The Girl and the Ghosts Page 26

  As I’ve said before, we’re not religious people, but as we sat in silence beside her bed I think Jonathan and I were both silently praying. I know that in that moment I didn’t believe that Maria was going to make it. Because she had taken so many tablets and some time had elapsed before she was treated in hospital, I was also afraid there was a risk that, even if she did survive it, Maria could suffer lasting liver damage.

  ‘It’s probably best if you go home and get some rest,’ a kind nurse said a while later.

  She had reassured me that Maria was stable now. She wasn’t going to die, as I’d feared, and so Jonathan and I agreed to go home, even though we were still worried sick.

  ‘Will she make a full recovery?’ I asked. ‘I mean, will her liver be all right?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ the nurse replied. ‘The doctors will need some time to do tests, I would imagine, before they can tell you exactly what has happened internally. Don’t worry, though. Maria will be monitored throughout the rest of the night. She’s safe with us here. You’ve done all you can.’

  Jonathan and I drove home in a daze. The experience was surreal, in fact. I felt as if I was living somebody else’s life as it seemed so unbelievable that Maria had taken those pills, could have killed herself and was now lying in a hospital bed. How had it come to this?

  ‘It’s not our fault,’ Jonathan said, reading my mind. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good. That’s important, Angela. We have looked after Maria well. We have not only given her a safe and comfortable home, we have been vigilant about her mental health, and we have been meticulous in reporting everything to Social Services that we have felt needed to be shared.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘But she’s still in hospital, isn’t she? Is it good enough to say “we did all we could”, when we both know that Social Services are so strapped that they can’t necessarily act on the information we give them.’

  Jonathan thought about this for a moment. ‘You have a point,’ he said. ‘But all we can do is our best, and we do do our best. You are a dedicated foster carer and you have nothing to feel guilty about, or to blame yourself about.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘No buts, Angela. Our job is hugely important. You do it brilliantly but unfortunately you cannot be responsible for the actions of others; only those of yourself.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said quietly. I appreciated Jonathan’s words, but nevertheless I still had tight knots around my heart and in my stomach. I don’t think I’d have been human if I hadn’t felt absolutely dreadful about this.

  Maria ended up staying in hospital for a week while she had intravenous treatment with something called acetylcysteine, which protects the liver cells against the toxins in paracetamol. Jonathan and I visited her every day while she was there.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said feebly the first time she spoke to us. ‘You saved my life.’

  Maria still looked younger than her years, and now she had a guilty expression on her face.

  ‘We’re both really sorry you felt so bad, that you were in such a bad place.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘Still, we are truly very sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It’s fine now. How is the shop?’

  We made chit-chat about the shop. Jonathan bought a newspaper from the trolley when an auxiliary came round, and then we discussed a local news story. We asked Maria if we could fetch her anything from home, to bring in on the next visit.

  ‘Lip balm,’ she said. ‘That nice strawberry one I have. And crisps, if I’m allowed?’

  I smiled. ‘Back to normal I see!’ I teased. ‘Prawn cocktail flavour, as usual?’

  We made the best of the visits, trying to keep Maria’s spirits up. We were her only visitors, and some time during that week I came up with the only possible theory I could about why Babs was keeping out of the way: she felt guilty.

  I came to this conclusion because, a couple of weeks earlier, when Maria’s grandmother had dropped Maria off after an overnight stay, I’d offered her a cup of tea, as I usually did. While she was drinking it I was sitting across the table from her, peeling vegetables for supper and trying to follow the complicated story she was telling me about one of her neighbours. ‘Her husband suffers from depression,’ she had told me, which was when the idea just popped into my head for some reason to ask her, ‘You do keep all medicines under lock and key, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ she replied.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘It’s a good idea. You know all foster carers have to have a locked medicine cabinet, and I think it’s a very good precaution for anyone with children in the house.’

  I don’t know if it was some instinct that had made me say this to Babs, or maybe it was simply because I knew Maria had been a bit depressed recently and I was feeling extremely protective towards her. However, it didn’t actually cross my mind that Maria would ever try to take her own life – I would never have predicted that.

  As we discovered later, however, Maria had taken at least one packet of paracetamol from the cupboard in the bathroom at her grandparents’ house. It contained sixteen tablets, and she had also bought a packet of sixteen in the local supermarket. She’d hidden them at her friend Meg’s house, together with two tablets I had given her a couple of days earlier when she complained of having a headache, and she took at least two more she’d got from somewhere else, making a total of thirty-six tablets. If she hadn’t come back to our house after taking them all that Sunday, I don’t think she would have survived. The medics told us as much, praising Jonathan for calling 999 the moment he did.

  Needless to say, the whole sorry episode was a horrible experience for Maria. Quite apart from whatever it was that made her feel so miserable that she decided to try to take her own life, she had to endure some very unpleasant hospital treatment over the week she was kept in. And the incident highlighted that she was obviously more distressed and disturbed than even we had realised. Jonathan and I were very relieved when, having spoken with a psychiatrist while she was in hospital, she had her first appointment with CAMHS within days of coming home.

