Tim Comes Home

 CHAPTER 11

I woke early, and went down to the kitchen to make breakfast in bed for Tim. His first day as an adult was going to start well, and we had an international train to catch. I fried bacon and egg, poured cereal, made toast and a pot of tea, and put it all on a tray. I knocked at his door, and was not amazed to get no answer. Well, at least I wouldn’t surprise him in the act of wanking! So I turned the handle and went in.

No Tim. Just his shorts folded neatly on the bed, and a letter addressed ‘to Dad’. I hoped that was me and not the other bastard. I put the tray on the floor and opened the letter.

An hour later, Paul, who had been searching for me all over the house, anxious about our trip, found me curled up on Tim’s bed too shocked even to weep. I simply clutched Tim’s shorts against my nose as I treasured his fading scent for the last time, staring at the wall and barely breathing.

Tim’s note was short and to the point. He said that he was going off to be a slave, he had found his true vocation and state in life. He was hoping by his self-sacrifice to right the wrongs he had done in the past. After thanking us for all we had done for him, he asked us to forgive anything he might have done amiss while he lived with us, and freely forgave any wrong we had done him, not that he could think of any. He asked us not to attempt to find him, but doubted we would succeed anyway, even though he knew we had worked out that he had gone to his natural Father.

‘You see, Dad’, wrote Tim, ‘Tim Sullivan was never my name anyway. You have never known my real name.’

That was the most terrible blow of all. Had these last few years all been a complete deception? What else had he not told us?

There was a sad little postscript in which he said that he was glad in this letter to be able to call me Dad one last time. He would have to acknowledge his fault to his new Master, his real Dad, and knew he would be severely punished for it, but, he said, it was worth it to bring me a little happiness in return for the great deal of happiness I had brought him.

Paul pulled the bedclothes over me, and then got into bed behind me. He wrapped his arms around me and tried to warm me with his body and with his love. In some distant way I was grateful for his presence, but even more for his silence.

It was another two hours before we were found by two hungry boys.

‘Dad’, said Marc to Paul. ‘Where’s Tim? …… Golly! Where’s all his stuff gone?’

‘He’s left home, Son.’

‘Cool! Can I have his room, then?’

Four terrible months passed, with no word from Tim, or whatever his name is. I can’t call him anything but Tim. But he was rarely out of my thoughts or my prayers. I lost a great deal of weight and for the first time began to look my age. Paul was wonderful, as always. He pushed me around, shepherded me, spoke to the police for me, took me to the doctor for my happy pills, ran the parish, and generally organized my life, never complaining at the three dependent males clamouring for his attention. ‘It’s a lot easier than seventy boys, which I had at St Tar’s’, he said. Though his grief at the loss of Tim was not so very much less than my own, it was compounded by the daily sight of my own sorrow, and the work with the diaspora of St Tar’s boys, and the building of the new home was already heavy enough as a burden.

The police were not a lot of help. They pointed out that my legal guardianship had ended on Tim’s eighteenth birthday, that he had plainly taken himself off, and he was now responsible for bringing any charges of assault that he wanted to on his own behalf. No, they wouldn’t institute a manhunt. Yes, they would keep their eyes open in the area.

No, you’re right. I didn’t believe them either. Their looks implied what they were thinking. ‘We all know about little boys and Catholic priests. No wonder the poor blighter got out of it the first moment he could, and good luck to him!’.

I knew with every fibre of my being that Tim was in trouble. I knew he had bitten off more than he could chew; it was simply not in his nature to fight back despite his awesome physique. He wouldn’t hurt a fly deliberately. I was sure that he would simply submit to his father’s abuse as he had done before. And I had little doubt that his father would eventually kill him. This thought did not help me to sleep any sweeter.

The parishioners were puzzled at Tim’s disappearence. What could I tell them? That he had gone to University? I didn’t want to lie to them, so I just prevaricated.

I had one ray of hope. One day a Mrs Flanagan spoke to me after Mass.

‘You know, I thought I saw Tim yesterday’.

I affected great nonchalance.

‘Oh really, where?’

‘Oh, it couldn’t have been him, of course. This boy had a neck brace and was completely bald. Tim has such lovely hair.’

‘I’m sure you’re right. Where did you see this lad? Perhaps he’s a relative of Tim’s; Tim was fostered after all and for all we know might have brothers and sisters all over the country’.

