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?
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.
But why the three-hour gap anyway? Would it really take that long to work? Was he simply taking it too early in the evening? I’d looked after a child who’d been prescribed melatonin a few years back, Olivia, and though she’d been younger I had a hunch that the principle held true; she’d take the pill at bedtime and, for the most part, would be asleep fifteen minutes later. Should I hold off giving Miller his three till it was time to go to sleep? Perhaps having it too early made it easier for his body to resist it – something I would need to discuss further with my GP.
For now, though, I decided, it was time to stop the rot. Yes, he was a serial absconder, but I’d managed my fair share of those, and even if taking him out meant risking him doing so, there was no way he could remain shut up in a house indefinitely. I needed to get him out, not least because it wasn’t rocket science that, everything else notwithstanding, some physical exercise would obviously aid sleep. He might manage to escape from me – from what I already knew, it was odds-on he would try – but I was reassured by what also I’d read and heard about him always coming back again and, in the absence of anyone else stepping in to either sit with him or accompany me, I was going out and he was coming with me, end of.
To that end, I’d already told him it was too late for breakfast, and that, today, we were going to sit down and have lunch together before him getting bathed and dressed, and going into town.
I’d made pasta, which he apparently liked, and set the kitchen table. ‘It’s almost ready, Miller!’ I called up the stairs. ‘Come on down, love.’
As I was beginning to realise was his instinctive way, he immediately responded to the request. Not with ‘I’m coming’, however, but with his own counter-order. Just as he’d done with the games console the first night we’d had him, he seemed incapable of responding to any request for action without adding several minutes before he did it. In this case, apparently, he required three.
This, in itself, wasn’t that unusual. Kids who are insecure because of abuse or neglect – and often both – will often attempt to exert control on their surroundings via time, needing to know what’s happening, when it’s happening, and needing constant reassurance that it actually will happen. This seemed different, though. It was almost as if he had a built-in resistance to doing anything without imposing his own timeframe on it. I suspected that if I told him there was a giant Easter egg downstairs waiting for him, he’d practise the same curious delaying tactic before he took it. It seemed almost knee-jerk, and I wondered if this was what Libby meant when she’d commented that he needed control. It didn’t matter what was asked of him – clean your teeth, go to bed, brush your hair, or whatever. He would only do it after a further few minutes had passed, the number of which he decided.
I’d tried to be wily, saying things like ‘breakfast will be ready in three minutes’, but, faced with that, it was almost as if he turned into an android, for whom it simply ‘did not compute’. He’d either shrug or mumble, or not respond at all. Then duly appear, not in three minutes, but in five.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew I had two choices in how to deal with it. I either accepted this oddity, and planned things accordingly, or tried to address it by tackling it head on, which would, of course, lead to endless confrontations, at least in the short term. But this was no easy choice till I knew what I was dealing with. If he genuinely had some kind of timekeeping phobia, then it would do him no good if I bulldozed straight in and created even more disorder in his already insecure world. If, however, it was simply a long-ingrained control thing, honed over years of manipulating various carers, then the sooner I tackled it the better. Quite apart from my own desire to escape the proverbial four walls, I knew, both as a mum and an employee – as a foster carer – that I wouldn’t be living up to my responsibilities if I simply allowed him to fester in his room, surfing the web. But without the bigger picture – all those long years of records I could pore over – I didn’t yet feel able to make the call. I simply didn’t know him well enough.
Today, though, other concerns over his welfare took precedence. We were down to the last of the melatonin Libby had brought for him, so,
