The Boy No One Loved and Crying for Help 2-in-1 Collection

I discreetly manoeuvred him – and thankfully he didn’t try to resist – out into the hallway, and then looked right into his eyes, maintaining contact as I spoke to him. ‘Look,’ I said gently, but also quite firmly. ‘I know something about all this has upset you, Justin, but we don’t want to hurt Riley’s feelings, do we? You’re obviously too angry to talk to me about it right now, I can see that, so why don’t you go on back upstairs for a bit, eh? Kieron will be up in a minute and you can get back to your game. Okay, love?’

For a moment he looked like he was about to speak, but then changed his mind and clamped his mouth shut again. Then he turned and plodded off back up to his bedroom and as I watched him go up, I slowly exhaled. Once again, I’d been holding my breath.

We didn’t see Justin downstairs again until Riley and David had finally left for home, and when he did come down, he had Kieron close behind him. And for a reason; when I asked him about it, sensing he was calmer, and would want to talk about it, right away, Kieron, who was standing behind him, was busy making a face at me and shaking his head.

Taking my cue, I dropped it, and instead just ruffled Justin’s hair. ‘I know it’s a lot of fuss, kiddo,’ I said lightly. ‘But don’t worry. It’ll calm down soon enough.’

It was only once he’d gone to bed that Kieron told me what had happened. He’d been aware from the off what had happened to Justin, bless him – had actually seen him metamorphose into that other, scary Justin, and though I hadn’t been aware of it, specifically popped upstairs to check all was okay.

Once up there, he’d asked Justin if he was okay and, getting little back, then observed, ‘Bloody women, eh! Getting all over-excited about babies! So. Back to our game, then? Prepare yourself, mind. Welcome to defeat, little brother!’

Justin had apparently laughed out loud at this, his parting comment on the subject being an equally spirited, ‘Hah! She won’t be so happy when she’s round and fat like my mum!’

I could have kissed Kieron for that. I really could. Trust him to have the wisdom to say exactly the thing Justin needed to hear. I really felt proud of him that day.

‘It’s not really surprising he’s found it difficult to swallow,’ said Mike, once we were tucked up in bed, him with his book and reading glasses and me with my magazine and coffee, like the grandparents-in-waiting we couldn’t believe we now were. ‘Hard for him to separate it from what’s happened with his mum, is it? You know, another woman having a baby, all the fuss and attention and everything. Must remind him of how wretched his own family life is.’ Mike put the word ‘family’ in quote marks with his fingers, and he was right to – what sort of family life was Justin ever going to have? His mother was about as reliable as the British summer. What were the chances of her every really wanting to reconcile with Justin once her ‘princess’, her precious baby daughter, came along? My guess was that she wouldn’t want him within a mile of her.

But all we could do for Justin was what we were doing already – trying to give him stability and boundaries and affection and, as far as possible, help him to deal with the scars he already had. And I couldn’t dwell on it all – not that night – as I was way too excited. ‘Grandparents’. It made me giggle just to say it out loud. In my head I was way, way too young to be a ‘nanna’, and I laughed when I realised I was actually rehearsing in my head how I was going to break the news to my parents. How mad was that?

But there was a serious aspect to this incredible new situation; the effect this would have on our fostering. Way in the future, though we’d yet to have so much of an inkling of it, our fostering would turn out to be such a great positive that it would end up having a direct effect on Riley’s own choice of career, but for the moment, as Mike commented, we must proceed with caution. We must make sure we had a much fuller background on future children, especially older ones, to be sure they didn’t have a history of hurting little ones.

In the meantime, I agreed, thinking about Justin’s reaction earlier, we must take care. If he was still with us when the baby was born – it was due in November – we mustn’t be blind to how that might affect him.

The days passed, and I never really did get Justin to articulate his difficulty about Riley and her pregnancy. Even though, intuitively, it was so obvious why it affected him, it still would have been so helpful for him to be able to talk his feelings through with me, yet as a subject for discussion, no matter how hard I tried to set things up for him to attempt it, it seemed it was a definite no-go area. I heard second-hand from Kieron that his only other comment to him on the matter was that all girls were ‘slags’ and that he knew ‘all the stuff they do to get pregnant’. He also warned Kieron that he should never get a girlfriend, because they were ‘trouble’.