Skin Deep: All She Wanted Was a Mummy, But Was She Too Ugly to Be Loved?

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‘Course I will,’ I said. ‘I’ll be like the BT woman, ringing up with alarm calls. Except they’ll be “un-alarm” calls, because there won’t be any alarms, I’m sure of it, as Lauren will have everything under control. And if anything unexpected does happen, you can call me, like I say. Except nothing will, I promise.’

He looked 100 per cent happier. ‘Thanks, Mum. Just till we’re there and settled and that, anyway.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘You’re just anxious about the travelling, love, which, trust me, is perfectly normal.’

And my ‘un-alarm’ calls had clearly done the trick. We’d spoken four times on the Saturday, three on the Sunday, and now, when I told him I’d got to go as John was due at any moment, he’d hung up before I’d barely taken the phone from my ear, leaving me secure in the knowledge that they were having a good time, and free to concentrate on my young visitor.

Who seemed to be arriving even as I put my mobile back on its charger. With all the windows open, in order to counteract the sweltering heat, I could hear a car pulling up outside the house even before I saw it. I felt the usual stirring of intrigue. It wasn’t quite excitement; that was the wrong word to use in such a circumstance – this was a child who’d been taken into care as an emergency, after all. But there was still a certain frisson; I’d opened several front doors by now, to several different children, and perhaps because ours was a kind of fostering that often took place at short notice I really had to be unshockable when I pulled it back to greet whoever was standing nervously on our front doorstep.

In this case, however, it was only John. And he didn’t look nervous in the least. Just very hot.

‘Oh,’ I said, looking beyond him towards the car. ‘Are you on your own, then?’

‘Only for a little bit,’ he said. ‘They’ve had to go back. For a forgotten Barbie doll. Shouldn’t be long.’

I ushered him inside. ‘Come on in, then. Do you want a cold glass of something? Or an ice pop?’ I said, grinning. ‘We’re very well stocked with those currently, as you can imagine.’

‘Just a large glass of water,’ he said, loosening his tie, and following me into the kitchen. ‘I’m parched. Like a flipping furnace, my car is, in weather like this.’ He grinned ruefully as he placed a manila folder on my kitchen table. ‘Actually – hmm – under the circumstances, perhaps I’d better rephrase that.’

It took me half a second to work out what he was on about. Of course. The fire. ‘Sorry,’ I said, placing a pint glass of water down beside the files. ‘Bit slow on the uptake there, wasn’t I? Sit down, I’ll’ – I stopped and went over to the window, which was being liberally sprayed with a blast from one of the water guns. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Tyler! Will you STOP that!’ I called out of the window. ‘Sorry, John. Think the heat’s getting to the boys, too. They’re both completely manic.’

John chuckled. ‘Enjoying the holidays, then? Sounds like young Ty is, anyway. Actually I could use that kind of dousing right now.’

‘Be my guest,’ I said, waving an arm towards the door out to the conservatory and garden, before pulling out a chair to sit on myself. ‘Though not till you’ve given me some detail on our new arrival. What’s the lowdown? How’s the mum? Badly burnt?’

John shook his head. ‘Apparently not. She’s still in hospital, but it’s mostly smoke inhalation they’re treating her for. A lucky escape.’

‘And the little girl’s okay?’

‘Yes, absolutely fine. Completely unharmed, which is something of a miracle, by all accounts. The blaze all but gutted the entire house, and the mother was lucky to get out alive. Philippa – Flip – was found quite a bit later, by all accounts, hiding in a wardrobe upstairs. Rescued by the lady next door, it seems, while the fire crew were attending to the mother. I just met her, as it happens – she’s become something of a local hero.’

‘I’m not surprised. How did it start? Do they know?’

‘I’m not sure they know for definite, but the assumption is that the mother fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand. Alcoholic,’ he added, opening his files.

I smiled. John had dropped the word into the conversation as if it was something bland and innocuous, like her hair colour or job description or star sign. As he would, because these were the conversations we tended to have. Ah, I thought. So we were getting to the nub of it now. There had to be something, after all. A child could and often would go into care as the result of a major house fire. If their home was gutted, the parent or parents hospitalised, and with no family or friends to take them, a child would invariably end up in temporary foster care. I imagined the little girl on her way to us was coming from temporary foster care herself; an emergency placement, while social services sorted out what needed to be done in the longer term, be it to keep the child there till the responsible adult was in a position to have them back again or, if they’d been orphaned, to find them adoptive parents.

