On Loving Josiah (11 page)

ON THE 2ND JUNE 1992,
Josiah Nelson, aged eight years and one day, was classified as an emergency. His mother had not resurfaced, his father had not spoken a word for nine months, and even a course of ECT hadn’t managed to resurrect him. His grandparents were still living in the US, his uncle wasn’t even interested in meeting the boy, and he had been deemed a failure by no fewer than five foster families. Lady Brack, it’s true, missed him terribly; but when the social worker had picked him up that morning, Josiah was sobbing so convulsively, and Sir Peter had been so disagreeable, that the
fostering
lady was persuaded to put a little black cross by ‘Brack’ in her file, for despite having six spare bedrooms, they were incapable of providing a child with a loving home.

Then there was Josiah himself, who had once been so appeaseable, so ready to fall in with a new plan; he was now absolutely resistant to any suggestion put to him. He even refused the temporary lodging with his teacher, whom he ‘hated,’ and in fact he seemed to hate everyone, and more than anything else in the whole wide world, he said, he hated families.

‘If you don’t co-operate, we shall have to put you in a Children’s Home,’ said June Briggs.

‘Then put me in a Children’s Home! I don’t care!’ shouted Josiah.

They were lucky to find a vacancy. Usually the Social Services are good at easing a child into a new situation – supervised meetings, key workers, trial days etc. But, as I have said, Josiah was now an emergency. It was a question of dropping him off with a suitcase.
The
Hollies
, a large Edwardian Residential Care Home for Children on the outskirts of Cambridge (Coleridge Road, Cherry Hinton) was to be his home for nine years.

The girl who received Josiah at the brown-painted door of his new home was called Kerry. She was dark and skinny and dressed in skimpy black clothes and looked about fourteen, but in fact she was eighteen and had already been on the care staff for a year.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Are you Joe?’

‘Josiah’, corrected the boy.

‘Josiah! What a lovely name! Come in, Josiah,’ and she stood to one side and ushered him in, and told the social worker who had brought him that they would be just fine. Josiah was the youngest in Kerry’s fold by two years, and her heart went out to him. All she’d been told was that the lad’s mother had deserted him and his father lay catatonic in Fulbright hospital, and that foster care hadn’t worked out.

‘You and me,’ said Kerry, bending her knees to meet him in the eye, ‘are going to be best mates, you’ll see! Fancy a glass of orange squash?’

‘No thanks,’ said Josiah, politely.

‘Well, then, I’ll take you to your room,’ said Kerry, picking up Josiah’s suitcase. ‘You follow me. You know what? You’ve got the best room in the house! Your bedroom is twice the size mine is, and it’s got the best view, right over the gardens.’

The stairs were steep, and Josiah found himself having to hold onto the banister. Each step was a climb in itself, and Josiah pulled himself up behind her, because there was no alternative. With a flourish, Kerry opened the door on the other side of the landing.

‘Here you are, Josiah. Not bad, is it? But it’ll be even better next week because we’re giving it a lick of paint and you can choose any colour you like!’

Kerry put the suitcase down on the bed and then sat herself beside it. ‘So what d’you think?’

‘Who was Rob?’ asked Josiah, still standing by the door.

‘Rob?’ asked Kerry.

‘“Fuck you Rob,”’ said Josiah. ‘Look, there’s a message.’

The message was small and in pencil, written neatly under the light switch.

‘Ah Rob!’ said Kerry, as though she’d only just remembered who he was. ‘Rob had this room before you. And now he’s gone. You see, young man, he was always in trouble with the police, just for small things, nothing serious. But yes, he went down yesterday. And that was lucky for you, because this is the best room in the house. And you’ll get new paint.’

‘Where did he go down to? Won’t he come back?’

‘No, he won’t come back, not here he won’t.’

‘Is he in prison?’

‘That sort of thing.’

‘Wouldn’t he be upset if he found me in his room?’

‘He won’t find you. He’s not coming back, I promise.’

Josiah sighed. ‘Promises, promises,’ he said morosely, looking at the floor.

‘Have you had some bad luck with promises?’

‘I’d like to unpack on my own, if you don’t mind,’ said Josiah.

‘You mean you want me to go?’ asked Kerry, surprised.

‘Yes, I want you to go.’

‘Right-o,’ said Kerry. ‘Just to warn you, they’re back from school at half past three, and tea’s at five. I’ll be in the kitchen if you want anything. And remember, the bell goes three times for afternoon tea. You’ll soon get the hang of it.’

Josiah, at this time in the story, was a mere eight years old, but he was not broken. He was brave for his father; he was brave for his mother.
His father was a rock, and his mother a lioness, and he was brave for both of them. And he knew that one day they would find him again, and in fact, even now they might be looking. That knowledge gave him strength, even at the worst of times. So when he went downstairs at five o’clock he held his head high. There were even a few minutes when his companions gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Kerry thought Josiah looked just like Mark Lester in
Oliver
, a film that had set her heart so aflame that it was the chief reason she’d gone into residential social work in the first place. And there was another girl who’d been eyeing him up for mothering, called Maggie, who was ten and wore frosted pink lipstick and stilettos.

‘Maggie, you come here a moment,’ said Kerry, kindly. ‘I want you to meet young Josiah, who’s going to be staying with us a while. And I want you to be his special buddy, and make sure he gets
everything
he wants.’

Maggie tottered over to Josiah and said, ‘Hi.’

Josiah looked serious and said ‘Hi’ back, and when she offered him her hand to shake he took it.

‘You come and sit next to me,’ she said.

