A Boy Without Hope. Casey Watson

if I’m honest. No point me sugar-coating it, is there? I’m sure Libby’s already told you, bless her. I mean, we’ve had our fair share of challenging kids, some of them long term, as I’m sure you have. But this one …’

      ‘So it’s not just the sleeping …’

      It was hardly a question, as I already knew the answer.

      ‘No, it wasn’t just the sleeping. If it had been …’ Another pause. Despite what she’d just said, I could sense she was reluctant to be too candid. As would I have been in her shoes, since it was another carer she was talking to – and, in this case, the one to whom the baton had now been passed. ‘Well, perhaps we could have coped better if he had slept,’ she said eventually. ‘But the truth is that he’s sneaky. Manipulative. And clever. You’ve probably already noticed that yourself. He’s also methodical. And ruthless – knows exactly how to push your buttons. Though did Libby tell you? After all that – after pushing us way beyond our limits – he carried on as if leaving us was the end of the world. So much crying and begging and refusing to go. She literally had to drag him away. And only then because we promised he could come back and stay with us on respite from time to time. That was a lie,’ she finished, bluntly. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that, but it’s true. But we didn’t know how else to get –’ She stopped abruptly. Had she been about to say ‘rid of him’?

      ‘Well, thanks for filling me in,’ I told her. ‘I appreciate your honesty. I’m going in blind here, pretty much, and forewarned is forearmed.’

      Though it was worrying, to say the least, that she had been so candid. That she was talking about him as if he was a little demon, not a child; an evil force that she was only too glad to have expunged from her life. ‘I tell you what,’ she said. ‘Let me gather my thoughts and set everything down in an email. You know, anything that comes to me that I think you need to know.’ Then she laughed – actually laughed. ‘So expect a long email! Seriously, and this is strictly between you and me, if you value your sanity don’t agree to take on this kid lightly.’

      ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I said. And I meant it. ‘I won’t.’

      Miller obviously couldn’t know it, but his timing was impeccable. Because it was only moments after I’d rung off that he appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was tousle-haired, sleepy-eyed, barefoot and shyly smiling. And a great wave of guilt mushroomed up in me from nowhere. Because no child was a demon. He was just a child who had demons. If I refused to try and help him how could I look myself in the eye?

       Chapter 6

      Taking on a new child, particularly when that child has multiple issues and challenges, is almost always a bit full-on for the first couple of weeks, and can be intense in a variety of ways. There is invariably a measure of drama, and very often there are floods of tears. There can also be outbreaks of unexpected violence, meaning you sometimes feel more like a zoo-keeper than a carer, trying to fend off, feed and socialise a distressed, out-of-control child.

      Miller, however, did not seem to fit any recognisable mould. Here was a lad whose fearsome reputation had arrived before him. A child variously described as a nightmare, as sneaky, as manipulative and ruthless, yet, apart from the outburst when Libby Moran had left him, he’d done nothing to provide evidence that any of that was true. Yes, he’d been chippy about the gaming, and a little petulant about rules, but other than that he’d presented no notable challenges. Yes, he’d push at the boundaries, but once he established they were firm, he didn’t kick off – he just meekly accepted them.

      So was there a bigger game being played here? Was he sounding us out just as we were doing with him? Apart from the sleep situation, which hadn’t yet improved, I was struggling to understand just why he’d been flagged up as such a challenge.

      The only pressing problem – and ‘pressing’ was unquestionably the word for it – was that three days had now passed and I’d not left the house, and the walls felt as if they were closing in on me.

      It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if I’d at least had some outside input, but no email had arrived yet from Jenny, and I’d not heard anything else from Libby either. The only call I’d received had been from Christine, who’d called the previous afternoon and, when I told her I’d been given nothing further from social services, told me she was going to ‘kick some butt’, and promptly rang off again.

      It was now lunchtime – almost a full twenty-four hours later – and I was still waiting to hear from her. Or anyone, for that matter. In the meantime, we’d fallen into a less than ideal routine of disturbed nights, as I tried in vain to get him to either sleep or read quietly, and him sleeping in till gone eleven.

      So it was odds-on that the melatonin wasn’t working. Either that, or the dosage or timing was wrong, and, since Miller was on an adult dose, experience told me it was more likely a problem with the timing. As it stood, he was supposed to take them at 7 p.m., the idea being that, at around ten, he would simply ‘drift off’. Which he wasn’t.

      But why the three-hour gap anyway? Would it really take that long to work? Was he simply taking it too early in the evening? I’d looked after a child who’d been prescribed melatonin a few years back, Olivia, and though she’d been younger I had a hunch that the principle held true; she’d take the pill at bedtime and, for the most part, would be asleep fifteen minutes later. Should I hold off giving Miller his three till it was time to go to sleep? Perhaps having it too early made it easier for his body to resist it – something I would need to discuss further with my GP.

      For now, though, I decided, it was time to stop the rot. Yes, he was a serial absconder, but I’d managed my fair share of those, and even if taking him out meant risking him doing so, there was no way he could remain shut up in a house indefinitely. I needed to get him out, not least because it wasn’t rocket science that, everything else notwithstanding, some physical exercise would obviously aid sleep. He might manage to escape from me – from what I already knew, it was odds-on he would try – but I was reassured by what also I’d read and heard about him always coming back again and, in the absence of anyone else stepping in to either sit with him or accompany me, I was going out and he was coming with me, end of.

      To that end, I’d already told him it was too late for breakfast, and that, today, we were going to sit down and have lunch together before him getting bathed and dressed, and going into town.

      I’d made pasta, which he apparently liked, and set the kitchen table. ‘It’s almost ready, Miller!’ I called up the stairs. ‘Come on down, love.’

      As I was beginning to realise was his instinctive way, he immediately responded to the request. Not with ‘I’m coming’, however, but with his own counter-order. Just as he’d done with the games console the first night we’d had him, he seemed incapable of responding to any request for action without adding several minutes before he did it. In this case, apparently, he required three.

      This, in itself, wasn’t that unusual. Kids who are insecure because of abuse or neglect – and often both – will often attempt to exert control on their surroundings via time, needing to know what’s happening, when it’s happening, and needing constant reassurance that it actually will happen. This seemed different, though. It was almost as if he had a built-in resistance to doing anything without imposing his own timeframe on it. I suspected that if I told him there was a giant Easter egg downstairs waiting for him, he’d practise the same curious delaying tactic before he took it. It seemed almost knee-jerk, and I wondered if this was what Libby meant when she’d commented that he needed control. It didn’t matter what was asked of him – clean your teeth, go to bed, brush your hair, or whatever. He would only do it after a further few minutes had passed, the number of which he decided.

      I’d tried to be wily, saying things like ‘breakfast will be ready in three minutes’, but, faced with that, it was almost as if he turned into an android, for whom it simply ‘did not compute’.