Tim Comes Home

 CHAPTER 4

Back at St Tarcisius, we were met by Paul, who, when he saw our faces and Tim’s hand confidently in mine—he may have been thirteen, but he wasn’t going to miss any chance of affection just now—broke out into a broad smile on his handsome face.

‘I guess that’s settled, then’.

I was taken aback; I had thought that I was going to have to do some quick talking to even set the fostering on the road. But Paul took us both into his office and told me that all the checks had been approved. The only remaining authority to satisfy was Paul himself.

‘And I know you only too well, mate. Congratulations, both of you!’

‘How soon can Tim come home?’ I asked. ‘He hasn’t even seen where I, no, we, live yet’.

‘Right now, if you want. If, in the very unlikely event it doesn’t work out, you can always bring him back here, but I think that what he needs right now is love and stability. As for the latter, I know you well, and I’m sure he’ll have that. And as for the love, I can see it from here. God bless you both’.

My head was spinning. So much had happened in a few hours, and with that short speech the course of my life was definitively changed. I looked at my foster son, and his face was shining, that is the only word for it, with that special radiant smile which had won me when I first saw it on the photograph. But this time it was for me, me alone, and that thought made me feel ten feet tall.

‘Run and get your things, Tim. We’re going home.’

Tim was off like a flash, as fast as his ill-shod feet could carry him. When he left the office, Paul pushed some papers across the desk. I read them, and signed them. Paul countersigned them, then looked seriously at me.

‘Johnny, I ought to warn you of something. As I said to you, I am pretty sure that Tim has been seriously abused, physically and sexually, and perhaps over a long period. No doubt you have seen for yourself that he is a lovely lad and appears quite balanced. But abuse always leaves psychological scars of one sort of another; as he moves into his teens, you’re going to have to watch him so very carefully, especially to see that he does not turn to abuse of others. I think, given his loving personality, that this is unlikely, but there may well be other things; theft, self-mutilation, even suicide—I don’t want to alarm you unduly, but these are possibilities. People who are abused often feel that in some way they deserved what they got, that there is a sort of justice about it. Given his reticence, and the importance he attaches to his own privacy, I don’t think it is a good idea to force Tim to talk about it—indeed, I’d be surprised if he’d let the subject be addressed at all, given our lack of success in this area—but if it comes up, be ready for it, and certainly expect more than the usual traumas of adolescence.’

Paul must have seen the apprehension on my face, because he then came around the desk and pulled me into his arms.

‘Oh Johnny, I feel so guilty at young Tim and me having manipulated you into this. I know we haven’t let your feet touch the ground, but if we had let you hesitate, you would have prevaricated and procrastinated like you always do, and this would never have happened. Trust me, this is really going to work out. I can’t tell you what joy it gives me to bring two of my favourite people together. Tim is a really special lad, one of the loveliest boys here, and if he is with you, I’ll be able to go on seeing him, too.’

And Paul kissed me on the cheek.

Mm. Nice! He had never done that before.

‘Yeah, well’ he said, looking at my shocked face, ‘I’ve done a bit of perving in my time, too, you old stud’.

Before I could regain my wits or think of something to say, Tim burst back into the office and said ‘I’m ready!’.

‘That didn’t take long! Okay, lad, time to go home’.

Tim turned to Paul and said, simply, ‘Thank you. Thank you so very much for everything, Father Paul’. He hesitated a moment, and then ran to him and hugged him tightly. Paul hugged Tim back, patting his shoulder and saying ‘Be happy now, Tim, and, you know, I’ll still be seeing a lot of you, because I come over to St Edward’s parish often to see Father John. And I want you to know that I will always be here for you if you want to talk, or want anything I can help with.’ We all got a bit sniffy and so I said.

‘Come on, let’s go. Where’s your luggage?’

‘Here’ said Tim happily, and he held up a single Tesco plastic carrier bag.

‘Is that all?’ My heart wept again for the boy’s deprived life. Tim nodded cheerfully; he didn’t care if he had nothing. He had a home now, and a dad, and that was all that mattered.

Teresa was in the house when we arrived. She knew that I was probably going to have a lad to live with me some time in the future, but she was understandably taken aback to find it happen so suddenly. Nevertheless, having had two boys of her own, she was accustomed to taking shocks in her stride, and she opened her arms to Tim and gave him a huge bosomy hug. Tim looked over her shoulder at me crossing his eyes and sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth to suggest that he was being crushed to death, but he hugged back enthusiastically enough. Teresa then held him at arms length and said

‘I’m Mrs Wright, Tim, Teresa Wright, but I think it might be best if you were to call me Aunt Tess. That way, we’ll get on just fine’.

