Hush, Little Baby

by Shane Dunphy

  Using the shovel, she slowly and deliberately scratched out the picture of the house, erasing its image from the surface of the beach in deft, wide strokes. I watched her, feeling sick and empty.

  ‘I’d like to go back to the centre now, please,’ she said, when all that was left where the house had been was rough sand. ‘I don’t think I like the beach very much.’

  8

  Tilly sat in the back seat of my Austin. She was holding the hand of her son Johnny. If I had not insisted against it, on grounds of safety, she would have had him on her knee, with her arms wrapped around him. Johnny accepted her affection with good grace but seemed more interested in watching the cityscape drift past as we drove from the hospital to the Currans’ new trailer. He was going home for Christmas, and both his mother and I were elated. Beyond all but my naive, stubborn hopes, it seemed that Johnny would recover most, though perhaps not all, of his previous faculties.

  The little boy’s progress had been nothing short of remarkable, testimony to his amazing strength of character and the skills of the various medical staff who had worked with him during his time in hospital.

  While a bandage still adorned his head and his face still bore marks of injury, he was speaking a few words now and, with the aid of crutches, walking very short distances. The greatest miracle, though, was Johnny’s obvious intelligence and glowing personality. The nurses who came into contact with him were all affected by this little boy, still mostly silent but with the most expressive eyes any of them had ever seen, who managed to communicate so much without words. A laugh always seemed to be touching his lips, a smile never far away.

  The other children on the ward also responded to him with boundless affection. One or more could always be found at his bedside, reading a comic, playing with one of the games I had left or just talking. Johnny didn’t need to be able to speak back. He had rapidly developed a system of body language that served him perfectly well as a method of communication.

  Despite all of this, however, the reality was that Johnny was still not forming sentences, and the odd words he did attempt were indistinct. He was walking only with assistance. I continued to harbour the belief that, over time, he could make a full recovery, but the medics insisted this was unlikely. Johnny Curran was, they informed me, permanently brain damaged.

  Tilly had started to visit a little more, but it was painfully obvious that she hated spending any time in the hospital. I knew that she found the doctors deeply intimidating, and, for their part, they made absolutely no effort to speak to her in a language she could understand. On the couple of occasions they had taken time out of their busy schedules to condescend to her, I had seen her eyes glaze over as they told her about Johnny in terms I had to struggle to follow – cranial fractures, cerebral fluid, neural pathways – words from a foreign language, as far as Tilly was concerned. She was a proud enough woman to be embarrassed by this, and it only added to her reluctance to enter the hospital at all.

  When I was given the news that Johnny could go home, I drove straight to Tilly’s caravan to tell her, and to explain the parameters of Johnny’s prognosis. I was still unsure if the young woman realized just how slim Johnny’s chances were of, for example, ever playing football. My relationship with Tilly was improving daily, and, to my delight, her new home was always sparklingly clean, and her children maintained the healthy state they had been in when they left the refuge. Despite our fears, Gerry’s family had not attempted to harm her or the children, a sign that, somewhere deep inside the quiet places within, they realized that the violence committed against Johnny had been very wrong. I had found no reason to appoint a family-support worker – Tilly’s extended family had rallied round and helped her adjust to her newly single life.

  She opened the door to me with a smile. It was a miserable night, and by the river, where her trailer still sat like a grounded space capsule, the wind howled, as if in protest. I was glad to climb up the steps into the warmth.

  The children all shouted greetings to me, then continued watching a video of a wedding on the T V, commenting on this person’s clothes and that person’s hairstyle.

  ‘My cousin Josie,’ Tilly explained, as she put on the kettle. ‘She got married to one of the Staple Street Connors.’

  I nodded, and unwound my scarf. Tilly had changed since she had been out of the refuge. The harried, bitter woman I had met in the halting site was gone. In her place was a capable, strong-minded mother, much more at peace with herself, and therefore with others. She seemed less tired, more confident and better able to express what she wanted from life. I felt that she found dealing with me far less wearing than she had at first. I knew part of that was my coming through for her with the trailer, but it was also her own growing sense of self. Perhaps I too was being more open with her, and less judgemental. I am always conscious that, no matter how hard we try, prejudices can, and do, creep in.

  ‘I have good news, Tilly,’ I said.

  ‘You take your tea black, don’t you?’ Tilly asked, as she took mugs from a cupboard.

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  Travellers have a way of making tea that differs from the usual, recommended procedure. They put water, teabags, milk and sugar into the kettle, and boil the whole concoction together. The resultant liquor, a dark brown, thick mixture, is then put into the teapot and served. I admit that I have sat and nursed cups of this foul stuff many times, but, because even having it in my hand makes me feel ill, I eventually had to tell Tilly I could not stomach it, and ask her to stick a teabag in a mug for me and pour over boiling water. To my relief, she was not in the least bit offended – she in fact seemed to find my tea-drinking preference quite amusing, smiling at me as if to say: ‘You settled folk and your eccentricities.’

  ‘Johnny can come home, Tilly,’ I said when we were both seated with our drinks. ‘The ward sister told me this evening.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Tilly said, beaming. ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Listen, there’s something we have to talk about. You know he’s not fully better yet, don’t you?’

