Nowhere to Go Read Online Free PDF

they would have done so by now.’
    I smiled. ‘That bad, eh?’ I helped myself to one of the Jaffa Cakes. ‘Anyway, I didn’t think that – it’s hardly surprising he’s off with us, is it? What with the court case and everything. Assuming that’s still happening. Is it?’
    ‘I’m afraid it looks like it,’ John said. ‘It’s the knife. If there hadn’t been the knife involved, he might have got away with a stern telling off, particularly given his age, but as it stands, and with the way the stepmother seems so determined to make him pay, then, yes, court seems inevitable. You’ll probably be asked to speak up for him, too, as no doubt you already know. Well, if that proves possible.’ He gave me a wry smile.
    ‘Optimism, John, okay? That’s the thing here. And, well, there you go,’ I added. ‘He’s probably bricking it, wondering what the hell is going to become of him. Don’t worry, John. We’ll get him on track. Warm him up. Make him see we’re on his side. One day at a time, eh? More coffee?’
    John accepted a second cup and while Mike took his time upstairs (he knew the drill) caught me up on a couple of things that he hadn’t mentioned in front of Tyler, including some more specific details surrounding his exclusion; Tyler’s aggressive streak was, it seemed, a thick one. And that wasn’t the only reason John was pleased to hear I’d persuaded the head of the local comp to take him in. He’d also managed to glean that because the family had recently moved house the younger brother, Grant, was now in the comp’s catchment area – he was currently in year six of one of their feeder primaries, which meant, in theory, that come September, assuming Tyler was still with us, the boys would at least be reunited in school.
    ‘It’s definitely looking that serious, then?’ I asked him. ‘No family reconciliation looking likely?’
    ‘You can never say never,’ John said, ‘but we’re working on the worst case scenario. From what they’re saying at the moment, this is very much a last straw situation – who knows what the dad would do if left to his own devices, but as of now their position’s clear – they are washing their hands of him. This isn’t his first violent outburst at home, apparently – far from it. And, given what we know of his behaviour in school, we have to believe the family are telling the truth. They clearly don’t have a clue what to do with him any more.’
    At the age of just 11. It was heartbreaking. How had it come to that? It wasn’t even as if he was a particularly big, strong boy, either. How had he come to be an object of such fear?
    ‘So he’s going on the programme with us?’ I asked, mentally rolling my sleeves up. ‘Doing all the usual points and levels?’
    ‘Definitely,’ John said. ‘Starting asap.’
    The ‘programme’ was what our kind of fostering was mostly based on. When a child first arrived they would be on a regime of very basic privileges, including TV time, computer time and time playing out with friends. In order to do any of those things, a child would have to ‘buy’ the time they needed, using the points that they accumulated each day. To earn those points, they would be expected to do a number of set tasks, each of which carried a points value, and with which they could ‘buy’ things for the following day. The programme was tailored to each individual child and the tasks would differ according to their needs. We had siblings once, for example, who’d come from an extremely neglectful background and had no idea about personal hygiene. They would therefore go to the toilet almost anywhere in the house, then, after wiping themselves with their bare hands, smear excrement on the walls. Their programme therefore reflected this, being loaded with items such as ‘Do not poo or wee anywhere other than the toilet – 30 points’ and ‘Wash hands and face and brush teeth every morning and before bed – 30 points’, and so