If I had been frightened before, I was terrified now, watching in mortification as the car slowed to a halt, half up on the pavement, and Mike leapt out, almost before it had even fully stopped.
‘No!’ I cried, standing up from the chair arm I’d been perching on. I banged at the window as hard as I could.
Mike barely gave me a glance, though I knew he could hear me, because he thrust a finger in my general direction and barked, ‘You stay inside!’
Which, of course, immediately made him the new focus of the ex-SAS man’s ire, and I knew – I just knew – what was going to happen next.
If Phil, fit lad though he obviously was, was a simple standing target, I could see – in that way you can’t help but see if you’re married to a big, well-toned man – that Adi had Mike sized up straight away as someone who might require a little more effort. And when that happens – again, I knew this from experience – it makes any would-be adversaries go in even harder, thinking they’d best make a good job of it first chance they got, as, should they fail, there might well not be a second.
I burst into tears as his fist met my poor husband’s nose – as I said, real violence if not remotely like the pretend stuff on screen, and I also felt a kind of sick, primeval fury; it was almost as if I’d been punched myself.
Mike apparently had no such concerns; he seemed keener to redress the balance and, though I wasn’t sure exactly what series of events caused it, within seconds, and amid much pulling and shouting, they were both rolling around together on the ground, while Phil, back on his feet, tried manfully to separate them, his pristine shirt not so pristine any more. Never has the sound of police sirens been so welcome, and when I heard them I almost crossed myself in gratitude.
‘What’s happening out there?’ It was Cathy’s voice. She’d poked her head between the double doors. I couldn’t see Paulie but I could still hear him wailing, and the way Cathy was positioned I concluded that, if not in a head-lock, she certainly had him in some sort of body-lock; perhaps firmly wedged under her arm. He had no fight left in him, evidently – that was the main thing.
‘Police,’ I mouthed, not wishing to inflame Paulie into another burst of energy. Then I motioned towards the hall, miming that I considered it safe to go and open the front door now, a decision helped in part by the sight of two burly constables bearing down on the tangle of limbs on our path that was Mike and the luckless former soldier.
It was all over, then, in a moment. By the time I’d gone into the hall and opened the front door, both men were back on their feet, Mike shaking his head, while Adi, safely held between the two grim-faced officers, was scowling his defiance even now.
‘He’s my fucking son!’ he was ranting at Phil. ‘You have no right – no fucking right – to keep him from me!’
‘Keep this up, mate, and you’ll have a lot more than a caution,’ one of the officers was saying to him. ‘Just come with us, quiet, like, and let’s get in the car, shall we?’
‘He has no fucking right!’ Adi persisted. ‘That’s my kid in there, don’t you realise? My fucking kid! And he needs me!’ He turned back to Phil again. ‘How would you like it, eh? Eh? You got kids, have you?’
‘Come on, Mr Selby,’ the other officer said, trying to coax him to turn around and go with them. But he was having none of it.
‘Can’t you give me a fucking minute, here? Can’t you? You got kids?’ he almost spat at him. ‘You?’ he asked the other. ‘Yeah, I’ll bet you have. Tucked up all nice and safe at home, are they? Safe and with you. You and the wife? Yeah. I’ll bet.’ His face contorted in distress. ‘Well, lucky old you, mate, because I haven’t!’ With his arms pinned, he had to use his head to indicate. ‘My little nipper – he’s in there, he is. In there, shut up. Can’t even see me. While his fucking slag of a mother – God!’ He seemed momentarily speechless. ‘Her and that shit of a bloke she’s got – they don’t love him, they don’t want him – they just want fucking shot of him! Shame on the bitch. Fucking shame on her!’ he was looking at me now. ‘Yeah, right. An’ what happens? My Paulie’s sent here. To fucking strangers! To –’
‘Mr Selby!’ Phil entreated, ‘we need to sit down and discuss all this like adults.’
