Hush, Little Baby

by Shane Dunphy

  Dorothy Carey watched uncertainly as I pushed back all the toys to clear a space in the centre of the playroom, and then unrolled soft exercise mats to create a wide, cushioned area. I was dressed in my workout gear: a large, loose-fitting T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers, and my hair was tied back in a pony-tail.

  ‘Explain this to me one more time,’ Dorothy said.

  I stood up, brushing myself down. The room was long and wide, and Katie and I would have plenty of space now.

  ‘Katie spends as much time being restrained during our play sessions as she does playing, agreed?’

  Dorothy shrugged. ‘I would have said she spends more time being restrained than she does doing anything.’

  ‘Let’s not split hairs. Have you ever heard of “The Rumble in the Jungle”?’

  Dorothy shook her head. ‘Is it a song?’

  I paused. ‘Now that you mention it, I think Creedence Clearwater Revival did have a song with a similar name … but that’s not what I’m talking about. Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fought each other for the heavyweight title in Zaire in 1974, and the promoters called it “The Rumble in the Jungle”.’

  ‘Boxing? You’re telling me about boxing now? Men. I don’t understand ye at all.’

  ‘Bear with me. Ali knew that Foreman was stronger than he was, and that, in an open, face-to-face bout, he couldn’t win. So he had to develop a strategy. He called it “rope-a-dope”. In each round, he leaned back against the ropes and let Foreman hit him. In fact, he taunted him, told him he boxed like a girl, encouraged old George to punch harder and faster.’

  ‘I still don’t follow.’

  ‘Each round, Foreman got more and more tired. In the end, Ali started to fight back, and when he did, George was so exhausted he had nothing left. He was beaten by knockout.’

  ‘And your point is …’

  ‘I’m getting nowhere with Katie because, more often than not, I come in here and she attacks me. I’ve tried reasoning with her, I’ve tried bribing her, I’ve tried ignoring her. Makes no difference. So that leaves us with one option. If she wants to fight, we’ll fight.’

  Dorothy’s mouth dropped open. ‘You have got to be joking.’

  ‘Nope. I’m not going to exactly restrain her. I’m just not going to let her hurt me. There’s going to be a lot of thrashing about, and probably a lot of sweating and swearing. At the end of the day, she’s a fourteen-year-old girl. I know she’s deeply disturbed, but I think I can just about handle her. Anyway, you’ll be watching in the observation room, so if I do get into trouble, you can send reinforcements.’

  ‘And what do you hope to achieve?’

  ‘When she finally realizes that she can’t scare me off, that I’m perfectly happy to let her vent, I’m betting she stops trying, and we can get on with the play.’

  ‘You’re going to let her wear herself out, basically.’

  ‘Yep.’

  Dorothy shook her head. ‘This I have to see,’ she said, and went to get Katie.

  I am not ashamed to admit that Katie Rhodes, that diminutive fourteen-year-old whom I was convinced I could ‘handle’, pushed me to the limit of my endurance over the next three sessions. I decided I would meet her daily until she ran out of steam and understood that I was not a threat and would, regardless of provocation, never hurt her.

  As I had discovered at our previous meeting, Katie was not slow on the uptake. She understood my intent as soon as she saw the mats and the cleared space in the playroom, and it enraged her beyond anything I might have expected.

  She stood in the doorway, looking at me and the proposed battleground, aghast. ‘You stupid cocksucker,’ she hissed. ‘I’ll put your sorry, cuntin’ arse in the fucking hospital.’

  With a roar, her hands like claws, she rushed me.

  I have little recollection of what followed. I seem to recall a sense of surprise at how strong she actually was, and having to constantly use my greater weight to gain an advantage. I have a memory of her struggling and wriggling like an eel. I remember being terrified of hurting her, and calling on all the training I had in restraint to hold her without doing harm. Her unnatural speed is also emblazoned upon my memory. Within the first three minutes she had raked me across the forehead with her nails, leaving four deep gashes, and I realized there and then that I might have bitten off much more than I could chew.

