Little Boy Lost

by Shane Dunphy

  ‘No? He seems a very gentle good-natured sort of chap,’ I said.

  ‘You should have seen him three years ago. He was almost unmanageable.’

  ‘What’s his… um… condition?’ I asked.

  ‘His what?’

  ‘Why is he intellectually disabled?’

  ‘Oh, my apologies. Yes, well it’s brain damage, you see. Our Dominic has quite severe epilepsy. It’s under control now, but it took the medics a long time to get the drugs properly balanced to keep the seizures at bay. When that young man was six, he had a grand mal seizure which lasted for almost half an hour. The strain of it scrambled his mental functioning. He never properly recovered.’

  Epilepsy is a fairly common neurological disorder characterized by recurring unprovoked seizures, which are caused by irregular neuronal activity. In other words, the epileptic experiences surges of electricity along the wiring in the brain, which either bring on convulsions or alternatively cause the system to shut down completely. Seizures are generally broken down into petit and grand mal (directly translated this means ‘little’ and ‘big sickness’). Petit mal seizures are short, and simply take the form of the individual passing out for a few moments. Grand mal seizures involve passing out as well, but also the rapid tensing and relaxing of the muscles, which creates the stereotypical shaking and trembling that most people associate with epilepsy. Such seizures usually do not last for more than five minutes.

  ‘Half an hour? He’s lucky to be alive at all,’ I said.

  ‘If he gets them now, poor chap, they’re generally very brief petits. When I met him first, though, he was still having grand mals, and he would get very sick with them. So here we had a young man – he was thirteen at that time – who could not understand why these things were happening, why he was feeling so wretched. He was a big bloke even then, and if anyone dared to say “no”’ to him, he’d rear up with those fists of his and, let me tell you, you’d want to get out of the way fairly fast. He had his mum and dad terrorized, and no school would touch him.’

  ‘That face couldn’t have helped things. He looks like he was carved by Michelangelo.’

  ‘Well, quite. He was so used to getting his own way, by hook or by crook, that he just believed the world owed him a living, and he would plough through anyone or anything that got in his way.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked, genuinely interested. I couldn’t even begin to think how I would handle a challenge like that.

  ‘I started saying no, and I meant it.’

  ‘He didn’t try to dissuade you?’

  ‘I am not easily dissuaded. You have to remember, this was a young man who did not know how to stop the cycle of behaviour he was locked into. He would come in here, and within five minutes there would have been a blow-up, and he’d be lashing out, in tears… I’m not a big believer in the timeout system, but there was nothing else to be done. Could you imagine him taking a swing at Ricki, there, or little Elaine?’ He motioned at a small, dark-haired girl with Down’s Syndrome who was sitting opposite me. ‘We had to isolate him until he calmed down, which he hated.’

  ‘And did he understand that he had to get himself under control before he rejoined you all?’

  ‘Remarkably quickly. Don’t misunderstand me, he fought it, but Dominic is a classic example of someone who wanted to be helped. He needed the control we placed on him, and the structure, and the guidance. He has thrived here. And let me assure you, he is a surprising person. There are depths to him that I’m still discovering. And by showing him how to be happy, we have saved a family. His parents were on the verge of having him institutionalized – they had no choice.’

  ‘And Ricki?’

  ‘Ricki was institutionalized for a long time. If you look at her file, she is classified as a “dullard”, which is a term that has not been written on an official document for a very long time.’

  ‘What age is she?’

  ‘Almost fifty. Her mother had her outside wedlock, a big enough scandal at that time, but to have a child with a series of congenital abnormalities to boot – the family never took her home from the hospital.’

  ‘So how did she end up here?’

  ‘I came across Ricki in an institution. Her real name is Ricardo, after some daft saint or other. She had completely sunk into herself. She was miserable, uncommunicative, probably ready to die. I don’t doubt that she would have done, if I’d left her there.’

  ‘What, were you visiting on the look-out for clients or something?’

  Tristan laughed.

  ‘Dear me, no. Do you recall I told you that I volunteered in a centre attached to a church? Well, the priest who ran that setting was friends with one of the nuns who looked after Ricki. She told him how worried she was about this little creature who was pining away in her asylum. The priest asked me to see if I could help.’

  I sipped some coffee.

  ‘And does she still live there?’

  ‘I arranged for her to be moved to a community house. It was one of the first things I did. As you saw today, Ricki was chosen by the group to invite you to join us. She is caring, sensitive, really quite bright in many ways. In the institution, she spent her days doing virtually nothing. She rarely spoke to anyone from one day to the next; she would sit about watching daytime television, drinking endless cups of tea… is it any wonder she was about to give up the ghost?’

  ‘And the nuns didn’t mind you taking her away?’

  ‘They weren’t bad people, Shane. They were just… misguided, I suppose.’

  I nodded. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere like this before.’