And she gave me an address where she had seen this boy in the company of an older man who was holding firmly on to the lad’s arm.

No sooner was she out of sight, than I ran to my car and drove like a maniac to the house she had told me about. I parked a little distance away and just looked and waited.

Nothing.

Nor the next day.

Or the next.

Or the next.

Or the next.

I saw men going in and out, but never anyone who looked remotely like Tim. Or anyone with moustaches or in leather chaps and caps, for that matter, either, though I don’t know why I thought that Masters always dressed according to sterotype. I don’t know why I stayed. I even stayed when no one had gone in or out at all for several days. Something kept me glued to the spot. I returned only to do my duty by celebrating Mass, to eat once a day and shower; I snatched a few guilty hours of disturbed sleep in the car.

Meanwhile, the time for the St Tarcisius’ summer camp had come. The new building at Turling Park was almost finished, so this year, not only the old residents of the former Home were coming, but also those who were due to move with us into the new buildings in September. It was thought that they would integrate together more happily if they had a chance to do so in a neutral and enjoyable place. Besides, those boys incarcerated in the old buildings at Turling Park would be able to get a full month’s holiday instead of the two and a half weeks in a Scottish boarding school that they normally got. So Marc and Conor left happily, waved off by Paul on his own. I was still obsessively sitting in my car, watching that bloody house.

It had been four days since I had seen anyone at all at the house—I had been watching now for over a week and a half—and Paul had had enough. With the boys gone, he was lonely, and he was worrying, with good cause, about my mental health. So he walked across town to the place where I had parked my car, and reached in through the open window, taking the keys out of the ignition. He got in beside me, talked to me with his hand on my knee, and finally forced me to see sense and get a good night’s sleep. He drove me back, undressed me, bathed me and even gave me a massage to relax me. He helped me into my shorts and put me to bed. He kissed me on the forehead and tiptoed out of the room. I was past thinking about sex, and his attentions didn’t even cause a flicker of randiness. Poor Paul.

He came up to bed at the usual time, but I was deeply asleep, and did not stir when, instead of getting into his own bed, he got in behind me and put his arms around me.

It must have been about 3am when I woke. I had had the strangest dream. In the midst of it, I thought someone had shouted ‘Roses’, several times.

‘Roses?’ Tim’s safeword! I was awake in an instant. I tore myself from Paul’s arms without a backward glance, without even particularly noticing that he had been in my bed with me. Not bothering to dress, I ran downstairs in my shorts, flung and left the door wide open, and ran out into the warm August night. I had no doubt as to where I was going. I was drawn as if by a magnet to that same house I had been outside for the last week or more. I ran and ran through the town, paying not the least heed to my sore bare feet.

When I arrived, the house was in darkness. I tore up to the front door and battered on it like a maniac. No response. Some little voice in the back of my head calmly told me that I was behaving stupidly, a nearly naked man disturbing innocent strangers in the early hours of the morning. I had not a shred of evidence that my son was even here, and I was undoubtedly trespassing. But I was driven by my love and my desperation. I went around to the back of the house and tried the other door. A large half-starved Alsatian dog chained to a kennel barked and strained to get at me; I couldn’t have cared less. The back door was locked, but I was so desperate that I picked up a large brick from a pile nearby and shattered the glass panel. I put my hand through and opened the door, passing through, not even feeling the shards of glass on the kitchen floor. I could see in the moonlight that the place was a disgusting tip and it stank of rotting food. About a century’s worth of filthy dishes stood in the sink. I choked as my gorge rose, and ran on into the house.

‘Tim! Tim! Are you there, Son?’ I called.

I heard a movement upstairs, so I ran up and called again. ‘Tim, Son?’ This time there was a faint gurgling noise from one of the rooms. I went in, and was plunged into deep darkness. There must be heavy curtains over the windows, and no light was able to percolate from the streetlamps outside. I turned back to the doorway and felt along the wall for a light switch. I found one; it worked, and the resulting brilliance dazzled me for a moment. When my eyes adjusted, I nearly passed out with shock.

