Torn: A terrified girl. A shocking secret. A terrible choice.. Rosie Lewis
She keeps picking things up, looking confused and then putting them down again.
Taylor knows something bad is going to happen; she can always tell. She glances from Dad to Mum, trying not to catch a glimpse of the spots of red on the carpet – her tummy goes funny when she remembers how they got there. Her little brother, Reece, huddles next to her on the sofa, his knees scrunched right up to his chin. He’s been crazy all day, grovelling around everyone and trying to please them. It makes Taylor sick.
She can’t wait to go to bed but it’s not even six o’clock. Jimmy, their Labrador, pads over and rests his chin on her lap. Every time one of them moves the puppy makes a noise, a sort of cross between a growl and a whimper. Taylor buries her face into his soft fur and cups her hand over his muzzle. ‘Shush, there’s a good boy, shush.’ When she looks up she sees that Mum has stopped tidying. She’s standing in front of them, a strange look on her face.
Taylor’s heart beats faster.
Dad hovers and, moving in slow motion, Mum starts tidying again, even though there’s nothing left to put away. Reece rubs his nose and sniffs. Taylor can feel his leg trembling.
Her eyes skirt slowly around the room. Things are definitely about to blow, she can feel it. Pretending to be calm, she tries to plan an escape route in her head like that girl in the Hideout cartoon, but it’s much harder than the website makes out. The front door is locked and she doesn’t know where the keys are. It occurs to her that one of the windows upstairs might be open, but then she remembers that Bailey is still in his cot and there’s no way she’s going to make a run for it without her baby brother. Oh, why can’t she think of something?
The wind blows outside the window and Taylor hears a clomping sound: footsteps on the pavement. Someone is walking past their house like none of this is going on. How can things carry on as normal, Taylor wonders, when everything is so wrong? Jimmy hears it too. His ears prick up and he jumps to his feet, barking. Mum’s head shoots round. Reece’s knees knock together.
For one hopeful second Taylor considers calling out for help but Jimmy starts howling and she freezes. His tail is buried so far between his legs that she can hardly see it. Keeping Mum in sight, Taylor edges closer to Jimmy and wraps her arms around his neck. ‘Please, Jimmy,’ she whispers, ‘it’s all right. Please don’t.’
Jimmy pulls away. He leaps around in circles, snapping at the air. Mum sways on her feet, her eyes flitting over the three of them. Taylor knows one of them is about to pay but she isn’t about to stand by and let her family get hurt, not again. She’s ten years old now and she’s been learning how to fight.
Ignoring the sick feeling in her tummy, she takes a deep breath and forces herself to her feet.
Maisie Stone eased the end of a biro between the wiry roots of her thick auburn dreadlocks, half-closing one eye as she twirled it around. Turning the radio on to mask our conversation, I reflected that the social worker wasn’t exactly what I’d envisaged when we’d spoken earlier that day, but then neither were the siblings waiting miserably upstairs in the spare room.
‘So, Rosie, this is kind of awkward,’ Maisie lisped, the words rolling over her silver-studded tongue so slowly that it was as if she needed winding up. Over the telephone she had spoken with such slow deliberateness that in my head she was nearing retirement. The woman sitting in front of me, with a thin leather bandana tied around her hair and taffeta skirt skimming her sandalled feet, had taken me completely by surprise. With her full lips and wide green eyes, there was an earthy appeal about Maisie, but the skin beneath her eyes was swollen and dotted with blemishes. By the way she was dressed I guessed she was in her early thirties at most, but somehow she seemed much older. Either that or she hadn’t slept in days. ‘When I picked them up I couldn’t believe there was one of each.’
‘You’d never met them before?’
Maisie’s beaded dreadlocks jingled as she shook her head. ‘No, their file landed on my desk at half past ten this morning. I only had time for, like, a quick flick through and when I saw Taylor described as a massive Chelsea fan I just assumed, what with her name and everything –’ her words trailed away and then she groaned, pulling her hands down her face. ‘Is there any way you could, like, jiggle things around to make it work?’
It was the look of open appeal on her face that really got my sympathy going. ‘Well, maybe there is a way,’ I said, my mind still clawing through possible solutions as I spoke. According to my fostering agency’s rules, only the under-fives or same-sex siblings were allowed to share a room. Since Taylor and Reece fitted neither category, they needed a foster carer with two spare bedrooms.
‘And you’re sure you don’t mind?’ Maisie asked a few minutes later, her eyes, if not bright with relief, then at least a little less puffy than they had been.
‘Oh, it’s not really a problem,’ I answered, in a not quite convincing tone. I wanted to help and so had offered to convert our dining room into a temporary bedroom for myself. On a practical level it made sense – Taylor and Reece were already here and it was a bit late in the day to start hunting for a new placement for them – but the thought of dismantling the dining table and then dragging my own double bed downstairs wasn’t very appealing.
‘Cool,’ the social worker said, the thick wooden bangles on her wrists knocking together as she scratched the other side of her scalp. ‘We prefer children to stay at their own school if at all possible, and the only other carer matching their profile lives, like, forty miles away.’
‘Ah, I see,’ I said, my eyes narrowing. When social workers were desperate to place children, all sorts of cunning ruses came into play. I was beginning to wonder whether there really had been a mix-up over Taylor’s sex when the rise and fall of frenzied conversation drifted down the stairs. The noise brought my thoughts firmly back to the children and I decided to focus on the positives. With a nationwide shortage of foster carers, siblings were still sometimes separated. At least, in this instance, they could stay together. The base of my bed came in two halves so hopefully it wouldn’t be too heavy to lift and, compared with the upheaval Taylor and Reece were going through, moving a bit of furniture wasn’t too much of a hardship. ‘What’s their history?’ I asked, setting my suspicions aside. I knew that five-year-old Reece had made a disclosure to his teacher earlier that day, but that was about all.
Maisie blinked several times. She seemed to be struggling to summon the energy to speak. ‘So, as I said, I haven’t had a chance to go through their entire file yet but it seems that the children have been registered as “in need” for years. Their regular social worker is on long-term sick and I’ve only just inherited the case, but from what I can make out, a few incidents of domestic violence have been flagged up to us by police. Nothing too serious, but Dad is long-term unemployed and when you add Mum’s depression into the mix –’
Maisie’s sentence trailed off and I nodded, unsurprised. It was the spring of 2005 and although I had only been fostering for a couple of years, I had already noticed a common theme of domestic violence among the families of looked-after children. The violence was often accompanied by parental depression and substance abuse, a set of issues labelled by social workers as ‘the toxic trio’. When all three ‘markers’ were present, children were feared to be most at risk of severe harm.
‘Unfortunately, Taylor, the eldest, has been replicating the violence at school,’ Maisie said, snail-like. ‘I’m told that most of her classmates want nothing to do with her.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said, pressing my lips together. It was natural for Taylor to use her personal experiences as a template for relating to others. The poor girl was probably suffering as much as the children she was bullying, although I knew that was a view that could be unpopular, particularly with parents of the victim.
Maisie leaned back into the sofa and sipped from a can of Red Bull. It was her second since she’d arrived and I couldn’t help but wonder what she would