Part 10 (1/2)

'You want me to drop you?' I asked, conscious of the tension in the room still.

She shook her head. 'No, you're all right. I'll walk. I need the exercise.'

'So, love,' I said to Sophia once I'd seen Riley out and returned to the kitchen. She was still standing against the kitchen worktop, looking petulant. 'What really happened? Because I think it's pretty clear Kieron's not upset because you beat him at bowling.'

Now she glared at me. 'Well, if it's not that, how the h.e.l.l would I know what's wrong with him? For G.o.d's sake! Why must everything be my fault?'

I was just about to give her an answer when she obviously decided she didn't want one. She marched past me and thundered off up the stairs. Great, I thought, as I waited for the inevitable door-slam. Bye-bye happy mood for today, then.

I followed Kieron and Lauren into the conservatory to find that they'd opened the French door and gone out into the back garden. They were sitting at the table out there, looking glum.

'G.o.d, that little madam ...' I began, despite my best professional intentions. Sometimes, it was just a knee-jerk. Didn't matter how much you understood all the underlying reasons, didn't matter that you cared. Sometimes you just couldn't help it.

'Mum,' Kieron said, 'she is impossible. She blatantly grabbed my b.u.m while I was bowling. Just grabbed it. In front of everyone. I was so embarra.s.sed. And when I told her to knock it off she just laughed in my face! Said was I only saying that because Lauren was about! I mean, as if!'

'She did, Casey,' Lauren confirmed. 'And I did try to have a word with her about it Kieron was really upset but she just laughed at me as well and called me a jealous b.i.t.c.h.'

'Oh, I'm so sorry, love,' I said, pulling out a chair for myself and sitting down. 'She's just a nightmare when she's like that. And when the two of you have been so kind, and taken her out and everything. I'll speak to her, I promise. We can't have her doing this.'

'Oh, what's the point, Mum?' said Kieron. 'She's not going to stop it, is she? But that's the last time I take her anywhere. So embarra.s.sing. And there were people we knew there, as well.'

I was just about to apologise again I so felt for them both but as I was about to open my mouth to do so a hairbrush suddenly crash-landed on the garden table.

Startled, we all looked up to see the source of the projectile, to find Sophia grinning down at us from her bedroom window.

'All talking about me again, are you?' she shouted down, her tone c.o.c.ky, her expression self-righteous. 'f.u.c.king losers, the lot of you!'

'Sophia!' I shouted back. 'Get inside now! And don't you dare speak like that! We have neighbours next door!'

'f.u.c.k the neighbours as well!' she yelled, ramping up the volume. Then she popped her head back in and banged the window shut.

Thank G.o.d for safety gla.s.s, I thought, as I pushed my chair back and got up to go in and remonstrate with her. Kieron stopped me. 'Don't, Mum,' he said. 'Stay here. Let her have her little rant. She knows we told you the truth and all she's trying to do now is to give you something else to be angry about.'

He was right, of course. I needed to remain focused on the original incident, not dance to the strings she was now trying to pull. So easy to fail to see the wood for the trees. Thank heavens for my clear-thinking Asperger's son, who saw everything in a much simpler light!

We headed inside now, in any case, as time was moving on, and Mike would soon be home and hungry for tea. I didn't go up and speak to Sophia Kieron was right. Best to leave her and instead took my frustrations out on the chops we were having. Not that I'd noticed. It was only the fact that Kieron and Lauren were laughing that made me realise I was being a bit heavy handed in my pounding. 'Hmm,' said Kieron, grinning from ear to ear as he watched me. 'I definitely wouldn't like to be that lamb.'

'Nor would I!' Mike agreed once he was home from work and I'd filled him in on the day and the latest Sophia drama. Kieron had popped to the bus stop to see Lauren safely on her bus. I was so glad she'd turned out to be such a generous-minded girl. It couldn't be easy for her having a boyfriend with a family like ours. We were enough of a culture shock on our own, I thought ruefully, but with the fostering well, there was certainly never a dull moment.

'But I'm going to do as Kieron suggested, and ignore the outburst,' I said. 'Kind of play her at her own game and pretend everything's all right. Perhaps if we start ignoring all the outbursts, she'll feel less inclined to have them in the first place.'

'Good idea,' said Mike, as Kieron returned. 'Be nice to have a meal without some woman causing a hysterical hoohah, eh, son?' he winked at me. 'Now, shall I make the mint sauce?'

And the meal did actually go without a hitch. I called Sophia down, and she smiled sweetly, and helped me dish up, was polite and cheerful, and couldn't have been more different. It really was as if she was just an everyday 12-year-old girl having a flounce and a tantrum one minute, sweetness and light the next. It also seemed that, just as I'd said to Mike earlier, by the miracle of just ignoring bad behaviour as a psychologist would tell you to do with a toddler it really could be spirited away.

Like magic. But that was precisely what we didn't have. And however appealing it was to think that simple behaviour modification would work, putting her on the points system that was central to our fostering programme would be, I was becoming increasingly sure, just a plaster on a big gaping wound.

But I did want to talk to her. Talk was what was needed; it was the only way to try and understand her better. So I suggested as we cleared the tea things that, while the men watched their football, she and I watch a DVD in the conservatory together, which she agreed to both readily and meekly. She even ran in and tidied it, plumped up the sofa cus.h.i.+ons and got a throw from her bedroom for us to snuggle in.

'Mama Mia,' she said. 'Can you stand that again, Casey?'

