Betrayed: The heartbreaking true story of a struggle to escape a cruel life defined by family honour. Rosie Lewis
Betrayed: The heartbreaking true story of a struggle to escape a cruel life defined by family honour
wasn’t unusual for fostered children to display symptoms of OCD, especially where food was concerned. But Zadie’s compulsive behaviour went beyond that; the strumming, the counting under her breath, the tidying. And then it suddenly struck me: the chapped skin on her hands might have nothing to do with sleeping out in the cold for two nights, and all the time she spent in the bathroom may not have been just purifying herself for prayers.
‘Had enough of social work then, Des?’ I heard Emily ask Des.
‘Funny you should say that,’ he answered.
But their conversation faded into the background. I was quiet, absorbed by my own thoughts. I remembered Zadie washing her hands after doing the dishes. I had thought it was nerves but now it all fell into place – she was an obsessive hand washer.
Just after 8 p.m. Des stood at the front door manoeuvring his feet back into his shoes. With his uncanny ability to read me he looked down and touched me on the shoulder. ‘Give it time.’
I sighed. ‘She just seems so very far away.’
‘She’ll come out of herself,’ he said, speaking with absolute conviction, ‘once she feels comfortable.’
He always seemed to make me feel better. ‘Thanks, Des. You would have been wasted as a rock star. You’re in the perfect job, if you ask me.’
He gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher. ‘Visiting you is more than just a job, Rosie. You do know that, don’t you?’
I smiled, patting his arm.
‘Anyway, looks like there might be changes afoot,’ he said cryptically.
‘Changes?’
Just then Jamie came into the hall and stood beside me, draping an arm around my shoulder.
‘I’ll tell you more on Saturday. You are going, aren’t you?’
Des was referring to the foster carers’ ball. Every year our fostering agency arranges a dinner dance for its foster carers. They often invite a motivational speaker along to give a talk and then to present long service and special recognition awards afterwards. It was an enjoyable occasion, although this year, feeling a bit guilty about leaving Zadie with a back-up carer so soon after her arrival, I wasn’t as keen to go.
‘Yes, I’ve booked my mum in to babysit.’
‘Great. Maybe I’ll persuade your mother to have a dance with me,’ Des said, winking at Jamie.
‘I wouldn’t, Mum,’ Jamie said. ‘He might start singing.’
About an hour later, while Zadie was having a bath, I went into her room to look for any dirty clothes she may have left in there. Foster carers usually have to keep their wits about them, especially at the beginning of a placement when the child is assessing their new environment. Taken away from all that is precious to them and then catapulted into a relationship with unfamiliar adults, it’s a natural response to react badly. I remembered the high drama of when 15-year-old Amy came to stay.
Amy spent her first week with us in a highly anxious state, withdrawing from cannabis as well as trying to deal with the commotion of coming into care. It’s fair to say that our house took a bit of a battering during her period of readjustment. But there seemed to be none of that with Zadie, and her room was immaculate, with not a thing out of place.
If anyone had asked me to name three character traits of Zadie’s after she had been with us for a couple of days, ‘quiet’ would most definitely have qualified. Above that would have been ‘nervous’, but I would have struggled with the rest of the list. There seemed to be no substance to her, nothing solid that I could put my finger on.
About to leave the room, I made a little triangle of her duvet by turning it back at the corner and grabbed her pyjamas from underneath the pillow. As I was smoothing them out on the radiator in the hall to warm them, I felt something knobbly beneath my palms. Frowning, I picked them up again, noticing for the first time how heavy they were. Turning them over in my hands, I felt several hard lumps in the material. Running them between my fingers, I found what felt like rough pebbles had been sewn into the hem of the top and the waistband of the bottoms.
‘Zadie. What are these doing here?’ I asked, surprised to find her standing behind me. She moved so lightly from room to room that all I had sensed was a wisp of air. I often have to remind the children I look after to keep covered up but Zadie had dressed back into her robe just to take the short walk along the hall to her bedroom. Her headscarf was off though, her damp, dark hair clinging to the robe and leaving a large damp patch at the back. It was surprising how different someone could look with the absence of one simple garment. She looked even prettier with her hair long and flowing.
‘What?’ she asked, though it was obvious she knew what I was talking about; she was staring straight at her pyjamas.
‘Why are there pebbles in your PJs?’
She looked at me, chewing her lip. With the line of her elegant neck visible she seemed so much more vulnerable. ‘I’d sleep on my tummy if they weren’t there.’
I held them in front of me, staring. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘I’m supposed to lie on my back.’
I shook my head as I passed them to her, still confused. ‘Why?’
‘Prophets sleep with their bellies facing upwards,’ she explained, clutching them to her chest and lowering her chin into the soft material. ‘I might be sent to hell if I sleep badly, so Chit sewed them in.’
I didn’t know how to respond so I stood clutching her door handle for a moment before saying goodnight.
Downstairs, I picked up a book and slumped on the sofa. Holding it open, I ran my eyes over the first page then realised I had no idea what I’d just read. I tried again but gave up after the second paragraph, too preoccupied to take anything in.
And so, the night before the real problems began to emerge, I lay in bed feeling generally puzzled. I was a bit concerned about Emily. From the moment she was born she had been a textbook baby. She slept when I laid her down, like one of those dollies with the closing eyelids, smiling and cooing whenever she was awake; she skipped her way through the ‘terrible twos’, and even as a teenager she was rarely moody or difficult. I resolved to leave it a few days before pressing her any further. Emily tended to think things through for herself before blurting out what was worrying her.
Unlike Zadie. I knew that she would need lots of encouragement if she was to open up. My thoughts turned to our earlier conversation and I felt a flicker of unease. Funnily enough it wasn’t the pebbled pyjamas that worried me. It seemed a bit of a draconian measure to me but it sounded like her family were doing what they could to keep her spiritually safe. All religions had their own special ways of negotiating their followers through an unpredictable world, I reasoned. I could see the logic.
When I was young, my father had a rigid routine of Bible study in place for when I got home from school. There was no relaxing in front of Grange Hill with milk and a biscuit for me. It was a case of working my way through the books of the Bible and memorising important texts to repeat to him when he got home from work. I had a feeling that Zadie’s experiences were magnified tenfold on a scale of severity, but I could certainly relate to them.
What really unsettled me was the control her brother seemed to exert over her. Zadie said it was Chit who had taken it upon himself to correct her for sleeping on her back. It struck me as strange that a brother should involve himself in disciplining his sister so harshly, but then a little girl, Freya, tugged at my memory. Even though she wasn’t quite five years old when she came to stay with me, she was well used to caring for her younger siblings. She knew how to prepare a bottle of formula milk for her baby brother and was so protective of her role as their carer that she became distressed when I tried to release her from it. I wanted her to learn to be a little girl again but she found it hard to relinquish what she saw as her responsibilities. Without his mother around, perhaps it was natural for