straight to us than have the upheaval (a new baby is upheaval enough anyway) of having to move somewhere else as a temporary measure.
And, well, a bit of me was pleased to hear she was pleased. We’d be fine together. I didn’t doubt it for a moment.
Over the past few days my house had been a hive of activity, and I had taken no prisoners. It was all hands on deck and, boy, did the family know it. No stone would be left unturned in my quest to seek out dust and destroy.
‘Honestly, Mum,’ Riley had said to me, exasperated, when I dispatched her into town to get a new duvet set, ‘the house is already perfect as it is! You have the beige bedroom all ready and you have the blue bedroom all ready. Which covers both bases. If she has the cot in with her – which she probably will – they can both go in the beige room and, if not, Roman can go in the blue room. Why on earth,’ she asked pointedly, ‘do you need new bedding?’
She was right, of course. She generally was in such matters. It was just my natural urge to do something extra to make them welcome. And it was an urge that had backfired with the last kids we’d fostered. It had seemed such a great idea to decorate one room pink and one room blue (all fostering eventualities catered for – ta-da!) till John Fulshaw gave us two unrelated nine-year-old boys, who could no more have shared a room when they arrived than fly.
Which was also why the pink room was now, in fact, the beige room, because it just so happened that the second boy, Georgie, was autistic, and as soon as he saw the pink room he freaked out (to use the professional term) because pink really, really upset him. So the moral of the story is don’t assume anything. Don’t prejudge what a child might or might not like.
But I never learn, and Riley knew that, and she duly went off to find a cheap and cheerful duvet set, as instructed, if only in the cause of calming me down.
Today, though, I was all of a flap again, as usual going through my lists – I’m at the age when I can’t function without my lists – for the umpteenth time. Riley had come over again, having dropped Levi at school and Jackson at nursery, just to help me finish off and to say hello. As a young mum herself, I knew Riley’s presence would be a positive one for Emma; one that wouldn’t smack so much of being faced with a posse of know-all middle-aged women, but more of introducing a like-minded friend.
‘Right,’ she said, as the time for them to arrive grew ever nearer. ‘Put that list away, and that’s an order, Mum. You’ve gone through it countless times already and you have everything you need.’
‘But what if she hasn’t got any baby milk or something?’
Riley shook her head. ‘Mum, you don’t live in Antarctica, you know. If she needs milk, then you can pop out and get some. Anyway, you don’t know what type she uses so it would have been pointless to stock up anyway. And, trust me; she will have enough milk. That also applies to the steriliser, the baby bath, the cot mobile, the muslins and all the other silly things on your list.’
‘It’s a very sensible list,’ I huffed as I walked to the window to look out for them. ‘Oh shit!’ I added, seeing a car pull up. ‘They’re here!’
I had a room spray in my hand, so I chucked it now at Riley. ‘Have a quick spray around with that, will you, while I let them in?’
She didn’t grace my order with a reply. Instead she just calmly put the aerosol in the dining-room cupboard. ‘Mum, you know something?’ she said finally. ‘You are just a teensy bit cuckoo. Go on, let them in. I’ll go and pop the kettle on.’
I took a deep breath, as I always did, before opening the front door, ready to see what sort of child might be on the other side. My first impression – my gut instinct – was something I had learned to trust over the years. You could tell so much about a child from that first sweep of information gathering; from the basics of what their clothes and accent said about the sort of world they’d come from, to the less obvious pointers, such as how they responded to you, and what that said about their personality and confidence. Were they frightened? Full of attitude? Traumatised? It wasn’t quite Sherlock Holmes territory, but it was an inner voice that had rarely been wrong.
‘Well, hello!’ I said, beaming at the little congregation on the doorstep.
I didn’t immediately take stock of Emma, however, because my eye was drawn to the car seat that was hanging from Maggie’s elbow, and the well-wrapped and fast-asleep bundle it contained. I dragged my gaze away, however, to greet the person I knew must be my main focus – his mother.
‘You must be Emma,’ I said, taking in how slight she was, how young-looking, how not at all her fourteen years. She was tiny, with blonde hair tied back into a side ponytail and enormous blue eyes. Ironic, but she looked the picture of chaste innocence. ‘Oh,’ I gushed, ‘and your baby is just gorgeous. Come on. Come on in. Follow me.’
Now, I’ve met some reluctant-looking kids in my time, obviously, but it had been a long time since I’d seen an expression quite as defiant and disdainful as the one etched on this particular teenager’s face. As I ushered the three of them in, I made my smile all the wider to compensate. Hmm, I thought. Whatever happened to the ‘oh, she’s so excited’ line from Maggie?
Still, this was probably par for the course, I decided, as I showed them into the dining area. It was the kind of attitude that was commonly seen in lots of teenagers, that whole scowly, cocky attitude thing she had going on. Standard teenager-ese, as portrayed in many a TV programme, and which reminded me that being a mother doesn’t stop a girl being a typical fourteen-year-old; it might eventually, and probably would, by sheer force of circumstance, but right now this was a teenager who just happened to have had a baby. Which didn’t stop her looking and acting like a teenager.
Riley, who was finishing off preparing refreshments, stood in the kitchen archway and beamed too. ‘Hi everyone!’ she said. ‘Drinks orders, please!’
I was pleased to note a slight but perceptible softening of Emma’s features on seeing my daughter. She’d obviously been told about Riley and now I could see her wondering how this young, cool and clearly more on-her-wavelength kind of person might fit into her life while she was with us.
‘That’s my daughter,’ I said to her as we all sat down at the table. ‘She doesn’t live here but she visits all the time. She has boys too – two of them. Levi and Jackson. I expect Maggie’s told you about them, hasn’t she? You’ll get to meet them in the next few days.’
This seemed to spark a return to the previous scowl. ‘If I’m here in a few days,’ she was quick to point out. ‘I told her,’ she said, glancing across at Maggie pointedly, ‘that I’m going to have to see how it goes first.’
Okaaayyy, I thought. I’m getting the real picture now, which is fine. I was just about to answer – with something agreeing that that was a perfectly reasonable point – when Maggie, looking apologetic, spoke first. ‘Sorry, Casey,’ she said, looking equally pointedly at her young charge. ‘But Emma’s having something of a stroppy day today, aren’t you? Didn’t much like getting up at six to get here, did you?’
Had I paid more attention to that I might have had more of a clue about the shape of things to come, but of course I didn’t. I just brushed over it and tried to jolly things along. ‘Six in the morning?’ I exclaimed. ‘That would be enough to give anyone a bad case of the grumps. But at least you’re here now, and I’m sure you’ll get a chance to catch up on a bit of sleep later.’
And I did feel for her. A new baby was exhausting. And though I’d forgotten
