Tim Comes Home

 CHAPTER 13

Tim went up to bed before we did, because he was emotionally drained. I went up with him, to help him up the stairs, brush his teeth, help him off with his kilt and generally do any little thing he might need. Then when he was settled, I kissed his forehead and went back down to Paul.

We discussed it all a little bit and then wondered what to do. We had both picked up on the reference to Tim Sullivan. Our Tim must have been rescued by our best friend; surely there couldn’t have been two policemen of that same name in that same area? We didn’t tell our Tim (we couldn’t get used yet to him being Ben) that we knew his hero; that would have to wait until we had thought what to do.

The priorities were, firstly to get his irons off, and second, to do something about his father.

Paul had an idea.

‘What about Turling Park? Do you remember that awful metalwork room? It was full of dungeon equipment; surely we can find something there which will help us with Tim’s irons. Tim Senior has the keys.’

‘Hasn’t he gone to Scotland with the boys?’

‘No; he didn’t go this year. He’s stayed behind to do some thinking; there’s a lad at the school he’s considering fostering.’

‘Well, well, well. Even mighty oaks fall!’

‘In any event, it would be good to get our own Tim away from here as soon as possible. I don’t like to think of his father knowing where he is until we have him under control.’

So there and then, we rang Tim senior, and arranged to bring our Tim down to meet him. We told him that we thought he had met our Tim in the past, though we mentioned nothing of the circumstances, which he would surely have forgotten in the meantime.

Tim senior sounded delighted. He had always wanted to meet his namesake. He giggled wickedly, and asked for Tim’s waist and leg measurements. I told him 30” waist, 33” inside leg. I could guess what was in his mind, but said no more. I told Tim that our visit was not entirely pleasure, and told him simply that our Tim had got himself locked in some ironmongery and needed releasing, so would he mind looking out the keys of the metalwork classroom.

‘Sounds kinky,’ said Tim. ‘Sounds like we’re going to have some fun!’

‘Tim, you don’t know the half of it!’

We chatted a little longer, then Paul and I went up to join Tim junior in bed.

The following day, we packed the car with all we would need. I put in a lot of clothes, as I planned staying there at least a fortnight, and Paul took most of them out again, saying that I had completely forgotten what Tim Senior was like; suits, clerical collars and smart shoes being the last things we would be needing for a while. But we did take the photographs and videos we had taken from young Tim’s Father’s house. That was vital evidence, and we could not risk a burglary while we considered the best course of action. And Paul packed our commando outfits.

‘We must have some fun’, he said.

It was wonderful to see Tim senior again. He was as usual wearing only his trademark shiny blue shorts, this time while he was painting the woodwork on the windows of his new big cottage which lay near the new buildings for St Tarcisius. Paul and I leapt out of the car, and the three of us hugged and kissed, forgetting for a while about our passenger.

‘Tim,’ I said, ‘we have somebody who wants to meet you.’

Our Tim, with a puzzled look on his face, swung his fettered legs together out of the car and with difficulty stood up, trying to pull down his kilt as he did so. And so he was looking down as he got out. When he raised his head, it was to look directly into those soft brown eyes he had remembered so well, and which had widened in shock and recognition of the piercing blue eyes of the chained boy before him.

Both of them said together

‘You!’

and young Tim fainted, with a rattle of ironmongery.

I had not bargained for this; I had expected suprise, pleasure, even shock, but not this. Our Tim had never fainted before, as far as I knew. Tim Senior was white, and no use to us at all in getting our boy into the house.

We laid our Tim on Tim Senior’s couch, and gently revived him. Then, when we were sure that he was in one piece, Paul and I withdrew to inspect the new buildings, tactfully leaving the two Tims to renew their acquaintance.

‘It was your eyes, Ben,’ said Tim. ‘You’ve grown so much, got so big, lost that frightened look, shaved your head… I’d never have known you otherwise, Soldier. Oh, lad, I cannot tell you how happy I am to see you at last!’

Ben was speechless. So many powerful emotions raged through him as he looked at the man who had occupied so much of his dreams, thoughts and aspirations for the last seven years; he could only gape. His hero squatted beside him with a quizzical smile on his handsome face. The years rolled away. Nothing at all seemed to have changed.

Eventually he found his voice. He croaked ‘How…?

‘How what?’

‘So many, many things. But, for a start, how did you know my name was Ben? I took very good care not to tell you or anyone else for that matter. Not even my Dada—Johnny, that is—knew until yesterday. Did he tell you? I think he hardly took it in himself.’