  ‘Drumlin is a community,’ Tristan said. ‘Here there is no such thing as disability. There are no allowances made. I expect all our young people to strive to be the best they possibly can be, to take responsibility for their own actions and the consequences of them. If Drumlin is to work, we all have to believe in it. Have you noticed we all sit round the table and eat together? I’ve worked in places where the “disabled” trainees sat at one table, and the “staff”’ – he made inverted commas in the air with his fingers – ‘sat at another. That always struck me as a kind of apartheid. I won’t have it here.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘I’ve had staff ask me when they get their lunch break. It can be a real stumbling block for some people. As far as I am concerned, the experience of eating together, sharing that essential human experience, is one of the most profound things anyone can do. Why would I want to deny anyone that?’

  As we had been speaking, I noticed that each wall had a series of colourful pictures placed near the ceiling.

  ‘What are those?’ I asked.

  ‘That, Shane, is our timetable. I think it’s important that everyone here knows what’s coming up and when. So craft is denoted by a hammer, or a pair of knitting needles. Story time by a book. Drama by the comedy/tragedy masks.’

  ‘How do they know which day it is?’

  ‘Do you see the green arrow over the door?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘That’s the beginning. So the first sequence of images is Monday, and so on.’

  I nodded. ‘Very clever.’

  ‘Not really. But it works. Everyone can look up, at any time, and see what’ll be happening in an hour’s time, or in two days’ time, for that matter. It adds a level of security.’

  ‘So ten thirty on Wednesday, is that always music time?’

  Tristan laughed. ‘No. As you can see, we usually have art at that time. But then life can sometimes reach in and throw the best-made plans awry. Everyone here knows that we will sometimes step out of the programme. But I always give advance warning, and it’s always something worth doing.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Who knows, maybe you’ll come back, and we can make music a more regular fixture.’

  I smiled at that, and said nothing. But it set me thinking.

  PART 2

  Terms and Conditions Apply

 
There was a naughty boy,

  And a naughty boy was he,

  He ran away to Scotland

  The people for to see –

  There he found

  That the ground

  Was as hard,

  That a yard

  Was as long,

  That a song

  Was as merry,

  That a cherry

  Was as red –

  That lead

  Was as weighty,

  That fourscore

  Was as eighty,

  That a door

  Was as wooden

  As in England –

  So he stood in his shoes

  And he wonder’d,

  He wonder’d,

  He stood in his shoes

  And he wonder’d.

  From ‘A Song About Myself’

  by John Keats

  7

  Two weeks later, almost to the day, I returned from a morning jog to find Tristan Fowler parked outside my house in a ram-shackle wood-panelled Citroën that was probably older than my Austin Allegro. He got out and waited as he saw me coming up the road.

  ‘I hoped I’d catch you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a proposition.’

  ‘Come on in,’ I said, opening the gate (it had been hanging off when I arrived, but I had fixed it and given it a fresh lick of paint) and standing back for him to go on up the short path.

  Once inside, I brought my guest into the tiny living-room area of the cottage, and put the kettle on for coffee. I poured myself an orange juice, and then sat down opposite Tristan.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘You haven’t exactly been honest with me, Shane,’ Tristan said.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Some of the things you said when you were at the centre struck me as odd, and I thought I might do a little checking up on you.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I just had a feeling about you,’ Tristan said, enigmatically. ‘Well, I had an interesting conversation with William, Annie’s father. He told me you dropped her home, that evening you met her, and that you had Douglas Bellingham from the Ragged Fox pub in the car with you. Douglas, when I spoke to him, informed me that you had mentioned having done what he called “social welfare” work. When I dug a little deeper, I discovered that you’ve got quite a job history. Up until recently, you worked for Ben Tyrrell.’

  ‘You know Ben?’

  ‘I worked with him across the water.’

  My old boss had worked extensively in the UK, and was something of a legend in social-care circles.

  ‘Well, I admire your determination, I think,’ I said. ‘But what has any of this got to do with the price of beans? Yes, I worked with Ben. Yes, I have a bit of experience of social-care work. I didn’t tell you because… well, I suppose because I don’t do that any more.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ Tristan asked, sounding genuinely puzzled. ‘Ben tells me you have a real talent for it.’

  ‘Well, Tristan, there are a few cases I could mention that would suggest otherwise.’

  ‘Oh come on, Shane. That’s just daft. There are always cases that don’t work out; it’s the nature of the job. You were working at the very sharp end of child protection for many years. If you hadn’t lost now and again, I’d think you were being dishonest.’

  ‘Yeah, well I don’t think I want to have that sort of experience any more,’ I said. ‘I like it here. I like the peace and the quiet and the simplicity. I’ve thought about things a good deal since coming out here, and I believe very firmly that I made the best decision for everyone concerned when I left the Dunleavy Trust. I was totally burnt out, and I’m in no way convinced that I was thinking straight.’

  ‘Yes, but that was almost a year ago, now.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Sure. I’ve been recharging my batteries. But I’m not ready to go back. I deserve the break.’

  I got up and made a pot of coffee. When I came back, Tristan was flipping through my CDs. ‘You have eclectic tastes,’ he said.

  ‘A man for all seasons,’ I said. ‘So is that all you’ve come for? To tell me you’ve found me out?’

  ‘No,’ Tristan said. ‘I would like you to come and work for me.’

