Torn: A terrified girl. A shocking secret. A terrible choice.. Rosie Lewis

sorts of intervention therapies have been offered but the Fieldings have refused to engage with any of them.’

      Longing to get upstairs and help the children to settle in, I reached for the nearest cushion, planted it on my lap and fiddled with the tassels. Being plucked from one life and planted in another one was a shock for anyone and the siblings were probably still reeling. Of course, there were some things that Maisie needed to tell me in private, but her drawl was agonisingly slow. ‘What did Reece disclose?’

      ‘So, Reece’s teacher noticed a red mark on his thigh as the class were changing for PE this morning. At first he made out that he’d been stung –’

      I grimaced, amazed at the lengths children went to in defending parents who offered little protection in return.

      ‘I know, sweet, yeah? But when pressed, he admitted that his mother had slapped him. Mum’s insisting that it was just a little tap but there’s a mark, like,’ Maisie cupped her hands together in the shape of a rugby ball, ‘this big on his thigh.’

      I sighed, my heart going out to him. It was March and the Easter holidays were only a few days away. There was often an influx of children coming into care when school holidays loomed – children seemed more able to cope with problems at home with the daily security of school to escape to but the prospect of losing that safety net sometimes drove them to reach out to their teachers for help. As a consequence, more disclosures were made in July and December than at any other time of the year.

      ‘School says that Mum’s really dedicated to the children so we’re leaving Bailey with her for the moment. There have been concerns about him since birth, mainly due to Mum’s mental health issues, but she’s on medication for her depression and things have been stable for a while, until this happened of course. We’re going to need to keep a close eye on things.’

      ‘Bailey?’

      ‘Oh, yeah, course, you don’t know that yet. He’s the youngest, fifteen months or so.’ Maisie took another sip of the energy drink. ‘We’re holding an emergency strategy meeting tomorrow to discuss what to do about him. For now, the parents have agreed to a Section 20 for Taylor and Reece.’

      If children were removed from their parents under a Section 20, Voluntary Care Order, their parents retained full rights, at liberty to withdraw consent to foster care at any time. Reluctant families sometimes went along with a voluntary plan because they felt that they had more control over what happened to their children.

      As Maisie finished her drink, I found myself wishing I had more space at home so that little Bailey could join us, should he need to come into care. Having recently attended a child protection course, I knew that on average over the past two years in the UK, more than one child a week lost their life at the hands of a violent parent. It seemed to me that social workers had a delicate balancing act on their hands in trying to ensure that the welfare of the child was paramount.

      One of Douglas Adams’s dictums suddenly came to me. He said, ‘The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.’ When a child is taken into care, the course of their life is sometimes changed for ever and I’ve often wondered how social workers set the bar of negligence objectively, in the absence of a definitive answer. I was just glad that the task of making such far-reaching decisions was outside of the remit of a foster carer’s role.

      A loud scream from upstairs interrupted my thoughts. Maisie blinked and looked at me. I jumped to my feet and ran into the hall. ‘Are you all right up there?’ I called, taking the stairs two at a time.

Chapter Two

      ‘It weren’t me,’ Taylor said, touching her hand to her chest. Straight away my eyes were drawn to her fingernails, painted a dazzling strawberry red. Sitting on the single bed nearest the door, she flicked her waist-length, burnished blonde hair over one shoulder and blinked belligerently. Five-year-old Reece, whey-faced and hesitant, hovered in the middle of the room chewing his bottom lip. ‘W-w-what’s going on? Where we sleeping?’ he asked, his face a picture of uncertainty. He dragged a knuckle across one eye, dislodging the black-rimmed spectacles he wore so that they fell across his cheek. ‘W-w-where’s Mummy?’

      ‘Well, that’s what Maisie and I have been discussing,’ I said, the disembodied screams already drifting to the back of my mind. The social worker entered the room at that moment, stopping just inside the door. She rested her back against the wall with a sigh, as if the task of climbing the stairs had drained the last dregs of her energy. ‘We’ve decided that, Reece, you can have this room and, Taylor,’ I turned to the ten-year-old, ‘you’ll be in a room just down the hall. I expect Maisie will fill you in on when you can see your mum. Isn’t that right, Maisie?’

      She nodded. ‘Yeah, sure. That’s something I need to discuss with Mummy first though.’

      ‘But there are t-t-wo beds in here,’ Reece said, screwing his eyes up and then blinking rapidly in what appeared to be a nervous twitch. ‘What one’s mine?’

      ‘Either one,’ I told him, smiling reassuringly. ‘We’ll decide later shall we?’

      He looked horrified at that, his mouth falling open in shock. Despite possessing the appearance of a miniature bouncer, with his closely cropped mouse-brown hair, broad forehead and stocky chest, I got the sense that Reece would need lots of reassurance to cope with being thrust into such an unfamiliar situation. ‘Tell you what,’ I said gently, walking over to the bed beneath the window and perching on the edge. ‘This bed is comfy. Would you like to sleep here?’

      For a split-second his features relaxed but then his thick eyebrows contracted, his amber-brown eyes pooling with tears. The fine lower lashes glistened, darkening his eye sockets so heavily that they appeared bruised. ‘I want Mummy,’ he cried, toddler-like. He clutched his midriff. ‘Ow, I got a tummy ache now.’

      ‘Aw, I know, honey. It’s all a bit overwhelming isn’t it?’ I held out my hand and he shuffled a few tentative steps towards me, lower lip trembling.

      ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Taylor mumbled, running her fingers through her hair and clamping it in a fist at the top of her head. The V of a sharply defined widow’s peak stood on show momentarily, until her hand dropped to her lap, her cheeks ballooning with a loud, huffing breath. Humiliated, Reece froze, mid-step. After a swift glance at his sister, he bent one knee and stretched his arms up over his head, as if he’d been planning to warm up his muscles. Taylor rolled her eyes and lifted her trainer-clad feet onto the bed. I felt a tightening in my stomach – a longing to slip an arm around Reece’s shoulder and reassure him that he was safe.

      I smiled at him instead and then turned to his sister. ‘Not on the sheets please, Taylor.’ Still in the infancy of my fostering career, I felt awkward imposing discipline on a child I had only just met, but caring for Alfie, a little boy with a penchant for biting, had honed my conviction that early firmness paid off. When the three-year-old had first arrived at our house, skinny and bruised, I felt such sympathy for him that I had allowed him to rampage through the house unbridled. It took five weeks to regain control, during which time we were all thoroughly miserable. I wasn’t about to make the same mistake again.

      Taylor tutted and heaved a heavy sigh but, I was relieved to see, kicked her trainers off using the edge of each foot. Sockless, her toenails were painted a deep maroon, the colour complementing her painted fingernails. I lifted my hands up and clapped them softly together. ‘Great, thank you. We’ll move the bed you’re sitting on after we’ve had dinner and then you can see your room. Is that OK?’

      She lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug and I took a long assessing look at her, trying to work out whether I was sensing an attitude or poorly disguised shyness. Something in her stance emitted an air of reckless disregard and my thoughts were suddenly touched by Riley, a fourteen-year-old lad who came to us as an