‘No, it wasn’t Johnny. Look, Ben, I will tell you how I know, only not yet. I don’t think you’re quite ready. But I have got a lot I want to say to you, and I’ve been waiting seven years to say it, so please sit back and make yourself comfortable.’

Ben did as he was asked, but he was feeling far from comfortable. He was fighting back tears very hard, and wanted to throw himself into this man’s arms and be held as he had been when he was a frightened eleven-year-old. He wanted to tell him everything; his whole life story, what he had for breakfast, the name of his favourite footballer, how to programme an Apple Mac, everything, and he wanted to know………

‘Ben, relax! We’ve got all the time in the world! And now’s my turn. You can have your turn later.’ Tim took the young man’s manacled hand in his own.

‘Soldier, the first thing I want to do is to humbly, no grovellingly, apologize to you—no, don’t say anything, shush—yes, apologize to you and beg you to forgive me for walking out of that hospital! Within an hour of doing it, I regretted it, and have regretted it more and more every day of the last seven years. I thought my police career was more important that you, and by the time that had sunk in, the social worker had taken you away. My selfish, thoughtless, act sent you into an orphanage; had I stayed with you, no doubt you would have been released into my care sooner or later, and we could have sorted everything out between the two of us. We could have gone and found your brother, got your father arrested and charged—yes, I know about that—and you and your brother would have been spared years of loneliness and misery.’

Tim then added in a very quiet voice; ‘And so would I’. The silence was profound. Tim went on,

‘Don’t think I didn’t search. Ask Paul. He even advised me on where to look, and when I came up with a blank, it was he who made the suggestion that I do some fostering myself. Imagine it: you were right under all our very noses, and we never realised it. I knew that Johnny had fostered a lad with my name, and that was what made me rule you out, besides the fact that you had come from St Tarcisius, and were therefore a Catholic meant that you couldn’t be the boy who had never even heard the word Catholic in his life. I came to work here, among abandoned boys, because that night we spent together touched something very deep inside me, and I thought that maybe I could expiate my guilt for abandoning you by making the lives of the boys here a little bit happier. And maybe find someone to foster. Maybe even you were here. But none of the lads, much as I love them, ever came anywhere near that meeting of souls I experienced with you. Until recently. I think now I have met a lad I want to foster, but I’ll tell you about him later.

‘But for now, I don’t want to rush you into forgiveness, Soldier. No doubt all of this has been a shock, and I’ve been a selfish sod again, getting it all off my chest before you can even say “hi” to me, or hit me, if that’s what you want to do.

‘Ben, I don’t know. I’ve been beating myself up about all this for so long. Perhaps you never felt the same way I did. Perhaps your asking to stay with me that night was simply a lad looking for anywhere at all to be safe. Perhaps I’ve been deluding myself all along, and you haven’t given me a thought from that day to this……’

‘O yeah’, Ben broke in. ‘I faint all the time. It’s my party trick. “Fainting Nelly”, they call me. Don’t be so BLOODY stupid! I have never stopped thinking about you. I worshipped you. When I was at St Tar’s, the other lads had Superman, and Batman as their heroes; I had Tim Sullivan. When they got older, they dressed and talked and walked like David Beckham or Michael Owen. I dressed, and talked and walked like Tim Sullivan. I’ve never even worn underwear, simply because you don’t, or didn’t then, anyway. “Can’t abide them”, you said, and that’s what I’ve always said. I hate sports, but I wanted to look like you, so I worked out, and pumped iron—you told me how to do it, in fact—and here I am. I even tried dying my hair dark brown to look like you. I looked stupid, by the way. I wanted Dada to buy me brown contact lenses, but he just laughed himself silly, and wondered why I would want to hide what he calls my beautiful eyes. Forget YOU? I even took your bloody name! How could I forget you, when every day I heard “Tim Sullivan, you haven’t done your homework”, “Time for bed, Tim”, “Sullivan, how could you miss such an easy goal”, “Tim Sullivan, I love you, my son”? Not even my beloved foster father, whom I love so dearly, knew that I lit such a candle for somebody else that I even took his name.’

Both Tim and Ben were now in tears. Ben carefully lifted his manacles over Tim’s head and bare shoulders and the two men embraced tightly. Ben whispered in Tim’s ear

‘I could no more not forgive you than stop my heart. There is nothing to forgive. I never thought there was.’

They held each other silently for a very long time.

This was not the first time that we had been to inspect the new buildings. We had carefully involved ourselves in every detail. The old St Tarcisius Home buildings had been well loved, but they had their faults. Lots of them! This time we could begin from scratch. Roger, Sylvia’s husband, was the main architect, and we had chosen well. He belonged to the school of Quinlan Terry; architects who wanted to design buildings according to traditional principles of beauty and function, and that suited us fine. Neither of us wanted a glass and concrete box, but somewhere that the boys could learn to love beautiful things. There must be proportion and elegance, we thought.