  I sighed deeply and poured us both some coffee. ‘Have you not listened to a single word I said, Tristan?’

  ‘I am not asking you to get involved with child protection. What we do at Drumlin is very different. The vast majority of our clients have been through their tough times and are reasonably happy and well adjusted. What we’re about is bringing them to a place of independence, or as much as they can cope with.’

  ‘I appreciate the offer, Tristan, I really do, but I am just not interested,’ I said as firmly as I could without raising my voice. ‘I’ve got other things to focus on now. For instance, I need to spend some time thinking about what I really want to do with the rest of my life, and what motivations have driven me to make the choices I’ve made up to this point.’

  ‘So you’re going through a selfish phase?’ Tristan said.

  ‘You could say that,’ I returned, more than a little offended (probably because he was perfectly correct), ‘but then Ben Tyrrell always told me that care workers must use their capacity to form relationships as the main tool of their trade. That means you are required to look after your emotional well-being – keep it serviced and maintained just like any piece of equipment you’d use for any other job. At the moment, my emotional well-being is in for a service.’

  ‘Touché,’ Tristan said, bowing ever so slightly.

  ‘Look, I’m genuinely flattered,’ I said, more gently, ‘but you’ve got to understand, I just don’t have any hunger for the job any more. Playing music suits me. I’m my own boss, there’s no real demands placed on me, beyond being asked to play “The Fields of Athenry” every night, which I can just about cope with – this semi-retirement is for the best. You’ll have to trust me on that.’

  ‘And yet when you came across Annie Kelleher, you were drawn to her immediately,’ Tristan said. ‘You interceded with those who would have hurt her, you took her from harm’s way and brought her home.’

  ‘Anyone else in my place would have done the same thing.’

  ‘Would they? Douglas told me he would have left her on the street.’

  ‘He didn’t, though. He let me bring her into the pub, and went with me up the mountain.’

  ‘Those men on the street intended to beat her, or worse.’

  ‘Idle bravado… Tristan, this is going nowhere. Thanks, but no thanks.’

  Tristan nodded sadly. ‘You will come and play for us again? Stop in from time to time for lunch?’

  ‘I would be delighted to.’

  ‘The lads speak of you often. You were quite the hit with them all.’

  ‘Flattery will get you nowhere, Mr Fowler,’ I said, standing and opening the living room door for him.

  ‘I wouldn’t be here if their reaction hadn’t told me strongly that you were the right man for the job.’

  I watched him drive off in his antique car, and felt a strange emptiness. There was a part of me that wanted what he was offering. I had felt completely at home at Drumlin, and knew that I could slot into the day-to-day running of the place with ease. But I also knew that I would be being unfair to myself and the pledge I had made if I did. I went back inside and stood under the hot spray of the shower for a long time.

  8

  Sometimes I think that the universe plays tricks on me.

  Halfway through the gig that night, as I was playing ‘This Land Is Your Land’, the door of the pub opened, and in walked Ricki.

  She was with two others whom I guessed came from her community home, and they sat right under the small stage and sang and clapped and enjoyed themselves greatly. When the time came for my break, I got a drink and sat down with them.

  Ricki introduced me to her friends, blushing dreadfully.

  ‘Now Ricki, I’ve
been playing here every Tuesday night for the past two months, and I’ve never seen you,’ I said. ‘What brings you along tonight?’

  ‘Every month, we go somewhere different for a few drinks,’ my new friend said. ‘We likes a bit of music, and Frank, who runs our house, tells us it’s good for us to look in the papers to see who’s playin’ about the county, and then organize to get there.’

  ‘Book a taxi or whatever,’ one of her friends, Ross, a plump, moon-faced man, said.

  ‘So, we was checkin’ the ads in the local paper,’ Ricki continued, ‘and I seen your name, and at first I wasn’t sure if it was you or not, but then I asked Tristan, and he said it was, so I asked Ross and Terrence if we might like to come and see you tonight.’

  ‘Well, I’m very glad you did,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, we’re glad we came,’ said Terrence, a tall thin kid who looked to be no more than sixteen, and was drinking a glass of orange. ‘You play some very good music.’

  ‘Thank you, Terrence,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, Terrence likes music,’ Ricki said.

  The group lapsed into silence. I watched them from the corner of my eye. Here they sat, in a crowded pub, engaged in an activity that was so simple, yet encompassed so many challenges for them. To choose a destination, to set up transport, to decide what to drink and where to sit, and to do all this without the safety net of a carer, must have been hugely frightening for this little family who spent most of their lives being told what to do, how and when to do it. I found myself suddenly filled with pride and admiration for them.

  ‘Do you like going to Drumlin, Ricki?’ I asked.

  She looked up at me, blinking, considering the question seriously.

  ‘I do, Shane. I like it very much.’

  ‘Why?’

  She took a swallow of her drink – a non-alcoholic beer – and scratched her head. ‘Tristan and Beth have been very good to me,’ she said at last. ‘I used to live in a bad place, and Tristan came and took me from there, and gave me somewhere where they looked after me good.’