Casey Watson - Skin Deep

‘Oh and one other thing –’ John began, but once again we were interrupted. By Tyler, who blew into the kitchen like an EF5 tornado, with Denver close behind.

‘OMG, Casey!’ he panted. ‘OMG! Yeuch! You gotta come!’

‘Come where?’ I wanted to know. ‘And what are those faces for, the pair of you?’

‘Casey, it’s like, soooo gross,’ Denver supplied. ‘You won’t believe it, honest.’

‘Like, so gross,’ Tyler added, grabbing my hand and tugging on it. ‘And that social worker lady, she says can you bring, like, a plastic bag and stuff? That girl –’ he gestured behind him. ‘She’s only gone and done a poo on the grass!’

I looked at John. ‘That the one other thing, by any chance?’

He nodded. ‘Yup.’

Mike and I have dealt with our fair share of ‘accidents’ with children over the years, so while Tyler and Denver continued to express their horror via the medium of extreme face-pulling, I simply reached for a pack of baby wipes, my disinfectant and my heavy-gauge rubber gloves, while John, following my instructions, pulled a plastic bag from the roll in the utensil drawer.

‘Boys, hush ,’ I told them as we all trooped in a crocodile out to the garden. ‘It’s just a poo, not the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!’

Ellie and Flip were in the far corner by our trio of plucky rose bushes – which seemed appropriate; roses loved a mulch of manure, didn’t they? Ellie was squatting on her haunches, talking quietly to Flip, as she carefully helped her step out of the pants she’d had on and had presumably pulled down before squatting on the grass herself.

I strode across to them, aware of the boys keeping a wary distance, and of John sensibly electing to stay with them and chat.

‘Here we are, sweetie,’ Ellie said brightly as she took the baby wipes from me and proceeded to pluck one from the packet to clean Flip up. ‘Let’s get you sorted now, shall we? And what do we say to Casey?’

Flip was now standing wide-legged, as if recently alighted from a long journey on horseback, which point I noted, wondering as I did so what life with her alcoholic mother had been like. She was eight. Not 18 months. Yet she was obviously used to being cleaned up in such a fashion. So this – this tendency to go where she needed to as well as when she needed to – was probably a long-entrenched behaviour.

‘Sorry, Mummy,’ Flip said, looking genuinely, if only very slightly, contrite. ‘I didn’t know it wasn’t allowed.’

‘Now that’s not strictly true, lovely, is it?’ Ellie corrected gently. ‘We go to the toilet in the toilet. Nowhere else. Remember?’

‘But I was despret,’ Flip countered. ‘I couldn’t help it. It just comed out.’

Since I could see for myself that this clearly wasn’t a case of a tummy upset, I doubted that very much. But perhaps she had never learned to ‘feel’ the usual signals; or, perhaps more likely, not to worry about the necessity to act on them as a priority. I sensed John was right. This wasn’t a signifier of emotional stress. It was a lack of house-training.

‘Let’s not worry for now,’ I said, as I pulled the gloves on and dealt with the other half of the equation. ‘We can have a chat about all that later, can’t we? In the meantime, let me deal with this’ – I tied up my bag – ‘and then we’ll see about finding you a swimming costume so you can have a play in the paddling pool with the boys. How about that?’

‘And Pink Barbie?’ Flip asked, beaming now, while Ellie used another baby wipe on her hands. ‘She’s got a cossie, she has. A sparkly one. She’s a beach Barbie, too.’

‘Excellent,’ I said, as Ellie rose to her feet and we followed a now skipping Flip back across the grass. ‘How about you get Barbie changed, then, while I see what I can find for you?’

She was back through the conservatory doors and off into the kitchen like a rocket, and I realised what we were dealing with felt more like a four-year-old than an eight-year-old. And then realised something else. The effect the something I was carrying was now having.

‘Oh my God !’ Tyler shrieked theatrically, seeing the plastic bag swinging from my hand and immediately shrinking away from me. ‘That’s just too gross. You’re not going to let her live with us, are you?’

I surveyed the offending bag, recalled the lack of mortification in our young visitor, and wondered if I should start the toilet training sooner rather than later, by having Flip accompany me to the downstairs loo for a ceremonial flushing away before we did anything else.

There were a multitude of challenges that we’d be facing with this slip of a child. I knew that, because John had already told me. Issues of her ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder), of her lack of empathy, of her apparent tendency to wander, of how the huge change in her life might impact on her emotional health. All of this fazed me not a jot, and I knew it wouldn’t faze Mike either. Our programme was designed to take a pragmatic, systematic approach to those challenges and we’d done it enough now to feel confident we would deliver it well.

But I also thought back to previous placements, and one in particular; a pair of almost feral young siblings. And, by extension, to the uniquely soul-sapping business of having a child or children regularly soiling around the house. No, it wasn’t a deal-breaker – well, hopefully – but as Tyler stood waiting for my answer I wondered if his question might be echoed by Mike, just as soon as he got home.

The soiling, however, wasn’t Mike’s main concern that evening. Nor was it mine, because, though my hunch was that she wouldn’t need to go again (not in that way), I watched Flip like a hawk. As did Tyler and Denver, with a kind of appalled fascination, as, once John and Ellie had been dispatched (the latter promising to return on the Friday to catch up and see how things were going), she darted from kitchen to conservatory to garden to living room, all the time chatting thirteen to the dozen to Pink Barbie, and seemingly physically unable to stay in one place, or engaged in one activity for more than five minutes at a time.

I’d had several children in my care who suffered the symptoms of ADHD, so the mile-a-minute behaviour and tendency to be easily distracted weren’t unfamiliar territory. What did strike me, and struck Mike as soon as he’d spent half an hour in her company, was that, very much unlike the majority of children we’d fostered, little Flip seemed not the least concerned to find herself in the company of complete strangers.

‘It seems like almost the opposite,’ he remarked, once we were flaked out on the sofa, half-watching Tyler’s favourite soap. ‘I’ve never seen a new kid so pumped up with excitement about being here. Weird.’

It was probably adrenaline, I’d decided. And it had clearly worn her out. When Flip had crashed, she had crashed good and proper. Having wolfed down her plate of bangers and mash – of necessity, it had been a cobbled-together kind of tea – she announced that Pink Barbie was tired and needed to go to bed and she thought it would be a good idea if she went with her.

We’d tried not to smile at Tyler’s fist pump (we knew how he felt) and, as Mike and he dealt with the dishes, I took her upstairs and found her some pyjamas from my stash, upon which she was in bed and fast asleep within a matter of minutes, Pink Barbie in her own pink pyjamas tucked in the crook of her arm.

‘She’s weird ,’ Tyler observed now. ‘She’s like a loony, isn’t she, Casey?’ He glanced at Mike, then, presumably to check that the use of the word ‘loony’ was acceptable. Which it wasn’t, of course, but, as he already knew that, Mike didn’t press it. This was an adventure, and a challenge, that was going to involve him as well, after all.