Chapter 19
As I expected, Tyler was over the moon about the prospect of finally getting to say goodbye to his mum.
‘Will it be a grave and stuff – so we can leave Billy there and everything? And I thought I could leave her a letter, as well, like I did for Grandad. She’d like that, wouldn’t she?’
I was touched again by him calling my dad Grandad so naturally, and it plucked at my heartstrings. It wouldn’t just be us who’d miss him when he’d left us. I also had to explain then what Will had told me. ‘There won’t be a grave, love,’ I explained, ‘because your mum was cremated, same as Cameron was. But Will’s told me there is a cross for her, in a garden of remembrance. So hopefully we’ll be able to leave Billy there.’
‘And did Will ask Grant yet? You know, about getting Billy back for me?’
I bit my lip, wondering what to say. The truth was that Will had asked Tyler’s dad about it, and had pretty much drawn a blank. He didn’t know anything about any teddy apparently, nor where he might look for one, and though he promised he’d asked Grant if he knew anything about it, it brought it home to me – and saddened me – that something so important to the little boy, the son he’d taken in, could have passed through his life for several years without him even remembering. Just how often did that little boy ever get tucked into bed at night by his father? Just how often had he been given a goodnight kiss?
I tried to put it out of my mind. It was history. It couldn’t be undone now. ‘They’ve been looking,’ I reassured him, realising I was probably lying. ‘But you know what it’s like when you move house, sweetheart. Lots of things get lost, and sometimes it takes years before they are found again. You watch. Just when they aren’t looking for it, it will turn up, I’ll bet. And, in the meantime, though, remember what I said? We’ll go into town and get another bear, just like Billy. That way, if Billy does turn up, you still get to keep him as a memory. Then you and your mum will have one each, won’t you? Just the same.’
Tyler processed what I’d told him and seemed to accept it. He smiled at me. ‘That’ll be nice. That’s a good plan, Casey. It’ll be like we have something together, won’t it? When will we go?’
The village where the cemetery was was south of us, close to a city and, being a practical soul, I’d already figured that I could kill two birds with one stone. I’d never normally travel that far to shop, but since we’d be in the area anyway it was an opportunity for some serious retail therapy – just the antidote to what would be an emotional kind of day. ‘Well,’ I said to Tyler, ‘I’ve been thinking about that, actually, and it’ll soon be December, won’t it? Time to start my Christmas shopping. So I thought that if we left it for a couple of weeks we could go into the big town centre there afterwards and you can help me choose some presents for the boys and Marley Mae. And also see the sort of thing you might like Santa to bring you, eh? What do you think?’
He was a boy, and had thus far shown little enthusiasm for shopping jaunts generally, but Christmas was Christmas, and the goal posts were therefore moved. He also vowed to be as good as gold until the big day arrived, of which I now had no doubt.
As far as Tyler’s behaviours were concerned, progress continued to be promising. It was as if, after Cameron’s death, he had changed overnight; as if he’d made a conscious choice to behave differently, as though some of his anger and frustration had died along with his friend. He was still as boisterous as ever, and still as sharp with his tongue when he chose, but that was a good thing – Mike and I could still see the essence of the real Tyler. Our job now was to build on that foundation so that when he left us to move to a more permanent home he would have all the tools he needed to live a fulfilling life.
Tyler was as good as his word, too. He was up on time for school every day, helpful with chores when he returned and, best of all, his progress at home seemed to be mirrored at school itself.
‘It’s like he’s a different child,’ his head of year told me when she phoned to report his weekly progress. This had been a regular thing since Tyler had moved up a level in his programme. It was a good way to check that the improvement was happening across the board. ‘He’s been a delight to teach,’ she added. ‘All his subject teachers have said so. Yes, he’s had his sad time, understandably, but he’s been so much less volatile, and, fingers crossed, relations with his brother seem better now as well.’ This was particularly good to hear. So Alicia hadn’t managed to completely turn Grant against him. ‘That’s great news,’ I enthused. ‘So they’re speaking again?’
