Mummy's Little Helper (8 page)

‘But
does
she?’ Abby’s voice was a sudden plaintive squeak behind him. She obviously had no interest in pond-life. ‘I bet she doesn’t. Not everything. Do you
know
how many accidents happen in the home, Mike? Well,
do
you?’

We both stared at her, taken aback by this unexpected little outburst. And, as had kept happening, once again her eyes immediately filled with tears. I rushed to put my arms around her, but she stiffened at my touch.

‘You shouldn’t laugh! You just don’t
realise
!’ she spluttered, shrugging me away. ‘The home’s a very dangerous place!’

‘Sweetheart, I know it
can
be,’ I said gently. ‘As I’m sure your book says. But, you know, you really mustn’t worry about Levi and Jackson. Yes, accidents can happen. And, you’re right – sometimes they do. But, you know, Riley and David
do
know how to take care of them. They’re very careful. As I know you’ll be if you have children of your own one day, too.’

Abby’s eyes blazed at this. ‘I’m not having any children! Ever! I just want mummy back! Why won’t they let me have my mummy back? I
hate
them.’ She turned to Mike. ‘And I hate
you
as well!’

And with that she turned and ran away from us.

Oh God, I thought, as Mike and I set off in pursuit. Please don’t let us have another runaway. Spencer had really run us ragged in that regard – ‘run’ being the operative word. In the few months he’d been with us, he’d gone AWOL pretty constantly, more than once being missing overnight. He was a proper little Houdini, and incredibly street-wise for an eight-year-old, and in the end we’d had to keep the house locked up like a prison – including all the upstairs windows. He was such an old hand at absconding he had every angle covered – and that had even included making getaways by shimmying across roofs, like a character in a cartoon.

Thankfully, Abby, though impressively fleet of foot, hadn’t figured on the perils of running over deceptively soft rain-sodden leaf litter. She’d headed off at quite a lick along the stream bank, but had barely covered a hundred yards before tripping on something – a buried log or tree root or tangle of brambles, probably – and going down hard into the cold peaty soil.

She was still face down when we got to her, her shoulders heaving as she sobbed, now as much in frustration, I didn’t doubt, as distress. Mike was there first, and helped her up from the muddy ground, and I looked on in dismay at the state she was in. Her previously pale pink hoodie was now liberally streaked with chocolate-coloured mud, and you could hardly see the fabric of the front of her jeans. Worse, her hands and face were caked in it and as she held the former up to the latter she let out a wail that could have brought bears out of hibernation, had there been any in this neck of the woods.

‘Sweetheart, don’t cry,’ I tried to soothe, as she looked at her palms in horror. You could see she didn’t know quite what to do with them. There was no part of her she could rub them on that wasn’t already covered. I had a packet of tissues in my jacket pocket, but it seemed pointless to even proffer them. It would be like trying to use a pedalo to cross the Atlantic. I cursed myself. I invariably went everywhere with wet wipes these days, as well as sanitising hand gel. It was one of those things that went with nanna territory. But not today. We were only popping out, the three of us, after all.

Thankfully Mike had his wits about him. ‘Come on, Abby,’ he said. ‘Back to the bank, eh? Let’s rinse those hands off, at least. Then we can get you home and in the bath, can’t we, while Casey works her usual miracles with the washing machine. She’s a veteran, you know. Muddy kit’s her forte.’

Abby nodded mutely and stepped gingerly where Mike indicated, and I was glad I’d at least persuaded her to borrow a pair of wellies from the vast supply I had amassed over the years. The one pair of trainers she’d come to us with were almost impossibly clean and white, testimony to the sad fact that unlike most of her contemporaries she didn’t spend her free time doing what other children did. But they would have been white no longer, had I allowed her to wear them. So that was something at least.

She was still sniffing back tears as we returned to the side of the stream, holding her hands out in front of her, horrified – almost as if they didn’t even belong to her, but had been tacked on to the end of her arms against her will. ‘Don’t you worry,’ I said, as Mike pointed out a place where there was water falling into a pool from a slight overhang. ‘I’ll have everything clean as new. Mike’s right. If they gave out Oscars for getting stains out of stuff, I’d have had to build a bigger mantelpiece to display mine on, I’d have so many!’

But Abby was far too preoccupied with the mud all over her to really listen, and clearly not in the mood to be jollied along. So instead I shut up, squatted down beside her and Mike, and helped her by rolling her sleeves up. She’d obviously feel much happier once her hands were at least clean. Then we could set off and get her home and in the bath.

‘That’s the way,’ said Mike, as she rubbed them together under the water. I dipped a finger of my own in. It was clear and ice cold to the touch. The mud sloughed off her palms easily enough, but also revealed a cut. She had a big scratch across the ball of her thumb, bless her.

