Nowhere to Go (12 page)

I could have kicked myself even as the words were coming out of my mouth. Why was I saying that when all my instincts – and the current facts – told me it wasn’t true?

Tyler had no truck with it either. ‘She won’t calm down. She hates me. And my dad don’t love me neither. It’s okay,’ he said again, but now I could see that his chin was wobbling. I went across and hugged him tight, not caring that it would bring on the tears he was trying so hard not to shed.

They were springing in my own eyes as well, as I held him. ‘They just don’t love me, Casey,’ he sobbed. ‘Nobody does!’

‘Don’t be daft, love,’ I said. ‘Who couldn’t love you? You’re a very special boy – and I, for one, am proud of you. And so’s Mike. What with everything you’ve been through, and how well you’ve managed to handle it …’

But he was shaking his head. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘I’m not special. I’m rubbish. If I was special, why did my mum leave me? Why’d she kill herself like that? I just want a mum, Casey. Just want a mum of my
own
. Just want someone proper to take
care
of me!’

He pulled away then and looked up at me, his face wet and shiny. ‘That’s all I want. An’ I’ll be good, honest. Can’t
you
be my mum?’

It all seemed to fall apart very quickly. As I suppose I should have expected, given how long we’d been fostering now, and given Tyler’s heartfelt request for me to become his mum now. How did you
deal
with that? I wished I knew, but it never got any easier,
ever
. In a parallel universe, perhaps all the foster parents in the world could become parents to all the kids who needed parents, but in the real world that simply wasn’t the way things worked out. There were just too many kids desperately in need of them.

Yes, it was a course of action some took; there were lots of foster parents who ended up adopting a child they had taken on and, who knew? One day that might happen to us. But right now it wasn’t an option. I spent that entire night going over and over everything in my mind, trying to think of a way to explain that Mike and I couldn’t become Tyler’s parents – but there was no way of ever sugaring such a pill.

I thought back to Justin, the first child we’d ever fostered, right after training, and the number of times we’d chewed over the scenario of keeping him till he’d grown up – of giving up the fostering, almost as soon as we’d begun it, in order to perhaps enable this one child to have a ‘normal’ life. But that word ‘perhaps’ was so incredibly loaded; we knew all about that from doing our training. We were there to take on ‘difficult’ kids, and Justin was very much that – a child who had been so profoundly emotionally damaged that it would never be more than a possibility that he’d be okay, and the same applied to pretty much every child we’d had since.

Yes, some were doing okay so far, but others were struggling and always would – and the reality was that the effects of trauma and abuse in early life often didn’t become fully apparent till the child was well into adulthood. That was the deal. That was the kind of fostering we did – tackling the kids who’d been so battered by life and toxic relationships that it was odds-on that they were mentally scarred for life.

And we’d made a pact, Mike and I, about what we were in it for. We had our own cherished kids and grandkids and we needed to consider their needs as well; was it fair to them for us to take on a child who might become a challenging adult? Whose troubles might impact negatively on the whole family for years to come?

It wasn’t just that, either – we also had a plan. To help not just one but a series of children – as far as we could anyway – till we got too old and cronky to cope. Perhaps then we’d bow out. Slow down. Concentrate on the currently growing band of grandkids. Who knew? But right now, our decision to keep accepting new kids had, we felt sure, been the right one. We’d had several more since Justin had left us, none of whom we would have been able to take in had we let our hearts hold sway and changed our minds.

Every foster parent will be familiar with the way your thoughts go round and round in such a situation, with the guilt and the indecision and most of all the heartache – in knowing you’re going to have to spell all that out to a distressed child. I knew it was
never
going to get any easier, and it wasn’t.

In the days that followed, and as the days turned to weeks, and September became October, I watched Tyler slide into an emotional malaise that neither Mike nor I knew how to pull him out from.

It wasn’t overt. There were no violent outbursts, and no major tantrums, just a gradual bedding-in of the truth he’d always feared: that he was unloved by his family, that even his little brother had turned against him, and that life was basically as shitty as his old phone.

We tried hard to keep him positive, as did Will, as did the fusty Mr Smart, who’d steadily changed from sermonising about behaviour (or so it seemed when I earwigged from the kitchen) to trying desperately to coax a shred of positivity about the future from his young charge.

I kept dragging him round to Mum and Dad’s too – it was one thing that always seemed to brighten him up slightly. As if his relationship with these two jolly elderly people was an oasis of peace and calm amid the mental turmoil of his young life.

