A Dark Secret: Part 2 of 3. Casey Watson

that bridge when we came to it, only a couple of days later I had further evidence that perhaps we couldn’t. That I’d been lulled into a false sense of security.

      In fact, it was in the night-time when it happened – at 3.20 in the morning. A horrible time to be jolted awake at the best of times, but even worse when you were woken by screaming. And there was something about Sam’s screams that never failed to go right through me.

      ‘I’ll go,’ I whispered to Mike, who had also woken up. ‘You go back to sleep, love. You’ve got to be up in three hours.’

      ‘Wha? Wha time is it?’ he mumbled as I pushed the covers back. Then he grunted and pulled the duvet back over his head.

      Screams still piercing the silence, I pattered out onto the landing, pulling on my dressing gown as I went. I knew Tyler wouldn’t wake up, at least – he’d been football training after college and it would take an earthquake to wake him after that. He might even still be wearing headphones while sleeping – it wouldn’t be the first time, as he often finished the evening with a late-night comedy podcast; it always made us smile to hear him tittering away to himself.

      Sam, though, despite my assumption he was screaming in his sleep, appeared to be wide, wide awake. He was sitting bolt upright in his bed, clutching the covers under his chin, his little hands balled into tight, white fists.

      But as I approached I wasn’t sure he was awake after all. His face was wet from sobbing, his eyes and pupils huge, but he didn’t seem to see me.

I sat down on the bed. ‘Sweetheart, did you have a bad dream?’ I stroked his hair as I spoke, which was damp and clinging to his forehead. ‘Have you had a nasty nightmare?’

      Sam nodded – so he was awake, at least half-awake – but he still stared straight ahead towards the mirror on his dressing table. I followed his line of sight and wondered fleetingly if that might be the problem. It was probably a scary thing if you woke in the night and saw a reflection of yourself in a mirror. I didn’t have time to dwell on that, however, as Sam had by now begun rambling. Not quite sense – more a string of random words and phrases, only a few of which I could pick out. Dog cage. The bad man. It hurts. Mustn’t tell.

      Sam was beginning to shake now, as well, so I put my arm around him and gently rocked him, holding him tight but not too tight as he continued spewing words out. I still wasn’t entirely sure if he was asleep or awake. The bad man. Mustn’t tell. Mustn’t tell Mummy. Courtney. He was sobbing too, little whimpers. Like a dreaming dog, chasing rabbits in its sleep.

      ‘The bad man,’ I said eventually, keeping my voice to a whisper.

      ‘He’s so bad,’ he said immediately, and I felt him stiffen in my embrace.

      ‘The bad man in your dream?’ I tried.

He stiffened further, and tipped his face up so he could see me. I looked into frightened eyes and I realised he was awake. Just gripped by something – an overwhelming mental image? A memory? I’d seen similar things before in deeply distressed children – a kind of tipping point, when whatever it is that they’ve locked away so carefully comes tumbling out of them finally, too big to contain.

      ‘He’s real,’ Sam said finally. ‘He’s proper. He’s real.’

      ‘And he hurt you?’

      A small nod.

      ‘In what way, sweetie?’

      ‘My winkie. He said he wouldn’t but he did! He’s a liar!’

      Can a heart ‘sink’? Of course not. It’s too firmly anchored. But the expression is a common one for good reason. Nothing else captures that sensation of resigned, heavy gloom quite so accurately. That moment when a person sees or hears something so wretchedly unwelcome that an exhalation or a head shake just isn’t enough. His winkie. A bad man. A man who hurt his winkie. It was a Pandora’s box I’d had the misfortune to have opened more than once – those few words so often the portal to a whole raft of nasties, the implications of them so huge. Were I given to swearing, I’d have sworn then, no question. This again.

      He was crying harder now, as if the admission had opened a sluice. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ I said, clutching him tighter. ‘Shhh, now. It’s okay. You’re safe, no one can hurt you here, I promise.’

      And, of course, he was. At least from the bad man who’d hurt him, whoever he was. But from the demons lodged in his head, not at all.

I riffled through mental file cards as I continued to rock him. Sexual abuse. That flipping dog cage. Not being able to tell his mummy. I knew what it meant, obviously – some sort of sexual assault. But what did it all mean, in terms of the role it had played in his past? Had this been an isolated incident or had it been an ongoing horror? I thought back to the few snippets I’d been learning from Christine Bolton. Sam’s mother had been painted as sick and neglectful. The next-door neighbour had reported a string of men in and out of the house. I knew that alcohol, or possibly drugs, had been mentioned. Had Sam been abused by one of his mother’s boyfriends? Had he been locked up in a dog cage to get him out of the way? Were both these things going on on a regular basis? It was all too easy to form a picture, because this was the stuff of my own nightmares – their foundations built on the disclosures of many children before Sam. Of being variously abused – physically, psychologically and sexually. Of being grievously neglected, of being ‘used’ in payment for drugs, of being treated as a sexual plaything by adult relations, of being forced to participate in horrendous, deviant acts. No, I hadn’t seen it all – not yet, at least – but it sometimes felt as though I’d heard it all. And all of it coming down to the same distressing business of vulnerable children being horribly treated and defiled.