medication she’d arrived with, and it seemed to me that nailing that was a priority.
‘Definitely,’ Ellie agreed when she made her visit the following Friday, by which time Flip had been with us for ten days. ‘You’re currently giving her two a day, right? First thing and teatime?’
I agreed that I was. ‘Not that it seems to have much of an observable impact on her mood or behaviour, I have to say,’ I added. ‘Or maybe the impact of her FAS overrides all that?’
Ellie frowned apologetically. She clearly knew as well as I did – or at least thought I did – that the pills should have some effect, and fairly quickly, too. Most people who spent time around kids with ADHD knew that. When they didn’t have their meds the term ‘all hell broke loose’ had serious resonance. ‘It’s still early days with the meds,’ she said. ‘Or so I’m told. And I’m really sorry it falls on you and Mike, Casey. But it’s really a case of trial and error till a routine is re-established. School will help with that, won’t it? And everything, you know, settles down after a bit …’
‘Settle’ and ‘down’ being the operative words. Because it seemed the night terrors weren’t confined to the night-time. Flip could ‘lose it’ – and properly lose it – seemingly without warning in the daytime too. Only the previous day she’d gone into some sort of major meltdown in the living room, leaving both Tyler and me dumbfounded.
‘They’d been sitting there watching TV, not six feet from me,’ I explained to Ellie. ‘Weren’t even talking to each other; just sitting there, opposite ends of the sofa – watching a nature programme, I think it was – when suddenly she was screaming at the top of her lungs.’
‘Something she saw on the screen?’ Ellie suggested. ‘A big spider, perhaps? Something like that?’
I shook my head. ‘Not a spider. It was a lion that set her off, apparently. A lioness, actually, carrying a cub in her mouth. Which completely freaked her out. And I mean freaked her out; it was almost as if she was having some sort of fit; she’d thrown herself on the floor, still clutching her doll, thrashing about, limbs flailing, the lot. And she was really thrashing about, too – took me a good while to get a proper hold of her, let alone calm her down. And even she couldn’t articulate quite why it had set her off the way it had. So it’s not like a phobia, nothing like that. It can come out of nowhere.’
And could do so at school, too, I reflected gloomily. Ellie shook her head and sighed sympathetically. ‘Well, there’s nothing in her notes, as you know,’ she said. ‘So perhaps this is a new thing. You know, with all the upheaval. And being separated from her mum, of course. Or perhaps it’s just a new manifestation of the ADHD. I guess all you can do is keep on recording everything; see if there’s any pattern to it, any obvious triggers.’
Along with the episodes of soiling, the night waking, the obsession with being so ‘ugly’, the myriad little ways the strangeness of our little house-guest was becoming ever more apparent. I was at least forming a picture of sorts, however dispiriting the colouring-in part. ‘Will do,’ I said. ‘Early days. I’m sure there’s a lot still to learn. We’ll get there – try our best to, at any rate.’
‘And you’re doing a great job,’ Ellie reassured me, smiling a bright, encouraging sort of smile, which couldn’t help but remind me of just how young and inexperienced she was, even as she affected the role of sage supporter. ‘Casey, I know you’ll do your best,’ she said. ‘You and Mike both.’ She grinned. ‘Trust me, you came highly recommended. So we have no concerns. None. And Flip seems to love it here. You all got a very big thumbs up, I can report. As did your cooking. And her room. So that’s positive, isn’t it?’ she finished brightly.
I couldn’t help but laugh. This, too, was a part of the process. The business of ‘bedding in’ – with both the child and the social worker that came with her. And one of the key things that happened during every home visit was that the social worker spent time alone with the child privately. This was a necessity, obviously, because it gave the child a voice; a chance to share their own thoughts about the place where they’d been billeted – to comment on how they felt about aspects of their care.
It was a dialogue that invariably had to be adapted to a child’s age and stage. An older child might well be able to articulate their feelings easily, but a little one might need a simpler schema to work with; a question-and-answer format that could elicit, say, a thumbs-up or thumbs-down response. And it wasn’t just valuable for the child. As a foster carer myself I knew what many of us were like. If given a thumbs-up, thumbs-down or halfway-between selection, we’d err towards the ‘up’ almost every time. That was the nature of the job – and perhaps the psychological make-up of the majority. You didn’t go into fostering if you were generally beset by negativity; that a person tended towards the positive was probably an essential to do the job. You definitely had to see hope where others didn’t.
Which made us unreliable witnesses. Given the opportunity to tell it like it was, I knew for a fact that the majority of us didn’t. We’d make light of problems if we could, wanting to try to deal with them ourselves, and only when things got really bad did we want to ask for help. Silly, really, and definitely not in anyone’s best interests, but definitely also par for the course.
Which meant that social workers, who didn’t always get a chance to see the extent of a child’s idiosyncrasies for themselves, sometimes failed to hear the full extent of them either. Today, however, Ellie was in luck because just as she was preparing to leave, having given me my pep talk, Tyler blew into the kitchen like the proverbial East Wind.
‘Casey, you best go outside,’ he said. ‘Go and see to her. I think she’s going Loony Tunes again.’
‘Tyler!’ I admonished, while Ellie slipped her files into her bag. ‘What have I told you about using expressions like that in this house? What do you mean, exactly? What’s Flip actually doing?’
‘Three guesses,’ he suggested as we both followed him out into the back garden. ‘Only much worse,’ he threw over his shoulder.
He wasn’t wrong. Flip, who as far as we’d known had been playing in the garden with Pink Barbie while we’d chatted, was squatting on the grass, holding the doll above her, swooping it back and forth like a boy would do with an aeroplane. She was also singing. Singing lustily, at the top of her voice. But it wasn’t the song – ‘Under the Sea’, from The Little Mermaid – that stopped me in my tracks. It was the fact that her hair and face, and that of the doll, were covered in what looked like something I hoped that it wasn’t but which I feared, from Tyler’s tip-off, that it more than likely was. ‘Flip!’ I shouted. ‘Is that poo that you’re covered in?’
Flip looked up as if surprised and then smiled and waved at me. She then put the Barbie – and I cringed – close to her ear. Then she spoke. ‘Yes, it’s Mummy, Barbie! Look! Wave to Mummy.’
Barbie waved. Tyler wrinkled his nose. Ellie tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Erm, Casey,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a meeting I really shouldn’t be late for. So unless you need me – and just say, because it’s absolutely no problem – I think I’d better get going and leave this to you.’
Would I do any different in her shoes? Probably not, I conceded. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘you get off. We’ve got this one covered. No problem.’
‘No problem?’ squeaked Tyler, sharp enough not to have missed my royal ‘we’.
I turned back to Flip. ‘Come on, miss. Indoors, please. Time for a bath. Honestly, Flip, how many times?’ I added, as she ambled across the grass. ‘Why would you poo in the garden again? You know you must use the toilet. Come on. Inside.’
Tyler stood back, making a big show of retching as he did so. ‘Urgh! You’re disgusting, Flip! Urrrrgh!’
I shared his sentiments. Up close and personal the smell was indeed disgusting, encouraging Ellie all the quicker to say goodbye and head for the front door. I