I thanked God for Teresa’s quick wit. She had understood that what Tim needed most was to feel he belonged, and this was certainly going to help.

I hadn’t even thought about which room Tim might occupy, so we went straight upstairs to have a look. There was no contest; he fell in love immediately with the attic room, up its own little flight of stairs and lit by skylights and a single dormer window. It had cheerful blue and yellow paint and colourful painted furniture.

‘Is this all for me? Just for me?’ He gaped.

‘Just for you, Tim. Glad you like it. This is your very own space, to do with what you want—within reason. Now let’s unpack and get your things hung up in the wardrobe.’

Tim upended his carrier bag and spilled all his worldly possessions onto the bed. There was a spare t-shirt, even tattier than the one he wore, a pair of blue Adidas tracksuit bottoms, a old blue and white football shirt, a pair of navy nylon football shorts, seven assorted socks, a rosary and missal (standard St Tar’s issue), some odd coins not amounting to more than fifty pence and a worn and dirty teddy bear. There was certainly nothing worth hanging up.

I said, in horror, ‘Tim, is this really everything you own? You had nothing else at St Tar’s?’ I found it impossible to believe that Paul would have let the lad live so shamefully poorly. But then, as I was to learn, Tim was apt to fade into the background, and simply get overlooked. Tim answered

‘Well, there were a few other clothes and stuff, but we have a rule at St Tar’s among the guys that when someone gets lucky, he leaves the best things for the others who have to stay. I’m not expecting you to buy me new stuff, it’s just that I didn’t want to be mean to the others. So I just took enough to get me by for a couple of years.’

‘A couple of years? Tim, one thing I know about boys is that they grow. Those jeans are already so tight on you that I suspect that your voice is never going to break while you still wear them. And you’re going to break your neck tripping on the hems one day.’ I picked up the tracksuit bottoms and looked at the label; ‘For boys 10-11 years’ I read out loud.

‘They’re ok, they’re stretchy’ Tim mumbled.

‘No, Tim, they won’t do. Tomorrow we go shopping. It’s a shame that tonight is too late. But it isn’t too late to make a start. Put these things into a drawer now; I’ll be right back.’

I went downstairs, shaking my head, to ask Teresa if she had a measuring tape. I told her about the contents of the carrier bag, and she put her hand to her mouth.

‘Oh, the poor wee lad’.

‘Quite!’ I said. ‘We’ll go shopping for some new clothes tomorrow’.

‘I’m sure I can put my hands on some of my boys’ old stuff’ she said; ‘I’ll bring a load tomorrow’.

‘Thanks, Teresa, but no thanks. I think that for the first time in his life Tim is going to get some brand new clothes that fit him, and that no one else has ever worn before.’

She squeezed my arm and smiled. ‘You’re a good man. I’ll get you the measuring tape’.

Back upstairs, Tim was sitting on the bed, smiling, and bouncing up and down, clutching his teddy. Suddenly he looked nine, not thirteen. I looked at him, and the most extraordinary protective instinct kicked in again. In a matter of hours his life, even more than mine, had been turned upside down, even if it was for the better, or at least I hoped so.

‘Slip your t-shirt and jeans off, Tim, and we’ll get you measured’.

He complied quickly, pulling the shirt over his head to throw it on the bed, and then sucking in his tummy to get a bit of slack to lower his trousers. And there was the next shock of the day. He had no underwear on. I remembered then that there had been none in the carrier bag, either. And I couldn’t help but notice that for a lad of his age he was very well endowed, as they say. Still hairless, as one would expect, but that only made the generous proportions all the more obvious.

‘Gosh, Tim, don’t you have any underpants?’

‘No, never have. Well, only occasionally. Can’t abide them.’ Abide? strange word for a lad, I thought; it’s as though he’s quoting someone.

‘Didn’t they mind at St Tarcisius?’

‘They never found out. There were an awful lot of us, and not all of us wear them’.

‘Why?’

‘They make me sweat, they tangle my tackle and get caught in my bum, if you want to know.’

Frank enough, I suppose. He’d obviously said that before, too. I thought about arguing, but then I postponed that particular battle for another day. He was so adamant about it that I could see he was going to take some convincing, and I didn’t want to spoil his pleasure in the day of his great escape from St Tar’s.

‘Well I’m not going to measure you like that, wearing only your odd socks, with your wedding tackle in the way’.