The dining room was large and light with stained carpet tiles and brown floral curtains. Plastic cups and cheap cutlery were piled up on one end of a long, battered table. The children, twelve boys and three girls, were making their way from the kitchen with plates piled high with beef burgers and chips. Each found himself a chair at the table and sank down into a slouch; some of their chins were a mere six inches from the table. Hair unkempt, spots unpicked, sweatshirts sweated in, inhabited by egos simultaneously vast and fragile. Maggie set Josiah down amongst them, whispered him
reassuring
words about her imminent return, and went into the kitchen to fetch them both supper.

Josiah knew he had to stay very still and look straight ahead till his protector returned.

‘So titch, who are you?’ asked his neighbour, a lad of eleven called Darren who’d been called ‘titch’ most of his life. There was faint interest from the others, whose chomping jaws paused briefly to hear titch’s reply.

‘My name is Josiah,’ said Josiah, avoiding their eyes.

Immediate laughter: “My name is Josiah,” imitated Darren, enunciating every vowel.

‘I’m so sorry,’ continued Steve in the same voice, ‘I think you’ve come to the wrong place.’ He was tall with bad acne, and had been living at
The Hollies
ever since he’d stolen his mother’s car at twelve and she’d signed any paper she could to get rid of him.

‘Yes,’ said a third boy, Jason, who if he’d been asked to say boo to a goose would have said ‘boo’ but was asked instead to throw a brick through a jeweller’s window. ‘You’ll find the Queen doesn’t visit often.’

A fourth said, ‘No, she simply doesn’t find the time.’ That was John, thirteen, who’d come to
The Hollies
at much the same age as Josiah. He was the youngest of eight, whose father had left home on the day of his birth, and he’d always been one too many.

But then Maggie returned with tea, and shooed them all off him as if they’d been pesky fleas. She put Josiah’s burger and chips in front of him and wriggled into her chair. ‘They’re fucking idiots here,’ she said.

Josiah began to gently suck on a chip, as though that might be nourishment enough for a day, while Darren leant over to grab a handful of them.

‘Ignore him,’ said Maggie, and went on saying it until Josiah’s plate was empty.

‘Here, help yourself to mine,’ she said.

‘Oooooo, love!’ said the three lads opposite, in unison.

Steve reached over the table with his fork and stabbed it into one of Maggie’s chips. Maggie grabbed the ketchup bottle and squirted the stuff over Steve’s face.

‘Lay off, Steve,’ she said.

‘Wrong move,’ said Steve, coldly, getting up from the table and nodding almost imperceptibly to John and Jason. For the three were gangsters, joined at the hip, and the only friends each had ever known. They were moving round the benches like a single,
menacing
organism to find their prey. Maggie thought that was her and took a stiletto off her foot to be ready for them. The other children were watching expectantly; Kerry was clearing the kitchen; Josiah was sitting very, very still and only Maggie noticed he was shaking.

It was Josiah they wanted. Moving as a threesome, each prodded a fork into his neck. Now, if Maggie had been a target she would have put up a good fight; twice she’d been expelled from school for putting up rather too good a fight. But her sense of outrage that Josiah was their chosen victim was such that Al Capone himself would have marvelled. Down came the blows on Jason’s head with her stiletto, down they came on the smallest of those three villains, and even the first gushes of blood did not satisfy her, but on she went till all the children in the room were screaming and Steve had his hands around her throat.

Kerry, poor thing, herself still a teenager, was just not up to the scene which confronted her. She burst into tears like a baby and was feebly shouting, ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ At first, she didn’t even notice Jason who was unconscious now, blood pouring from his head, but happily surrounded by curious children who were wondering if he was dead. All she saw was Steve, his two thumbs pressing down on Maggie’s windpipe, and all she heard was Steve’s assertion that ‘You will die.’ Kerry ran up to him and began pulling at his hands.

‘Get off her! Get off her!’ she cried. ‘Are you mad? Are you going to kill someone? Are you going to prison for the rest of your fucking life?’

Darren said, ‘She’s the murderer round here!’

And suddenly they were all quiet.

It’s so strange the way children move, like birds, like rabbits, like sheep, like animals. Kerry sat slumped on the bench with Maggie, who was fighting for her breath; Jason lay corpse-like on the floor, while the others, even Steve, even Josiah, congregated against the walls of the room.

‘You’re all fucking useless,’ said Kerry. ‘You, Steve, call a fucking ambulance.’

It was Maggie who suggested getting towels to wrap round Jason’s head, and Kerry took her cue from her, happy in the momentary refuge of her kitchen as she fetched clean tea-towels from the drawer, happy in the dense quiet of the dining room as she took authority once more and knelt beside Jason’s body and took his hand in hers to check his pulse, and happy, above all, that his hand was warm and the day would pass like any other day.

How good the children were that night! How they took themselves off to bed without demur! How quiet the house was! The ambulance came and went, and by the time Kerry’s co-worker Dave had come at six with the promised electric guitar no one was interested. Kerry said, ‘Not tonight, Dave,’ and they had a cup of tea instead.

When Josiah brushed his teeth with his new
Mickey Mouse
toothbrush,
courtesy of the Social Services, and took his carefully folded pyjamas out of his top drawer, and folded back his bedcovers before slipping inside, he felt better than he had for a long time. Foster homes made him feel claustrophobic: whether he was being watched, criticized or fawned upon, he was always the object of attention. He loathed the feeling of indebtedness, when it was not coupled with the love which turns such a feeling into gratitude. Josiah also
instinctively
felt that in his case a certain amount of hardship was
appropriate
. If his parents were suffering on his account – he felt quite certain
their disappearance had something to do with him – then he should be suffering on theirs, and he was looking forward to a cleansing of conscience that no amount of molly-coddling or ‘understanding’ could ever satisfy.