Nowhere to Go (20 page)

‘I understand that there’s some kind of memorial here for Fiona,’ I said, aware just how unimpressed Tyler seemed to be, to have come all this way for a line in a book.

‘That’s right,’ the funeral director said. ‘There’s a cross in the garden of remembrance. But there’s something more.’ He looked down at Tyler with a kindly smile. ‘There’s also a plaque.’

‘What’s a plaque?’ Tyler asked.

‘Like a sort of brick,’ Mr James said, ‘that people pay to have displayed here, on a lease. Made of granite, and inscribed with your mother’s name. You’ll find it in the main hall. Shall I take you there first?’

This was a surprise. I’d done my research about council burials and cremations, and this was something I hadn’t figured on at all.

‘There it is,’ Mr James said, pointing just above head height to one of many similar plaques that filled the wall. ‘There’s your mum’s memorial, young man.’

I gasped as I read it, truly gobsmacked.

My beautiful sister, Fiona Lessing, Forever young.

Beneath it was her date of birth and her date of death. Such simple words, yet so revealing. And from Angela! Well, unless she had another sibling or half-sibling, and I was pretty certain that she didn’t. Would have put money on it, in fact. I turned to Tyler. His chin was wobbling, so I put an arm round him and pulled him close. ‘Well, I never,’ I whispered. ‘I wasn’t expecting that! Were you?’

‘She never said,’ Tyler sniffed. ‘Why’d she never say about that?’

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘Perhaps she knew she didn’t need to.’

‘Or p’raps she just forgot,’ he answered sagely.

Mr James then took us outside, leading us to a large, very beautiful enclosed garden, enclosed by an almost unbroken square of memorial benches, where he told us we could stay as long as we liked, and also asked us if we could place any offerings not by the crosses themselves but on the benches and in the urns left for the purpose at the garden’s borders.

It was an emotional place to be, reminding me of those fields you’d see pictures of in northern France and Belgium, where crosses marked fallen soldiers for as far as the eye could see. The scale was obviously smaller here, but it was arresting and moving even so.

Mr James left us at the row where Fiona’s cross was located and within a few steps we were standing in front of it. Gazing down at it was unexpectedly moving.

‘Sweetie,’ I said gently, ‘I’m just going to leave you alone for a minute. I’ll put these flowers and the bear over on that bench for you, if that’s okay.’

Tyler turned and looked up at me, his eyes full of tears. ‘But what about my letter, Casey? I wanted to leave my letter on her cross. If we leave it over there it might blow away.’

I thought for a moment. Mr James hadn’t actually said anything about letters, but no other cross had anything attached to it that I could see, and I didn’t know what best to suggest. Then I had a moment of possibly divine inspiration. ‘You know what?’ I said. ‘Rather than just leave the letter, Tyler, why don’t you read it out to your mum instead? I think that’s better anyway, because that way she’ll hear your voice reading it to her, won’t she? It’ll be like hearing your thoughts out loud, wouldn’t it?’

He seemed to like that idea, and pulled the letter from his pocket, holding it tightly so it didn’t blow away.

I felt the need to leave him then, and walked the few steps back to the end of the row, but in the silence I could hear him speaking anyway.

Dear Mum

I’m sorry you had to die when I was so little and I wish I could have known you. I’m not mad at you any more and I know you were sad. I’ll try to be a good lad so’s you can be proud of me. I didn’t like the mum I got after you. She was horrible to me. But I’ve got Casey, and she’s epic, and so’s Mike. But I got to move again because I’m in fostering, so I’m going to be getting a new mum after Christmas, but I’ll write again and tell you what she’s like.

PS Can you please look after my best friend, Cameron? He’s got browny blond hair and he’s funny, but he’s dead now.

All my love for ever, your son, Tyler

By the time Tyler had refolded the letter I was in pieces. As was he, so I rushed back down the row and pulled him into my arms. I didn’t know what to say, but that was fine. There was nothing to be said. In fact, it was Tyler who broke the silence, with another belated PS.

‘Bye, Mum,’ he said, stroking the cross as we prepared to leave it. ‘Now I know when your birthday is, I’ll come back to see you.’ He then looked at me. ‘We can, can’t we, Casey?’

I nodded without thinking, before it really hit me that it probably wouldn’t be me who brought him back to this place. His mother’s birthday wasn’t until June.

I remember when my gran died. I remember I was inconsolable. I remember coming back from her funeral and climbing into bed and not wanting to come out again, ever. I’d been 13 and I remember how well-meaning grown-ups had kept telling me that ‘life goes on’ and how ridiculous a thing it seemed to me to say. My beloved gran hadn’t gone on, had she? And I didn’t want to. Just wanted it to stop and let me be till I felt better.

So when we returned home from our trip and Tyler said he wanted to go to bed, I was more than happy to let him and to leave him for as long as he needed. He was exhausted – both mentally and, as a consequence, also physically. It’s so easy to forget how the act of crying can be so debilitating; how it drains you, how it makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and your chest ache. And he had cried. He had cried buckets. He was drowning in his tears now. Tears he’d needed to shed, but which had taken their toll.

