Читать книгу A Dark Secret: Part 2 of 3 - Casey Watson, Casey Watson - Страница 6

My dog-walking idea proved to be a winner. Not only did I have the undying gratitude of my neighbour’s grandson, but, as far as I could fathom Sam’s complicated personality, I felt I’d really turned a corner with him, at least in knowing what made him happy, because walking Flame seemed to make him very happy indeed.

It also provided an outlet for his need to howl and bark and, though we attracted the odd sideways look when Sam launched into an episode, most didn’t even bat an eyelid – he was just a nine-year-old boy, out with a dog, who was pretending to be a dog. As for the dog himself, well, he seemed to enjoy it too.

Our new regime of daily dog walks also proved to be a much-needed distraction from all the waiting around for news from the various authorities. Although meeting Colin Sampson had been uplifting, and a very positive experience, I still knew that all the reams of red tape dictated that we had a long road ahead. There were lots of unanswered questions and only certain professionals had the authority to answer them. CAMHS – Child and Adolsescent Mental Health Services – would ultimately decide if Sam really was autistic, and if so, what level of help he would need. The ELAC team would then decide which school he could be enrolled with and, finally, social services would then update Sam’s care plan to show how we, as a family, could best address and support his needs.

In the meantime, as a family, there was some nice news. In the form of an invitation from my niece Chloe – my sister Donna’s daughter – to a wedding just under six weeks hence. Closely followed (Six weeks away? Whattt? had been my first thought) by a call from Donna herself.

‘Sorry,’ she said immediately. ‘I meant to call you last week. But it’s all been so manic since I saw you –’

‘I’m not surprised!’ I interrupted. ‘What’s going on? Why? I thought they were getting married next spring, not this spring.’

‘D’oh,’ my sister laughed. ‘Because she’s just found out she’s pregnant!’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Wow. That’s certainly … unexpected.’ And it was. My niece was the last person on earth I’d have expected to be expecting unexpectedly. Just like her mum she had life organised to the nth degree. Yes, she’d been with her fiancé a good while now, and they were definitely planning to have children, but as far as I’d been aware, they’d planned to do things in a slightly different order to the one my sister sketched out to me now.

‘Oh, they hummed and hawed about it,’ she explained. ‘They initially thought they’d just have the baby and get married next year, like they’d planned to, but in the end she decided she’d rather be a bride without a baby, in preference to being in the first throes of motherhood – fat and tired, as she put it, bless her – and as it’s turned out they can have a venue gratis, it was a no-brainer.’

Donna went on to explain that Jack’s boss – Jack being Chloe’s fiancé, and a chef – had offered them the use of the marquee at his hotel, after they’d had a late cancellation. And though Donna sympathised with the girl who’d cancelled – as did I, poor thing, because her fiancé had apparently split up with her – she also saw it as fate making the decision for them. ‘They’ll save shedloads. Which they’ll need, of course. So, can you make it?’

I could hear the excitement in my sister’s voice, like a fizz down the phone line. Not only was she about to plunge into full mother-of-the-bride mode, she was also going to have her greatest wish granted and become a grandmother like I was, to boot. And there was to be another baby in the family, which always made me happy.

So my first response would normally have been just try to keep me away. Which is exactly what I said. But with a caveat: Sam. Chloe and her fiancé lived a hundred and fifty miles away now and though I was fairly sure Mike could organise a couple of days off, we’d also need to organise respite. It was almost certain that my own kids and their respective entourages would be going (turning up to the opening of an envelope was a Watson family trait) and only the other day Christine Bolton had been telling me that the service was almost at breaking point, with respite carers currently so thin on the ground that they were having to go further and further afield to find any – perhaps as far away as where Chloe lived? Conceivably.

‘So just bring him with you,’ was Donna’s immediate response when I told her. Which was so like her. Come one, come all. And that despite his little episode in her café. But then she didn’t know Sam that well, did she?

‘Absolutely not,’ was Mike’s, an hour later, when I told him.

And he was resolute. We had a right to a couple of days off. We’d forgone a planned trip to take on Sam in the first place, so it was a problem we had to be extremely firm about – as in placing it very firmly on social services’ shoulders. ‘It’s not fair, love,’ he’d added, seeing the doubt in my face. ‘Yes, you’ve made strides with Sam – big strides – but things are still far from perfect, and who knows how he’ll react in the company of complete strangers? And it’s not fair on you to have the stress of looking after him all day and evening. And what if he has one of his meltdowns during the service? That’s definitely not fair on Chloe.’

He had a point. A very good point. It was Chloe’s day and it wouldn’t be right to potentially disrupt it just because we had a problem. So I’d just have to put my foot down. And though a part of me still thought we could cross that bridge when we came to it, only a couple of days later I had further evidence that perhaps we couldn’t. That I’d been lulled into a false sense of security.

