Little Boy Lost

by Shane Dunphy

  ‘The police told him,’ Tristan said. ‘Apparently he turned up at the station looking for his daughter in the middle of the night.’

  ‘What brought him there?’

  ‘God knows,’ Tristan said. ‘They told me that he was in quite a state. Seemed to think she was hurt, or something.’

  I nodded. It made as much sense as anything.

  ‘How’s she doing, then?’

  ‘Better now she’s with her father.’

  ‘Did you tell him about Charlie?’

  ‘I didn’t have to,’ Tristan said. ‘He informed me that the gentleman in question had moved on, and would not be coming back. Whatever that means.’

  ‘Tristan, I couldn’t give a damn.’

  ‘My sentiments precisely.’

  38

  The next time I saw Annie was three weeks later. Lonnie and I were walking on the mountain, a habit we had come to treasure. We crossed a field of silver-frosted grass, and there she was, dancing across the frigid ground to a tune neither of us could hear. If she saw us, she gave no indication, and passed across our line of vision, heading for a cluster of ash two hundred yards to our left. In a minute, she was gone.

  ‘She looks better,’ Lonnie said.

  He had gotten a haircut, and was wearing a baseball cap, a leather jacket and jeans. He looked good, too.

  ‘What happened to her will take time to heal,’ I said, ‘but I think she’s in the right place for that healing to occur. This is where she loves, and I don’t think her dad will ever again leave her unsupervised like he did.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on him,’ Lonnie said. ‘How could he have known what that bollix was after?’

  ‘You’re right, I know,’ I said. ‘I’m still sore over it all, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Lonnie said. ‘You love her, too.’

  ‘We all do,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  We continued our progress over the icy, rocky earth.

  ‘So how are you doing these days?’ I asked.

  ‘Up and down,’ Lonnie admitted.

  ‘And today?’

  ‘Mostly up.’

  He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘No jokes about that? “How high up can someone like me actually get,” maybe?’

  ‘Naw,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have made those gags in the first place.’

  ‘I gave back in spades.’

  ‘It wasn’t kind,’ I said. ‘You deserved better.’

  He patted me on the arm. ‘We were both learning, I reckon.’

  ‘Learning what?’

  ‘How to be friends with one another,’ he said.

  The field ended in a line of blackthorn trees, beyond which the land opened up like a picture book. We could see for miles in every direction.

  ‘Drumlin isn’t the same lately, is it?’ Lonnie said, as we drank in the view. ‘Since everything happened.’

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘But Tristan said to me, a year ago now, that the world doesn’t stop at the door of the unit. I suppose it just decided to stop waiting on the mat and came on in.’

  ‘It was kind of magic there for a while, though,’ he said. ‘We had some fun.’

  ‘We’ll have more,’ I said. ‘We’ll just have to start over.’

  ‘Do you want to?’ Lonnie asked.

  ‘I don’t have anything better to do,’ I said.

  ‘Me neither.’

  And we started to walk back to the warmth of the cottage.

  Afterword

  Little Boy Lost is a book about new beginnings. It recounts a time in my career when it felt very much as though I was learning to be a care worker almost from scratch, when every step forward seemed painstaking and ridiculously difficult. Yet it was also a time of inexpressible joy. Tristan Fowler, or at least the man upon whom I based him, remains a dear and loyal friend to me to this day. He has taught me more about acceptance and the true meaning of integration than anyone else I have ever known.

  I say without any shame that when I ran away to the country, I was completely broken. Drumlin and the amazing people there put me back together again. That all their stories are bittersweet should not be a sign of any kind of failure on their part or on anyone else’s. Life is just like that.

  I know that some readers will consider it, particularly during these times of economic crisis, deeply foolhardy to wish to work on a voluntary basis when money is being laid on the table. You will have to take my word that, at that time in my career I really did not believe that I would stick the job on offer for more than a few weeks. I felt something would happen to send me running again, and I would then be letting these people, whom I already cared a great deal about, down. I could not stand the idea of carrying more guilt around with me. Volunteering seemed the best option. By signing nothing and promising less, I was not tied, either legally or morally. It was as much as I could cope with.