Dioceses are prone to do everything on the cheap. We had every expectation that the Bishop would allow us only the bare minimum from the insurance money and the sale of the old land in order to build the new home, keeping the remainder for other purposes. But the Charity Commissioners had intervened, and the Bishop himself had agreed that every penny could be spent on the new building, and on establishing a trust fund to pay the staff and provide other amenities. Since the old St Tarcisius’ buildings were in the middle of town, on a very valuable site, the sum of money was very sizeable indeed, and it meant that we could really afford to push the boat out.

We wandered around the echoing new corridors. The building itself was complete now, and the plasterers and electricians had just finished. All that remained was to decorate and furnish our new home. The boys at Turling Park slept in large dormitories, twenty to a room, in bunk beds, each with a little cabinet to keep whatever few small possessions they had. The old St Tarcisius boys had done better; the old dormitories had been divided off into cubicles, so that the lads had privacy of sight, if not sound. But, remembering the early days when Tim, Marc and Conor had come to us and been frightened to sleep on their own, Paul and I were absolutely adamant that each boy should have his own room, unless he positively wanted to share, for which purpose we would provide a number of larger double rooms. The seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds would even have their own bathrooms.

Our own accomodation was nice, too. There was a large Warden’s flat for Paul, large enough for a married couple to live in one day, if a priest were no longer to do the job, and a slightly smaller Chaplain’s flat for me next to the Warden’s accomodation.

‘When the dust has settled, my love, we shall put a connecting door through between our flats’, Paul promised me.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘But, Paul, there is one thing that we have not talked about, and we must do it right now. What about our Tim, Marc and Conor?’

‘I thought it was obvious. Tim can have the spare room in your flat, and Marc and Conor can share the spare in mine.’

‘Tim, fine. He’s eighteen, and there are not many St Tar’s boys who will have known him well—we still haven’t decided about finshing his schooling, by the way—but Marc and Conor are a different matter. Presumably they will go to school here at Turling Park with the other boys?’

‘Presumably. What’s your point?’

‘Then how is it going to look? Our two will be loved and cherished in your flat. While on the other side of the wall are forty or fifty boys who are less loved and cherished, with whom Marc and Conor will have to mingle every day. Our boys’ lives may well be made hell. At the very least, the other boys will be made to feel second-class citizens!’

‘Oh shit! I hadn’t thought of that!’

‘It wouldn’t matter so much if they weren’t physically under the same roof. There are quite a few Turling Park boys who live with foster parents locally, but get their schooling here’.

‘Well, Marc and Conor will have to have rooms with the other boys, and not in our flats.’

‘Then what are you saying to them? That they are no more special to us than anyone else here! That is to send them right back where they came from. You will fuck them up properly, Paul.’

‘Boarding school elsewhere?’

‘And having taken them under your roof, you are effectively sending them away again. No, it won’t do. And I won’t be separated from them; I love them too much.’

‘Oh, Johnny! What are we going to do? This is terrible!’

‘My love, what we are going to do is to pray for a solution.’

And there and then we knelt down in the beautiful but still bare new chapel which lay at the heart of the building, and we prayed with all our hearts for our two boys. We knelt before the statue of St Tarcisius, still wrapped in plastic after its journey from its old home, and begged that this early Christian boy martyr would look after our two deeply-loved tearaways and find us a way to keep them in our family without breaking any more hearts.

Paul and I returned from inspecting the new buildings and we came in quietly. We saw Ben and Tim crying down each other’s bare backs and knew that something special was going on here; no doubt it would all be explained in good time. Seeing the two Tims so intimate brought a pain to my heart. I knew that my son had first been attracted to me because I was like his hero, but seeing his affection returned in such measure by that same hero was a shock. I felt the first stirrings of jealousy. Paul must have seen my face, for he slipped his hand in mine, and nodded his head towards the door. We went outside the house, and stood on the roadway. Paul put his arms round me.

‘Sweetheart, Tim has to grow up. He’s eighteen, and he has been carrying our friend in his heart all his adolescent life. This is a fulfillment for him. Be happy for him!’

I let a tear or two of self-pity trickle down my cheek.

‘I love my son, Tim, and I also love my friend, Tim. But I have spent so long keeping an eye out for that boy, that nobody should ever hurt him, that I have come to think of myself as his only protector. Seeing a rival on the scene, and somebody I love myself, is not easy, not easy at all. That he should cry on somebody else’s shoulder, hurts. I love my son so much, so very, very much. And I’m terrified to lose him. After all he has been through. Oh, dear Lord, he was in that house only two days ago!’