‘They are. And in a healthy way. Tyler’s not seeking him out so much. They often meet up at lunchtime, but it’s not like it was. My spies tell me it’s much as you’d expect it to be. Relaxed. None of that tension. So we’re happy.’
I was happy, too. Even more so when I had a phone call from Will the following week telling me that he’d already been to see Tyler’s aunt Angela.
‘She’s – how shall I put this politely?’ Will said. ‘Hmm. A bit of a rough old bird, I have to say.’
I laughed out loud. ‘And does she cluck?’
‘I couldn’t imagine anyone less clucky,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry – you’ll know what I mean when you meet her.’
‘When I meet her? Is she coming to visit, then?’
‘Not exactly,’ Will said. ‘I don’t think she’s, ahem, really the “visiting” type. But she did say that she’d love to see Tyler, and though I can take him – and would be happy to – I thought you’d probably want to take him yourself, since it was you who instigated all of this. Anyway, so, being the presumptuous type, I told her I thought you’d probably be up for it.’
Up for it? He was right. I would have run over hot coals. If she was dying to meet her nephew, then I was dying to meet her. It would be lovely for Tyler to have another family member in his life, even if she was a rough old bird.
‘I understand you’re going to see his mum’s memory cross too,’ Will went on. ‘I think that will be fantastic for him, Casey. Give him something to hold on to, something tangible – a place he knows he can always go. Poor lad’s still got a lot of changes ahead.’
‘I know,’ I said, feeling that familiar rush of guilt I always got when we got to this stage with a placement. ‘Will, thank you so much for all this. Thanks a mill, Will, in fact. You’ve gone above and beyond here, and we really appreciate it.’
‘Not at all, Casey. All in the job, this kind of thing.’
Which I knew it probably was, but that didn’t make me appreciate him any less. He’d never been less than brilliant, not to mention kind and enthusiastic, and – oh, I didn’t know – just so up for it himself. I was so glad he was Tyler’s social worker.
‘Oh, and there’s something else,’ he said. ‘You might also be impressed by another piece of progress I think I’ve made. Nothing set in stone yet, of course, but I think I just might have found a placement for Tyler. Lovely couple. They can’t take him until after Christmas, so I thought we’d hold off for a bit with any meetings, but still it’s looking promising, so fingers crossed.’
I felt my heart lurch. Sort of leap into my mouth, however physiologically impossible. There was a potential placement for him already? It seemed he’d only been with us for two minutes. Which was rubbish – it had been months now, and, of course, we always knew this day would come, but, oh, how I hated hearing those words.
I thanked Will as heartily as I could and hung up. Then I sat miserably for the next hour, as I always did at this point, writing up my latest notes in my foster-carer log, and after doing so I began flicking back through it. It was fat now – a wodge of fat files and notes and bits of paper, and I glanced through the notes of some of the other children we’d had living with us: Justin, Ashton and Olivia, who been with us for so long; Cameron – just a few days; Spencer – a few months; Sophia, little Abbie … So many children, so many painful goodbyes.
It was a form of masochism; turning the pages was like being struck repeatedly by a mallet, and before long there were tears rolling down my face. Bloody fostering! I thought. What on earth had possessed me to do such a thing!
Truth be told, I knew the answer. I did it because I loved it. This was just the cost we paid for all the joy. I needed to man-up and I did, as I’d done many times before, those gloomy thoughts being dusted away as carefully as the cobwebs in my conservatory, so that by the time Tyler and I set off on our journey to see aunt Angela I had my equilibrium and my smile back in place.
‘I wonder if she looks like my mum,’ Tyler called from the back seat of the car as we approached the estate on which she lived. ‘I bet she does. I can’t remember what Mum really looks like but the social lady said she’d seen a picture of her once and that she was very beautiful. She told me that.’
I smiled through the mirror. ‘Well, I don’t know if your auntie looks like her, sweetie – we shall have to see. But if your mum looked like you, then she will indeed have been very beautiful.’