‘Ooh, you poor thing,’ I soothed. ‘I’ll bet that’s stinging now, isn’t it?’

But Abby didn’t answer. Once again she let out a wail of distress.

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘I know. But we’ll be home soon and we can get some cream on it. And a nice big fat plaster …’

Now Abby looked up at me with huge tear-filled eyes. ‘But we have to go to hospital,’ she sobbed, ‘or I’ll die!’

This was, I reflected, as I gathered up Abby’s discarded clothing, not only new but very confusing territory. You get used to things as a foster carer. And perhaps Mike and I, given the kind of extreme foster caring we usually did, had had the opportunity to get used to more than most. We had dealt with all kinds of self-harming, with being threatened with knives ourselves, with kids so badly neglected that they were feral and crawling with lice. We’d dealt with everything from inappropriate sexual behaviour in children barely out of nappies, to extreme violence and suicide attempts.

And that was just as foster carers; in my previous role as a behaviour manager I’d seen more damaged children in an average week – doing damage to both themselves and others – than some teachers in some schools might see in a whole term.

Abby was different. She was loved. She was cherished. She’d been wanted. Yet she was damaged too, and quite profoundly. She had been so upset by the cut on her hand that it took us till we were half the way home – Mike had scooped her up and carried her in the end – to manage to get out of her why she was so sure she was going to die.

Tetanus had been the answer. She was convinced she now had tetanus. And when she’d calmed down enough to speak she was quick to point out why. She’d been cut in the outdoors and that’s ‘where tetanus happened’. It lived underground and it didn’t like the air. So you got it by being cut when you were out playing in the garden, because the germs went straight from under the ground to under your skin, so they didn’t go in the air so they didn’t die.

But you
did
. She seemed to know absolutely everything about it, no doubt from both her mum
and
one of her books. So it took us both a long time to reassure her that she didn’t have to worry because it was only a scratch, and that tetanus was extremely rare, and was only a problem with deep outdoor injuries, such as standing on a rusty nail or something.

‘Besides,’ Mike had pointed out, as he pulled off her wellies, ‘you’ll have had an inoculation against tetanus when you were a baby, so even if you
had
had a nasty injury of that kind, the bug couldn’t live in you anyway.’

‘But if we don’t get those clothes off and in the washing machine pronto,’ I added, ‘that mud will start feeling
way
too at home. Come on, missy, let’s get you upstairs and in that bath, eh?’

Abby let me pull the hoodie over her head and took her socks off. She kept coming back to her hand – which to calm her I had wrapped up in half a dozen of my tissues – and still didn’t look as if she was convinced.

‘But what if I didn’t?’ she wanted to know, as we trooped upstairs to the bathroom.

‘What, have your immunisations? Oh, you’ll have had them, trust me. All babies do.’

‘But what if Mummy didn’t take me? What if she was too poorly that day and missed it?’

‘She won’t have,’ I said firmly. ‘She absolutely won’t have. So. Bubble bath. I have vanilla or I have … let me see … Japanese garden. Which scent would madam prefer?’

‘But that is a point, to be fair. She
might
have missed it,’ said Mike, once Abby was busy soaking in her cherry blossoms. ‘I mean, you don’t know, do you? How would we?’

‘Oh, lord, don’t you start,’ I said, as I gratefully grabbed the coffee he’d made for me. I was still feeling the cold and could have done with a soak myself. I pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. ‘Of course she’ll have had her jabs. God, you’re going to get me all twitched now.’

‘I’m just saying,’ said Mike. ‘We know hardly anything about her, after all.’

‘Well, it’s something I can check easily enough, I guess. I might have to register her with Doctor Shackleton in any case. So I can ask him to check, can’t I? But she
hasn’t
got tetanus. That was just a tiny scratch from a bramble, which barely scratched the surface. I think I’d know if it was the sort of wound that was deep enough for tetanus to be a worry. And I’ll put some Savlon on it anyway, and …’ I looked at Mike. Who was grinning at me now. ‘
What
?’

He continued grinning. ‘Just you,’ he said. ‘And for what it’s worth, I agree with you. But she’s a funny little thing, isn’t she? I meant to mention earlier. Have you noticed that thing she does with her sleeve?’

‘What thing?’

‘I noticed it yesterday, and then again this morning. She always pulls her sleeve over her hand when she opens a door. Like this –’ Mike pulled his jumper sleeve over his own hand to demonstrate. ‘And one time yesterday, I noticed, when she didn’t have a sleeve long enough, she spent about five minutes trying to do it with her elbow instead.’