‘Yeah, look, mate,’ Mike added calmly. ‘This is doing you no good, is it? Please just do what the officers tell you. Leave us be. Go with them peacefully. No one wants this …’
Adi looked at him contemptuously. ‘Yeah, you know what, “mate”?’ he said, looking like he’d be well up for round two. ‘And you, “mate”, can fuck off, as well.’
‘Right, that’s enough,’ one of the officers said. ‘That’s it, now.’
Adrian Selby was bundled into the back of their patrol car within seconds. And he was crying. He was sobbing like a baby.
‘Well, what else was I going to do?’ Mike was saying half an hour or so later. ‘No idea what’s going on. You slamming the phone down. Some racket kicking off – God only knows what kind of racket. Tell you what – I am very glad I turned up when I did. State of your face,’ he added, grinning at Phil – and then grimacing at how much it hurt to do so. ‘Man, if I hadn’t turned up you might have been pulverised.’
Phil’s face did indeed look a tad worse for wear. When he lifted the bag of peas I’d supplied to try to help reduce the swelling, it was clear the swelling was winning the battle, for the moment, at least. ‘I perhaps should have stayed in the house,’ he admitted, echoing my thoughts. Then he grinned as well. ‘Typical social worker, eh? Always thinking we can perform miracles.’
Mike shook his head. ‘I’d have done the same, mate. You weren’t to know he’d kick off like that, were you?’
‘Well, strictly speaking, yes,’ Phil said. ‘But you do what you do, don’t you?’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Cathy, who’d just come into the kitchen. She dabbed at her lower lip, which was also swelling badly, as well as cut.
‘God, you too?’ I said, running the cold tap again so I could moisten some cotton wool for her. ‘D’you want some ice for that as well?’
She shook her head and grinned ruefully. ‘Only in a large gin and tonic.’
‘Well, I have to say, I’m impressed,’ I said. ‘Do you know any other magic tricks? Though with the one you already have you’ll probably be set for life.’
And it was true. By some miracle, Paulie was out for the count currently, having at some stage – between my going outside and the police coming and going – succumbed to whatever dark magic Cathy practised when not being a play worker, and fallen into an inexplicable and extremely convenient sleep.
Not that there wouldn’t be hell to deal with when he woke up again, as he would before long. When he woke up and it all came flooding right back to him; that his dad had come to get him and we’d failed to hand him over, which was why, half an hour after that – Phil and Cathy having gone back to their respective offices – John informed me that in all likelihood he’d pick Paulie up that evening, because there was a chance – if Adi wasn’t kept in the cells overnight, which apparently he might well not be – of another visitation.
‘I’d like to think not,’ he said. ‘I’m hoping the sensible part of him will prevail. Mental health issues or otherwise, he can’t be so stupid as not to realise that another episode such as this will certainly scupper whatever chance he has of getting custody of his son.’
I did a double take. ‘You think there is a chance?’ I asked him, strangely unsure whether to be mortified or pleased.
‘There’s always a chance,’ John said. ‘Whatever else is true, this is a man with a distinguished military record. Whatever’s happened since … well, we all watch things like Afghanistan on the telly, don’t we? So we all know the toll it takes on servicemen and women.’
‘But if he’s that unstable, that potentially violent … actually violent, as we’ve seen …’
‘That’s true as well. And my hunch is that if anything were to be sanctioned, we’d been looking at the longer rather than the shorter term. But, you know what? I’d like to think there’s some hope here, don’t you? After all, who’s to say that his problems haven’t been exacerbated by losing his son? Who’s to say that, if Paulie does stay in care, and Adi is supported – you know, with regular contact – that he can’t get better and be the father he needs to be in order to get him back? There’s also a mum and dad – did I tell you? Adi’s parents. I’m told they’d quite like to be proper grandparents again. So that’s something too, isn’t it?’
It was. And I thought back to the teddy bear Paulie had come with. Someone did love this strange little child. Several someones, perhaps. And John was right. That was something indeed.