making squealing sounds and chewing on her hand. I watched Kieron gently remove her fist from her mouth and encourage her to try and have a guess.
‘It’s G … G …’ Olivia trilled excitedly. ‘Ash, it’s G … G …’ She reached across and grabbed Ashton’s damp hair and tugged on it. Now it was clean, I could see just how long it was. I made a mental note: cherubic though he looked with his now soft and curly locks, I must get it cut as a matter of priority. ‘Get off, Livs!’ Ashton snapped, clipping his little sister around the head. ‘I know who it is, okay? I’m not thick!’
‘Hey,’ Kieron chided. ‘Less of the hitting, okay? That’s naughty, Ashton. And well done Olivia! It is Garfield. You clever girl, you!’
I was amazed. I couldn’t believe my son had understood what on earth she was on about, because I certainly hadn’t. I was just about to go in and congratulate Olivia myself, when I heard a key in the lock and saw a shadow through the glass in the front door. It was Riley and Levi, bearing clothing.
Riley smiled at the children, who were studying her warily. ‘And who do we have here, then?’ she asked the two of them. ‘Hey, Levi,’ she added. ‘Some new friends for you!’
At the mention of the baby, the children’s wariness disappeared instantly, and they both got down from the table and clustered round the buggy. Levi, on form, did his new party trick. He was twenty months old now, a proper toddler, and his most fun thing to do was to flap his arms frantically and go ‘Hiyah! Hiyah! Hiyah!’
Olivia, particularly, was enchanted, and I was reminded that these kids were probably very used to babies, having lived cheek by jowl, probably, with three of them. ‘Hiyah,’ she mimicked at him. ‘Hiyah, liccle baby! Oh, you’re so sweet! Like my dolly! Who’s called Polly! Hang on, babes, I’ll jus’ go get her!’
Olivia sped off upstairs, and Riley laughed as she began pulling carrier bags off the handles of the buggy, so I could inspect the new things she’d got for them both. ‘Got some live wires, then, I see!’
And the upbeat tone continued for what remained of the afternoon, the children clearly responding well to both Kieron and Riley. If anything, they seemed more relaxed around our kids than they had been so far with the perhaps more authoritarian figures of me and Mike. Which was no bad thing, I mused, as I left them to it and went into the kitchen to clear the decks for tea, because it meant – if I was lucky – that both my kids would be happy to help out a bit with the pair of them. Which was no small thing. Sophia, who’d been twelve, had had multiple issues, and there had been multiple occasions when she’d clashed with one or more of us. We’d had as many traumatic, stressful times with her as good ones.
This, on the other hand, seemed far less complicated a business. We’d enjoy our short time with these little ones, all of us, as a family. And as Riley had plans to become a foster carer herself, once hers were older, I knew she saw the hands-on experience as useful training.
In the meantime, I needed to feed my new charges, and managed to establish, once I’d worked out that offering them choices was an alien concept, that sausages and beans would be a sensible thing to cook.
‘But we can’t use these,’ Olivia told me, as I handed out their cutlery, just before I dished up. ‘We’re too liccle for them things. We need spoons.’
And some basic training, I thought silently, as I swapped knives and forks for dessert spoons for today. As of tomorrow, I’d start teaching them some everyday skills. And, boy, was I glad I’d opted not to dress them in their shorts and T-shirts, because even with the cutlery they professed to be used to, I’d never seen children – not those over six months of age, anyway – make such a comprehensive amount of mess in such a short space of time. By the time they had finished eating, half their tea was splattered over them – both their freshly washed hair and their newly scrubbed faces and their T-shirts one horrible sticky mess. The only plus side was that they still needed to have the nit lotion rinsed off, so at least they’d be in the bath again anyway.
As for the dining room, Mike was having to try extremely hard not to laugh his socks off. I’m a stickler for cleaning – borderline obsessive about it, actually – and I could see he was finding this chimps’ tea-party hilarious.
‘Oh dear,’ he laughed wiping the tears from his eyes. ‘You’re going to have such fun with this little lot!’
He was still giggling about it, hours later, in bed. He couldn’t stop. And though I kept trying to chastise him, it eventually became infectious. It was funny. There was me, Mrs Doubtfire – Mrs Hyperactive Houseproud – and I couldn’t have picked a more challenging pair of urchins if I tried. So I laughed along with him. This would be an adventure, I decided. And after the stress of our last foster child, a potentially much less harrowing ride. And they were both of them so sweet, that you couldn’t help but want to hug them.
‘Rather you than me, love,’ Mike qualified, grinning. ‘At least till I’m convinced it’s definitely hasta la vista for the bugs.’
I started itching at the thought, but I drifted off happy. This would be fine. Two sweet innocent children who we could really do some good for.
Little did I know that, so far, we’d seen nothing.
Chapter 4
It felt like the middle of the night when I woke up. I didn’t know what it was that had woken me, either, only that something had startled me. I wasn’t sure what. Had I dreamt it? Imagined it? I reached across to press the light button on my alarm clock. 4 a.m. Maybe one of the kids had got up to use the toilet. I slipped out of bed quietly, so as not to wake Mike.
Once on the landing, tiptoeing quietly, I peeped in to check in Ashton’s room. I could hear him snoring gently, so it couldn’t have been him. But then I noticed that not only was Olivia’s door closed – I had left it open, as promised – but there was a strip of light visible at the bottom.
I pushed against the door softly, conscious that I didn’t want to frighten her, and as it began to open so did my mouth. I simply couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
She was squatting on the bed, clutching what I realised was an open jar of jam, and met my gaze with huge terrified eyes.
‘Olivia?’ I said softly, though in incredulous tones. ‘What on earth is going on?’
She swiped her fringe from her eyes with a jam-covered hand. There was jam everywhere it seemed, on her face, in her hair, smeared down her front, on the bed. In fact, as I took in the scene I could believe it even less – the whole duvet was covered in food.
‘No, lady,’ she answered tremulously, scuttling towards the wall and clutching the jar even tighter to her chest. ‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anyfink!’
My principal reaction was one of sadness. In any other circumstance it would be one of anger, I knew, but looking at her, crouched in the midst of all this mess, the only thing I felt for her was pity. The bed was in chaos, playing host to an upturned bag of sugar, an open tub of butter and two empty boxes of cereal. There were also God only knew how many empty biscuit wrappers strewn around. She must have already had quite a feast. In fact, it looked, for all the world, like there had been a major eating binge, of the type you often hear about in magazines, illustrating the distressing practice of teenage bulimics. But this was a six-year-old – hardly more than a baby! What had prompted it, I wondered? This was surely not down to hunger. She’d eaten normally during the day and had done nothing to indicate she was starving,
