bailey. ‘But unfortunately, it was off Stacey’s finger in a trice and nowhere to be
seen. We even searched her pockets, her bag and her desk, but there was no sign of it, only minutes after it had been on her finger.’