Four Waifs on Our Doorstep Read online

  But I’ve read up on it since and I’ve learned that there are certain patterns that follow people’s experiences, like people who’ve been in concentration camps always keeping their larders full of food throughout their lives, just in case.

  I knew Sam had kept his Pokemon cards – just the monstery ones. He still had nightmares most nights, as they all did from time to time. He was always afraid of the dark and had to have the light on all night. He never did talk about his emotions.

  It was chilling, seeing what Alison made of Sam’s play with the farm. I’d always thought that, being the youngest, he had been the least affected by his early life, but now it seemed he too, like the others, may have been the subject of these paedophile predators’ abuse, and still kept the aftereffects locked up inside him.

  It made me all the more desperate to get therapy organised for all of them.

  As all the children’s problems continued and their behaviours escalated, their need for some sort of counselling therapy seemed more acute than ever. But for all four of them I knew the costs would be way beyond our means, so I had to try to think of a way to fund the therapy. Then I remembered that solicitor I’d met at the adoption support group, so I found her card and rang her number.

  ‘Can I come and see you?’

  We arranged an appointment and I went along to her office.

  ‘What are the chances of suing their local authority?’ I asked. ‘Because these children desperately need therapy. They’re wrecking their lives. Their wrecking everyone’s chances at school, they’re wrecking our home life, and we can’t go on like this.’

  ‘Do you have any evidence of the local authority’s negligence?’

  I told her about the different sets of case notes and Michael Warren being given information about my children that they had refused to give me. I explained the background of how they had neglected the children’s welfare and safety for so long.

  She agreed to take on the case and secured a pot of funding to pay for it, so we thought it was all going ahead. She interviewed us and put together a file of evidence to apply for a court case. All we had to do was wait for a date for the case to begin and then it would be all systems go.

  Meanwhile, with the other three causing their own problems at school, I had not really given much thought lately to Sam’s situation. He had done very well at his primary school, and he never complained, even though I had the feeling he was still being bullied for his detached manner. He never really took part in things, in class or with the other children. He didn’t want to do group activities and he refused to be in any plays they put on. It was all part of his autistic tendency that I’d never had diagnosed. He had a hard enough time with it, I thought, without having a label.

  It was Sam’s first year at secondary school, and at that time this school was renowned for its bullying. One day he came home a gibbering wreck, with a terrible tale to tell. He was in such a state that it took us a long time to get it out of him, but what it came down to was that a group of boys had held him by the ankles from a third-floor balustrade, hanging upside down over the open stairwell.

  Had it been Carrie telling me this, I wouldn’t have believed it. Or Stacey, with all her dramatic fantasising. But the thing about any kind of autism is that the person cannot tell lies. Everything has to be literal. So I knew that, with Sam, there was no embroidering of the truth. He was telling me as it was.

  I called the school number straight away, but it was too late, the call went to voicemail. I was livid. All the more so because there was no one I could talk to till the morning, so I took my frustrations out on everything inanimate, banging down the saucepans on the stove to get rid of my pent-up anger.

  ‘What’s the matter, Trisha?’ asked Mike as we tidied up after the kids had gone to bed. ‘I’ve been dodging bullets all evening.’

  So I told him everything Sam had said. ‘He was so upset, poor lamb,’ I said.

  ‘Petrified, I should think,’ nodded Mike.

  ‘I can’t get that image out of my head. Him being dangled over that twenty-foot drop. How could they do that? It makes me shudder.’

  I called the school first thing in the morning. ‘I need to talk to the headmistress,’ I said in my sternest voice. ‘It’s very urgent.’

  ‘I’m afraid she’s in a meeting at the moment. She won’t be free till half past nine.’

  ‘Right, I’ll come in and see her then.’

  ‘Well . . .’ the secretary hesitated. ‘I’m not sure if—’

  ‘I want to make a formal complaint.’

