A Dark Secret

by Casey Watson

  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.

  But what were the particulars here? What was Sam’s particular story? I shelved the question, though. This wasn’t the time or place to ask him.

  ‘Your mummy,’ I said instead, ‘why didn’t you feel you could tell your mummy?’

  ‘Because he said if I did he would take me away. And never bring me back again. Not never!’

  I kissed the top of his head and sighed inside. So far, so familiar. Fear was such a reliably effective holder of children’s tongues.

  ‘But you’re safe now,’ I said again, glancing at the time on the wall clock. ‘You know that, Sam, don’t you? That there’s no need to be scared, because the bad man can’t hurt you. Now, how about I sing you a lullaby to help you get back to sleep?’

  He was limp in my arms now – probably exhausted by his turbulent awakening – so I knew it wouldn’t be long before his eyes closed and he slept again.

  And it wasn’t. In a matter of minutes, his breathing had changed, and I was able to lie him back down and tuck the covers in around him.

  Needless to say, though, I didn’t get another wink.

  Chapter 11

  The next day I got up feeling predictably groggy, having spent the rest of the night hours awake with my thoughts. But coffee helped, as did my feeling of conviction that I would get to the bottom of Sam’s disclosures. For these were key, surely, to much of his emotional distress. So, at some point during the day, I would commit them both to my log and to email, and hopefully add weight to the case for prompt action. In the meantime, however, I must let Sam lead the way.

  So I got him up as normal, saw to it that he did his daily morning tasks, ticked them off his chart with lots of praise and made him breakfast. Of course, if Sam had wanted to talk about it more, I would have certainly encouraged him, but he made no reference to his nightmare, let alone its contents – as I was coming to understand was normal practice for him. Once a thing had been put out there, it was treated as done – simply parked in a mental corner and forgotten. At least for now.

  I did, however, feel it appropriate to register that he’d had a nightmare. ‘You feeling okay this morning, love?’ I asked him as we ate our scrambled eggs together. ‘Did you manage to sleep alright after your bad dream?’

  Sam picked up his glass of orange juice and took a big slurp from it. ‘I feel fine,’ he said brightly, as he put it back down again. ‘Am I allowed to take Flame for a walk now my jobs are done? I’m excited to do the park bit on my own again.’

  I’d gone out on a slight limb over the past couple of days and, so far, it was appearing to pay dividends. Whether he’d wanted to appear grown-up or just wanted to have time with the dog alone, he’d told me a few days previously that I didn’t need to go to the park with him if I was busy. That I could go home and do my ‘scrubbing and stuff’ while he walked Flame by himself.

  I’d do no such thing, of course, not at this early stage, but I saw no harm in giving him the space to be on his own with the dog, so for the last couple of mornings we’d picked up Flame from Mrs Pegg’s, and walked together to the gate to the park. There I’d left him, promising to be back at the gate in thirty minutes (I’d even given him one of Mike’s old watches to wear for the purpose) and while he took a turn around the park, I had loitered with intent – intent on not being spotted while I passed the time strolling around and catching up with my friends and family on social media.

  I hadn’t minded. I’d read something only recently about the importance of daylight as an aid to restful sleep, and, trapped as I was currently by the needs of my caring responsibilities, a chance to be out and about every morning, for a dose of light and vitamin D, seemed like a win–win situation.

  Plus, letting Sam apparently take charge of Flame (with Mrs Pegg’s agreement, obviously) gave him a sense of self-esteem-boosting responsibility – something I suspected had been sorely lacking in his life up to now. And, though I hung around, I wasn’t unduly concerned for his safety – the park was invariably bristling with neighbours who knew me – and Sam, too, now – dogs being such great social lubricators.

  And today I’d use the time to call Colin and Christine, and give them a heads-up on the email I’d be sending later.

  ‘That’s a great idea,’ I said, glancing out of the kitchen window at another bright spring morning. ‘And it’s a lovely day for it too, isn’t it?’

  Sam agreed that it was, and while I cleared away the breakfast things trotted off upstairs to get his ‘kit on’ – the same ensemble of welly boots, jeans and hoodie that he’d worn every day for our outings, topped off by a green waterproof jacket that had once been my grandson Levi’s, the pocket stuffed with enough doggy-poo bags to last a month.

  And while he did so, I got my thoughts in order. I hadn’t forgotten that as well as updating social services about Sam’s small hours disclosures, I also had to inform them about my niece’s upcoming wedding, and my need for forty-eight hours of respite care. Not the best timing, given what else I had to tell them.

  But I’d at least come around to Mike’s way of thinking. Convenient as it seemed to simply take Sam along with us to the wedding, it would be a very long day for a child with such a short attention span and attendant behavioural challenges. And now we had a history of abuse in the mix, that felt even more of an issue. Given that he’d already delighted us with a couple of pretty pithy expressions, who knew what else might be in there? And might also come out, should he get stressed.

  And that he’d been sexually abused I was in no doubt. It might have been an isolated incident or a longer-term horror, but I was sure he’d been telling me the truth. Like most children on the spectrum, Sam struck me as essentially an honest person – because he simply didn’t have the capacity to tell lies. No matter how much trouble he might get into, there hadn’t been an occasion I could remember when he hadn’t told the truth, at least within a very short time of being confronted about some misdemeanour. So it was now just a matter of unravelling the things he’d told me and working out who it was that had hurt him. Last night he had mentioned a bad man, so there must be one. All we had to do now was find out who that bad man was.

  ‘Possibly a boyfriend of the mother,’ Christine had suggested when I had explained everything to her after dro
pping Sam and Flame off at the park gate. ‘Or maybe even his own father. There’s nothing on file to suggest he ever visited the home – or that he was aware of Sam’s existence, for that matter. It’s not even clear if the three kids even had the same father. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t. Or that one of the other’s fathers didn’t. You never know with these things, do you?’

  ‘That’s half the trouble,’ I said. ‘We know practically nothing about this family and their past. Are you in touch with the other siblings and their carer? I wonder if they’ve said anything similar.’

  ‘I’m not personally involved with Will and Courtney,’ Christine said, ‘but I do know their social worker and, according to her, they’re thriving in their new setting. Both in school again, both quite settled and happy. And if they’d made any disclosures about abuse she would obviously have told me.’

  This saddened me. I knew I should be happy that the two little ones were settling well into their new lives. And I was, of course. How could I not be? But at the same time I was sad that poor Sam didn’t have this. Yes, he was trundling along, and, increasingly, at least having more good days than bad days – especially now he had access to dogs – but there was no question that his autism presented challenges they didn’t have, and to have all this on top felt like another of life’s unfairnesses. Because the bottom line was another of life’s uncomfortable truths: it was highly possible that he’d been the child marked out for abuse precisely because of his communication problems. I recalled something else Christine had told me in one of her emails. That he hadn’t really started speaking properly till he was around five years old. If this was true, it was a factor that could certainly have contributed to his rages and deep unhappiness at times; it’s hard not to get angry when you feel you can’t properly articulate your needs.