Free The Boy No One Loved by Casey Watson Page B

He nodded. ‘And something else I know is that when young kids go through bad stuff – when kids are too young to really understand what’s happened to them and why, well, sometimes it makes them really angry when they’re older, and then they do things like you’ve been doing to your feet. It’s not your fault, Justin. I’m not cross with you. You do understand that, don’t you?’
    He was silent for a long, long moment, head hanging, then he lifted it and turned to me, his eyes meeting mine. And suddenly came this whole rush of words. ‘What’s to understand, Casey? My life’s been fucking shit! She’s a bitch, that’s all. A bitch. She got rid of me, told me all this stuff about how I was trouble and everything. But she kept Alfie and Mikey, didn’t she? Didn’t she? I understand alright. I understand all of it.’ He was crying now, I could see, except so softly and so silently. Leaking tears, almost. It wasn’t anger. It was if he had no fight left in him. Now instinct told me that it would be okay to touch him, so I moved closer and put my arm around his shoulders. I waited for him to stiffen, but he didn’t. Quite the contrary. He leaned into me, burying his head into my chest, and now he started sobbing much harder.
    ‘It was shit,’ he said again. ‘Shit. I mean, I knew she was on drugs. Couldn’t not know. All the kids used to take the piss all the time. But I never knew it was heroin. I never knew that. I mean I knew the name of it, and everything, but not what heroin was, what it does . All I knew was that she never got any food for us. Never fed us. An’ Alfie only needed fucking baby milk, that’s all . An’ she never got it …’
    I squeezed his shoulder. ‘I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to live like that.’
    He lifted his head away a little to look at me again. ‘Casey, can I tell you something?’
    ‘Course you can, love,’ I answered. ‘Though there’s something I need to tell you first, okay?’
    I hated having to do it, but I really needed to say it. It was an essential, integral part of my job that I say it. ‘It’s just that you have to know, Justin, that if it’s something really, really bad that you’re going to tell me, that I have to share it. You understand? So that we can all try to help you. Okay?’
    He nodded, though I wasn’t completely sure it went in. He seemed more focussed on continuing now than listening. And I needed to let him.
    ‘It was Alfie and Mikey,’ he went on. ‘And we were, like, starving. All of us were. I couldn’t even remember the last time we’d got some food, because she’d been flat out, just, you know, lying there mostly, for days. And now she was out and I was minding them and she didn’t come back, and they just kept shouting and crying from upstairs and I didn’t know what to do. But then I remembered in next door’s garden they had stuff growing. Lots of things. An’ they had rhubarb. You know rhubarb?’
    I nodded. ‘Yes. I know rhubarb.’
    ‘So I climbed on the dustbins and over the fence and I stole a load of sticks of it, just so they had something. But when I took it up to them, they were in their cot together, and they were just sitting there in it, nappies off, eating their own shit. Eating it, Casey! Both of them. Sitting there, eating their own shit!’
    ‘Oh, love, that’s horrible …’
    ‘She didn’t care, though!’ He was having to gulp back the tears now. ‘She didn’t even care ! And she’d, like, come back, and bring all her druggy mates with her, and they’d just be there, then, downstairs. All laid out on the sofas and on the floor. And the babies would be crying, and no-one would even hear them!’
    I could sense the anger building in him as he recounted all this to me. I was trying to picture the horror of it, and I was beginning to feel physically sick. I could sense, though, that I needed to brace myself even further, because it seemed clear to me that this was just the