I said, firmly. ‘We don’t touch people like that at all! Not down here, not in your bedrooms, not anywhere. Walls don’t have ears, or eyes, but other people do. Other people who know it isn’t right to touch others’ private parts.’
They both stared at me in utter confusion. Which made it hit home to me even harder. They simply didn’t understand me. They so obviously thought what they were doing was normal. Except not quite, as they clearly knew – well, Ashton did, anyway – that the adults close to them wanted it kept a secret.
‘Not even family, Casey?’ Ashton asked me, quite innocently, as if he was in a classroom asking a teacher a question. ‘It’s all right if it’s family. It doesn’t matter if it’s family.’
‘Yes, it does matter, love,’ I tried to explain to him. ‘Our bodies belong only to us, d’you understand? Which means it’s wrong to let someone else touch our private parts. It’s wrong of them to do that to you. Even family.’
They both stared at me, two pairs of wide, uncomprehending eyes. They really didn’t understand what I was on about. I stood up again, and glanced across at Kieron and Lauren, who were still framed in the doorway, open-mouthed. We exchanged a look that said it all; if it was as entrenched as it appeared, this was going to be a massive thing to deal with. A five-minute chat with them wouldn’t even scratch the surface.
Taking my rising as a cue that the lecture was over, the children both got up off the sofa, and began playing with the building blocks again. Whatever they were building, all I could think of was icebergs. And how I’d just got a glance at the great seething mass beneath the tip of this one.
I spent much of the week that followed making notes on the computer, carefully recording every incident I witnessed and reporting it by email to both John and Anna. There was clear evidence here of an even darker family background, and it was vital the authorities know about it, particularly with the hearing coming up. I also recalled the allegation of abuse by their father’s cousin. No smoke without fire? Maybe so.
But it wasn’t just the sexual behaviour that was disturbing. Just as difficult a problem to try and manage was the children’s lack of hygiene and their toileting behaviour.
I had already started waging a war on poo, as it had become clear from the start that the first night’s bout of bed wetting was by no means a one-off, brought on by stress. It was actually the tip of another iceberg in itself – this one composed mainly of excrement. If my nose had been wrinkling in distaste on Day Two, it was positively beginning to curl up now. The children had clearly not had any sort of potty or toilet training. Ashton just always seemed to poo in his pants, and the little one seemed to have no consistent pattern – so I was soon finding bits of faeces everywhere. There would also be smears of it on the toilet walls, and on the walls of the children’s bedrooms – even, on more than one occasion, on my banister. It was sickening and I began to feel nervous about touching anything, not before I’d zapped it with bleach.
And, as with the sexual behaviours, nothing I said seemed to sink in.
‘Olivia,’ I said to her one day, having taken her by the hand, up to the toilet, so that we could together take a look at what she’d used to decorate the toilet wall. The smell was so intense that I was gagging as I did so, but she seemed completely oblivious. ‘Do you know what that is?’ I said, pointing. She nodded and smiled.
‘Poo!’ she said, grinning. ‘It’s poo! Poo poo poo!’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Poo. And now poor Casey has to clean it. And that’s not very nice for me, is it?’ She looked at me blankly. The concept of ‘cleaning’ was obviously new to her, and I wondered in what sort of God-awful place she must have lived. ‘Look, sweetie,’ I said gently, once I’d banished the offending streaks. ‘Let me show you how we go to the toilet, okay?’
I took a few sheets of loo roll and held them in front of Olivia. ‘After we’ve done a poo, we take some paper from the roll – like this – then we wipe our bottoms – very carefully – and pop the paper in the toilet. Like this, see?’ I then did some acting. It was probably a good thing that no one could see me, because I then took more loo roll, started la la la-ing, as if singing to myself, and proceeded to mime what one did when one had finished on the toilet, wiping the paper across the seat of my trousers in an exaggerated fashion and saying ‘pooh!’, before depositing the paper in the toilet with a flourish, and pressing the flush with a grand ‘ta da!’
Olivia, transfixed, found all this riveting and, like any six-year-old, was keen to play ‘pooh!’ herself. I let her practise about five times before she tired of it, then took her to the basin, where we then spent a splashy ten minutes practising hand-washing too. I hoped, I just hoped, that if I kept this up long enough, my banisters – my whole house – would thank me.
But it wasn’t just a case of learning new skills. Olivia’s problems, in this regard, were more disturbing than I’d first thought, as I would find out a couple of days later.
It was evening, and, dinner over, both the children were in the kitchen, busy completing a giant jigsaw with Mike. I’d decided to use the time to change the children’s duvet covers – washing and turning around bed linen for them had become one of my new daily chores.
I went into Olivia’s room first, and was hit at once by the smell. I was used to bad smells now, but this was something else. It had been a hot afternoon and her windows had been closed, but even by current standards – stale urine, soiled underwear – the stench was both arresting and overpowering. I opened the windows and immediately set about trying to find the source, feeling my irritation rise, even though I knew the poor mites couldn’t help it. I was a clean freak, always had been, and living in such fetid squalor was really beginning to get me down. Gritting my teeth, I reminded myself why I took the job in the first place, but I still couldn’t help feeling angry at social services. If they knew these kids as well as they should have, they would have known about all this. For them to not brief us fully was just so bloody annoying!
I checked the bed, and then under it, then the wardrobe and chest of drawers. But found nothing. I didn’t even know what I was looking for; only that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pleasant. I then began clearing the toys on the floor. And then it hit me, as I passed the book case, that the smell had suddenly become a lot stronger. I put the toys down, and gingerly began pulling books from their shelves. Now the stench was so strong that I actually retched. I almost dropped the books I was holding when I finally found the cause. Hidden behind the books on the bottom shelf, squashed against the wall, were three packages of human stools, loosely wrapped in tissue paper. I backed away, disgusted, and called down to Mike from the landing. ‘Love, can you bring Olivia up here a moment, please?’
They were up seconds later, and I gestured to Mike to take a look. He clapped his hand over his mouth and I could see that, like me, he was struggling not to gag. Olivia stood, quaking, in the doorway.
‘Why?’ I asked her gently. ‘Why did you do this, sweetie?’ I was genuinely struggling to make sense of it, particularly after the toileting lesson we’d so recently shared.
‘I not done it. Me never done it. I didn’t, Casey, honest.’ She looked terrified.
I crossed the room and put my arm around her. She immediately flung her arms around my waist. ‘I think you did, love,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry. We can sort it all out. Don’t be scared. We just want to know why. It’s made your pretty room all smelly, and you don’t want that, do you?’
She started crying. ‘It’s just my poo,’ she sobbed. ‘That’s all. I just wanted to keep it. But I won’t do it no more if you don’t like it.’
‘Sweetheart, poo must be done in the toilet, like I showed you. Always. Every time you need to go. You must do it in the toilet from now on. Nowhere else, okay? It has germs in, and it could make you sick. Make you very sick. And we don’t want that, now, do we?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘So from now on, when