Read Online Nowhere to Go by Casey Watson - Free Book Online

committed to him and, heaven knew, we’d had enough training, hadn’t we? Enough training to have ‘It’s the behaviour that’s bad, not the child’ mentally tattooed on our foreheads. But the image of that traumatised three-year-old, all alone with the body of his dead mother, was one that stuck firmly to the forefront of my brain.
    ‘And you know what always strikes me?’ I told Riley one afternoon the following week. ‘It’s that he doesn’t even seem to realise that he’s been handed such a bad hand.’
    Tyler being out for his first trip with Will – they were off to the local bowling alley – we were round at Mum and Dad’s, enjoying a bit of family time with the baby, which only served to remind me how random a child’s birth circumstances were. Some babies were born into loving, stable homes. And some weren’t. Some had everything stacked against them from the outset.
    ‘Life’s been so tough for him,’ I went on. ‘I don’t think he really appreciates just
how
tough. Or that it’s the adults in his life that are responsible for how he now feels. He just doesn’t seem to have processed that. Turns everything on himself. Seems to feel it’s perfectly appropriate for people not to like him. It’s like he just accepts that he’s angry and wants everybody else to as well.’ I sighed. ‘I just wish I could find a way to get him to talk to me about it. But it really is like trying to get blood out of a stone. I only have to look at him in a certain way and I can see him squirming. I swear he has some sixth sense that tells him when I’m about to corner him and try and talk to him. Perhaps he’s like a dog – he can smell a heart-to-heart on the horizon like they can smell fear.’
    Riley clapped her hands together. ‘Love it, Mum!’ she laughed. But she then moved on to her serious face, clearly thinking about the problem. At 27, she was the polar opposite of Kieron, though. Where my son would see everything on the surface and immediately have a practical solution or suggestion, Riley was a deep, thoughtful thinker. Like me, she always tried to look beyond what you could see. She was good at it, too, and until taking a bit of a break after having had Marley Mae she and her partner David had been fostering as well – providing respite care for the same agency that we worked for.
    Passing the baby across to my mum for a cuddle, she smiled at me. ‘Well, you know what to do about that, Mum, don’t you?’
    I raised my eyebrows as she continued to fuss over my youngest grandchild. ‘I do?’
    ‘Course you do,’ she said. ‘Do what you used to do with me and Kieron. Trap him in the car. Take him off for a drive somewhere and drone on at him while he can’t escape.’
    ‘God, you make it sound like a form of torture,’ I said, shaking my head at my amused mother.
    Riley laughed. ‘It was! Felt like that sometimes, at any rate. I swear, sometimes me and Kieron used to sweat at the jangle of your car keys.’
    ‘Oh you do exaggerate, Riley,’ I admonished. She was right, though. I did remember doing just that. And she was spot on; sometimes it probably did feel like a kind of torture – especially if the subject matter was at all sensitive: affairs of the heart, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, sex …
    And it worked. Even if you didn’t always see the evidence at the time, there was a lot to be said for putting kids in a position where they didn’t have to make eye contact with you. It made it easier for them to talk. And it made it harder for them not to listen.
    I still did it, too, with foster kids – albeit almost unconsciously these days. And Riley was right. I’d not yet thought about it, but it was exactly what I should do with Tyler. Because if I was to help him, I really needed to understand better where all that rage and hurt and self-loathing had come from.
    And it didn’t take a brain surgeon to reach the conclusion that the relationship with his stepmother was probably