He laughed at that. ‘I can’t be beautiful. I’m a boy, Casey – derr! Oh, but I’m dead nervous. If she asks me about where I live, or about my dad, or that witch, I’m gonna tell her I’m a foster kid because I don’t want to live at home. If she finds out they don’t want me, it might make her think I’m no good, mightn’t it?’
‘She will not,’ I said firmly, ‘and if she did, she’d be wrong. Couldn’t be more wrong,’ I added, for good measure.
So, I thought, Tyler had simply accepted then that he wasn’t going home. No one had ever told him that. He’d just taken it as a given that they didn’t want him. I hoped he wasn’t back on his tack of being unwanted because he was unlovable. I watched him through the rear-view mirror. He couldn’t be more lovable, in my book.
It was another 20 minutes before we pulled up outside what my sat nav called ‘my destination’, though as a destination address it wouldn’t make Homes & Gardens. It was a bleak-looking, run-down semi on an equally bleak street of run-down semis, and having been doing this job for years now and the one I’d done before it, I had seen enough to know that the person who was waiting behind the front door would be one just clinging on to their independence.
‘Looks like we’re here,’ I said, painting a smile on my face. Now we’d arrived I wondered if this had been a good idea after all. ‘Look at you,’ I said, going into bustle mode, ‘you’ve got chocolate all around your mouth. Come here.’ Tyler leaned towards me as I did that mumsy (and perhaps unforgivable) thing of taking out a tissue, dampening it on my tongue and then scrubbing the corners of his lips with it. He duly grimaced, but in a good-natured way. Then he grinned at me instead. ‘Will I do now?’
‘You’ll do for me, kiddo,’ I said as I let him out of the back. Then, for the first time that I could remember, he reached for my hand. I hadn’t proffered it – he had just found it and grabbed it.
We were greeted at the door by a woman I knew was in her forties but who looked – understandably – much older. She was thin and gaunt, and though she had long sleeves covering her arms I couldn’t help but wonder how many scars lay beneath.
‘Hi there,’ I said, smiling. ‘You must be Angela. I’m Casey, and this is Tyler.’
Tyler smiled shyly at his aunt, still holding tight to my hand, but was almost knocked off his feet as she lunged forward for a hug.
‘Hello there, little guy,’ she said, smiling to reveal not so much a row of teeth as a row of gaps with the odd tooth still present. ‘Oh my God,’ she declared, ‘you don’t half look like your mummy!’ She then let him go and stepped back into her hall. ‘Come on then, come in, I’ve got the kettle on. Excuse the mess and the dog hairs, they’re a bugger to get off the carpet.’
There was no sign of any actual dogs, but I assumed she’d locked them up somewhere. Out the back, perhaps, because there didn’t seem to be another downstairs room. Just a through-lounge and a kitchen, the door to which was open, revealing a cluttered worktop and a clothes drying rack, slung with washing.
Tyler kept my hand in a vice-like grip as we followed her into the house. She led us into the through-lounge and pointed to her sofa. ‘Make yourselves comfy,’ she ordered. ‘I’ll just go get the teas. I got the lad some milk. That okay?’
Tyler nodded as she left the room. ‘Casey,’ he whispered, ‘she looks a bit funny, don’t you think?’
I stifled a smile. ‘Tyler! You mustn’t say that – it’s rude. Just try to look beyond that. Try to get to know her a bit. She’s probably as nervous as you are.’
I then tried to find a spot on the sofa that wasn’t covered in dog hairs and God knew what else and, failing in both regards, sat down with Tyler gingerly. Angela did look kind of funny, I conceded, what with so many teeth gone. And her hair, obviously once black, was liberally streaked with grey and tied on the top of her head in a slightly skewed ponytail, so tightly that it seemed to pull at her face.
I tried my best to blank out the disorder that surrounded me (not to mention the sweetish, cloying, catch-in-the-throat smell) and graciously accepted the chipped mug of tea that she brought back, bearing the timeless legend Have a Break, Have a Kit Kat. It wasn’t easy to drink. I didn’t drink tea – I was a coffee person – and it wasn’t helped by the greasy blobs floating on the surface. But not to drink it would have been ungracious so I sipped the scalding liquid as best I could, while Tyler, taking my lead, did the same with his beaker of milk.