But it was his friend Cameron – the boy I’d only briefly met and didn’t really know – who seemed to be the main rock to which he clung. Unsurprisingly, really, given that they’d known one another for so long; he was the nearest thing to a loyal older brother he’d ever had.

But Cameron was a troubled lad himself. So it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that this was a friendship that wasn’t necessarily going to be a good thing. Not given Cameron’s age, not given his mildly feral situation, and definitely not given the distinctly dodgy, druggy friends that I knew he mostly hung around with.

Which was a huge worry, because the one thing Mike and I had to do, above all, was to keep Tyler on the straight and narrow and away from anything dodgy, not just because of his supervision order, important though that was. It was also because if he was to have a fighting chance of being placed in a permanent foster home, he had to come across as a kid that someone wouldn’t be frightened to take on.

It was a Thursday evening when it all began unravelling. Tyler had been generally good about coming straight home from school if he didn’t have any after-school activities – presumably because he was hungry, and because he didn’t really have much else to do, particularly if Cameron wasn’t around. But today he didn’t return, and when it got to five I began getting antsy – particularly when I went up to his bedroom and discovered that the one thing I
couldn’t
discover was his BlackBerry. Which meant that he’d taken it to school.

Which was against the rules, and he knew it.

‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ I said to Mike when he got in from work. ‘I just feel it in my bones.’

‘Try not to panic, love,’ he soothed. ‘Perhaps he’s just testing the boundaries. You know what kids are like – and I mean
all
kids. Not just kids dealing with the crap Tyler’s had to. He’s probably gone off to someone’s house and it’s a serious case of peer pressure stopping him from letting you know. Let’s eat our tea and put his under some cling-film for later – I think that’s best. Let’s not panic till we have to, eh?’

But by eight we had no choice
but
to panic. Without Tyler’s phone we had no way of getting hold of any of his friends – his old one was in his bedroom but his sim card was obviously not – and I cursed myself for not having thought about trying to get a couple of their numbers. I was also beginning to wonder quite what we should do, because there was the small matter of the supervision order to take into account. If we alerted anyone in authority – Will, say, or John, or the emergency duty team – we would straight away land Tyler in all sorts of grief, something I made a point of pointing out in my latest voicemail.

But, at the same time, he was just 12 and it would have been both unprofessional and irresponsible not to take one of those steps, and very soon, too. We were fortunate, though – Kieron came to the rescue.

Well, came up with a plan at least, bless him, for which I was very grateful. He’d only popped round to give Mike back his drill – he and Lauren had been putting shelves up – and was supposed to be heading straight home to dinner.

‘But why don’t we just head out and look for him?’ he suggested, once I’d outlined our worries.

‘I suppose,’ I began. ‘But I wouldn’t know where to look …’

‘I would, Mum,’ Kieron answered, ‘because I do.’

And I noticed something straight away – that his expression was telling me something he hadn’t yet said. Kieron was not good at artifice.

‘I suppose you do,’ I said, though not loading the statement with any undercurrent. Not yet. Of course he’d know where to look – he was a youth worker, wasn’t he? It was his job to know where the kids locally hung out. He and Lauren also volunteered once a week for a local homeless charity, so he also knew where all the druggy and disaffected kids went. There was more to this – I just knew it. And I was right.

‘Mum, don’t go off on one, okay?’

‘About what?’ I chipped in.

‘About what I’m going to tell you, okay? Mum, I’ve seen Cameron hanging about. He’s down the town centre all the time, smoking dope. And – um – well … I’ve seen Tyler with him there once as well. I said not to go
off on one
!’ he added, presumably seeing my horrified expression. ‘It was only once, and it was the daytime and he seemed fine – even said hello to me. And I told him then that it wasn’t the place for him to be chilling and sort of implied that if I saw him there again I’d have to tell you too.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘
Great
!’ I repeated to Mike, who’d just joined us. He’d gone to get our coats and his car keys, and had only heard the tail end of it.

‘So that’s what I’m doing
now
,’ Kieron pointed out. ‘Okay? So shall we go?’

In the end just Kieron and I went, as it made no sense to leave the house empty – Tyler might show up there, after all. So, leaving Mike to hold the fort, we drove down to the town centre, following Kieron’s directions, fetching up at what used to be the old central bus station. A disused, concrete area, surrounded by an overgrown patch of woodland, it was a natural magnet for bored teenagers and those with mischief on their minds, as it was away from the main streets now and not overlooked.