  The real problem was that, once I had committed to this course of physical therapy – because that is inherently what it was – I had no choice but to continue until it reached its conclusion. I was acutely aware that, if Katie got the better of me and sensed that I was weakening, then our relationship would be damaged beyond repair. She had to see that I was the one in control, and that I was not only able to withstand her rage but could keep her from harming herself. While she was spiralling into chaos, I would maintain order and help her do the same. A large part of this, as odd as it may seem, was about making her feel safe with me.

  That first day it took an hour and fifteen minutes for her to stop struggling. By the end of this period I was drenched in sweat and aching in every muscle. Katie wasn’t much better. Her black hair hung in strands, and she breathed in ragged gasps. When I was sure she was spent, I picked her up and carried her to a beanbag, where I left her lying, inert, then went to clean out my wounds.

  Dorothy was waiting for me down the corridor, the first-aid box in her hand. ‘Jesus, Shane. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’ve felt better, to be honest.’

  The following day I woke up stiff and aching, with the overwhelming urge to stay in bed and ring into work sick. I spent almost an hour in the shower, with the temperature as high as I could stand it. Then I made coffee and a light breakfast, smoked three cigarettes and finally felt as if I might actually be able to get through another eighteen rounds. Just.

  Katie entered that day without a word. She circled the room before leading her attack with an attempted kick to my groin, followed by a head butt from which I could barely protect myself. It took an hour to wear her out, and I almost didn’t make it. There was a point when she elbowed me in the throat with such force I almost lost my grip and couldn’t breathe for close to thirty seconds.

  The most significant thing about this second day was that she was silent throughout. The previous session had been punctuated by Katie’s now customary flow of colourfully arranged obscenity. This day, however, she fought without a word, her whole being focused on her fury, her drive to hurt.

  Day three ended, thankfully, after forty minutes. I sensed a renewed desperation in the girl’s attacks, a real draining of her available energy resources. Panic was setting in. No one else had endured her venom like this, and she wasn’t sure how to react. So she fell back on even greater cruelty. She tried to bite me, which she had not done before, and in the end broke away and spent two whole minutes casting about the room for a weapon. She settled on throwing toy cars at me, before collapsing in tears in a heap on the floor. I fell to my knees on the mats, close to breaking point myself, and watched her sobbing silently. This was what I had been waiting for. The rage was gone. Only sadness remained.

  It took two further days of Katie ignoring me completely for her to begin to play again. I expected this – she, understandably, felt she had lost face. Katie’s persona, when she was with me, was of the tough, unrelenting warrior. I had shown her that I was not afraid of her, that I could, repeatedly, take all she could dish out and would keep coming back for more. Sitting in silence in the playroom, after three days of unremitting rage, was actually quite pleasant. I did not want to force the issue. She had to work it out for herself.

  Then, one morning, I arrived to be told she was already in the playroom and that I’d better hurry.

  ‘She said to tell you she’s waiting and you’d better move your arse or you’ll miss the show,’ Dorothy informed me. ‘Looks like she might be coming around.’

  ‘Don’t count your chickens,’ I said, but ran up the stairs.


  I heard her before I even got to the door. It was the strange little game she had played before, about Ken and Barbie getting drunk and abandoning their child. In the days that followed, this was all she played. It didn’t matter what toys or equipment I brought in or suggested, it was always the same sad psycho-drama. Occasionally there would be a variation, in which the police arrived to the house unbidden and arrested the two drunken dolls, but even in this version the baby was left behind when the parents were sent to prison. Not even the gardaí cared about that lonely, plastic baby.

  A week of this made me realize that a change of scenery might be called for. I had been toying with the idea of taking Katie out of the house anyway but wanted to ensure it was safe to do so. Seven days without an outburst (and it wasn’t just me – the staff had reported a cessation of all but the most half-hearted violence) assured me that things were as safe as they were likely to get. I discussed my plans with Dorothy, who approved them.

  So it was that, despite the freezing weather and occasional flurries of snow, Katie and I arrived at the beach one Monday morning. I wanted to try something new with her, a technique called ‘sand-and-water’ play, a method developed by the visionary psychologist Carl Jung. Jung is believed by many to be part of the lunatic fringe of childcare theorists. He is the person who came up with the idea of the Collective Unconscious (the concept that we are all psychically linked), wrote his doctoral thesis on spirit mediums (he actually took some of them perfectly seriously) and believed he had a prophetic dream warning him of the outbreak of the First World War. Like his friend and mentor, Sigmund Freud, he was a womanizer and wrote books on everything from personality types to Tarot cards and the I Ching.