‘How old’s the lad?’ Angela boomed, as she sat down on the adjacent armchair, slopping tea on the carpet as she lowered herself into the sagging seat.
‘He’s 12 now, aren’t you, Tyler?’ He nodded his confirmation, still looking as transfixed by her as he’d been when we’d first seen her. ‘We’re, er, off to the crematorium,’ I went on, when she didn’t answer. For all her decibel level, she seemed as awkward as we felt. And it suddenly hit me that her booming voice might be the result of her being deaf. Used to needing people to speak up – didn’t that unconsciously make you raise your voice? I didn’t know, but it seemed the most likely explanation. ‘There’s a memorial cross there,’ I added. ‘We thought we’d take some flowers, didn’t we, Tyler? But the reason we wanted to come and meet you was because Tyler obviously doesn’t remember his mum, and we thought you might be able to tell us a bit about her – whether you had any nice memories you could share with us … a few photographs, perhaps. Tyler hasn’t got any,’ I finished. ‘Not one.’
Angela sighed and put her mug down on the carpet, where it slopped over again, the liquid joining the marbling of beige-y stains there. ‘Look,’ she said, frowning and slapping away some stray strands of escaped hair, ‘I don’t want you to think I’m being awkward or anything – and I did wanna see you, kid, honest – but, well, truth be told, I don’t have much I can tell you. Truth is, lad, I was out of it most of the time,’ she said, looking straight at Tyler. ‘I was in a bad place back then – when our Fi was a youngster. And I never got my head straight, not before she died, at any rate. I was a crap sister, basically,’ she added, shaking her head and looking genuinely regretful. ‘I should have been looking out for her and I didn’t. My problem – you know, the heroin and that – always came first. Before her, before my own kids –’
‘Oh, you have children?’ I said, my excitement at hearing this causing me to jump in before properly engaging my brain. Of course she didn’t.
‘Not no more,’ she said, as if discussing a used car rather than flesh and blood. ‘Got taken off me, both of ’em, soon as they were born. Not that I cared,’ she added. ‘Not a bit of it. I was that bad. Don’t you touch drugs, son, you hear? Never.’
Touching though her words were, there was no sadness there, however – not for the children she’d never know. The children were probably adults now and would never know her either. Just the objective regret of a life not well lived. As a one-woman drug awareness and prevention programme for Tyler, she couldn’t have been bettered. Her honesty was as refreshing as her surroundings smelled stale.
‘So you see, kid,’ she went on, ‘I’m not a lot of use to you. As bad as it sounds –’ She tapped her temple. ‘My pigging brain is messed up, isn’t it? I don’t even have any memories of my own, so I don’t have anything up there to give you. And I’ve only got one photo, so I can’t let you have that. Sorry, but I can’t. It’s all I got to remember. I got to look at it, you see, so I can.’
Tyler nodded his understanding, and I wondered if he was taking all this in. He certainly didn’t look angry or sad – just resigned. It was no more and no less than perhaps he expected. It was perhaps me who had hoped for a little more.
But I fixed on the positive. ‘The photograph you have. Could we take a look?’
Angela turned to me, looking puzzled, as though she had already forgotten. ‘Photograph?’ she asked. Perhaps she had.
I nodded. ‘Yes. You said you had one photo of your sister? Of Fiona? Can we look at it? I’m sure Tyler would like to see it.’
She stood up, and pulled the hoodie down, yanking it hard by either side. It felt so incongruous to see a woman of her age dressed the way she was. Incongruous, but what else should I have expected her to be wearing? Smart separates? Elegant footwear? She clearly only dressed to keep out the cold. ‘You can look at it,’ she said over her shoulder as she shuffled off to the back half of the room, ‘but I can’t let you take it. I’m sorry, kid, but it’s all I have left.’
