dashboard, I jotted down notes as Desmond spoke.
‘She’s been taken straight from school into police protection. They should be with you in the next half an hour or so. Will you be home by then?’
Slipping the key into the ignition, I switched the Nokia to loudspeaker mode then dropped it into my lap. ‘Yes, should be. I’ll just have enough time to let Emily and Jamie know what’s going on.’
My own children were keen to welcome new little ones into our home but I preferred to seek their approval before someone new arrived on the doorstep, to make sure they felt consulted.
‘I won’t be able to make it, I’m afraid – sorry, Rosie, I’m up to my neck in it over here. I’ll come and see you some time in the next few days, though.’
Saying goodbye to Des, I stopped at the next set of traffic lights, holding my notebook up at eye level. The page was still blank but for my scribbled notes: girl, age eight; warm and friendly. Without noticing the lights as they turned to amber, I sat staring at the words on the page. Overstretched social workers were sometimes so keen to place a child that they stretched the facts, I mused, moulding them into a mishmash of half-truths and downright fabrications. Experience had taught me to treat the initial information they provided on a child with as much caution as estate agents’ patter. Just as a house located at the side of a busy motorway could be listed as ‘close to all transport links’, social workers might describe a difficult, confrontational teenager with a penchant for injecting heroin as ‘lively and inquisitive’.
A hoot from the driver behind caused me to start. Lifting my hand in apology, I nudged the accelerator and caught up with the rusting white van ahead, catching sight of myself in the rear-view mirror. Often I felt that my blonde, naturally curly hair offered a cheery distraction from the lines that were beginning to appear under my eyes, giving people the impression that I was bubbly even when I felt nothing of the sort. Today, though, the damp air had taken its toll, making it look like a pile of dried hay and dragging the rest of my face down with it. Grimacing, I tucked the frizz behind my ears, hoping to fit in a hair wash before Phoebe’s arrival.
Driving under an arched railway bridge and along a tree-lined, residential side road I noticed a few drops of rain appearing on the windscreen. A grimly portentous grey sky stretched into the distance and a bubble of apprehension rose in my stomach as I flicked the wipers on, knotting itself stubbornly in my throat. ‘Warm and friendly’ were hardly forbidding adjectives, so what was I reading between the lines?
My 11-year-old son Jamie arrived home a few minutes after me. On hearing the news he dashed into the kitchen, armed himself with some biscuits then took up a position leaning over the back of the sofa, staring out of the living-room window. With Jamie as self-appointed lookout I fussed around the spare room, trying to make it look as welcoming as possible for the new arrival. With the police involved, and Phoebe being taken without the consent of her parents, it was likely she would arrive in a highly distressed state.
Planned placements were much easier to prepare for than emergencies, with time to find out the child’s interests. With so little warning, it was difficult to tailor the bedroom to appeal especially to Phoebe. The airing cupboard was full of duvet covers and curtains I had collected over the years, with everything from Fireman Sam to Peppa Pig, but what would a warm and friendly eight-year-old like? I wondered, finally settling on a cover featuring Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
Tense with anticipation, I jumped at the sound of a key in the door.
‘Mum?’
It was my 14-year-old daughter Emily, just home from school.
‘Guess what, Em?’ I called out.
She darted up the stairs and arrived on the landing, rain-soaked blonde hair flattened against her flushed cheeks, rucksack still half-slung over her shoulder.
‘We got a call?’
I nodded, smiling. It was lovely to see her so excited. ‘She’s eight years old and friendly, that’s about all I know at the moment.’
‘Great!’ Throwing a soggy arm around my neck, she dropped her rucksack on the carpet, draped her damp blazer over the bannister and dashed past me into the spare room.
Flitting in and out of the space, she arranged soft toys on every available surface. Twisting a set of lights around the struts at the foot of the bed, she announced a sudden brainwave. ‘I still have my old stick-arounds, pink butterflies and stuff. We could decorate the walls to make it look more girlie in here.’
‘Lovely idea,’ I said as she rushed past me en route to her own bedroom. I was grateful that she and Jamie remained as committed to fostering as I was. In any fostering family, birth children sometimes get overlooked. Foster children can demand a high level of attention but Emily and Jamie never seemed to resent having to share my time – they just seemed to want to make life better for whoever stayed with us, particularly the most troubled youngsters. I regularly reminded them that by being friendly and welcoming, they helped to do just that.
‘Did they say how long she’d be staying?’ Emily asked, breathlessly separating sticky butterflies from the dusty packet she had retrieved from her room.
I pictured my scribbled notes and shook my head. Actually I knew very little about Phoebe and certainly had no idea how long the placement would last, but that was often the way. When children arrive as an emergency, the on-call foster carer is obliged to keep them for 72 hours, but as I had a vacancy it made sense for Phoebe to stay with us for as long as necessary.
As I was a short-term foster carer, the placement could last anything from one night to four or five years. The aim of short-term or ‘task-based’ fostering is to support the child through the uncertain stage when their birth family is being assessed by the local authority; if a Care Order is secured through the courts, the child needs to be primed for permanency with long-term carers.
With the room ready, Emily followed me downstairs and into the living room. I sank into the sofa and she flopped beside me. ‘I wish they’d hurry up,’ she said, laying her head on my shoulder.
My whirlwind son, Jamie, was far less effusive in his excitement. ‘Why couldn’t it have been a boy?’ he asked from his position on the two-seater sofa, though he still tapped out a rhythm on the window sill with restless fingers, eager to catch a first sight of his new housemate. ‘Girls are boring.’
I smiled to myself. While Emily was a sensitive soul, contemplative and always receptive to the feelings of others, my son says what he sees. ‘You know where you are with Jamie,’ was a comment made by several of his teachers. I presume it was a compliment.
‘Right, so we all remember the safe caring rules, don’t we?’
Jamie clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘Oh, heck, here we go,’ he groaned. ‘We’re not stupid, Mum!’
‘It’s important that we protect ourselves, Jamie, as well as Phoebe.’ I knew that they both tired of being reminded to stay out of all bedrooms except their own and to avoid physical ‘horseplay’ with the foster children but it was so easy to forget, especially once the children have settled and everyone adjusts to the new dynamics of having an extra person around.
An exhilarated excitement buzzed through my veins, as it did at the beginning of every placement. Everything to come would be new and mysterious, offering our family a whole new set of challenges. Before the year was out we would encounter an extreme range of disturbing behaviours and Phoebe would be one of the most extraordinary, heartbreaking placements we had ever taken on.
But in the companionable peace of our cosy living room, I had no sense of the enormity of what we were about to face.