Tyler slept through on Saturday, and though he came down for breakfast on Sunday morning he went back upstairs and slept most of Sunday away too. Indeed, by Sunday evening I was beginning to think that he’d need to stay off school on Monday as well. But he didn’t. On Monday morning he came down and, though he was still a bit quiet, I could tell he was on the road to recovery by the fact that he’d already sniffed out the batch of chocolate brownies I’d made and wanted to know if he could have one in his lunchbox.

‘Unless they’re for something else,’ he said. ‘Some family thing you’ve got happening today or something.’

‘Tyler,’ I said, laughing, ‘do you
really
think I’d make a batch of chocolate brownies and leave you out? That would be almost like a criminal offence!’

I pulled the lid off his box to show him that there were already two nestling in there. ‘See?’ I said, giving him a playful nudge. ‘You’re as daft as a brush, you.’

‘Yeah, but they
might
have been. I didn’t want to just make presumpshions.’

I told him he could preshump all he liked but right now it was time he left for school, and after he’d donned coat and gloves and conceded to a scarf at last I stood on the doorstep and thought about his words, waving till he’d crossed the road and turned the corner.

Yes, he was definitely on the mend. He just seemed so much lighter of heart, somehow. It wasn’t something readily noticeable – not by any old anyone, anyway – but by me it was, because I knew him so well.

Still, his words left a mark that stayed right through my making coffee, and right till I was halfway down my second mug. ‘Some family thing,’ he’d said. He’d wondered if they’d been earmarked for ‘some family thing’, as if that wouldn’t include him –
didn’t
include him, despite us spending so many months telling him the opposite, that we were his foster carers and that while we had him he was very much one of our family. Not a guest, not a visitor. Just one of us.

I drained my second coffee, aware of something else as well. That, for some inexplicable reason, I felt like crying. What the hell was wrong with me? Yes, I knew I always felt a bit like crying at this point, but this was different. I really did want to just sit and blub. And then I started thinking about Will, and the conversations he’d likely be having with Tyler now, preparing him for whatever he’d been preparing for him after Christmas – a meeting with his new foster family perhaps? I didn’t know. The last couple of times we’d spoken I’d been too chicken to ask. Was it Will’s influence that had Tyler talking of ‘some family thing’ that by definition didn’t include him? Was that a part of the preparation as well?

‘I don’t want him to go,’ I told my mum that lunchtime, round at her and Dad’s house. ‘I really, really don’t want him to go, Mum.’

She paused in the beating she was doing – she was making omelettes for lunch and had thrown in some extra eggs for me. ‘And this is
news
?’

‘What d’you mean?’ I asked, struck by her odd reaction. At the very least I’d been expecting ‘There there’s. ‘Yes, it
is
news,’ I added. ‘I’m dreading it, Mum, honestly. And, yes, I know what you’re going to say, and you’re right. I
do
always dread it. But I’m dreading it so much
more
this time, for some reason. That’s what I wanted to ask you. You started the menopause around my age, didn’t you? Is this hormonal, feeling like this? Feeling so tearful and wet-raggy and generally pathetic? You think that might be it? That I’ve started the menopause?’

Mum shook her head and went back to her beating for a few seconds. ‘Sweetheart,’ she said finally, ‘that’s not it. Well,’ she added, ‘not as far as I can see, anyway. Yes, you might be starting but I don’t think it’s that, and nor does Riley …’

‘Riley? What’s Riley got to do with this? Have you been talking?’

She grinned. ‘Is that illegal then? Me talking to my grand-daughter?’

‘No, of course it’s not. But if you’ve been talking about
me
, spill the beans, please.’

‘Casey, love, you know exactly what the problem is – we’ve both said it, and your dad agrees. You’ve fallen in love with this kid and that’s all there is to it.’

‘Mum, I fall in love with all of them – that’s a given.’

But she was already shaking her head. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but not the way you’ve fallen in love with this one. Well, this one and our Justin – be honest, if you hadn’t just started out fostering you’d have kept Justin too. Don’t deny it.’

I stared at her open-mouthed. ‘Er, pardon? Kept Justin
too
? What are you on about?’

‘You want to keep Tyler, love. So I don’t know why you don’t just see if you
can
keep him. Well, speak to Mike about it first, obviously, but as I was saying to your dad yesterday, for what possible reason would you let him go?’

She stopped beating the eggs then and put a pan on the hob ready. ‘Love, admit it – this time it’s different. He wants to be
your
kid, not farmed off to another lot of strangers. And you want to be his mum. It’s that simple. And –’ she said, raising a finger to stop me from interrupting, ‘if you let him go you will regret it. I
know
you will. And you do too, so stop all this “being in denial” nonsense, or whatever Riley calls it. Menopause, my eye,’ she finished, grinning at me again.

