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this job, I told myself. So was my husband, Mike. Plus I already had several years of experience looking after difficult children. And this was the new career I’d chosen for myself, wasn’t it?
    But along with the anxiety, I also felt proud. I looked around me and found myself smiling with satisfaction at what I saw. I certainly couldn’t have thought harder about the way to do his new bedroom. Because one of the few things we did know was that Justin liked football, we quickly settled on that as a theme. So we’d done out the spare room in black and white and splashed out on some special wallpaper that made one of the walls look like it was a crowd at a stadium. We’d laid a green carpet, for a pitch, added a football-themed frieze, and I’d trawled charity shops endlessly for the books, games and jigsaws that I knew my own kids had enjoyed at his age. We also knew he liked movies, especially Disney films, apparently, so we’d bought him a starter pack of those too. I had agonised over every detail, every decision, every tiny item, because it meant so much to me to do everything I could to help him feel at home. The one thing I didn’t know was what team he supported, so, till I did know, I’d pinched my son Kieron’s old duvet cover for him. I reasoned that England was a pretty safe bet for any football-mad eleven-year-old boy.
    I checked the time on the big blue clock Mike had fixed on the wall. Almost eleven. They would be here any minute, I realised. And, as if by magic, I heard Mike call my name from downstairs.
    ‘They’re coming up the path, love,’ he said.
    I had met Justin already, of course, just the previous Tuesday. In fact, it had only been a week since we’d been asked to consider our first placement at that point, and only eight days since I’d left my old job at the local comprehensive school. It had been an intense week, too, with everything seeming to move so quickly, and even though the way all these things were done was still new to us, Mike and I had both felt there was a real sense of desperation in the air. John Fulshaw, our link worker from the fostering agency we worked for, had been clear: this was not something we should undertake lightly. How little did we understand then just how true his words would be.
    We’d been assigned John as our link worker when we’d first applied to be foster carers and we’d struck up a good relationship with him right away. By now we also felt we knew him quite well, so if John was anxious it naturally made me anxious too. Not that we weren’t anticipating challenges. What Mike and I had signed up for wasn’t mainstream fostering. It was an intense kind of fostering, intended to be short term in nature, which involved a new and complex programme of behaviour management. It had been trialled and was proving very successful in America, and had recently started to be funded by a number of councils in the UK. It was geared to the sort of kids who were considered unfosterable – the ones who had already been through the system and for whom the only other realistic future option was moving permanently into residential care. And not just ordinary residential care either – they’d usually already tried that – but, tragically, in secure units, many of these kids having already offended.
    ‘The problem,’ John had told me, during our first chat about Justin, ‘is that we know so little about him and his past. And what we do know doesn’t make for great reading, either. He’s been in the care system since he was five and has already been through twenty failed placements. He’s been through a number of foster families and children’s homes, and now it’s pretty much last chance saloon time. So what I’d like to do is to come round and discuss him with you both personally. Tomorrow, if it’s not too short notice.’
    As a family, we’d talked about that phone call all evening, trying to read anything and everything into John’s few scraps of