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,