  ‘I see,’ she said sounding surprised. ‘I’ll let her know you’re coming, Mrs Merry.’

  Then I rang Ken Piper, an adviser who goes to tribunals. He was as shocked as I had been to hear what had happened to poor Sam.

  Mr Piper came into the school with me and when we got to the meeting room there was the headmistress, the assistant head and the chair of the board of governors. The secretary must have alerted them all.

  ‘I want to make a formal complaint,’ I began. ‘Yesterday, my son Sam was held over the stairwell by his ankles by a group of children in your school.’

  ‘It was a joke, Mrs Merry,’ grinned the assistant head. ‘I heard about it and spoke to the children involved, so I know it was just a joke.’

  I saw red. ‘Well, a good job they didn’t drop him, then. Because, what would that have been? A farce?’

  ‘Oh no, they wouldn’t have dropped him.’

  ‘I don’t think you have any understanding of my children’s needs.’

  Mr Piper sat next to me, his long legs sticking out, his paperwork on his knees, and he looked shocked at the assistant head’s response. Meanwhile, the headmistress said nothing. She was inscrutable.

  ‘You have no idea about my children. You do not understand complex children’s behaviour.’

  The chair of governors was sat there, silent, next to the head.

  ‘On the contrary, Mrs Merry and Mr Piper,’ said the assistant head. ‘We’re well used to oddballs like your children.’

  Still neither of the others said a word.

  ‘Come along, Mrs Merry,’ said Ken, ‘I think we have heard all we need to hear. It’s from the top down. Indicative.’

  And we walked out together.

  We stood by my car and he said: ‘You’ve got a case here, Mrs Merry.’

  I sighed with the weight of everything that kept hitting me. ‘But I’m already fighting the local authority about their neglect of the children, and trying my best to cope with everything else that happens with teenage children. I can’t, I just can’t fight the school as well.’ It was true. I felt it was all too much. I could not have gone to a tribunal just then. I couldn’t. But I wished I had.

  The only thing I could do was take Sam out of that school and find him somewhere more suitable, smaller and more caring. So he went to a private all-through school with a brilliant art department.

  ‘Sam is a gifted artist, you know,’ said his art teacher at the first parents’ evening, and I was so glad that we moved him when we did.

  But it didn’t solve everything.

  22

  The Runaway

  ‘A child who has been damaged in the past will sometimes actively spoil things to confirm their own unacceptability.’

  Therapist’s comment

  Something strange was going on. We all noticed it. When any of us went to top up our mobile phones, we found large sums of credit already there.

  ‘I’ve heard of gremlins getting into gadgets,’ said Mike. ‘But this is the other extreme.’

  ‘A phone fairy, or something?’ I suggested.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what it is, but I like it.’

  ‘Perhaps the phone companies are giving out more generous freebies these days?’

  ‘What’s in it for them?’

  ‘Maybe they’re lulling us into a false sense of security . . . and then they’ll strike with huge increases.’

  Then
I discovered it wasn’t just us.

  ‘There’s something very odd happening to my phone,’ said Jane one day. ‘The credit keeps going up, but I haven’t paid anything into it. Laura and Brett’s phones are just the same. What do you think it can be?’

  ‘Join the club. It’s happening to us too.’

  It was all quite a mystery . . . until my credit card bill arrived. That’s when I saw all the payments to our phone providers, and for a lot more numbers than just the family. I called the bank, but they didn’t know how it had happened.

  ‘There does seem to have been a lot of irregular activity on your account, Mrs Merry. I have a note here that somebody in the fraud department did try to ring you, and left a message, twice. But you didn’t call back.’

  ‘Really? I don’t remember that,’ I said. ‘But now I realise that so much money has gone . . . How did it happen?’

  ‘All the mobile phone payments were made on your card,’ they said. ‘With your pin number.’

  I checked my statement again, with a calculator, and all the phone payments added up to about two thousand pounds. I looked to see if one had received more than any of the others, but nothing jumped out at me. I just couldn’t understand who would have done this.

