A Boy Without Hope

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked him.

He grinned at me. ‘I’m bouncing.’

‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘But, love, it’s two in the morning. Come on, back into bed and go to sleep.’

‘I can’t sleep,’ he said. He continued to bounce.

‘Well, you have to try,’ I said, reaching a hand out to stop him. ‘Come on, into bed, before you wake the whole house up.’

‘But I can’t sleep,’ he whined, as I took hold of his wrist.

‘But you have to,’ I told him, taking his other wrist and stilling him. ‘Everyone needs to sleep.’

‘I don’t,’ he said.

‘Well, in that case, you must at least get into bed, and be still now. I can’t have you making all this noise. It’s the middle of the night.’

‘Boring,’ he said, but he didn’t try to fight me. Simply whumped down on the bed, harrumphed and let me straighten the covers over him. His eyes gleamed in the darkness. ‘I won’t sleep. I don’t sleep.’

‘Then stay awake. But stay there,’ I said firmly.

And, to my surprise, he did as he was told. Well, for an hour, at least. I was woken again at 3 a.m. – this time by a different noise, which turned out to be the sound of a tennis ball being thrown repeatedly against his bedroom wall.

He was kneeling on his rug now, his suitcase open at the side of him, throwing the ball and catching it, putting me in mind of that iconic scene in The Great Escape. But this was no German camp and he was no prisoner of war.

‘Miller, what on earth are you doing?’ I asked exasperated, eyeing the case and its spewing contents. What other diversions did he have in his box of tricks, I wondered?

‘I told you,’ he said. “I don’t sleep. Not ever. So I have to find stuff to do because I get so bored.’

I sat down on the edge of the bed, still fuzzy with sleep myself. He, in contrast, couldn’t have looked more wide awake. ‘Well, I’m sorry, love,’ I said. ‘But the rest of us do sleep.’ I pointed towards the tennis ball, which he was now throwing into the air and catching. ‘And you doing that is keeping us all awake. So if you really can’t sleep – and I know it’s hard when you’re in a place you’re not used to – then you’ll have to find something more quiet to do. How about reading?’ I nodded towards the books I’d put on top of the chest of drawers. ‘There’s some Harry Potter books, and a couple of David Walliams ones too. D’you like David Walliams?’

‘Ish,’ he said. ‘I’m not really fussed about reading. I’d rather watch Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. But I can’t get it on that telly,’ he added scathingly. ‘It needs tuning into the internet. But it’s not.’

I looked across at the TV, which couldn’t have been more than a year old. What? What did ‘tuning the TV into the internet’ mean? Every time I thought I was just about up to date with technology, some new thing came along to confound me all over again. I made a mental note to ask Tyler what that meant in the morning.

I stood up then, and plumped his pillows, then beckoned him to get back into bed. ‘Well, I’ll get Mike to look at it tomorrow,’ I said. ‘But for now, Miller, I’m afraid it has to be reading or nothing. I need you to be very quiet so that I can get a couple of hours’ sleep.’

‘Ok-ayyy,’ he said, tossing the tennis ball back into the suitcase, and, again, to my surprise, meekly doing as he was told.

And again, at four, when I had to go in and tell him to stop singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and then at five, when I heard him fiddling about in the bathroom. ‘Told you I don’t sleep,’ he pointed out as I chivvied him back to bed a fourth time.

But once again, he let me lead him back to bed without arguing and, by six thirty, when the scent of coffee roused me reluctantly from my slumbers he was, of course, sleeping like a baby.

‘You should have woken me up,’ Mike said, when I regaled him with the extent of my nocturnal activities. ‘I’d have gone in to have another word with him.’

I reached for the coffee in much the same way as a drowning man would grab a passing lifebelt. ‘I’m not sure it would have done any good, love,’ I told him. ‘It’s almost like his body clock’s set to nocturnal. I don’t know about Lego Batman – he’s like a flipping bat! He wasn’t even tired. Not remotely. He was buzzing. So much for the sleeping pills he’s been taking.’

‘But a challenging day for him, don’t forget. Perhaps he was just over-stimulated.’

‘I wish I thought that, love, but I don’t. I got this impression that last night was pretty much as per. And with him not going to school, you can see how that might happen. And what’s the point of him popping pills if they’re not helping? It’s clearly something we’re going to have to address as a matter of urgency. Direct with the GP if need be.’

And his former carers, for that matter. Had this been true for them too? If so, it was a habit that needed breaking, and fast.

For the time being though, I was too tired to start, so once Mike went to work, and Tyler headed off to school, I did some housework, drank coffee and fired off a couple of emails, in the hopes of at least getting some sort of medical history. And all the while, our ‘non-sleeping’ nocturnal house guest slept on.

I also decided to try and speak to Miller’s previous foster carer, Jenny, to get a better sense of his routines and habits. No, he’d not been there long, but, from their point of view, anyway, clearly more than long enough. Was it the lack of sleep that had pushed them to the brink with him?

After flipping through the little paperwork I had, I found her number and punched it into my mobile. If Miller did come downstairs unexpectedly, I could easily take myself off into the back garden. And perhaps take him out there later, too, in an attempt to tire him out.

‘Oh, hello!’ Jenny said. She sounded happy. Like a woman, it occurred to me, who’d had a decent night’s sleep. ‘I would have called you but I was going to give it until tomorrow so you weren’t inundated with endless calls,’ she said. ‘I know what it’s like when you have a new placement.’

I almost laughed. Did we even work for the same fostering agency, I wondered? When I had kids delivered, all I ever seemed to be inundated with was a big, noisy silence – the parcel, and the problem, passed on. ‘I haven’t heard from anyone,’ I told her. ‘That’s why I was calling. He’s been up half the night. Is he always like this? I was hoping you might have a few tips for me.’

‘Ah,’ Jenny said. And it was a very telling ‘ah’. ‘I wish you all the best with that, I really do.’

My heart sank to hear my fears so swiftly confirmed. ‘So it’s not a one-off, then? I was hoping it might be just a first-night thing.’

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I wish I could tell you it was but, to be honest, we didn’t have an unbroken night the whole time he was with us. It’s one of the main reasons we had to let him go. He’s hard enough to cope with at the best of times, but when you aren’t getting any sleep … And with the hours my husband works … well ...’ She sighed. ‘Look, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the whole thing’s been a bit of a nightmare, 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 (#u6dcccb14-42e2-5a8b-93a4-a0734658d271)

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.