It had little else to commend it as a place for kids to gather and I wondered, as I always did, just where kids of that age were
supposed
to gather – something they were naturally drawn to do – particularly those who didn’t have welcoming homes to invite their friends into. It was a bleak part of the town, badly in need of regeneration, and with a bank of smelly, much graffiti-ed shelters at the back. It was grim, and put me in mind of a post-apocalyptic movie.

‘This is just so sad,’ I whispered as we climbed out of the car and made our way across to where we’d seen the glow of a small bonfire and the young people silhouetted by it. Close up they all looked so horrifyingly young.

‘Oh, this is nothing, Mum,’ Kieron said. ‘There’s a couple of places much worse than this – proper hardcore. But that tends to be more the old alkies and so on. This is mainly school kids.’

Yes, I thought sadly, school kids who were often absent from school, puffing on skunk, necking cheap vodka and sniffing aerosols. I’d seen a few of them in my time, for sure. And seen the effects, as well, more to the point. Not to mention having read such frightening things about strong weed, and the potentially catastrophic effects it could have on young minds; science that was only now becoming apparent.

Would Tyler be here? I both hoped he was, because I wanted to find him, and at the same time hoped he wasn’t. He was only 12, and I couldn’t help but cling to the idea that he might just be round Cameron’s playing some shoot-’em-up on an Xbox, so engrossed that he was unaware of the time.

I was disabused of that notion in moments. Kieron was a few steps ahead of me as we crossed the scrubby ground and I guessed there was no major dispersal going on because they both recognised Kieron, who I knew cultivated relationships with these kids, and, with me being five foot nothing, probably assumed I was just another teen.

‘Yo, Jamie,’ he called out. ‘How’s it going?’

It was only as we got close that I could see anxious faces beginning to scrutinise me properly, and for a moment I wondered if they’d all go haring off, just like me and my mates used to do when we were 13 or 14 and would be smoking the proverbial fags behind the park pavilion.

How things had changed, I thought. Such innocent times.

‘K,’ the nearest lad said, which would in other circumstances have tickled me – was that what they knew him as? But not these.

They clasped hands, and even as they did so I could sense a couple of the younger kids melting into the shadows, and it was when one moved that I realised I was looking straight at Cameron – well, someone I thought I recognised as Cameron anyway; it was difficult to be sure in the dark. One thing that I could see, however, was that he hadn’t really noticed me. He was sitting off at the side, his back against the one remaining piece of glass at the back of the furthest shelter and, surprisingly, seemed oblivious to our arrival.

Kieron was chatting to the boy called Jamie, explaining that we’d mislaid Tyler, couching it in terms that made it sound a million miles from ‘who-is-under-a-supervision-order-and-this-is-serious’ kind of talk. I was very impressed. One hint of authority and it would have probably meant a total shut-down. There was a code, I knew, and it was part of their lore that it wasn’t broken. It would have been ‘No, I ain’t seen no one’ all round.

But it soon became academic anyway. I touched Kieron’s arm. ‘That boy over there? The one sitting under that far shelter in the red hoodie? I’m sure that’s Cameron. Shall I go and speak to him? See if he knows where Tyler might be?’

I felt a new hope flare. That with Cameron being here and there being no sign of Tyler, perhaps they’d been together earlier and had since parted company. Perhaps Tyler was already back home.

‘Let’s go and see, shall we?’ Kieron said, nodding, and it took us no more than half a dozen strides to be in a position to see that just beyond Cameron was another lad, also sitting with his back against the glass, and who I’d not previously spotted in the gloom. He had one earbud in his ear and I realised he was sharing an iPod with a girl who was sitting on the other side of him. He was obviously listening to music, because though his eyes were half shut his head was nodding rhythmically, along with the girl’s.

I felt relief wrapped in gloom. It was Tyler.

He looked stoned. And, perhaps because of that, he was perfectly happy to see us. There was certainly no kind of scene or resistance. ‘You coming home, love?’ I asked him, and after blinking at me a couple of times he took out the earbud, handing it to the girl who was attached to the other end of it, and got unsteadily to his feet. ‘Sure,’ he said, brushing ineffectually at the dust on his trousers.

And at that point I was glad no one else was involved because he was silly and giggly, his pupils like black moons in his already dark eyes. A proper little stoner.