A Dark Secret

by Casey Watson

  But he was right. Could this be the same boy? Because when I peeked in on him later, just before heading to bed myself, he was sleeping, and looked the absolute picture of innocence. I wondered, as I pulled the door to, when this other child might show his face, the one that everyone was afraid of, with the devilish nature, the spiteful attitude, the belief that he was canine. Was that child really somewhere within Sam’s cute, sweet, exterior?

  But I’d been doing the job long enough to know appearances could be deceptive. That the answer was almost certainly ‘yes’. And that, despite my observations, that child would probably show up soon enough. As sure as night followed day.

  I switched off the landing light, and tiptoed across to my own bedroom. Fingers crossed not quite as soon as that, though.

  Chapter 3

  There is a place between sleep and waking which, if you linger there long enough, makes you forget where you are, where you’ve been and how you got there – which is why, for a few moments the next morning, I was knocked completely off guard by the strange sounds assaulting my ears.

  Mike, too, it seemed. ‘What the hell is that?’ he spluttered, as he twisted around to check the time. ‘God, it’s not even bloody six o’clock!’

  It was an animal sound, so my subconscious automatically supplied the details. ‘Not those cats from next door, again,’ I mumbled blearily. ‘Honestly! You’d think she’d let them in in this weather.’

  The noise continued, and, as it did so, I finally woke up properly, and realised that it was actually coming from inside our house. Which was when it hit me. Of course. We had a new child in. D’oh!

  Comprehension having dawned, I sat up and shook Mike’s shoulder. ‘Listen!’ I said (as if he had a choice). ‘I think it’s Sam.’

  Mike groaned, threw back the duvet and swung his legs out of bed. ‘I think you’re right, love. God, he’s howling, isn’t he? Just like they said. Better go and check on him.’

  Gathering such senses as I could – early mornings, particularly in winter, were more Mike’s domain than mine – I got up too, grabbed my dressing gown and pulled back the curtains. It was still fully dark. Just the street lamps were burning, illuminating the silvery sheen the frost had painted on the path. Which made the mournful sound coming from across the landing even more so. And very eerie. Like a werewolf in a movie.

  Mike was already coming back in again as I was coming out. ‘Very weird,’ he said. ‘It’s almost like he’s in some sort of trance. He’s just lying there in his bed. Not moving or anything – just eyes shut and howling. No response when I spoke to him. Come on,’ he beckoned. ‘Come and look.’

  I followed Mike into Sam’s room, which was lit only by a night light, and where Sam, as Mike had said, was perfectly still in his bed. And I shuddered – were it not for the racket he was making, it was almost as if he was laid out at an undertaker’s, before a funeral, his hair spread across the pillow and his hands clasped on his chest.

  ‘Sam, love?’ I whispered. ‘It’s Casey. You okay, sweetie?’ Nothing. It was as if he didn’t even realise we were there.

  I touched his hand, and felt the heat of his soft, living skin. ‘Sam, love?’ But again, there was no response – just the merest hint of movement beneath his eyelids. But he didn’t seemed at all agitated, and to intrude might distress him. Better, at least for now, to leave him to it, I decided.

  I gently tugged on Mike’s forearm and we shuffled back outside again. ‘Let’s leave him be for a bit,’ I suggested. ‘I think he’s self-soothing. Probably his way of coping with waking up in yet another strange house.’

  ‘What an odd way to go about it. Still, you’re probably right. Let sleeping dogs lie, eh?’ He mouthed ‘boom-boom’ in the half-light. ‘Sorry. Couldn’t help it. Anyway, I’d better go and shower. You okay to make the coffee? I need to get a shift on. We’ve a big delivery due in at seven.’

  These days, Mike pretty much ran the warehouse where he worked, which meant long hours, sometimes even on a Sunday, like today, and greater responsibility. And with senior management having always been so understanding about our fostering – not least because it sometimes meant him taking time off at short notice – he took those responsibilities very seriously. It was a point of principle that he was never, ever late.

  So I rattled down the stairs, got the coffee on and generally gathered myself together, all the while listening to an almost unbroken soundtrack of those unmistakeable rising and falling ‘ah-oooo, ah-ooooooo’ sounds.