  My interest in him, however, stemmed from his work with the deeply traumatized. Jung was fascinated by the plight of children who had been so abused as to effectively shut down – children who were elective mutes (kids who could speak but chose not to), who were catatonic (in a kind of waking coma) or who had become desensitized to pain and other physical stimuli (had just stopped feeling). To get through to such children, Jung developed a series of ways of working based on their senses: touch, taste, sound and smell. He used natural media, such as sand, water and clay, believing that these are the basic materials of life. Jung rationalized that catastrophic experiences can cause children to dissociate, to shut themselves off from all feeling and sensation. A child who has regularly been beaten, for example, ceases to allow themselves to sense pain, while someone who has been rejected by a loved one will not permit friendships or close relationships to develop, purposely sabotaging such interactions. Yet virtually everyone can identify the feelings you experience on plunging your foot into a pool of freezing water. The words ‘wet’ and ‘cold’ are perfectly apt descriptions. Such physical experiences are then used to begin a process of reconnecting the person with their more elusive emotions.

  I have used this technique several times with really disturbed children and am always bowled over by the rapid responses I experience from the kids. I don’t know why such a simple play exercise is so powerful – but it is.

  I brought Katie to the beach a little after ten in the morning. I decided to come early, so that the only people about would be the usual assortment of hard-core joggers and dog-walkers. If Katie did open up or become upset, I wanted there to be as few witnesses as possible.

  The child was uncharacteristically quiet as we walked along the sand. It was almost as if she knew something serious was afoot. I was looking for something specific, and, after we had gone around 500 yards, I found it: a rock pool, right on the water line, so that there was wet sand on one side and dry on the other. All about were shells, stones, bits of seaweed and driftwood. Katie was carrying a bucket and spade we’d bought at a little shop on the waterfront.

  ‘What’re we gonna do here?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s up to you,’ I said. ‘I thought this might make a nice change from the playroom in the house. I know you haven’t been out in a little while, and I reckoned the open space would be good for you. It’s cold, but it’s pleasant. I like to come here and walk and think sometimes. There’s a kind of peace to the place, isn’t there?’

  But Katie wasn’t listening. She was on her knees, in the dry sand by the pool, the plastic spade in her hands, digging a shallow hole. I squatted a little away from her and lit a cigarette.

  At first, Katie dug delicately: little loose shovelfuls of sand were tossed into a pile by her side. But, as she continued, the action adopted a frenetic energy. Deeper and deeper she went, until she had made a trough around three feet deep. For a moment she stopped, sliding on her knees into the hole. Then, grunting with the exertion, she continued. The sand was cold and hard, damp and difficult to cut through, but she worked on regardless.

  I badly wanted to intervene but knew from experience that to do so would only be detrimental. Katie was acting out her own private game here, and I was not part of it. We had, painfully and haltingly, built up a kind of trust over the past week, and I did not want to do anything to break that. I had told Katie that her play was her own, and that I could get involved only at her invitation. She had not, as yet, asked me to join in. She seemed hyper-aware that I was watching, and her ‘Ken and Barbie’ games were certainly performances for my benefit, but she had never asked me what I thought of them, or what they might mean. She had come to accept my presence but seemed not to quite know what to make of me.

  Katie’s excavation was now at least four feet deep, and as long as she was. All of a sudden, I realized what she was doing. Finally, her work finished, she lay down in the freshly dug grave.

  I stayed where I was, feeling the wind push at my back, smelling and tasting the salt spray beneath the tobacco as I smoked. For several minutes, she lay in the hole in silence, then I heard her call me: ‘Shane.’

  ‘Yes, Katie.’

  She was lying flat on her back, her dark hair spread about her, her hands crossed over her flat chest. I had never looked at her and seen vulnerability before, but, just then, I did. My heart went out to her. ‘Bury me,’ she said.

  I took the spade and began to fill in the sand, until all but her face was covered, to a thickness of maybe five inches. She closed her eyes while I worked, seemingly relaxed, enjoying the feeling.