Tim giggled and said

‘That’s easily put right; I’ll take my socks off!’, and he did.

‘Tart’, I said without thinking. But Tim didn’t notice. He took his navy nylon shorts out of the drawer and pulled them on; I was pleased to see that for once we had found a garment that actually fitted him. No doubt he had acquired them when they were far too big. I took an appraising look at my son’s body for the first time and noticed that he was really pretty muscular for his age, with strong well-defined pectorals and abdomen.

‘Most of us work out in St Tar’s’ he said, seeing what I was looking at. ‘Survival of the fittest! Not bad, eh?’ he preened.

‘Not bad is right!’

I began to take his measurements and as he lifted his arms to let me put the tape round his bare chest, I saw several little scars dotted here and there, mostly on his pectorals. Cigarette burns. My heart thudded. I turned him round, and there were several long white scars on his back and the backs of his thighs. They were all old.

‘Excuse me, Tim’, I said, and pulled down his shorts a little to reveal a web of welts on his buttocks. I pulled his shorts back up and turned him round, looking deeply into his eyes. I pulled him into a fierce hug, all my protective instincts raging, raging, raging. I wanted to kill someone.

‘My son, who did this to you?’ I asked in a shaking voice.

‘Them’, said Tim tonelessly, his mood suddenly turned black. I was startled at his voice.

‘Who’s them?’

‘Just Them. The sperm donor and the owner of the cunt I came out of,’ he spat viciously.

‘Your mother and father?’.

‘NO! ’ He suddenly shouted. ‘They are not my parents, they are never my parents. YOU are my father. I don’t WANT another. I HAVE no other’. He broke into a storm of weeping, so I took him in my arms, sat on the bed and rocked him gently until he calmed down. I was staggered at this sudden tempest that had come out of nowhere. I was going to have to go carefully.

‘Ssh, my son, ssh. You’re safe now, you’re home. Nobody is going to hurt you any more. Ssh, my son, my beloved son.’

I don’t know how long we sat there, but when I looked up, there was Teresa in the doorway, tears in her eyes.

‘Poor wee laddie’, she whispered. ‘What a lot of sadness he’s seen in his short lifetime. We’ll have to do our best to make it up to him’.

I could only smile ruefully. I was thinking that this was only the beginning of a long road that Tim and I were going to have to travel together while we unpicked all of this. Tim himself had had an awful emotional rollercoaster of a day, and now he was fast asleep in my arms. All for the best. I gently lifted him and laid him on the bed, pulling the duvet up over his bare chest. I kissed his forehead; his features had relaxed again and he gently smiled in his sleep, his good mood restored in slumber.

‘Has he eaten?’ said Teresa.

I smacked my head. Neither of us had even finished our Macdonalds burgers early in the afternoon. It was now eight in the evening.

‘I’ll make him a sandwich, Father,’ (she pronounced it ‘sangwich’) ‘and leave it by his bed. I’ll do you one, too’

‘Bless you, Teresa, for everything. But it’s long after your going home time now’.

‘Ah well, it’s a special occasion, isn’t it? I’ve the car with me anyway.’

After Teresa left, I sat down in my den and put my feet up to think about the events of this momentous day. No sooner had I done so, then the door bell rang.

‘Fuck!’ I swore out loud. No doubt some old biddy wanting a Mass card signed. No peace, it seems, for the wicked.

‘I heard that, Father! Not very priestly, I must say,’ came a voice through the letter box.

‘Paul, you bastard!’ I said, opening the door to my best friend, he being dressed casually in chinos and a blue shirt. ‘But you’re just the bastard I want to see right now’.

We hugged, and he gave me a bottle:

‘It’s the rest of the whisky we didn’t finish the other day. I thought we might have another stab at it. Where’s the lad?’

‘Fast asleep upstairs. Emotionally worn out, I guess. I’m pretty fucked myself.’

‘You wish!’

‘Piss off! Grab yourself a glass’.

We sat together on the sofa in companionable silence. After a while, Paul asked me how it had all gone. I told him about the day, and about how it had ended. Paul gave a low whistle.

‘I knew about the scars, of course, but he would never say who had given them to him. We guessed that it was probably his parents, but he has told nobody before. You’ve done really well for a first day!’

‘Who were his parents?’