  ‘So,’ I said to Mike. ‘Somebody must have taken my card out of my bag, found out my pin code and used it to do the topping up.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Yes, it does seem very strange. Usually, fraudsters only benefit themselves, and most of the payments were for family phones.’

  ‘Who do you think it could be?’ he asked. The two of us sat there, puzzling it all through, and suddenly the penny dropped.

  ‘Who’s the most likely person in our family to think up a devious way to gain credit on her own phone, without attracting suspicion?’

  He looked at me with an open mouth. ‘You mean Stacey?’

  ‘Yes. Who else would pull a trick like this?’ We had to laugh, but we weren’t going to tell her that. And it was actually very serious. I couldn’t afford to lose two thousand pounds.

  When I confronted Stacey about it the next day, she openly admitted it; brazen as you like.

  ‘Well, I have a lot of friends.’ She shrugged. ‘I needed to call them, but I never had enough credit on my phone. And you always say how important it is to have our phones with us when we go out, in case of emergency, so I didn’t think you’d mind,’ she said, smiling sweetly. ‘I added some to their phones too.’

  ‘But how did you get my pin number?’

  ‘Oh I’ve known that for ages. I watched you use it at the checkout in Tesco’s.’

  ‘But why top up all our phones as well?’

  ‘So that you wouldn’t know it was me, of course,’ she smirked. ‘Don’t you think that’s quite clever?’

  ‘Clever’s not the word I’d use, Miss Stacey,’ I said. ‘It’s a huge amount of money you’ve taken from me. But never again! I’ve cancelled this card and you can bet your bottom dollar I won’t be telling you my new pin number!’

  The value of money didn’t seem to be on the kids’ agenda. I suppose they had come from somewhere that had no money for anything they needed, to a home where everything they could possibly want, and more, was generously provided for them.

  That combined with their disruptive behaviour and wrecking skills made an uncomfortable equation. I don’t think most people realised just how destructive they all were, to each other, to us as a family, to school, to their clothes, to their toys. They would be given something and within hours it would be broken or lost.

  ‘Where’s your phone?’ I asked Sam.

  ‘Oh, it got lost somewhere.’

  ‘But I only bought you that yesterday. It cost a hundred pounds, Sam.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  At least he apologised. I didn’t usually get that from the others.

  Shopping with Stacey one day for a new bra, she caught sight of a short denim skirt.

  ‘Look at this skirt, Mum. Isn’t it lovely?’

  ‘It looks OK,’ I said, checking the price ticket. ‘It’s far too expensive, love – £70,’ I gulped. ‘And there’s hardly any material in it!’

  ‘But it’s so cool,’ she said. ‘All my friends have denim skirts, and I’ve wanted one for ages, but I never saw one I liked. But I really love this one. It’s exactly what I always wanted.’

  ‘What about getting the next size up?’ I suggested, holding it up against her. ‘That’s much better. The length is more attractive, and you’ll be able to wear it for longer.’

  ‘But it doesn’t show off my legs,’ she wailed.

  ‘Sometimes, it’s better not to show off too much, Stace. Leave some things to the imagination.’

  Judging from her withering expression, she thought I was too old-fashioned to have any opinion worth listening to.

  ‘You just don’t understand!’

  But that was the problem, I understood only too well. Stacey was the ultimate believer in ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it.’

  As usual, she was so persuasive that she had to have it as there was no other denim skirt in the world as good as this one. I reluctantly paid over the £70.

  The next day I went into her room to put her laundry away and there, scrunched up on her bed, was the £70 denim skirt, with a wide ragged strip cut off, so that it was now shorter than a pelmet.

  I picked it up and took it away. My first thought was to confront her with it immediately, but something told me to hang on to it for a few years, for the day when she was earning her own money and would understand the value of it. Perhaps then she would realise how disappointed I was.