  Christine did not visit Maria at all, incidentally. Babs told us she was ‘too busy with the baby’, but sent her love and hoped Maria got well soon. I half expected her to put in a complaint to Social Services about Jonathan and me, perhaps blaming us for what happened, but I’m very glad to say she didn’t get involved at all like that.

  During this period, Jonathan and I looked back and tried to make some sense of how it had come to this.

  When Maria was younger, we were busy doing things with her almost every weekend – caravanning, walking in the countryside, going on bike rides, having barbecues and so on. It meant she didn’t really have time to dwell on all the horrible things that had happened to her when she lived with her mother and stepfather. But as she got into her teens, she became more introspective and started spending more time on her own in her bedroom, when she must have tried to make sense of some of the things that didn’t really make any sense at all.

  I think we only ever knew a very small part of what Maria had experienced before the age of nine, when she was primarily living at home. At least, now that she was going to be getting some professional help, she might begin to understand that she wasn’t to blame in any way for the cruel treatment she’d been subjected to.

  In fact, I’m very happy to say that the psychotherapy she received through CAMHS helped Maria a lot. She stopped self-harming and her life became relatively stable – for a while.

  37

  ‘Oh, that man!’

  Jonathan and I did everything we could think of to motivate and encourage Maria with her schoolwork. Overall, she did do well – well enough, in fact, that by the time she was working on her GCSEs her teachers started telling us that if she continued to do the excellent work she had been doing, she would be able to go to university.

  One day, wh
en I’d been trying to encourage her to study, she told me, ‘Nan says no one in our family has ever been to university, so I’d be the first.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be great,’ I responded. ‘I think you’d enjoy it. And a university degree gives you more choice, too, about the sort of jobs you can do.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll be a lawyer,’ she laughed. ‘Or a headmistress – then I could open a school for witchcraft and wizardry, like Hogwarts!’

  Maria absolutely adored Harry Potter, and had read all the books several times and often talked about them.

  ‘You could be anything you wanted to be if you set your mind to it, sweetheart.’

  I don’t think her grandmother could really believe that Maria would be able to go to university and have the sort of life we knew she was capable of having. I think Babs was trying to be kind and protect her from disappointment when she told Maria not to worry if she didn’t do well at school, because ‘I didn’t go to university and I have a nice life.’ But it was frustrating to know that the one person Maria might have listened to wasn’t using her influence to encourage her to fulfil her obvious potential.

  One day, Maria’s new social worker, Luke, told me that Babs had complained to him that I’d refused to buy some school equipment that Maria’s teacher asked her to get. Alarm bells rang in my head and I feared that Babs was causing trouble for some reason, though I couldn’t think why she would do this. In the light of what Maria had been going through, this seemed very petty indeed. However, we’d learned over the years that Babs didn’t normally set out to deliberately cause trouble – it was usually just a case of her inadvertently creating problems by not supporting Jonathan and me in decisions we made that we felt were in Maria’s best interests.

  Trying my hardest not to sound indignant and without mentioning Luke, I later asked Babs what school equipment she was talking about, because Maria hadn’t asked me to buy anything recently, and I certainly hadn’t refused.

  ‘I’m sorry, Angela, I don’t know what you mean,’ Babs said.

  Although she was well-practised in the art of sounding innocent when perhaps she wasn’t entirely blame-free, Babs did seem to be genuinely bemused on this occasion.

  I explained as tactfully as possible that Luke had told me what she’d said to him.

  ‘Oh, that man!’ she scoffed. ‘He’s caused nothing but trouble ever since he took over Maria’s case. Of course I didn’t complain about you. I did buy Maria some stuff for school recently, but it was nothing worth mentioning to anybody. I don’t know what is going on here.’

  Babs explained that she’d met Maria in town straight after school one day and bought her some pens and pencils that the teacher had asked her to get hold of for an art project.

  ‘I bought them for her then and there, because I wanted to,’ Babs said, sounding exasperated. ‘Maria didn’t say anything about having asked you first. Anyway, she can’t have asked you, because I met her on the day the teacher asked her to get the equipment. She hadn’t even been home yet.’

  ‘Well, what on earth is going on?’ I asked, scratching my head.

  ‘I don’t know. That Luke is nothing but a troublemaker. Honestly, Angela, you’ve always bought Maria everything she’s needed, and far more. Oh, it makes me feel quite upset to think that man told you that!’

  As unlikely as it had first seemed, it did appear that it was Luke who had made a mistake and created trouble unnecessarily, not Babs. Unfortunately, the social worker’s attitude could be brusque, almost to the point of being deliberately confrontational, and Jonathan and I hadn’t really taken to him the first time we’d spoken to him.

  Luke wasn’t what you would call a ‘people person’ at all, which was quite a disadvantage to him, because social workers need to get along with all kinds of people. Jonathan and I told ourselves it was just his manner that was unfortunate, not Luke as a person, and we tried to be open-minded about how the miscommunication had come about.

  ‘Perhaps he’s got too much work on,’ I said to Jonathan.