  Though not particularly loud or urgent, it was a sound that went through you, but, at the same time, if it soothed him, then I was loath to intervene. After all, I reasoned, it would defeat the whole purpose if he wasn’t allowed to do what made him feel better. Even so, I gave myself a mental time limit. Once Mike had gone to work, I would go up again and see if I could rouse him.

  Mike having left to do just that, I was just about to head up and do so when a very confused-looking Tyler appeared in the kitchen.

  ‘What’s going on up there?’ he asked, sleepily rubbing his eyes. ‘Have you been in and seen him? What on earth is he doing?’

  ‘Howling, love,’ I said as I finished off my coffee (and reflected that ‘howling, love’ was such an unlikely thing to find yourself saying if you weren’t in a horror film). ‘Apparently, he used to act like a dog to scare his younger brother and sister. But I think it’s more that he’s scared. And that he’s howling to soothe himself. We once looked after another little boy who had autism, and he used to flap his arms, a bit like a bird, when he was stressed or afraid of a situation.’

  ‘Sam’s autistic?’ Tyler asked. ‘Really? He doesn’t seem autistic.’

  ‘It’s a very broad spectrum, love,’ I explained. ‘Some signs are hardly noticeable and others a lot more so. Sam hasn’t been officially diagnosed but he must have displayed some of the signs for it to be mentioned in his file, but we’ll just have to wait and see. You never know, this howling might be the extent of it.’

  Tyler shuffled across the kitchen to grab a box of cereal. As was often the case, now he’d started at college, he had a full schedule of Sunday-morning football to attend, and needed a suitably hearty breakfast. Though possibly a little earlier than he’d planned.

  ‘Shall I cook you something love?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll see to it. You want me to make a bacon sarnie for you too? You need to deal with – ah. Hold up. I think he’s stopped finally.’

  I listened. ‘Yes, you’re right. I think he has. I’ll nip up and see what’s happening. Oh, and double yes about that sandwich, with brown sauce and knobs on. Because I suspect this might just be the calm before the storm.’

  I hurried back upstairs. ‘Morning, sweetie!’ I called out brightly after knocking and entering. ‘Would you like to come downstairs and have some breakfast with me and Tyler? I’ll pop some cartoons on for you while we get things ready, if you like.’

  Sam was still lying on his back, staring blankly at the ceiling. But he was aware of my presence now, because he immediately turned to look at me. He looked confused at first – not surprisingly – but then smiled and sat up, and swung his legs out of the bed.

  It was an odd smile, however, that didn’t quite seem to reach his eyes, and I tried to remember where I’d seen that before. It hit me then that it had been Georgie, the autistic boy I’d just mentioned to Tyler. When I spoke to him, he’d often adopt that exact expression – as if he knew what a smile was, but didn’t really feel it. Just understood, or had been taught, when he was expected to produce one.

  ‘I like cartoons,’ Sam said. Then he pointed at his pyjamas, ‘Look, Mrs Bolton,’ he said. ‘See? These are cartoon pyjamas. Fireman Sam. The lady got them for me because I’m a Sam too. And I’m going be a fireman as well.’

  I laughed and held out my hand. ‘Come on then, Fireman Sam. And Mrs
Bolton – Christine – is the lady who brought you yesterday. My name is Casey, remember?’

  Sam took my hand, which surprised me, and nodded. ‘Choo, choo! Casey Jones!’ he said, pulling on an invisible train whistle with his other hand. And this time his accompanying smile seemed more genuine. ‘I know that story, too. You know, you should be a train driver.’

  I smiled back. This kid was certainly full of surprises. How on earth did he know about a TV show that pre-dated even me?

  ‘You know what?’ I said, as we walked, companionably hand-in-hand, down the stairs. ‘I would have loved to be a train driver. But I couldn’t get a job. I was too short to see over the engine.’

  ‘For real?’ he said, eyes wide.

  ‘Just kidding,’ I told him. ‘So. What would you like for breakfast? Cereal? Bacon sandwich? Boiled eggs and soldiers?’

  ‘Boiled eggs and soldiers?’