I nodded. I could recite the script in my sleep. She'd already had it on three or four times since she'd been with us, and I'd already seen it a couple of times myself. But that didn't matter. I was more concerned with getting her out here, just the two of us, in the hopes she'd open up to me some more.

We watched for about forty minutes, when I suggested we take a 'commercial break' so I could rustle up two hot chocolates and nibbles. In her case they were a bag of crisps like most people with her condition, she craved and needed salt and in mine, a couple of my favourite chocolate biscuits. 'And a quick chin-wag, I thought,' I added, as I pa.s.sed her her drink.

She frowned. 'Is this about earlier in the garden? Because I'm so sorry, Casey, I really am. I just lost my temper. I promise I won't do it again.'

'No, it's not about that,' I said. 'Though that was immature of you, and you know that. We just don't speak to one another like that in this house, and while you're with us you mustn't either.' She looked chastened. 'No,' I went on. 'It's about what happened when you were bowling. Kieron and Lauren told me, and they have no reason to tell me anything but the truth. And I just need to know, lovey, what were you thinking?'

'It was just a joke, all that, Casey. I swear it was. I just thought well, that Kieron would find it funny.'

'Sophia,' I said gently. 'You have to understand. There is no way Kieron would find something like that funny. He is a grown man, and you are 12. Much too young to be touching him like that. But you are also old enough, I think, to know that, don't you? All this touching men well, it's not right, is it?' I almost asked her to reflect on how she had felt about it when the tables were turned and she was being molested by those grown men. But something held me back. Something told me that now wasn't the moment to go there. I wanted her to reflect on her own behaviour. Here and now. She looked on the edge of tears.

'I'm so sorry,' she said, her chin wobbling. 'I do know that. I just didn't think about it. I just did it. I don't know why. And then Lauren looked at me as if I was a piece of dirt, and I dunno. It just made me so angry. And when I get like that I just don't seem to know how to stop it.'

Her tears were spilling over now, and I put my arm around her. 'Sweetheart, you've lived with us for over two months now. You must know that we all care about you very much. We're here for you. That's why we do what we do and that includes Kieron and Lauren to help you and support you through a bad time in your life. So you need to think about him the way he wants you to think about him like a big brother. Not some boy at school you fancy. Not a conquest.'

She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. 'I do think of him that way. I do, honest, Casey. It's just like, well, it's just like I can't stop myself. I wouldn't have done it if had just been me and him, honest I wouldn't. It's just like Lauren tries to keep him all to herself, and I feel left out.'

Never a truer word, I thought. Never a truer word has she yet spoken. This was surely the nub of it, this instinctive behaviour. Learned, no doubt, at her mother's knee. Only metaphorically, maybe, but wasn't that the crux of it? That she knew no different than to compete for male attention in this way? To compete with her mother for the attention of the apparently countless boyfriends, and to play up to them too to punish her mother for her lack of love by focusing that male attention on herself instead? I was no psychologist, but this was hardly rocket science, was it?

'You are a silly sausage,' I said, pulling her close. 'First off, Lauren's ent.i.tled to keep Kieron to herself she is his girlfriend, after all! And you're all wrong about that anyway it was her idea to take you bowling! She wants to be friends with you. They both do! Which is why you must try to think before you act. And as I've said before, there's plenty of time for you to be having boyfriends. Ones your own age. Not wrinkly old guys like my Kieron. That a deal?'

'That's a deal.'

'So shall we get back to that movie?'

In answer she clicked the remote and snuggled in even closer. And for the next hour, bar my dead arm pinioned under her, you could almost believe that just by talking and cuddling and being patient and really listening, you could fix all the ills in the world. Which you could, in many cases. I did actually believe that.

But this child, I'd soon learn, was just too broken.

Chapter 14.

Predictably, the next few days pa.s.sed without incident. A pattern of behaviour seemed to be emerging. We would have an outrageous tantrum or outburst, which Sophia would then try to explain away or ignore, and then she'd be especially good for a few days. Until the next event, anyway (which we rarely could predict with any certainty), when the cycle would start up again.

Both the agency and Sophia's social worker deemed this a good thing. That there was a pattern at all all this repeated blowing up and then reining in was seen to be evidence of 'progress'. In time, they felt, we would learn to read her and expose her 'triggers': which events or interactions (the illness aside) caused her to lose control, upon which 'we' could set about tackling them. That 'we', however, felt very much a royal 'you'. It was me and Mike, our whole family in fact, that would be at the sharp end of all this. Great, I thought. We'll just keep on being emotionally battered just as long as you've decided it's a 'good' thing.

Privately I wasn't so sure. I felt the pattern was just evidence of a structured routine, no more, no less, and that while we might make some progress with Sophia's behaviours it wasn't actually addressing the root problem.

But it wasn't for me to play psychiatrist, was it? I'd told John my concerns and that was all I could do. My job was to care for her, not treat her I wasn't qualified, so best I get on with doing the stuff I was qualified for giving our little lady an unforgettable thirteenth birthday.

By the time we reached the Wednesday before the big day I had pretty much got everything organised. I'd also asked Riley to come round and help me with some of the decorations while Sophia was at school.

Well, I say help me, but in reality it was me who was the helper. Ever since she became old enough to display her talents as an artist, it was Riley who became the family's creative consultant. She'd been on the internet and printed several photos she could work from, and soon had me busy cutting out all the giant witches and wizards she'd drawn. But then it came to the painting, and I was never much good at painting. Emulsion, yes, works of art, no.

I looked out of the window it was a beautiful spring morning. Cold but clear. And Levi was getting fractious, which gave me an idea.