  ‘There you go,’ I said, after I had patted down the sand.

  ‘You’re not finished,’ she said. ‘I want you to bury me. All of me. Fill in the fuckin’ hole.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Katie. You’ll suffocate.’

  ‘I don’t care! Bury me, you fucker. You said you’d do whatever I asked. I want you to bury me and leave me here.’

  ‘I also said that I wouldn’t let you hurt me or yourself. Filling in this hole because you asked me to would be the same as letting you hurt yourself.’

  She looked up at me from the deathbed she had made, and I saw the anger drain from her as quickly as it had appeared. ‘Don’t you see, Shane? I want to die. I don’t like being what I am any more. I’m too tired.’

  ‘Let me help you, then. Together we can work something out.’

  Tears dribbled out of the corners of her eyes and ran into the sand. Her hand suddenly appeared from where I had covered it. I took it and pulled her out. She cursorily brushed herself down but most of the stuff, which was pretty wet, remained stuck to her clothes. Picking up a stick, she walked a few yards below the water line and began to draw something. I followed, and saw that she was sketching the shape of a simple house.

  She hunted about until she’d found a scallop shell and placed it in one of the rooms she had outlined in the ground floor of the structure. ‘This is Katie,’ she said. ‘Katie lives in this house with her mammy and daddy. Katie is three years old. This is the kitchen. Katie would sit here sometimes, when Mammy and Daddy were so drunk they fell asleep. She would stay there, because there was bread and milk, and her daddy would usually have passed out in the living room, so she was scared to go in there. She felt alone and a
fraid, and wished her mammy would wake up and come and talk to her. Even though her mammy was not always nice to her, Katie still loved her.’

  She moved the shell to an upstairs room. ‘This is Katie’s room.’ She took a black stone from the rock pool and placed it beside the shell. ‘This is Katie’s mammy. She used to come to Katie’s room, sometimes, after Katie was asleep. “Get up,” she’d say. “Come downstairs and help me with the cleaning,” and Katie would have to get up and do housework – washing the dishes or sweeping the floor. Mammy’d be drunk, and when Katie couldn’t work fast enough, or when she dropped a plate because she was so tired, Mammy’d sometimes beat Katie until Katie was too sore and scared to go back asleep.’

  She moved the shell to the other upstairs room and took a piece of dried seaweed from the sand, placing it in the room also. ‘This is Katie’s daddy, and this is Katie’s parents’ room. When Katie’s mammy was at work, Daddy would take Katie up to his bed and make her do things to him. Sex things. If she didn’t do them, he’d hit her until she did. Sometimes the things he forced her to do would make her cry, but he didn’t care. Once, he shoved his thing into her, and she thought she would die, it hurt her so much. She screamed and screamed, and he stopped, but he was mad, and even though she begged him not to, he put it in her mouth instead and made her do him like that.’

  The shell was moved again, this time to the remaining downstairs room. A little piece of wood was placed beside it, and a crab claw. ‘This is the living room, and this is Una and Jumbo. Una was Daddy’s friend, and she came to babysit Katie when Mammy and Daddy went out to the pub. Katie thought Una was really nice. She let her stay up late, and they sometimes watched scary movies together, and when Katie got afraid, Una would hold her real tight. Una always brought sweets and crisps and fizzy drinks with her, and Katie looked forward to her mammy and daddy going out, ’cause she liked being with Una so much. One night, Katie told Una what her daddy had been doing, and Una listened, and told Katie she believed her, and that she’d help. Katie was so happy. She dreamed about Una coming and taking her away, and being her new mammy. Only that didn’t happen. Katie’s daddy kept on doing bad things. Her mammy still beat her, and the next time Una came to babysit, she brought her boyfriend, Jumbo. Jumbo seemed nice too, but he wasn’t. He made Una put Katie to bed early, and in the night he came into her room and did worse things than her daddy had ever done. Katie was bleeding after he was finished, and he gave her things to put into her knickers to stop the blood – sanitary towels, Katie knows now. She was too little to know what they were then. After that, he always came when Una was babysitting, and in the end Una used to come with him to Katie’s room and they both did horrible sex things to Katie.’