‘That’s okay,’ Tyler said – the first thing he’d said in ages. ‘I can take a photo of it. I have a smartphone.’
‘A what phone?’ she said, looking back towards us while rummaging in a drawer in a pine dresser.
‘A smartphone,’ Tyler said again. ‘A BlackBerry.’
‘Oh, one of those,’ she said, heading back. ‘You’ve got one that takes photos, have you? I know about those. Never likely to have one, though. Some of us can’t afford such luxuries.’ But she said it in a way that was not at all provocative and accompanied by what was probably a wink, directed at me. In another universe she’d make a great aunt – even a kind of gran figure. But not this one. Which felt very sad.
Tyler held his phone up. ‘It was a present,’ he said. ‘I got it for my birthday.’
‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘I remember. You said you were 12. I thought it must have been recent, way you puffed up when you said it. Anyway, here you go. That’s your mum.’
I moved closer to Tyler as he took it from her, so I could get a better look myself. The photo was old and curled and, strictly speaking, it was only half a photo. It had been ripped down the middle – in an effort, I presumed, to remove some undesirable.
‘That weren’t your dad,’ Angela said, presumably reading our thoughts as she sat back down again. ‘This was before that, and he was just some other shitty boyfriend she once had. Didn’t want to have to look at his ugly face, either.’
Not that you would, I thought. No, your eye would immediately be drawn to her. Because, just like Tyler, she had the sort of eyes that just pulled you in. And it was funny, having seen so much of Tyler in his father, to see someone who looked even more like our young charge; same petite form, same indefinable something – I didn’t know what it was, quite, but I hoped he could see it too.
She was dressed for the times, all early-nineties grunge-style, heavy eye make-up, pale face and hefty, mannish boots. She looked around 17, full of attitude, and reminded me of how Riley – just a little bit younger then – had gone on and on and on about N-Trance and Baby D, and how obsessed she’d been with having her hair permed. Not to mention how cross she’d been that I wouldn’t let her.
‘Go on, then,’ I told Tyler, ‘get your phone on the case. And take a few – maybe do a couple by the window with the flash off as well.’
I knew then, I think, that we wouldn’t be coming back. There was nothing for Tyler here, and he knew it. I think Angela did too, as we said slightly stiff goodbyes and she told us half-heartedly to keep in touch. There was no spark of kinship – the drugs had put paid to that – and no sense of unfinished business either.
But we had our photo, and as we pulled out into the road to drive away Tyler pulled it up and gazed at his collection of images, looking at the face of the girl who’d chosen drugs over him, and I don’t think he held it against her.
‘That social worker lady was right, wasn’t she?’ I said softly. ‘She was beautiful, love, wasn’t she? And so like you, too. That really took my breath away, that did.’
He nodded. And then, out of the blue, he laughed out loud.
‘What’s funny?’ I said, surprised. It was the last thing I’d been expecting.
‘Weren’t you terrified?’ he asked. ‘God, when she went to get that photo? Honest, Casey, I was thinking she’d look just like that lady did. That would have been just awful, wouldn’t it?’ He grinned at me then. ‘So I was, like, majorly, like, phew!’
We’d had bad days and worse days and absolutely appalling days. But today, I thought, as I tucked Tyler into bed that night, had been unequivocally, gloriously good. Which was not to say, I decided, looking at the glow from his new screensaver, that it wouldn’t provoke a weepy moment looking back.
‘We’ll get a print made from that,’ I told him, nodding towards the photo on the screen once I’d kissed his cheek, said night, night and hoped the bed bugs wouldn’t bite. ‘Then you can have it framed and keep it by your bed.’
‘That would be epic,’ he said sleepily, turning onto his side. ‘And Casey,’ he added, turning back towards me again. ‘I know you’re not my mum, but …’
He fell silent again, clearly undecided about whether to say what he wanted to say.
‘But what, love?’ I coaxed softly. ‘Go on. You can tell me.’
‘I love you like you were my mum. That’s all.’