When Tyler returned from football camp on Friday evening to find Paulie already gone, his first utterance, perhaps naturally, was ‘How did it go?’ and his second, also naturally (because he had eyes in his head), was, ‘Mike, what the hell happened to your face?’
We were a long time round the tea table that night.
Riley’s naughty step dictated that an errant or out-of-control child’s time out should run to one minute for each year of a child’s life. It didn’t escape my notice that we’d managed a similar sort of regime with Paulie – for every year of his life we’d taken care of him for a day, and though it was anyone’s guess whether those five days made any difference, I knew they were numbers that would remain in my memory whenever naughty steps were mentioned again.
We found out some facts – John’s always brilliant at keeping us updated – and they all made a welcome kind of sense. It seemed Paulie hadn’t intentionally killed the family’s rabbit. The facts were pieced together down the line by a counsellor who began working with him, when it emerged that he had an extremely high IQ. Paulie, in fact, had accidentally slammed the hutch door on the animal’s neck – having been sent outside to feed it he’d acted too quickly when the pet made a bid for freedom and he’d tried to bang the door shut. He’d then incurred the wrath of his stepfather, who, all too ready to believe it had been an act of murder (perhaps unsurprisingly under the circumstances), laid into the child for a confession, and, of course, duly got one.
As Paulie explained to the counsellor, he decided it would be ‘better to say I purposely deaded it, because if I did, they’d send me to go and live with my daddy’. Except he wasn’t. He was whisked into care, and then off to our house. And, interestingly, no mention of a rock or stone was ever made by him. It was perhaps just a ‘figment of the stepdad’s imagination’, if one wants to be charitable.
Paulie is currently with a long-term foster family, and is likely to remain there for the foreseeable future. He’s also in school, and being well supported, having been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum – something that has now been identified as probably having played a bigger part in his challenging behaviour than anyone had previously realised.
Sadly, this seems to have made little difference to Paulie’s future when it comes to his mother. Tragic though it is, it seems he was always destined to be rejected by her, having been the product of a short, and probably ill-advised, liaison – not to mention being affected by the bitter acrimony that followed their split. He was damaged, to put it mildly, by association. The better news, however, is that he has regular contact with his father. It’s still supervised at present, while Adi works through his own issues, but sometimes includes, to their joy, Paulie’s grandparents.
So, all in all, it’s still very much a ‘watch this space’ situation, but, increasingly, it’s looking like the picture is slightly rosier. Oh, and one of the things that needed to happen before Adi was officially allowed to make his case to social services was that he properly displayed remorse for his actions on the day Paulie left us – the memory of which Mike has stashed away in a mental file marked ‘When moaning about going back to work and that your wife has all the excitement, be extremely careful what you wish for!’
We still have Adi’s letter.