But in this case they were moving her on to us, which meant it was slightly more complex than that. Mike and I, however, weren’t those regular kinds of foster parents. We were trained to foster children who were tending towards being ‘unfosterable’; our specialist programme was designed to modify the behaviour of the most challenging children in the care system, in order that they could be socialised sufficiently to have a hope of going into mainstream foster care and/or being put up for adoption.

Yes, from time to time we did respite care, to help the fostering agency out, just as Riley and David were doing at the moment, but, generally speaking, if a child needed to come to us there was usually an extra problem, and I already knew, from John’s initial call, that there was a reason why he wanted us to have Flip. And this was apparently it.

Well, half of it. The mother being an alcoholic wasn’t the whole story, I was sure. No, there would have to be some sort of challenge to address with the little girl as well.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘And?’

‘And she’s a long-standing alcoholic. Well known to social services. As is the daughter, because she has foetal alcohol syndrome. Something you’ve probably –’

At which point he stopped, because there was a rap on the front door.

If I’d finished his sentence correctly, John was right. I had heard of foetal alcohol syndrome (commonly known as FAS), because we’d touched on it in training. ‘Touched’ being the operative word; we’d touched on lots of things in training, but with so many ways in which a child could be damaged by the things life had thrown at them, if we’d done more than touch on most of them we’d still be in training all these years later. So, as I walked to the front door, it was with the usual thing in mind – that what I didn’t know I would now simply learn, on the job, so to speak.

I opened the door, the sun streaming in almost bodily; certainly casting my guests into deep shadow, almost silhouetting them on the step. But not for long, because the little girl stepped straight over the threshold. ‘Hello,’ she said brightly. ‘Do you think I’m ugly, Mummy?’

As first lines went, it was an unusual one, to say the least, but as I smiled down at the dot of a girl who now stood before me, I was more struck by what I saw than what she’d said. She was dressed for the weather, in a flower-sprigged cotton sundress with a shirred bodice, the straps tied in neat bows on her skinny shoulders, but my eyes were immediately drawn upwards, to her face.

I’d clearly absorbed more about her syndrome in training than I’d realised. I took in the small head – which seemed too small, even on her tiny little body, even with her fullish head of wavy dark-blonde hair. I took in the far-apart eyes, the upturned nose and the thin upper lip. It was almost like ticking off boxes on a checklist, and I was surprised how immediately the details of FAS came back to me.

But ugly? No, call me soft, but she definitely wasn’t that. Arresting, unusual, but definitely not ugly. Bless her little heart.

‘No, of course you’re not, sweetheart!’ the young woman with her supplied before I could, as she steered Flip around me so she could step inside herself.

‘There,’ I added, smiling at her. ‘Took the words right out of my mouth. Come on in – Flip, isn’t it?’

The girl nodded. ‘And this is Ellie. She’s my social worker. She’s pretty, isn’t she, Mummy?’

‘She is indeed,’ I said, smiling at the social worker, then gesturing towards the doll in Flip’s hand. ‘And who’s this?’

‘It’s Pink Barbie. We nearly forgetted her.’ She raised her other hand, which was clutched around the handle of a small pink vanity case. Both looked new. And apparently were. ‘She goes with this,’ Flip explained. ‘It’s to keep all her clothes in. I gotted them from Mrs Hardy. As a present.’

‘And we nearly came without her, didn’t we?’ the social worker added. ‘As John no doubt told you. Still, we’re here now. All present and correct. Well, such as we can be.’ She too raised a hand holding a bag; in this case a ‘for life’ one, supplied by a well-known supermarket. ‘This is pretty much it.’

‘And I’m pretty, too,’ Flip reminded her. ‘Mummy said so.’

We went back in the kitchen to find that John had filled the kettle and put it on, and was busy pulling mugs from one of the cupboards.

‘You must have read my mind,’ I said, pulling out a third chair. ‘How about you, Ellie – coffee? And what about you, Flip?’ I added, as the social worker nodded an affirmative. ‘Would you like some juice?’

Flip turned to her Barbie – clearly now a very precious possession, even though she had managed to forget her temporarily along the way. ‘Yes, please,’ she said, having put the doll to her ear. ‘And Pink Barbie says do you have any teeny-weeny cups, Mummy?’

‘I’m sure we can find something just right for her,’ I assured her. Mummy. And three or four times now, I mused, as I rummaged in my ‘teeny-weeny cups’ drawer for something Barbie-sized the doll could sip from. What an unusual prospect this sweet little girl looked like being.

