Free Blood Family by Anne Fine

don’t have the sense to tweak their guidelines about children having the right to see an ‘innocent’ parent more or less on demand, then what am I to do? How could I let him go in there thinking his mum was going to spin around, shout ‘Eddie!’ joyfully and squeeze him tight when I knew it was far more likely that she’d be slumped in a chair, clutching a handkerchief and staring blankly at the wall?
    We talked about how, if he was upset after the visit, he could ask Linda for an extra cuddle. She would understand.
    ‘She’ll give me biscuits,’ he said. ‘And read the story without asking me .’
    ‘Without asking you?’
    ‘To do the easy words,’ he explained. ‘She’ll read it all herself. Till I feel better.’
    My watch was warning me that we were almost over time. I led him to the door. ‘Bye, Eddie.’ I squeezed his hand, but gently, since his finger ends still looked a little pink and raw. ‘And good luck with the visit.’
    ‘Fingers crossed,’ he said.
Rob Reed, Social Worker
    I put my hand up. It was a terrible mistake, taking Eddie to see his mum. The problem is, the things children imagine, left to themselves, are usually so much worse than simple fact. The times I’ve driven kids to prison to visit a mum or dad for the first time. All the way there, they’re pale as grubs – can’t answer the simplest question or focus on anything. Can’t even taste the burger I buy them on the way.
    Then in we go. All these new family suites have toys and jigsaws, book boxes, beanbags, even bright and cheerful mobiles dangling over the cots for the babies. It’s like a daycare centre. The volunteers tend to be motherly ladies, pressing the young ones into accepting chocolate milk and fancy biscuits. No one is jangling keys or scowling. There are no bars in sight. And when the dad comes in, he and the warder who’s accompanying him are as often as not sharing a joke.
    The child I take home is a child I wouldn’t recognize.
    So when I heard he wanted to tell his mum how he could read a bit, and show her how well he could write his letters, I was very keen. Her bruises would have gone. The bald patches on her head would have grown out. (And, to be fair, most of them had.)
    What I’d not bargained for was her dead face. It was a mask. I wondered if that monster Harris had somehow kicked her into some sort of embolism, or stroke. Lordknows, he’d bashed her hard enough to do permanent damage. She seemed dead from the neck up.
    The woman who had led us to the room said, ‘Here we are, Lucy. Here’s your lovely little boy, come in to see you. Say hello to Eddie.’
    She put her hand out – even touched his fingers – but her eyes stayed blank.
    The minder prompted again. ‘Come on now, Lucy. Say hello to Eddie. You’ve not seen him for a while, have you? But here he is, so let’s try saying hello.’
    She smiled then. Not a proper smile – the stupefied dead sort you might see on a widow’s face as she thanked people after the funeral. She said, ‘Hello.’ The greeting was so flat you would have sworn she’d not met him before, and wasn’t fond of children anyway.
    I’d usually prompt a child to greet the parent back. ‘Well, say hello, then.’ I didn’t, though. I don’t know why. I think I might have been too angry to speak. I know the theory – misery breeds misery. And that is true, and we must understand and try to sympathize all the way up the family line, right back to where trouble began. But sometimes that is hard . Most of this misery is so unnecessary . If Lucy Taylor had only had the simple wits or guts to walk out on that man the very first time he gave her an aggressive nudge, none of this would have happened.
    Sometimes I’d like to punch the parents of my clients really hard. Smash in their faces, in fact.
    Oh, God! Don’t write that down.
    What happened after we left? Well, that was even worse. I got him in the car and waited while he strapped himself in. (He was