There, hanging from the high ceiling by manacles was a powerful young man, but in a terrible state. He was completely naked, his neck in a huge steel collar, and his ankles in heavy fetters. His nearly black testicles dangled low, pulled by heavy weights. His feet could scarcely touch the ground, and he alternated by hanging from his arms, when he could raise one or the other foot to lift the weights hung from his testicles and then standing on the toes of both feet to give his arms some relief while his balls screamed pain instead. The outline of every muscle could be seen, which suggested that he was seriously dehydrated. He was gagged with some sort of ball in his mouth, tied with a cord around the back of his head. Every inch of his body was shaved clean of hair, though there was a little stubble on his scalp.

There was no doubt it was Tim, though.

I moved like a robot. First I had to to ungag him. As I went round the back of him, I saw that the skin of his back, buttocks and thighs had been flogged brutally. And trailing down the inside of his legs was a dried and caked mess of blood, shit and semen. I untied the cord; Tim, his jaw helpless, was unable even to spit out the ball, and I gently took it out.

He then whispered thickly and hoarsely through scarcely moving lips:‘Oh Dada! Roses! Roses! Dada, oh Dada!’.

He had never ever called me that before. Only Dad, or sometimes Father, when we were being formal in front of parishioners. ‘Dada’ was the cry of a little child. I understood immediately that he was giving me a new and more precious title than just ‘Dad’.

‘Oh Tim, oh my beloved, poor, poor Son’. I kissed him tenderly on the shoulder; this was as high as I could reach.

My first priority was to take the weight off his testicles so that he had only one problem to manage at a time. Thankfully, the weights had not been fastened in any secure way, but were simply attached with small shackles. Tim groaned with relief as the terrible weight was reduced to the weight of the collar on the scrotum itself, to which I turned my attention next. There was nothing I could do about that. It was much thicker and heavier than the one I had seen him wearing before, but, like that earlier one, it had been welded on in some way. Even if Tim’s balls at normal size could have passed back through the aperture in the collar, which I doubted, there was no way that they could do so in their current swollen and bruised condition.

Tim’s weight was suspended by manacles on his wrists, which were connected to each other by a chain, and a shackle on the mid point of this chain was suspended from a pulley in the ceiling by another chain, attached to the wall behind Tim. To lower him gently would take another person to hold his weight as the tension was released. And the tension was so great that I could not release the chain from the hook on the wall. Tim could not push himself any higher to release the tension—he was already at full stretch—and so I looked around desperately to find some tool to use. A metal bar was nearby, with shackles on each end of it—no doubt used to hold Tim’s legs apart at some time—and I battered at the hook on the wall to try and release it. I fitted the bar behind the hook, put both feet up on the wall and pulled with all my might, shouting to Tim to lean all his weight downwards on the chains. After what seemed an eternity, the hook came free from the wall, and as I fell backwards to the floor I snatched at the chain to try and break Tim’s fall. However, even in his pitiful state, his weight was too much for me, and Tim crashed to the bare floorboards, a look of absolute agony on his face as his outraged arms were wrenched from the place where they had almost set, and from having been tugged around by me on the other end of the chain; his sore balls were trapped under a thigh also. But he had no voice left to cry out; he could only gasp and make dry sobs. I could only sit there and pull him into my lap and sob for him.

At that point, my heart suddenly nearly stopped. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs!

At that stage I didn’t even want to move. If I couldn’t get away, then I just wanted to die there with Tim, and that was that. A tall man came into the room, and I didn’t even look up.

‘Oh there you are’ he said.

It was Paul, in shorts and a t-shirt. He had guessed where I had gone as soon as I had torn away from his arms to run into the night, and had brought the car to try and bring me back to my senses. Though he had followed me immediately, he had waited outside until he could bear it no longer, and now he had found us both.

I suddenly found his simple ‘oh there you are’ hilariously funny. So utterly inadequate to the appalling situation. I cried and laughed—I’m not sure which; I suppose it was a hysterical reaction, but Paul soon joined in, chuckling, and even Tim heaved his ribs trying to laugh.

Somehow between us we got Tim home. We thought of trying to find him water, clothes or medical help there at the house, but we were nervous still that his tormentors would return, and thought that the more quickly we got him out the better. No doubt we should have taken him to hospital, but somehow that did not occur to us. Perhaps unconciously we thought that the humiliation for Tim would have been too great on top of everything else. In the event, our instinct that his hurts were not life-threatening was to prove right, but if he had had some serious injury, I suppose we might have put him in danger. After what he had gone through, though, we wanted no other hands touching him but those who loved him.