  ‘You mean you’ve never eaten soldiers?’

  Sam shook his head. He looked flummoxed. ‘What, real soldiers?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. But made of bread, so you can stick them in the egg. If you listen closely, you can hear them going “oi!”’

  I studied Sam while Tyler and I made short work of our bacon sandwiches, and our little visitor wolfed down his eggs and soldiers. What a complicated little lad he was. And an immature one, as well – both physically and mentally. Though not immature in the pejorative sense of the word. I was just building a picture of a boy half his age. The precious backpack, the pyjamas and the talk of being a fireman – a fine ambition at any age, of course, but, in tandem with what I knew of his regular toddler-tantrum-like outbursts, I felt sure I was in the presence of arrested development, of a child who had probably missed many milestones. And conceivably, given the little I did know of his background, a fair bit of schooling. Possibly as a result of his autism or neglect, and perhaps both; a child who’d never heard of boiled eggs and soldiers.

  But Sam had definitely heard of Lego. And once Tyler had left, and I got my enormous crate of bricks out, he fell upon it as if I’d handed him the keys to the proverbial sweetshop, having never in his life, he told me, wide-eyed and breathless, seen so much of it, in one place, all at once.

  Let alone been allowed to play with it. So Lego it was, then, and since he didn’t want me to help him, I switched the telly to a daytime chat show (a rare, guilty pleasure), happy to just observe as he tipped the entire box onto the carpet and, once he’d gathered up and sorted what he needed into neat different-coloured piles, set about making ‘the biggest, bestest bridge ever’.

  And after an hour during which he was completely absorbed, he had indeed built something pretty magnificent. Whatever problems there might be with his emotional and social development, his engineering skills, eye for detail and spatial awareness really were something to behold.

  And I was just about to say so when the whole thing went pear-shaped, and the much-heralded wild child, who rampaged like an animal, showed up to join us, as if from nowhere.

  And it really was out of nowhere. I’d had absolutely no inkling. One minute he was sitting back on his heels admiring what he’d made – I had shuffled forwards on the sofa and muted the telly so I could inspect it too – and the next he was on his feet and, completely without warning, had karate-kicked a foot out to smash it to pieces – a full-on sideways thrust right at the middle of it with his bare foot.

  ‘I hate you!’ he screamed at it. ‘I hate you! I hate you!’ And once he’d reduced it to a pile of bricks again, he kicked at it some more, sending showers of bricks pinging all across the room.

  ‘Sam! What on earth’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Why on earth have you done that? Your bridge was brilliant. Why would you smash it into pieces like that?’

  He whirled to face me. ‘Cos it’s shit!’ he screamed, stabbing a finger towards the mess he’d made. ‘The colours got all wrong! This Lego is shit! I don’t want it! I hate it!’

  ‘The colours got wrong?’ I asked, keeping my voice low to try and calm things. ‘What d’you mean, love? The colours looked lovely to me.’

  I should have known better than to disagree with him, because this only made him crosser. ‘The colours got wrong!’ he raged. Then, again without warning, he lunged at me, grabbed my hair and began pulling.

  What a sight we must have looked to anyone passing by – me still perched on the sofa, Sam’s face at my eye level, pink-cheeked with fury, two clumps of my hair clutched tight in his fists. I could feel his warm breath puffing in angry gusts on my face.

  ‘I hate you! I hate you!’ he screamed, pulling harder, now kicking out with his feet at my shins as well. Thanking God for him being shoeless, I unfolded myself to standing, though with my head dipped, of necessity, to the level of his chest.

  ‘Sam, let go of my hair, please,’ I said through a veil of it.

  In answer, he tugged harder. I put my hands over his. ‘Sam. Let go of my hair, please. Now.’

  Another tug, this time accessorised by an eardrum-splitting scream. ‘Sam!’ I shouted, now forcibly unbending his fingers. ‘You need to listen to me. Let go this minute. Calm down!’

  He was screaming at such a pitch now that I doubted he could even hear me. But my greater strength won out and I managed to free my hair. His own hands I hung on to though, tightly. What must this kind of assault be like if you were the same size as he was? Or smaller – Kelly’s fears for her poor kids were now making sense. And no wonder his own siblings were so scared of him.