  Tilly sipped her tea and looked out the window, which revealed an inky blackness. From where the caravan was parked, we could hear, in the distance, the roaring of machinery from the docks. It created a kind of ambient background noise, which was not, actually, unpleasant. ‘I know he’s not able to walk right, if that’s what you mean,’ Tilly said at last.

  ‘He’s barely talking either. He might not ever. Therapists … doctors are working with him every day, but he’s still making very slow progress. He might have to go back into hospital for a bit after Christmas. And he’ll probably need regular checkups, maybe for the rest of his life.’

  ‘I know,’ Tilly said. ‘I know what you’re trying to tell me, Shane.’

  ‘Do you, Tilly? Do you really?’

  ‘My Johnny is goin’ to be special. A special child.’

  I smiled at her, and suddenly felt like crying. It was a cliché, but it was probably the best way to express who Johnny was.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and my voice sounded hoarse. ‘He is special.’

  That had been the previous day. Tilly’s brother Tom met us at the door of the trailer, and Johnny’s brothers and sisters were gathered in a guard of honour outside, despite the terrible weather. Johnny became visibly more excited as I parked, and refused to accept help from either me or his mother as he struggled out of the low seat and on to the frost-hardened ground. There was silence from the gathered crowd as he tottered uncertainly, balancing his weight between the crutches and his spindly little legs, and then awkwardly climbed the steps into his home. At the top, he turned, a huge, proud grin on his face. Tom led a cheer, and Johnny revelled in the applause. Becky, his younger sister, overcome with excitement, almost undid all her brother’s hard work by knocking him over with a hug.

  ‘All he needs is love, Shane,’ Tilly said, standing beside me.

  ‘I wish that were true,’ I said, unable to keep the
pain from my voice.

  ‘I know what you’ve been doing for him,’ Tilly went on. ‘The nurses have told me you’ve been in there day and night, sitting with him, talking to him. Well, I can take over now.’

  ‘Johnny is going to need a lot of time, and a lot of patience,’ I said. ‘He might never be able to walk without crutches. And his speech might not come back either.’

  ‘But then, it might,’ Tilly said. ‘And y’know, it doesn’t matter. He’ll be home. If he needs a little more love than the others, well, we’ve all got plenty of that to spare. Let’s just be thankful he’s back with his family. It’s goin’ to be baby Jesus’s birthday. Who knows what might happen?’

  Those words would return to haunt me, but that evening we laughed and looked forward to the oncoming season, and life seemed rich and full of hope.

  I was in the office, just after lunch the following day, catching up on paperwork when a call came from Roberta Plummer.

  ‘Clive’s had an episode.’

  I paused in pushing a piece of paper into a plastic folder, the phone cradled between my chin and shoulder. ‘What kind of episode?’

  A pause, then: ‘He attacked a nurse and almost killed her. He … he tried to rip her throat out. Scratched her with his nails. Broke her arm. They said he almost tore her cheek off with his teeth.’

  I was horrified. How could this have happened? He had been so calm when I’d spoken to him last. The doctors had been discussing sending him home for a couple of days.

  ‘I suppose that qualifies as an episode. What brought it on?’

  She was crying now, barely able to speak. ‘I don’t know. Jesus, Shane, he’d come on so well. I thought he’d be discharged soon.’

  I sighed and lit a cigarette. The window of the office I shared with a behaviour-management expert called Loretta looked out on an overgrown garden that, at Ben’s insistence, had been allowed to run wild. It seemed to mirror my mental state as I looked at it now, the trees and shrubs thrashing in the wind. ‘Me too. Look, I’ll go over and see what we can do, okay?’

  This was met with even greater sobbing. ‘Okay. Thank you. I’m sorry to ring you in this state.’

  ‘I’ll call soon, Roberta.’

  Clive had been placed in a private room, where, to restrain him, he had been fastened to the bed with leather straps. Dr Fleming had informed me that the boy had been sedated, but the drugs seemed to have had little effect: Clive was fully conscious and raving when we entered. He was struggling with all his might against the shackles and screaming a hoarse, painful cry. On seeing me, he fell silent for a moment, peering through lidded eyes.

  I had seen Clive two days before, but the intervening time had much altered him. He looked, to be honest, as if he had received a severe beating. One of his eyes was swollen shut, a long gash ran down his left cheek, and his lips were cracked and damaged. I noticed that two of his front teeth had been knocked out. I looked at Dr Fleming. No one had told me to expect this, and I was shocked and angry.

  ‘You led them to me,’ Clive said suddenly, glowering at me from the bed. ‘You tricked me into being your friend, and then you brought them here.’

  ‘Who, Clive?’

  I moved to go over to him, but the doctor held me back. ‘It’ll only make him worse, and he might hurt you. He’s deeply distressed and dangerously delusional.’

  ‘The monsters,’ Clive said, and then laughed maniacally. ‘One of them came, oh yes, he came to me. They’ll have me back, he said. They will come and take me to them and that’ll be the end of me.’