‘We haven’t a clue. Tim was found wandering on the Brighton and Hove bypass at night eighteen months or so ago, wearing only some old tracksuit bottoms. It was late November, and he was suffering from hypothermia. He never gave any details of his family; we don’t even know if has given us his real name. He was sent to us because Sullivan, being Irish, would make him probably a Catholic and the local authorities were anxious not to have to take another mouth into the county home, Turling Park, which is like a borstal in my opinion anyway, and therefore Tim’s good luck. In the event, Tim hadn’t a clue as to whether he was a Catholic or not, but took to it all like a duck to water, so after he begged, I baptized him and gave him his first Holy Communion last June. He is fixated with the idea of God as his father, Mary as his mother, and Jesus as his brother, so I guess it all fits together, especially his wanting to come to you. He badly needs to belong somewhere, or to someone. I think our faith supplies deep needs in him. Which is nice all round.’

‘Paul, I need to ask you a question, and it’s been burning me for a while. Why is Tim dressed so badly? It can’t have escaped your notice that he looks like a street kid. Surely St Tar’s isn’t that short of cash?’

‘Well, we are pretty strapped, Johnny, but no, we usually do better than that for the boys. Honestly, Tim would never take clothes or anything from us, more than the simple minimum. We do get clothes and toys given us quite frequently. We’d noticed that Tim tended to hang back when the scrum was on, and so got little or nothing, so we’d put one or two things aside for him. He’d give them to the other kids, though, saying that as he wasn’t going to be here long, he didn’t need them. They took them happily enough, as you can imagine. So we began to shift heaven and earth to get Tim fostered as quickly as possible. I even wondered whether he were playing some clever game and had manipulated us into this very thing. But then he turned down not just one family, but two. Unheard of! The other boys thought he was mad. I think he just wanted you, and was waiting for you to notice him. Finally, he had to stir it a bit.’

We talked for a couple of hours about everything, and by the end of it we were both very relaxed and pretty drunk. Paul, leaning forward with his hand on my thigh, shook the last drops from the bottle into my glass and said

‘A pious bottle; made a good death with not one, but two priests.’ He thought a moment. ‘Shit, I can’t drive; I must be well over the limit. Can I stay?’.

‘Of course. As long as you want’. Forever, I thought.

‘I’ve got nothing with me, though’.

‘I’ll give you a pair of my footie shorts and a new toothbrush. That do you?’

‘Mm. Fantastic. Am I in my usual place in the attic?’.

‘No, that’s Tim’s room now. You can have the room opposite me: the bed’s made up. Good night!’

‘’Night’. We got up. Paul stumbled a little, or appeared to, and steadied himself on my shoulder.

‘Mm, you smell nice’ he said, and he paused, looking intently into my eyes. An eternity passed, and then he gently leaned forward and kissed me for the second time that day, but this time full on the lips. I was too shocked to respond, even if I had known how. I looked into his beautiful brown eyes, and realised that neither he nor I were as drunk as we made out.

‘Sleep well, Paul’, was all I could say.

‘Mm, you too’.

In the middle of the night I woke up. There was someone in my room. I remembered Paul’s kiss and my heart gave a bound of mingled desire and dread. I put the light on and saw Tim, still in his shorts, looking tousled and sleepy. He also had a raging erection.

‘Dad’ (my heart beat even faster to hear myself called that) ‘Dad, I really need to pee, and I can’t find the bathroom’.

‘Oh Tim, I’m so sorry, we never even gave you the grand tour of the house’. I hauled myself out of bed, wearing my usual footie shorts, and took him to the loo, leaving him to find his own way back. He did, but he appeared in my room, not his own.

‘Dad, can I stay in here tonight?’

‘What’s wrong with your own room, Tim?’

‘It’s lovely but it’s all so quiet. I can’t sleep very well’. Then, reluctantly, he added ‘and I’m a bit scared.’

It then dawned on me that maybe Tim had never had to sleep in a room on his own before.

‘Er, well, sure… but how are we going to manage; there’s only one bed?’

Tim grinned happily and jumped into my bed, scooting over to the far side. All sorts of warning bells rang, including the fact that the director of St Tarcisius’ Home was sleeping just on the other side of the corridor, and he would presumably not be at all happy to find us cuddled up together on our first night as foster father and son. The bed was only a large single, not even a double.

I had to ask myself whether I was any danger to Tim. Had I any sexual desires for him? None whatever, I concluded. On the contrary, my urges were all to protect this lad, not exploit him. Tim, looking puzzled at my delay, patted the bed.

‘Come on, you’ll get cold’.

‘Cheeky sod’.

So I got in, and my son snuggled close to me. We slept with my right arm protectively wrapped around him. It was a first for me, too.