– levels I never knew even existed. It’s like he’s a hacker or something, I swear!’
I had several good reasons to be wary of what kids could get up to on computers these days, not least the teenager we’d most recently cared for, Keeley. It still concerned me that she’d been able to run a whole cottage industry – and of a kind that still made me blanche when I thought of it – out of nothing more than the smartphone in her bedroom.
Smartphones, generally, were becoming the bane of our working lives. As foster carers, we had always had a plethora of ‘training’ documents, one of which was obviously about online safety. But in recent years, recognising that a document produced a decade ago no longer applied in the fast-moving virtual world, we’d been expected to attend regular sessions to make good the lack. In truth, however, we had little hope of keeping up. The advice was sound enough: to teach children about how to stay safe online, to not give out personal information, to only accept ‘friends’ that they knew in the real world and to put parental controls on any device used by younger children. But modern kids are extremely savvy, and Miller was obviously no exception. They had ways and means to counteract many of the filters we put in place.
But by far the biggest problem today is that most kids of around the age of twelve, and often younger, already have their own smartphones when they come to us. Which they naturally keep private, even if they have nothing to hide, and if the phone belongs to them we have no legal right to remove them. So, both legally and practically, we have our hands tied. It’s a growing problem, and one social services are still struggling to cope with.
So I understood exactly what Tyler meant. You were a fool if you didn’t understand just how many streets children were ahead of you when it came to the virtual world these days. Whereas even being ‘online’ was an alien concept for those of us who grew up in the last century (and a science we had to learn, and keep learning), kids nowadays were around computers and tablets almost from birth; what was often extremely taxing for fifty-somethings like me and Mike was as natural to modern kids as breathing. It truly was a whole new world, and a changing one too – that this kid was twelve and apparently already knew more than a sixteen-year-old said it all.
I patted Tyler reassuringly. ‘Well at least we’ve discovered two things that he appears to like,’ I pointed out. ‘Gaming and dinosaurs. So that’s a positive, isn’t it? And who knows – perhaps him being able to teach you a thing or two about computers will be a great way to break the ice between you.’
‘Hmm,’ he said, looking decidedly unconvinced. ‘I mean, I know he’s clever and that, but I’m not sure we’re going to have much in common. Mum, he freaks me out a bit to be honest. He’s weird.’
‘Early days, love,’ I said, patting him again. ‘Early days.’
But clearly not early nights. Not without a battle of wills. When I popped back upstairs to let Miller know his hour was over, he didn’t even seem to hear me. He certainly didn’t take his eyes off the screen, or stop his thumbs flying across the control pad. ‘Ten more minutes,’ he said finally, when I asked him a second time. ‘I need to get these guys out of this warehouse first.’
I digested this, dithered briefly, but then shook my head. Yes this was his first night, but, knowing what I knew about his control issues, I felt it best that we start as we meant to go on. ‘No, Miller, I’m afraid you’ll have to pause it, or whatever it is you need to do, and finish it off in the morning. I told you we had a cut-off time, and this is it.’
Miller dragged his eyes from the screen long enough to look at me in astonishment and, if I wasn’t mistaken, contempt. ‘You can’t just pause it!’ he said, still tapping furiously on the control pad. ‘That’s not how it works. I need notice. If you didn’t want me to have ten minutes at the end, then you should have given me ten minutes’ notice. Don’t you know anything?’
I hadn’t noticed Mike follow me up, but he now appeared in the bedroom doorway. ‘Okay, lad,’ he said, before I could. ‘I’m sure you’ve lived in enough houses to realise that each family has their own rules. In the morning we can go over our house rules with you, but for now the one that matters is that electronics go off at bedtime.’ A short pause. ‘So go on, do as Casey says. Switch it off, please.’
Miller continued to tap away, and this time he didn’t look up. ‘And I suppose bedtime is just whenever you say it is, right? And that’s because you’re a grown-up and I’m a kid. Nothing to do with it being correct or anything. Anyway, I only need five minutes now, so it’s not like the end of the world, is it?’
There was no aggression in his tone. Just an invitation to keep the discussion going. Where no discussion should be happening in the first place. I knew a stalling tactic when I saw one.
But Mike wasn’t in the mood to play games, so he didn’t answer. Simply took two strides and switched the TV off at the plug socket.
‘Why did you do that?’ Miller yelled. ‘You complete idiot! Now I’ve lost everything!’
‘Rule two,’ Mike added mildly, ‘is that we do not speak to each other like that in this house. We don’t scream and yell and we certainly don’t call people idiots. Now I strongly suggest you get yourself into bed. I will then put the television back on for you – quietly – but not the console. And you will try to get some sleep. And then we will start afresh in the morning.’
Which seemed to be the end of it, even if he was cross about it, which he was – throwing the controller down, jumping into bed and burrowing under the duvet, huffing noisily as he rolled himself across the bed to face the wall. Which we took to be a signal for us to leave, so we did.
And silence reigned then, and continued to, when we went to bed ourselves, both agreeing that first nights were, more often than not, difficult. That we’d all sleep on it. Regroup. That tomorrow was another day.
But a day that would be a very long time coming.
It was just before two when I was awoken by the sound of banging. And as I sluggishly dragged myself from sleep into alert mode I soon worked out it was coming from Miller’s room. I lifted the duvet back and padded across the landing to investigate, only to find he was bouncing up and down on his bed, fully upright, as if practising for a trampoline tournament. He giggled like a toddler when he saw me.
‘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