I suppose it was as well that nobody saw us that night. Two almost-naked men carrying one completely naked man in chains to a car and driving him off in the night; well, that would have given Mrs Flanagan something to gossip about, wouldn’t it? Particularly if she’d recognized us.

We tried to lie Tim on his back on the back seat of the car, but his wounds were too painful. We couldn’t lay him on his front because of his tender testicles.

In the end, we sat him up in the back seat, and I supported him with my hand behind his neck. Paul drove slowly and carefully. I alternated ecstatic joy and happiness at having found Tim with bitter tears at his distress. Tim just sat in silence, too overwhelmed to have any reactions yet, groaning from time to time, perhaps out of habit, perhaps at the little potholes in the road which Paul could not avoid. I could see by the trembling of his shoulders that Paul was finding it hard to keep back the tears.

Back home we brought Tim and laid him gently on the couch in my den, where Paul had been laid when he was had been injured on the night St Tarcisius’ Home burned. On that couch, Tim’s blood could mingle with Paul’s almost like a strange blood-brotherhood ritual.

Tepid water, gently administered sip by sip, from a spoon held by Paul, was the first priority, followed by a weak solution of sugar and salt. In all this, Tim lay in my arms as gentle as a lamb, his beautiful, beautiful eyes fixed on us both with love. He never uttered one word of complaint, though moving him and all the manipulation must have been terribly painful. We then got a camera, and carefully photographed all his hurts; it might be necessary for evidence later. We explored his body minutely, testing the feeling in each of his fingers and toes, to see whether there had been any nerve damage from the long suspension in steel bonds. It seemed that he had been very lucky in that regard. We carried him upstairs to the bathroom; as life returned to his limbs, he found that he could slowly and agonizingly walk, as long as he went between us with an arm around our shoulders, and we supported him around his narrow waist. We tenderly washed him clean, pushing our face flannels under the steel that still bound his limbs. We cleaned up his lacerated back as well as we could—it had always been scarred—and examined his anus for tearing. Thankfully there appeared to be no major damage. I suppose he had been raped so often in the last year that he could take whatever his father had to give him in that area. He bore all these indignities so patiently that I was moved beyond description. Never had I loved him more than at that moment. We fed him a little fruit juice, and some warm milk.

We took him downstairs again and laid him on a sheet on the floor; we had to do something about his irons. While Paul went down to the shed to find some tools, I examined them. The collars that he had been wearing round his neck and balls at the time he left us had gone. In their place were these new, much heavier, ones. These, like their predecessors, had been welded into place; there were burn marks here and there on Tim’s skin, as if he had not suffered enough! Tim’s testicles under their heavy collar had already returned to a more regular colour, though they were still swollen, terribly bruised and sore. Tim choked with pain whenever they were touched, though he still said not a word in protest. The fetters on his ankles were terribly heavy too, and the chain between them was thick, heavy and short, only about just over a foot in length. About the same length of lighter chain connected his wrists, from which he had dangled. Paul brought a couple of files, and we set to work. We made almost no progress at all, and by the time dawn came, we seemed to have barely scratched the surface. We decided to call it a night.

I was on my last legs. I left a note for Teresa, asking her to go around quietly with her work, and went up to our room. There I found that Paul had pushed our two beds together and remade them as one big double bed; I hadn’t thought where Tim was going to sleep. We couldn’t leave Tim alone, so now there was room for the three of us here. Paul said

‘Somehow, I don’t think it would be fair to make Tim sleep on his own tonight’.

‘Well, Tim, we have one big bed. Where do you want to sleep?’ I asked him.

“Between the two of you, in the middle, Dada,’ he whispered hoarsely. It was the first time he had spoken since we had brought him home.

‘On the crack between the mattresses? I asked.

Tim smiled wanly.

‘Dada, I’ve been sleeping in a dog’s kennel, on concrete or standing up, for the last few months. I think I can cope with the crack of two mattresses!’

And his smile broadened into his characteristic beautiful, radiant smile. It was at that point that it all became too much. The dam broke, and it seemed a lifetime of tears and sobs rushed out of me. Tim painfully raised his arms, lifted his chains over my head and hugged me tightly, then Paul came up behind me and hugged us both together. I wanted that moment never to end. And so we went to bed.