  ‘There’s no perhaps about it,’ Jonathan sighed. ‘Every social worker we’ve ever come across has too much work. Maybe he’s just not coping with it as well as others.’

  It never occurred to us that Luke might be deliberately causing trouble, but unfortunately this was not an isolated incident and, as improbable as it seemed, we did start to wonder if Luke was actively trying to break the placement down.

  Not long after the pen and pencil mix-up, Luke arranged to have a meeting with us at our house at eleven o’clock one morning. Jonathan had been working in the garden since quite early, and he was just finishing weeding one of the flower borders at 10.50 a.m. when Luke arrived and said, quite rudely, ‘Had you forgotten about our meeting this morning? Did you not realise I was coming?’

  Jonathan is very even-tempered and tends to take everything in his stride. So while someone less tolerant than he is might have responded equally rudely, he simply said, ‘No, Luke, I didn’t forget you were coming. I just thought I’d use the last ten minutes I expected to have before you arrived to finish weeding this border. But you go on in. Barbara’s manning the shop and Angela’s in the house, ready and waiting for you. I’ll be right behind you.’

  ‘Well, you should be waiting for me too,’ Luke said, in a tone of voice Jonathan described to me afterwards as one he himself wouldn’t even use to speak to a naughty child.

  Once the meeting started, on the dot of eleven, Luke told us Maria had complained about us ‘always going on at her’ and not allowing her to have any freedom. Like many fifteen-year-olds, Maria considered we were ‘going on at her’ when we asked her to do almost anything, so we just accepted that. Her second complaint certainly wasn’t true, however. We gave Maria as much freedom as she wanted within safe and reasonable parameters. She was allowed to see her friends, go to the youth club, visit her grandparents, shop in town and go bowling, ice-skating and to the local cinema at weekends. We always made sure we knew where she was and we set times for her to be home and were strict about sticking to them. We also had rules about getting homework done before going out, but we certainly did not restrict Maria’s freedom.

  I told Luke all of this and said I felt the criticism was completely unjustified.

  ‘Well, her grandmother said the same thing about you,’ Luke replied tersely, before moving on to the next point he wanted to discuss.

  Jonathan and I felt confused after Luke left. We couldn’t imagine Maria would complain about having no freedom; how could she? It also seemed unlikely Babs would have been complaining about us behind our backs. And if Luke believed Maria and Babs and felt it was an issue, why had he moved swiftly on? None of this seemed to make sense – unless, of course, it was Luke who was being the troublemaker here.

  Although we wouldn’t normally ask Maria about anything she’d discussed with her social worker in private, Jonathan and I were so bemused we did talk to her about what Luke had said to us.

  ‘Why would I feel like that?’ she said, pulling the ‘what-are-you-on-about-now?’ face she had perfected in her teenage years. ‘I see friends whenever I want to, and I’m often round at Nan’s house. I might not always want to do my homework, but it’s my teachers who are to blame for that more than you are!’ She grinned at us then, and we knew she was telling the truth. I also raised the issue with Babs and I could tell she had nothing to hide either.

  ‘What did I tell you? That man is a liability. Call himself a social worker? More like a social disaster!’

  I felt we’d got to the bottom of the Luke situation, and there were no hard feelings between Maria and us, or indeed Babs. But very disappointingly, over the next few weeks, Maria’s attitude towards Jonathan and me began to deteriorate. The grin we’d seen on her face was nowhere to be seen, and she started moping around the house and having angry outbursts for no apparent reason. It was heartbreaking to see, as I had felt that since her overdose she’d been making steady progress, and that everything was
moving in the right direction. She was still having ongoing CAMHS appointments, and I thought these seemed to be helping.

  Now, however, Maria suddenly became extremely sullen and angry with us for no apparent reason. We couldn’t understand what was going on at first, until, when she was in a temper with us about something one day, she shouted, ‘Yeah well, why don’t you complain to Luke about that too? You can add it to the list.’

  She stormed out of the room and slammed the door before we had a chance to ask her what she meant. Unfortunately, we found out shortly afterwards that Luke had told her a lot of negative things he claimed we had said about her, all of which were totally untrue.

  It was a very difficult period. The things Luke was saying were putting the placement at risk and damaging the relationships we had with Maria, which was not just frustrating, but also devastating.

  We loved Maria. We’d known her since she was seven and she’d been living with us for more than six years by now. We wanted nothing but the best for her, so why was this man being so disruptive when it was his job to do the opposite, and to help make placements run as smoothly as possible?

  38

  ‘Why does life have to be so hard?’

  Jonathan and I eventually heard that Luke had some serious problems at home, and fortunately our support social worker, who was now a very clued-up woman called Cath, began to realise that Luke’s attitude towards Jonathan and me was at best unhelpful, and at worst thoroughly destabilising.

  One day, when we felt we had no choice but to do so, Jonathan and I took the bull by the horns and said, at one of the regular placement meetings we had with Social Services, that Luke was causing a rift between Maria and us, and creating trouble for us with her grandparents.