And this trivial incident suddenly opened the floodgates in me. All the tension and the worry of the last few weeks found an outlet, and I screamed, howled and cried in Paul’s arms. He took me away quickly into the woods, out of earshot of Tim’s cottage, and held me closely while my grief had its way. I rolled on the ground, tore at my clothes and hair, wept, sobbed, yelled, swore, and probably blasphemed, until I finally subsided, spent, in Paul’s loving and strong arms.

‘Paul, my love,’ I sobbed, ‘He’s only eighteen, scarcely a man. What did he do that this should happen to him? In his short life he has seen so much pain, violence and misery. He’s only eighteen!’

‘In the first world war, Johnny, eighteen-year-olds boys were considered old enough to die for their country, and hundreds of thousands of parents lost their sons forever to bombs, bullets, poisoned gas, trench fever, and a thousand other horrible deaths. We have got our Tim still safe and sound. He has been through a terrible time, it cannot be denied, but we still have him. He is safe, Johnny, bar some scars on his back, and some sore balls. And what is more, in his head he is better than he was before. He has worked whatever it was out of his system. He was a loving, wonderful boy, and can you doubt that he will be a wonderful, loving man? Especially now that he has sorted himself out. This pain has been a catharsis for him; he is clean, whole, new. And I think that now it really is nearly over. His father cannot trouble him again while we have those photographs safe. All we have to do is help him become a fulfilled adult, which in many ways he has already become. Do you really grudge him intimacy with our friend Tim? Think about how intimate we have been with Tim! Tim’s that sort of guy. If our Tim loves Tim senior, that’s good, isn’t it? We love Tim senior. It’s just that we have to let our Tim grow up and join our circle of friends. He really is a man now, no longer our little boy. The three of us will become the four of us, in other words. That’s all. And actually, I rather think I’m looking forward to it. Something tells me it’s going to be a whole lot of fun!’

‘You know what I hate about you, Paul Topham?’

‘No, what?’

‘Why do you always have to be so fucking right all the time?’

‘Natural genius, my sweetheart!’

We kissed, hard and long, and then, hand in hand, we walked to the waterfall, and then returned to Tim’s cottage. It wasn’t quite the same as his old cottage, which had special memories, but, as Paul said to me, we could create new memories just as easily.

Eventually, Tim said to Ben, ‘Having seen you that night, I can understand why you did not want to be identified as Ben Thompson. But how did you find out my name in order to be able to pinch it? I never told you, any more than you told me yours.’

‘It was your lucky shirt’

‘Eh?’

‘I had no shirt when you found me, so you gave me one of yours. It was a blue and white football shirt, and you said that you had scored loads of goals in it when you were my age. It had a school label with your name inside the collar. The nurse in the hospital thought that the shirt was mine, and so when I refused to give my name to the social worker, she told the woman that my name was Tim Sullivan. Who was I to argue with her? If I couldn’t be your foster son in fact, I might at least be so in name.’

‘I remember now. I hope the shirt brought you luck on the soccer pitch too’.

‘No it didn’t. I was always hopeless. But my little brother Conor has it now, and he’s amazing at football.’

The ordinary talk had relaxed them both, and Tim got painfully up from his long crouch to make a pot of tea. Ben clanked into the kitchen to help. As they sat at the kitchen table with their mugs, chatting aimiably about nothing, Ben slopped his tea; his arms were still not fully under control, and Tim had to rush round the table to help him, and wash the scalding tea off his chest. His kilt was soaked, too, and Ben yelped with pain as his already outraged balls were scalded. While Tim was mopping up what he could, he saw Ben’s back again, and his mood sharply sobered.

‘Ben; what happened? Your back looks even worse than it did the night you came to me. I see it’s been cleaned up and is healing, but I can’t imagine what must have happened to you. And all these chains and things? They’re not locked on, but welded, or soldered, or something. I take it you’re not on your way to a kinky party, so something awful must have taken place, Soldier.’

So Ben took a deep breath and calmly told him everything.

By the end of it, Tim was white, shaking, and sobbing like a child. Ben was still calm, but he got up and pulled Tim into a hug, placing his chains over his head as before. Through his tears, Tim said

‘Ben, you say you have forgiven me, but I shall never, never, forgive myself for bringing all this onto you.’

