I was just about to say so when the whole thing went pear-shaped, and the much-heralded wild child, who rampaged like an animal, showed up to join us, as if from nowhere.
And it really was out of nowhere. I’d had absolutely no inkling. One minute he was sitting back on his heels admiring what he’d made – I had shuffled forwards on the sofa and muted the telly so I could inspect it too – and the next he was on his feet and, completely without warning, had karate-kicked a foot out to smash it to pieces – a full-on sideways thrust right at the middle of it with his bare foot.
‘I hate you!’ he screamed at it. ‘I hate you! I hate you!’ And once he’d reduced it to a pile of bricks again, he kicked at it some more, sending showers of bricks pinging all across the room.
‘Sam! What on earth’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Why on earth have you done that? Your bridge was brilliant. Why would you smash it into pieces like that?’
He whirled to face me. ‘Cos it’s shit!’ he screamed, stabbing a finger towards the mess he’d made. ‘The colours got all wrong! This Lego is shit! I don’t want it! I hate it!’
‘The colours got wrong?’ I asked, keeping my voice low to try and calm things. ‘What d’you mean, love? The colours looked lovely to me.’
I should have known better than to disagree with him, because this only made him crosser. ‘The colours got wrong!’ he raged. Then, again without warning, he lunged at me, grabbed my hair and began pulling.
What a sight we must have looked to anyone passing by – me still perched on the sofa, Sam’s face at my eye level, pink-cheeked with fury, two clumps of my hair clutched tight in his fists. I could feel his warm breath puffing in angry gusts on my face.
‘I hate you! I hate you!’ he screamed, pulling harder, now kicking out with his feet at my shins as well. Thanking God for him being shoeless, I unfolded myself to standing, though with my head dipped, of necessity, to the level of his chest.
‘Sam, let go of my hair, please,’ I said through a veil of it.
In answer, he tugged harder. I put my hands over his. ‘Sam. Let go of my hair, please. Now.’
Another tug, this time accessorised by an eardrum-splitting scream. ‘Sam!’ I shouted, now forcibly unbending his fingers. ‘You need to listen to me. Let go this minute. Calm down!’
He was screaming at such a pitch now that I doubted he could even hear me. But my greater strength won out and I managed to free my hair. His own hands I hung on to though, tightly. What must this kind of assault be like if you were the same size as he was? Or smaller – Kelly’s fears for her poor kids were now making sense. And no wonder his own siblings were so scared of him.
‘Sam! Listen to me,’ I said firmly, holding his hands now in front of him. ‘I want to help you. I want to help you figure out what went wrong with your bridge. But I cannot do that – I cannot help you – while you’re this angry.’
His eyes were full of tears now. ‘It was the blues! It was the blues!’
I saw his leg twitch, and braced for another kick, but it didn’t come. I lowered my backside back onto the sofa so we were again face-to-face. ‘Okay, so that’s a start,’ I said. ‘Sam, look at me. Look at me. There. That’s a start. So, what about the blues? What exactly went wrong with them?’
‘There was a wrong one!’ His tone suggested he was incredulous that I could have missed it. ‘A blue one where there shouldn’t have been one! And I never did it! I did a red, then a white, then a blue, then a red again. But I never put two blues together. I never!’
Wow, I thought, he has misplaced a brick. That is all. ‘Ah, I see,’ I said. ‘Well, yes, I can see how that would make you cross. So perhaps it’s best if we put the bricks away for today, okay? So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to pick them all up, together, and put them back in the box. Then how about I see if I can find Fireman Sam on the telly?’
‘But I never did it!’ he squeaked at me. ‘I never!’
But I could tell from his changing body language that this was only the embers. The raging fire, quick to ignite, had died away equally quickly. I let go of his hands finally. He flexed and unflexed his fingers.
‘Come on,’ I said, getting down on my knees now. ‘Tell you what, shall we make it a race?’
In answer, he was down on his own knees in seconds, gathering. ‘Beat ya, beat ya, beat ya!’ he sang. ‘Gotcha, gonna eat ya!’
Which made little sense to me, but that was absolutely fine. The important thing was that the storm had passed as quickly as it had started. And at least we’d had it, which meant that we were at last up and running. And though I didn’t know to where, quite, with this tornado of a child, at least I had a better idea of what I was dealing with.
If that one small incident opened a window to what Kelly might have been dealing with, the next couple of days saw me thrown headlong straight out of it, and onto what I had to concede was something fast approaching a battlefield. Life with Sam was definitely going to be no picnic. No wonder Kelly, with two little ones, had struggled to cope. Because it wasn’t just the screaming and the howling and the tantrums, and it wasn’t just the constant threat of violence when Sam exploded. It was that I just never saw them coming.
And they seemed destined to be a regular occurrence. That same afternoon, after Mike and Tyler had returned, I was in the kitchen, toiling away at a late-afternoon roast, when there was another major blow-up.
Sam had been watching TV while Mike and Tyler had been going over some college coursework, and, as the volume had been creeping up to a disruptive level, Mike had asked Sam if he could turn it down a little. He’d duly nodded – this was apparently no problem in itself, because he did as he was told immediately – but when he accidentally pressed the ‘change channel’ button, and lost the programme temporarily, it triggered a second bout of screaming and swearing and lashing out – this time, and just as I ran into the living room, by throwing the remote across the room in a fit of temper, catching Tyler a glancing blow across the face.
Mike was obviously quick to act, grabbing Sam up in a bear hug before he could lay hands on anything else to throw, and while Tyler heroically took the blow – in both senses – on the chin, Mike was already deploying the restraint technique we’d been trained in; using his superior strength to physically contain Sam while trying to quell the storm of his temper.
And what a whirlwind of a thing that temper was. Mike had his arms firmly around Sam, pinning his own to his sides, but I could see he was looking for any opportunity to attack, gnashing his teeth, and trying to get his mouth close enough to bite Mike, while kicking his feet out to try and kick him on the shins. Had he not been just nine – and such a scrap of a thing – it would have been a fearsome sight. As it was it just made me feel very sad.
While Tyler gathered up the batteries and put the remote back together, I went across to see if I could help. ‘Sam, until you stop that silly kicking and biting, Mike can’t let you go,’ I tried. ‘The way you are carrying on, you will hurt yourself, and we don’t want that to happen. We just want you to calm yourself down, okay? So stop yelling and take some deep breaths, please.’
But the only thing Sam was listening to was his anger, which seemed to be drowning all other sounds out. Eyes squeezed tight shut, he continued to wriggle and squirm. ‘Are you listening, mate?’ Mike asked. ‘You need to stop this, okay? Because I can’t let you go till you do.’
Mike shuffled back a little, towards the sofa, pulling Sam up onto his lap, speaking softly as he did so despite the heels hammering at his shins. ‘There we go, mate,’ he said,