Free Postcards From Berlin by Margaret Leroy

end even Brian Meredith couldn’t cope with Jason, and he was
     sent to Avalon Close, an adolescent psychiatric unit with a grim reputation. Girls like Aimee Graves, whose father had held
     her head in the loo and flushed it, who came into Care and had seventeen foster placements: Aimee, who was so misnamed, for
     no one loved her. Except me, for a while. Except me.
    Brian Meredith solved some big problems for the council. He did what he liked, and his methods were all his own. Two rooms
     on the second floor. The secret of his success. Pindown. Each room with a bed, a table, a flimsy electric fire, and the glass-paneled
     door, the glass screened with brown paper. There were no locks, no keys, but saucepans were hung on the outside of the door
     handle, and someone was always there, the other side of the door. If you misbehaved or ran away, that’s where they put you.
     They took your clothes and shoes: You had to wear your pajamas. If you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to knock on the
     door. They set you writing to do: You sat at the table and wrote down the wrong things you’d done. The rules were stuck on
     the wall, a list with lots of no’s: no smoking, TV, radio, books; and no communicating out of the window without permission
     — because you could see the woman who lived in the flat next door, her sitting room was level with your window, you could
     see right in. You’d watch her dusting, watching television, sitting on the arm of the sofa and having a quiet smoke, and you’d
     want to bang on your window, to see if she might wave to you. Sometimes you felt she was your only friend.
    Most of the staff were young. Some were doing it for experience; they wanted to get on courses and become proper social workers,
     the kind who sat in offices and went to case conferences, and visited places like The Poplars then drove away in their cars.
     Some of them just couldn’t get anything better. Most of them wanted to help, really. They wore denim and had piercings and
     said how much they liked the music we liked and tried to get us to talk about our feelings. You could see when they talked
     to you, trying to get near you, how they longed for some kind of revelation — for the gift of some confidence, a disclosure
     or confession about your family and what had been done to you — longed for your trust, though they didn’t know what the hell
     to do with it if you gave it. They were OK, most of them. Only Brian Meredith hit us. But they did what he said: used Pindown.
    Lesley was the nicest. She arrived soon after I did. She was perhaps ten years older than me, twenty-three to my thirteen.
     Lesley became my key-worker. She was different from the others: rather awkward and clumsy, with feet too big for her body,
     but her eyes were quiet when they rested on you.
    Lesley was very conscientious. She took me off for individual sessions. We sat on the square of carpet in the staff room —
     the only bit of carpet in the place — and did exercises from a ring-bound manual she had called “Building Self-Esteem.” She
     drew a self-esteem tree on a big piece of paper with felt tips: There were fruits on the branches, and you had to write something
     about yourself that you liked in each of the fruits. I remember the dirty cups on the coffee table and the smell of Jeyes
     from the corridor where someone had been sick. I couldn’t think of much to write in the fruit. She turned a page of her book.
     “If I could wave a magic wand, what would you wish for?” she asked. “When you’re grown up and all this is behind you, what
     would you want to have?” I sat there in the smell of cabbage and disinfectant. “Close your eyes,” she said. I closed my eyes,
     and saw it all, clear, vivid. Perhaps it was the tree she’d drawn, triggering something in me: I saw lots of trees, a garden;
     I saw a house and children and a husband, all these images welling up in me, precise as though I’d drawn them. “I’d like