‘I hadn’t,’ I said. ‘But it fits with everything else we know, doesn’t it? The health and safety obsession and so on. The million times a day she seems to need to wash her hands. It definitely figures.’

‘I was going to mention that too,’ Mike said. ‘Endlessly.’

I sighed. ‘Poor little thing. I mean, I know in the grand scheme of things it’s not so bad, really. I mean, not when you compare her to someone like Justin, at any rate. But even so.’

Justin had been our first foster child and I loved him dearly. We still saw him regularly – he’d never stop being part of our family – and if ever there was a child with the world on his shoulders, it had been him. The child of a drug-addicted mother, he’d been in care since he was five, when he’d burned down the family home.

How damaged did you have to be to do such a thing? We soon learned. He’d then spent the next few years bouncing back and forth between his feckless mother (who would pick him up and drop him with as much care as an inept knitter) and countless children’s homes and foster homes. His eventual tally of 20 failed placements was a shocking number for a span of just five years – and he’d grown steadily more damaged with every move. By the time we got him, aged ten, he’d been given up on by just about everyone. No, compared with Justin, I reminded myself, Abby’s problems weren’t
that
bad.

Except, of course, they
were
. Or soon would be, if her life wasn’t straightened out. It wouldn’t take much for this traumatised child – missing her mother, adrift, anxious, friendless and bewildered – to become irretrievably psychologically disturbed. In some ways, I thought, social services had shown great prescience in addressing that fact, because her mother clearly hadn’t.

And it was our job to try to stop that happening. I drained my cup of coffee in determined mood. ‘But that’s what we’re here for, eh?’ I said, as much to myself as to Mike. ‘And look at the time. She’s got to be clean by now, even by her exacting standards.’

‘Even if her clothes aren’t,’ commented Mike, looking at the filthy heap on the kitchen floor.

Having scooped up the offending items and filled the bowl with water to soak them, I was just about to go up and see how Abby was doing when she reappeared. She looked pink and fresh again, and with an expression that was marginally brighter. Perhaps now she’d had a soak she could accept that the scratch on her hand was only minor. Or perhaps she was just resigned to whatever fate was in store.

She glanced at the bowl. ‘I’m really sorry, Casey,’ she said, her expression serious. ‘I was being silly, running off like that, wasn’t I?’

‘Oh, no harm done,’ I said lightly. ‘It’s been an upsetting time for you, sweetheart. We understand, really we do.’ I was on my knees under the sink by now, pulling out my plastic box of heavy-duty laundry aids, and when I looked up I saw her wan smile turn to one of relief and pleasure. Well, that was what it seemed to be, at any rate. Even if I couldn’t work out why.

She came across and joined me on the kitchen floor, looking almost joyful. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I was wondering where you kept all this stuff!’

I might just as easily have pulled out a box of Barbie dolls or cupcakes. ‘It’s my magic box,’ I told her. ‘Full of all my lotions and potions.’ I did a little witchy cackle. ‘All eventualities covered. Though spells and hexes only by arrangement.’

I was pleased to see I’d conjured a big grin from even her. She peered into the box excitedly. ‘Are you going to do some cleaning? Can I help you?’

‘Well, I was just going to find some stain-removing powder, so I can soak your jeans and hoodie before I wash them.’

‘But while you’re doing that …’ She pointed towards my trigger bottle of bleach spray. ‘I could do some polishing and stuff …’ she paused and then said shyly, ‘to be helpful.’

‘Oh, you don’t want to be doing that on a Sunday …’ I started. ‘And besides, I’m such a clean freak, you’ll be hard-pushed to find anything
to
polish!’ But then I thought of what Mike had said about her worrying about germs on the doorknobs. Perhaps it would help her to settle if she cleaned them herself. Yes, that might be a useful plan. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I guess if you really want to, I suppose … yes, I don’t see why not.’

The effect was electrifying. She plunged her hands into the box as efficiently as any professional contract cleaner and, rubber gloves popped back the right way out and quickly donned, had both spray and the correct cloth in hand in moments. And within no time, while I attacked the bowl of muddy clothing in the sink, she set about attacking all the knobs on the kitchen cupboards. I clearly wasn’t the only one who found contentment in cleaning, then.

‘You know,’ I said, once I’d changed the soaking water and added my magic powder, ‘Jackson’s going to be one soon and we’re planning to hold a little party for him. And Mike and I were wondering if you’d like it if we made it a joint one, for your tenth birthday, since it’s coming up soon as well. Would you like that?’

The anxiety flashed in her eyes once again. ‘I don’t have birthday parties,’ she said, almost as if admonishing me. ‘It’s too much for Mummy. We always just have a special tea.’