  Jamie had never stolen from us, or from anyone as far as I knew, since his food-stealing days were over. I don’t believe he lied much either. His main Achilles heels had always been his anxiety and his anger.

  However, as a teenager he became more and more obstreperous, and by the time he was fifteen Jamie was in total rebellion, running away for odd nights at friends’ houses, not telling us where he was, getting up to all sorts of things we didn’t know about. But he always turned up within twenty-four hours. Until one day.

  We had found out that he was now smoking weed and drinking alcohol, though goodness knows where he got it all from. School maybe, or the youth club.

  Thinking about it now, I suppose it takes a lot of guts for someone like me to ring up Social Services and say ‘I’m struggling with this.’ But that’s what I did. I didn’t want to go blundering in and get it wrong, but I knew we had to deal with this as a family. We couldn’t just overlook his drug and drink problems, but I wanted some advice about the best way to approach it.

  ‘Well, Mrs Merry,’ said a detached voice at the other end of the phone. ‘Why didn’t you stop this before it started? Why haven’t you talked it all through with him and engaged him in other things with you? Why don’t you—?’

  ‘Hang on, hang on,’ I said, exasperated. ‘Who will look after the other three, all of whom have their own individual needs, while I spend all my time with Jamie?’

  ‘Well, how long have you allowed him to be on drink and drugs?’

  ‘No, you’ve got it wrong. We haven’t allowed it. We’ve only just discovered he’s doing it.’

  ‘You should have stopped him doing it.’

  ‘If I tried to stop him, just like that, he would kick off and run away for good, so how would that help him? Anyway, we couldn’t stop him if we didn’t know.’

  ‘Why didn’t you know?’

  ‘Look,’ I said, as calmly as I could, ‘all I want to do is find the best way to help him now. Do you have any suggestions?’

  ‘Get a therapist,’ she said.

  I don’t think I had ever felt more alone than I did that day, with no useful support from anyone, except of course Mike and my adopted family. The authorities just didn’t have either the expertise or the money to help and being an adoptive parent is a lonely pla
ce when you can see it all crumbling in front of you.

  I talked it through with Mike that evening and we decided what I would say when I broached it to Jamie. So the next day I sat down with him at the kitchen table while Mike took the others out to walk the dogs. But he seemed very wary and I think he knew. As soon as I started to speak, he flew into a rage and stormed out of the house.

  That was it. He just went and, of course, we didn’t panic. He’d come back like he always did. He might be a bit the worse for wear, but hopefully with no real harm done.

  However, this time he didn’t come back.

  The following day we had a phone call from a woman with a raspy voice called Mrs Edwards.

  ‘Jamie’s staying here, Mrs Merry. He’s told me all about it.’

  ‘Right, OK.’ I was so surprised that I didn’t really know what to say. God knows what he had told her, so what could I say? I wasn’t about to argue with a stranger about whatever accusations he might have made about us.

  ‘You should never have children if you don’t know how to look after them,’ she admonished me. ‘You’ve got to understand them. He’s very unhappy, you know. He’s in the same class as my grandson, and I’ve adopted my grandson, so I know all about adoption and how it works.’

  ‘Do you?’ I asked, with a mixture of irony and indignation. ‘And if you want me to get in touch with Social Services, I will do that as well. They will need to know, Mrs Edwards, because Jamie is under sixteen and you need to have a CRB check, and you would need to inform me officially if you are thinking of fostering or adopting him privately. I would want to know that everything is done properly and the local authority needs to be fully involved.’

  ‘Oh, I knew this would be your response,’ she said in a superior voice, with more than a hint of annoyance, as she hung up.

  A couple of days went by, and she called again. This time she spoke in a very irate voice.

  ‘Mrs Merry, Jamie tells me he has no clothes, so I’m going to have to go out and buy him some.’

  ‘Oh, don’t do that,’ I replied calmly. ‘I’ll bring his clothes over to you.’