  ‘No one is taking you anywhere, Clive. Listen to me.’ I broke away from Fleming and grabbed the boy’s arm tightly. He thrashed even more wildly to get at me, but the straps were too strong. ‘I am your friend. I haven’t spoken about you to anyone but Roberta. I would never knowingly allow anyone to hurt you. You have to believe me.’

  He leaned forward as far as he could, craning his neck, and hissed in a cracked whisper through his ravaged teeth: ‘They dress as men of the cloth, but they are not men, Shane. They walk among mortals, and they prey on the unwitting. You cannot help me …’

  His voice trailed off, and he began to bang his head back against the bed. The mattress and pillow softened the blows, but the force with which he lashed himself got more and more aggressive. I tried to stop him, to hold him down, but he bit me as soon as I got close enough, my thick jacket being the only thing that saved me. I drew back, and saw that he was crying now uncontrollably.

  Dr Fleming already had a syringe out, filling it from a phial of clear fluid. ‘Hold his arm still,’ he said, and moments later Clive was unconscious.

  I sank to the floor, my head in my hands. ‘Jesus Christ, Doctor. What the fuck happened? How did he get into that condition?’

  ‘He … he put up quite a struggle, I believe.’

  ‘I’ve restrained kids who put up quite a struggle. None of them ended up looking like that.’

  ‘The nurse he attacked … he almost killed her. She must have fought back.’

  ‘No female nurse did that,’ I said, forgetting, in my anger, that an angry and threatened woman can be just as dangerous as a man.

  ‘I don’t know! He was in that condition when I arrived on the ward. He might have done it to himself, God knows he has in the past.’

  I stood up feeling exhausted and impotently angry. It was possible Clive’s wounds were self-inflicted, but I had a notion that some of the staff who had come to the rescue of his unfortunate victim may have got a shade overzealous. I’d seen such things on rare occasions in the past. Dr Fleming seemed as upset as I was at what had happened, though, so I took a deep breath and ran my hands through my hair.

  ‘I’m going to file a complaint, Doctor, just to let you know. Come on, let’s get a cup of coffee, and you can tell me just how this whole shitty mess happened.’

  The canteen in St Vitus’s looked just like one of the wards, except with wooden tables and plastic chairs instead of beds. The coffee was weak, and the only thing they had to eat were Marietta biscuits. There was an old lady, the cleaner I’d seen several times, drinking tea and smoking at the other end of the room. She cast a hurried glance at Fleming and me now and again. I nodded at her, and she quickly looked away. I lit a cigarette and took a long pull.

  ‘Would you mind if I have one of those?’ Dr Fleming asked.

  I pushed the box over, and he lit one with a shaking hand.

  ‘So what happened?’ I asked when we had smoked in silence for several minutes.

  ‘The simple answer is that I don’t really know,’ Dr Fleming answered. ‘I’d been very pleased with Clive’s progress. Taking him out birdwatching was inspired – we’ve actually started a nature-walk programme with some of the acute patients, and it’s working very well with a lot of them too. We’d lowered Clive’s medication, and I had planned to begin gradually weaning him off it altogether. Then … this. I’m at something of a loss, really.’

  ‘Where was he when the episode occurred?’

  ‘On the OT ward – Occupational Therapy.’

  ‘The games room.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Was he with any other patients? Was this nurse – Yvette, didn’t you call her – talking to him? Had he been agitated earlier in the day?’

  ‘I’m not sure who was around him earlier, but, from what I’ve been told, Clive was sitting alone when Yvette went up to him just to check if he was all right. He responded by grabbing her and, well, you know the rest.’

  ‘Was there any other nurse in the room at the time?’

  ‘Yes, Claudia Harris was there too.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Still on the OT ward, as far as I know.’

  I stood up, stubbing out my cigarette. ‘I’ll go and have a chat with her.’

  Dr Fleming nodded. ‘You know the way.’

  Claudia Harris, dressed in plain clothes, was seated at a desk at the top of the Occupational Therapy room, which conta
ined only a smattering of patients, mostly seated on their own, reading magazines. Claudia was writing an incident report. She was around five foot one or two, and muscularly built, with shoulder-length brown hair.

  ‘Yeah, I was here,’ she said. ‘If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: kids of that age should not be in this place. Is it any wonder he snapped? Poor Yvette. She’s going to be scarred, God love her.’

  ‘Is that how it happened? He just lost his head with no warning whatsoever?’

  ‘I’m telling you. He’d been in great form when he came down. I played Snap with him, and then he was reading one of those bird books of his, and going through some of the nature magazines we’ve ordered in for him – he loves those – oh, and he had a visitor.’

  ‘A visitor? Who?’

  ‘I didn’t know him, now. Some priest –’

  ‘The chaplain?’

  ‘No, not Father Aodhán; I’d never seen this guy before. He was with Clive for twenty minutes or so, then he was gone. Never said goodbye.’

  ‘And you didn’t catch his name?’

  ‘No, I just called him “Father”, as you do.’

  ‘Has he been in to see Clive before, do you know?’

  ‘You’d have to check with the weekend staff, but he certainly hasn’t been in while I’ve been on shift.’