And she was right to point it out. Right to try and persuade me to stop denying it. I knew it was the answer – I’d just been too scared to ask the question. Too scared to pull it up from the place deep inside me where I could safely bury it so it couldn’t surge up to hurt me. She’d been right about Justin too, but that had been different. Back then it was never going to be an option. But now? What
was
stopping me, exactly? A zillion things, actually. Logistical things, practical things, emotional things, others’ needs.

‘Mum, it’s not as simple as that,’ I began.

‘Fiddlesticks. Of course it is! Casey,’ she said, looking at me sternly and waggling her non-stick fish slice. ‘If that kid has a chance of a happy life with you, and it’s within your power to provide it, then you should ring that John and ask him. Bugger the protocol, just
ask
him, for goodness’ sake. And do it quickly before they find someone else.’

I felt like crying again then, remembering what he’d said to me after Cameron’s funeral about loving me like I was his mother, and what he’d said in his letter to his real mum, that being with us was epic. But that didn’t necessarily make it possible. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘you’re wrong, it really
isn’t
that simple. They’ve already found a couple, wheels have been put in motion, and, anyway, it’s not what we signed up for. We’re supposed to be delivering these specialist –’

‘And bugger what you signed up for, as well!’ my mum said with feeling. ‘Specialist programmes or otherwise! And if it’s about rules, what about when they send you kids who aren’t right for the programme? That’s okay, isn’t it? They can put it to one side, then, when it suits them, can’t they? And they do. So now, just for a change, tell them that this is what suits
you
. Casey, you won’t know unless you ask them, will you?’

My father shuffled in then, looking from one of us to the other. ‘Food isn’t going to be happening any time soon then, I take it?’ he asked. ‘Because all I can hear is you two yakking!’

And though it’s an expression that’s over-used, I could have used it at that moment. I really
didn’t
know whether to laugh or cry.

Once the idea took root, there was no stopping it. What exactly was standing between me and this thing mushrooming inside me – this thing that I knew was the right thing for me, and hopefully for Mike, and without a doubt the right thing for Tyler? A lot of things, basically, I thought as I drove home again, fuelled by a mixture of petrol and cheese omelette and sheer excitement. So I would have to go through them – possibly draw up a list of pros and cons, perhaps, and once I’d done that (and I didn’t have long till Tyler came home from school now, either) I would have to consider how best to approach both the small hurdle that was John, and the rather larger hurdle that was Mike.

But I was optimistic. Another half hour in Mum and Dad’s company and I could already see that, actually, it could work. Tyler had done the programme, and that meant a great deal in itself, because though there would doubtless be all sorts of challenges to come, he had at least proved that he was malleable and sufficiently biddable for us to maintain parental control. And with that proven (well, as far as it was capable of being proven) I would still be free, I reckoned, to continue to foster; take new children in and put them on the programme, just as I’d done before.

But Mike – how would he feel about this kind of arrangement? I didn’t know. And that was a shock in itself; that, for perhaps the first time in three decades together, I had absolutely no idea how my husband would react to this bombshell. And bombshell it would certainly be. It was one thing knowing how to sweet talk him into taking a new placement on after saying we’d have a sabbatical, but quite another to say,
Oh, by the way, let’s hang on to this latest child for another six or seven years.
No, I’d have to choose my moment and my words very carefully.

In the meantime, I decided, when I arrived home and went indoors I would at least get the small hurdle out of the way.

And John turned out to be a somewhat larger hummock. Not negative – he could hardly think us unsuitable, after all, but not quite as ‘Sure, it shall be so’ as I’d perhaps anticipated.

For starters, he was shocked, so he clearly hadn’t been talking to my mother. ‘You sure about this?’ were his first words. ‘You’ve completely thrown me,’ being his second. He then went on to explain that people like me and Mike were a scarce specialist resource and that there were implications to us taking on Tyler long term. ‘You know how it works,’ he said, even though I hardly needed it explaining. ‘One of the criteria in taking on kids such as you and Mike do is that it’s one on one – that you don’t get asked to take it on if you have other children in the family home. Particularly kids who have troubles themselves.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ I said, ‘but it struck me that there’s an argument to be made here. Having Tyler around could actually be of benefit, couldn’t it? To both kids. And it’s not like we’re not very experienced at this now …’

‘Well, it can’t hurt,’ he conceded. ‘There’s no reason why we can’t ask. Leave it with me. I’ll sit down and have a word with the powers that be, and speak to Will too, of course – assuming you haven’t already done that? He’s the one who really has the final say in where Tyler goes, after all. But I can’t promise,’ he finished, deflating me somewhat. ‘These things are never as cut and dried as you might think.’

‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ I said, smiling to myself, even so. If they weren’t cut and dried than I would cut them up and dry them up personally. ‘And thank you
so
much, John,’ I gushed at him. ‘And I promise you, if it comes off, we’re not going to stop the fostering. I know we can make this work, I really do.’

‘Well, we’ll see,’ said John, not sounding quite as convinced as he might have done. But I’d never been surer of anything.