Unusual, interesting and definitely bordering on the profoundly challenging. Or so I was about to find out. First, though, there was the usual raft of paperwork, and, of course, the formal introductions. Ellie turned out to be called Ellie Markham, and had only just been assigned to Flip, as a consequence of her having been transferred from out of our local authority area. Though, thankfully, they’d been prompt in transferring all her notes, I felt for Ellie; guessing at her age, my hunch was that she’d not long been qualified, so she was probably diving straight into the deep end while still a little wet behind the ears.

As she wasn’t in a position to give us much in the way of background, I suggested she and I take Flip outside to meet Tyler and Denver, and that perhaps Tyler could take them on a little tour of the house and garden. It was a job that usually fell to Mike while John and I and the attending social worker dealt with all the forms, but with it having been too short notice for Mike to get away from work, we were having to improvise on that front anyway.

Which was fine; I also thought it would be nice for Tyler to meet Flip with his role in the family clearly evident, i.e. that she could see he was very much one of the family, and would naturally assume a big-brother role while she was with us, for however long that looked like being. We’d already primed him a while back, and with the respite work we’d done since we’d had him I was confident he’d adjust to a new child pretty quickly, just as long as he didn’t feel insecure.

Indeed, he seemed puffed up with pride at being given the responsibility, and it was only Ellie’s insistence that she stay by Flip’s side that meant she wasn’t back with John and me herself. ‘Crossing the Ts and dotting the Is,’ John explained when I returned to the kitchen so we could make as short work as possible of the formalities. ‘She has a tendency to wander, I’m told. No sense of stranger danger either – one of the features of her FAS.’ He patted a pile of papers in a slip case. ‘There’s plenty for you to get your teeth into here.’

‘And this is it, is it?’ I asked him as I retook my place at the table. ‘She’s in the care system now? No likelihood of her being reunited with her mum?’

John shook his head. ‘That’s not the plan. She’s been on the “at risk” register for quite a while now, apparently; there have been repeated attempts to get Mum into alcohol abuse programmes, parenting classes and so on, so this fire’s really just been a line drawn in the sand. It was probably only a matter of time in any case. There’s no home for either of them to go back to now, anyway. They’ve apparently lost everything.’ He pointed to the bag Ellie had parked by the table. ‘That’s all she has; the bits and pieces the respite carers pulled together for her. So she’ll need kitting out …’

‘That’s no problem,’ I said. ‘Well, in terms of stuff to run around in, anyway. I have a boxful. Not that any of it’s pink. Poor mite. She must be reeling inside, even if she’s not showing it. Probably too dazed by it all … When did it happen?’

‘Friday evening,’ John said. And we were now into Wednesday.

‘She must be in shock still,’ I said, as I took the forms he was handing me. Copies of the care plan, the risk assessment, the moving forms and so on, all to be signed three times. Nothing in social services ever happened except in triplicate.

John shook his head. ‘Apparently not,’ he said. ‘Ellie tells me what you see is what you get. One of the main problems Flip has is a lack of empathy, which I’m told is quite common. I’m sure you’ll be Googling it all later, and, as I say, there’s more about her background in the file here, but she’s a tricky one; she’s already been dealing with the legacy of being born the way she is, and it’s been compounded by the rackety way she and her mother have been living. Oh, and she’s on Ritalin for her ADHD, so that needs managing too. And probably hasn’t been, not properly …’ He grimaced as he tailed off. ‘You know how it goes.’

‘Indeed I do,’ I said, mentally ticking off another checklist. Of all the things we’d need to get put in place as a priority; of all the things we’d need to establish in terms of ground rules and routines and behaviours. Of how many ways in which my first impression had already begun changing about this outwardly sweet, biddable, idiosyncratic little girl.

‘Oh and one other thing –’ John began, but once again we were interrupted. By Tyler, who blew into the kitchen like an EF5 tornado, with Denver close behind.

‘OMG, Casey!’ he panted. ‘OMG! Yeuch! You gotta come!’

‘Come where?’ I wanted to know. ‘And what are those faces for, the pair of you?’

‘Casey, it’s like, soooo gross,’ Denver supplied. ‘You won’t believe it, honest.’

‘Like, so gross,’ Tyler added, grabbing my hand and tugging on it. ‘And that social worker lady, she says can you bring, like, a plastic bag and stuff? That girl –’ he gestured behind him. ‘She’s only gone and done a poo on the grass!’

I looked at John. ‘That the one other thing, by any chance?’

He nodded. ‘Yup.’