  ‘Sam! Listen to me,’ I said firmly, holding his hands now in front of him. ‘I want to help you. I want to help you figure out what went wrong with your bridge. But I cannot do that – I cannot help you – while you’re this angry.’

  His eyes were full of tears now. ‘It was the blues! It was the blues!’

  I saw his leg twitch, and braced for another kick, but it didn’t come. I lowered my backside back onto the sofa so we were again face-to-face. ‘Okay, so that’s a start,’ I said. ‘Sam, look at me. Look at me. There. That’s a start. So, what about the blues? What exactly went wrong with them?’

  ‘There was a wrong one!’ His tone suggested he was incredulous that I could have missed it. ‘A blue one where there shouldn’t have been one! And I never did it! I did a red, then a white, then a blue, then a red again. But I never put two blues together. I never!’

  Wow, I thought, he has misplaced a brick. That is all. ‘Ah, I see,’ I said. ‘Well, yes, I can see how that would make you cross. So perhaps it’s best if we put the bricks away for today, okay? So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to pick them all up, together, and put them back in the box. Then how about I see if I can find Fireman Sam on the telly?’

  ‘But I never did it!’ he squeaked at me. ‘I never!’

  But I could tell from his changing body language that this was only the embers. The raging fire, quick to ignite, had died away equally quickly. I let go of his hands finally. He flexed and unflexed his fingers.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, getting down on my knees now. ‘Tell you what, shall we make it a race?’

  In answer, he was down on his own knees in seconds, gathering. ‘Beat ya, beat ya, beat ya!’ he sang. ‘Gotcha, gonna eat ya!’

  Which made little sense to me, but that was absolutely fine. The important thing was that the storm had passed as quickly as it had started. And at least we’d had it, which meant that we were at last up and running. And though I didn’t know to where, quite, with this tornado of a child, at least I had a better idea of what I was dealing with.

  Chapter 4

  If that one small incident opened a window to what Kelly might have been dealing with, the next couple of days saw me thrown headlong straight out of it, and onto what I had to concede was something fast approaching a battlefield. Life with Sam was definitely going to be no picnic. No wonder Kelly, with two little ones, had strugg
led to cope. Because it wasn’t just the screaming and the howling and the tantrums, and it wasn’t just the constant threat of violence when Sam exploded. It was that I just never saw them coming.

  And they seemed destined to be a regular occurrence. That same afternoon, after Mike and Tyler had returned, I was in the kitchen, toiling away at a late-afternoon roast, when there was another major blow-up.

  Sam had been watching TV while Mike and Tyler had been going over some college coursework, and, as the volume had been creeping up to a disruptive level, Mike had asked Sam if he could turn it down a little. He’d duly nodded – this was apparently no problem in itself, because he did as he was told immediately – but when he accidentally pressed the ‘change channel’ button, and lost the programme temporarily, it triggered a second bout of screaming and swearing and lashing out – this time, and just as I ran into the living room, by throwing the remote across the room in a fit of temper, catching Tyler a glancing blow across the face.

  Mike was obviously quick to act, grabbing Sam up in a bear hug before he could lay hands on anything else to throw, and while Tyler heroically took the blow – in both senses – on the chin, Mike was already deploying the restraint technique we’d been trained in; using his superior strength to physically contain Sam while trying to quell the storm of his temper.

  And what a whirlwind of a thing that temper was. Mike had his arms firmly around Sam, pinning his own to his sides, but I could see he was looking for any opportunity to attack, gnashing his teeth, and trying to get his mouth close enough to bite Mike, while kicking his feet out to try and kick him on the shins. Had he not been just nine – and such a scrap of a thing – it would have been a fearsome sight. As it was it just made me feel very sad.

  While Tyler gathered up the batteries and put the remote back together, I went across to see if I could help. ‘Sam, until you stop that silly kicking and biting, Mike can’t let you go,’ I tried. ‘The way you are carrying on, you will hurt yourself, and we don’t want that to happen. We just want you to calm yourself down, okay? So stop yelling and take some deep breaths, please.’