  Dominic never came out of the psychiatric hospital where he was placed after the incidents described here. He died there as a result of a severe epileptic seizure. I think of him often with deep sadness, but also great fondness. He was a gentle, sweet-natured, wonderful person, who was simply too trusting for this world.

  Reading this book and seeing the number of occasions where Dominic became violent, I expect some of you are questioning my calling him ‘gentle’, and that is understandable. You must remember that Dominic was operating, to all intents and purposes, at the level of a toddler. Children are physical – when a baby does not want a toy or to eat his dinner, he throws that item out of the pram or away from the high chair. Dominic responded to adversity in a similar way. He had no concept of his strength or of the fact that a table might do some damage if you happened to be in its flight path. He never meant any harm by his actions. He was locked away because of the terrible fear that the roller-coaster of emotions he was falling prey to were becoming too much for him to cope with.

  I miss him greatly. He was as true a friend as I have ever had.

  I never saw Sukie again. I hope that I have not represented her cruelly in this book, because, in reality, the mistakes she made are commonplace enough. I cannot recall how many times I have encountered qualified staff at day-care centres telling adults with intellectual disabilities that yes, they are their boyfriends/girlfriends, or how many times I have seen girls going to work in settings – from pre-schools up to nursing homes for the elderly – dressed as if they are going out partying.

  In the case of Sukie, things ended very badly indeed, yet in the vast majority of cases things just muddle along, usually with a very confused or deeply frustrated population of clients. This is, in actuality, simply lazy care work. The appropriate answer to: ‘Are you my girlfriend/boyfriend?’ is ‘No, I like you very much, but I am your friend.’ It is simple, truthful and in no way open to misinterpretation. Sukie did many things right when she was at Drumlin, and through a little investigation, I discovered that she now runs a youth centre in the south-west of Ireland. I wish her well.

  Annie is still around. I see her from time to time, and she always makes me smile. The pain of her experiences with Charlie are long forgotten. She finds the world too rich a place to waste on such sadness.

  The question the police asked when we discussed Annie with them is a common one in the case of people with learning disabilities: how can someone who is technically just as bright as most ‘normal’ people be intellectually disabled? The reality is that Annie is quite an intelligent young woman, and a very gifted artist. Yet the way she experiences the world is very different to the way you or I do, and she has difficulty with many things – not least being communication.

  I often wonder if the term ‘disability’ is an appropriate way of thinking about people like my friends in Drumlin at all. I really believe they are just different. And I have always thought that difference is something we should celebrate rather than hide away or try to mould into an image of conformity.

  Yet Annie is a
nother person for whom the world is just too difficult a place. She is more at home on her mountain, in the fields and the woods and the high places. And even that is disappearing. I have, of late, come to think of her as an endangered species whose habitat is being gradually eroded by developers and builders. There is a large housing estate not a mile from her home now, and a factory is to be built later this year where her woods are situated.

  Lonnie continued to attend Drumlin, more as a member of staff than as a client (the lines are often blurred, as sometimes seemed natural there) until his death, as a result of a congenital heart problem, at the age of forty-two. Of my friend I can say that he took life on his own terms and did not look back. He died a contented and well-loved man.

  There is a term in disability studies: disability activism. It describes individuals with disabilities who see their situation as a political position, and campaign for rights and access and integration. A large part of their stance is that having a disability is something not to be ashamed of but should be a source of pride. Lonnie had never heard of disability activism yet, he was, in his own peculiar way, quite proud to be a dwarf. He was aware that people found the way he looked funny, and he understood that he was unusual in a world that values blandness, but nevertheless, he learned to love himself. He made a point of going to the shops, of going about his business in the small town close to where he lived, and even though people still stared and mocked him from time to time, he was a big enough person to realize that the problem was not his, but theirs. It is a grave pity that so many of those ignorant people could not understand that basic truth.

  Beth Singleton left Drumlin – and Tristan Fowler – several years after the events described in this book. She went back to nursing, and on the odd occasion our paths cross, she always reports that she is very happy.

  And maybe she is.