In fact, it was in the night-time when it happened – at 3.20 in the morning. A horrible time to be jolted awake at the best of times, but even worse when you were woken by screaming. And there was something about Sam’s screams that never failed to go right through me.

‘I’ll go,’ I whispered to Mike, who had also woken up. ‘You go back to sleep, love. You’ve got to be up in three hours.’

‘Wha? Wha time is it?’ he mumbled as I pushed the covers back. Then he grunted and pulled the duvet back over his head.

Screams still piercing the silence, I pattered out onto the landing, pulling on my dressing gown as I went. I knew Tyler wouldn’t wake up, at least – he’d been football training after college and it would take an earthquake to wake him after that. He might even still be wearing headphones while sleeping – it wouldn’t be the first time, as he often finished the evening with a late-night comedy podcast; it always made us smile to hear him tittering away to himself.

Sam, though, despite my assumption he was screaming in his sleep, appeared to be wide, wide awake. He was sitting bolt upright in his bed, clutching the covers under his chin, his little hands balled into tight, white fists.

But as I approached I wasn’t sure he was awake after all. His face was wet from sobbing, his eyes and pupils huge, but he didn’t seem to see me.

I sat down on the bed. ‘Sweetheart, did you have a bad dream?’ I stroked his hair as I spoke, which was damp and clinging to his forehead. ‘Have you had a nasty nightmare?’

Sam nodded – so he was awake, at least half-awake – but he still stared straight ahead towards the mirror on his dressing table. I followed his line of sight and wondered fleetingly if that might be the problem. It was probably a scary thing if you woke in the night and saw a reflection of yourself in a mirror. I didn’t have time to dwell on that, however, as Sam had by now begun rambling. Not quite sense – more a string of random words and phrases, only a few of which I could pick out. Dog cage. The bad man. It hurts. Mustn’t tell.

Sam was beginning to shake now, as well, so I put my arm around him and gently rocked him, holding him tight but not too tight as he continued spewing words out. I still wasn’t entirely sure if he was asleep or awake. The bad man. Mustn’t tell. Mustn’t tell Mummy. Courtney. He was sobbing too, little whimpers. Like a dreaming dog, chasing rabbits in its sleep.

‘The bad man,’ I said eventually, keeping my voice to a whisper.

‘He’s so bad,’ he said immediately, and I felt him stiffen in my embrace.

‘The bad man in your dream?’ I tried.

He stiffened further, and tipped his face up so he could see me. I looked into frightened eyes and I realised he was awake. Just gripped by something – an overwhelming mental image? A memory? I’d seen similar things before in deeply distressed children – a kind of tipping point, when whatever it is that they’ve locked away so carefully comes tumbling out of them finally, too big to contain.

‘He’s real,’ Sam said finally. ‘He’s proper. He’s real.’

‘And he hurt you?’

A small nod.

‘In what way, sweetie?’

‘My winkie. He said he wouldn’t but he did! He’s a liar!’

Can a heart ‘sink’? Of course not. It’s too firmly anchored. But the expression is a common one for good reason. Nothing else captures that sensation of resigned, heavy gloom quite so accurately. That moment when a person sees or hears something so wretchedly unwelcome that an exhalation or a head shake just isn’t enough. His winkie. A bad man. A man who hurt his winkie. It was a Pandora’s box I’d had the misfortune to have opened more than once – those few words so often the portal to a whole raft of nasties, the implications of them so huge. Were I given to swearing, I’d have sworn then, no question. This again.

He was crying harder now, as if the admission had opened a sluice. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ I said, clutching him tighter. ‘Shhh, now. It’s okay. You’re safe, no one can hurt you here, I promise.’

And, of course, he was. At least from the bad man who’d hurt him, whoever he was. But from the demons lodged in his head, not at all.

I riffled through mental file cards as I continued to rock him. Sexual abuse. That flipping dog cage. Not being able to tell his mummy. I knew what it meant, obviously – some sort of sexual assault. But what did it all mean, in terms of the role it had played in his past? Had this been an isolated incident or had it been an ongoing horror? I thought back to the few snippets I’d been learning from Christine Bolton. Sam’s mother had been painted as sick and neglectful. The next-door neighbour had reported a string of men in and out of the house. I knew that alcohol, or possibly drugs, had been mentioned. Had Sam been abused by one of his mother’s boyfriends? Had he been locked up in a dog cage to get him out of the way? Were both these things going on on a regular basis? It was all too easy to form a picture, because this was the stuff of my own nightmares – their foundations built on the disclosures of many children before Sam. Of being variously abused – physically, psychologically and sexually. Of being grievously neglected, of being ‘used’ in payment for drugs, of being treated as a sexual plaything by adult relations, of being forced to participate in horrendous, deviant acts. No, I hadn’t seen it all – not yet, at least – but it sometimes felt as though I’d heard it all. And all of it coming down to the same distressing business of vulnerable children being horribly treated and defiled.