‘You didn’t bring it on me, Tim! It was my father who brought it on me. He, and nobody else. He started this whole train of consequences. You had no way of knowing the consequences of what you did in good faith. If you had taken me in, how would you have prevented my father coming after me as he did when I was with my Dada, Johnny? My Dada would have done anything to have avoided that. You could not possibly have done more. And how can you know that we would ever have found my brother Dan? My father told me that he ran out that night and was never seen again. He’s probably dead; either in a ditch somewhere, the poor little sod, or else my father killed him in one of his scenes or rages. Tim, believe me, you’ve been one of the good things, no, one of the very best things, in my life, even if we knew each other only a few hours. Never think anything different.’

‘Soldier, I have something else to tell you now that you should know.’ Tim spoke into Ben’s bare shoulder, the tears still flowing freely. ‘I think you should prepare yourself.’

‘Mm?’

‘Ben, Dan isn’t dead. He’s here at Turling Park. He’s also the boy I have been hoping to foster.’

Ben fainted again. This time his chains were around Tim’s back, and so Tim was pulled down on top of him.

Johnny and Paul, still hand in hand, chose that moment to return. Paul said, in an amused voice

‘We’d better stay; if we go off again, your son and our best friend will be at it like jack rabbits!’

When Ben revived, he was pleased to find himself back on the couch with Tim’s arm around him, and his father and his Uncle Paul looking concernedly at him. Then he remembered the last thing Tim had said to him before he fainted. He looked around frantically

‘Dan………?’

‘…is in Scotland, soldier, with the rest of the boys. You’ll just have to be patient!’

‘Patient! After everything I’ve told you, you tell me to be patient!’

Johnny then spoke; while Ben had been unconscious, Tim had told him and Paul everything.

‘Tim,—my son, Tim, that is—we’ve got to think how to do this. If this is a shock for you, just think what a shock it’s going to be for Dan. I think that there are a lot of things to sort out first. I’m really sorry, Tim, but patient is what you’re going to have to be. For a start, do you really want Dan to see you like this?’

Ben looked down at his chains and his tea-stained kilt, and thought of his ravaged back.

‘No, Dada, you’re right as always! I’ll try and be patient. But I think you’re going to have to get used to calling me Ben. It’d be too confusing otherwise. And besides,’ he added wryly, ‘I’m embarrassed as all hell to be caught using my hero’s name. It sounds really pervy.’

Everyone laughed, and the tension was broken.

It was decided to wait until the following morning before going to the metalwork room; it was only the ball collar that was really giving Ben much discomfort; the rest was merely awkward. Ben’s sodden tea-stained kilt wasn’t exactly decorative or comfortable either, but he didn’t want to take it off both for reasons of modesty and also because he knew the sight of his red, imprisoned balls would make the others uncomfortable. So when Tim suggested that they turn it into fun and all get naked, Ben shook his head, smiling. Then Tim suddenly said

‘I’ve got it!’ and sprinted upstairs to his bedroom, where he rummaged around in his impressive collection of sportsgear and returned triumphantly.

‘Breakshorts’

‘Eh?’

‘They’ve got popper fasteners all up the legs. Ben will be able to wear these.’

And so it proved. Once in the shorts, Ben was much more comfortable. He could sit with his knees apart, like a man, instead of having to keep them together like a girl. And they gave a measure of support to his weighted balls, though the crotch of the shorts did tend to push his bruised nuts against the collar.

It was decided that they would start on Ben’s irons in the morning. There was some concern about discovery, but Tim reassured the others that The Screw was in Scotland with the other boys;

‘One of the staff dropped out, and so The Screw had to go, all of a sudden. Poor bloody kids, that’s all I can say!’

Paul and Johnny brought in their belongings from the car. Everyone was longing for a swim, but with Ben still in his irons, it seemed unfair. So they lay together in the late afternoon sun. Johnny offered to cook dinner.

‘I’m a fantastic cook, and we deserve a real blow-out, I think.’

Everyone agreed, so Paul and Tim were dispatched to the shops to buy ingredients and wine. While they were gone, Johnny and Ben had a long talk. Nobody knows what they said, but by the time the others had returned, the two were hugging with all their strength, and so everything was fine, and Johnny went to the kitchen to start work.

Gin and tonic in hand, Tim was looking at the pile of books that Paul and Johnny had brought.

‘What’s all this?’

‘Definitely not pre-prandial reading. Those are the photographs albums that we found in Tim’s—I mean Ben’s—Father’s house.’

But it was too late. Tim had taken one of the books and opened it. He turned a page or two. The glass fell from his hand and he choked;

‘Oh my God!’

Paul rushed to Tim’s side. ‘What is it, mate?’

‘These photographs…’

‘Yeah, they’re really horrible.’

‘No, no…well…yes, but you don’t understand! They’re all Turling Park boys! I know them all!’