Is For Life... Chapter Three: Sammy and Carthenage

                    Chapter Three

            The school bus pulled up outside, Sammy was in the third seat from the front—his seat— staring out of the window. He showed no recognition of his house and didn’t move to exit the bus. Sandra, the driver’s help, opened the side door of the minibus and climbed in. A moment later, she reversed onto the pavement holding Sammy’s hand and guiding him through the door. Sometimes, Sammy allowed people to touch him, sometimes not. It was as unpredictable as the British weather and didn’t bear any relevance to his current mood. On a bad day, when you could expect him to be at his most unreachable, he might allow this small contact and likewise, on a very good day, he might not. There was no way of telling what he would tolerate. Shelly saw that he was withdrawn, that always signified a bad day. There was no margin for extenuating circumstances, Today was a shitter day.

 Walking to the garden gate to meet him, she pulled hard on her maternal strength. Today she’d really needed a good one. Sammy refused to make eye contact with her and stared at his shoes as she took his hand from Sandra. He gave no indication that he was aware of his change of protector. 

            ‘Thanks Sandra, how’s he been?’

            ‘Oh, no problems at school, they said he was fine but we had an incident on the way home.’

            ‘New route?’ asked Shelly.

            ‘No, the traffic light sequence was wrong. They’d been working on them over the weekend. Anyway, the first one was green, which was fine, but when we came to the second set they should have been green but, what with being messed about with, they were on red, which of course knocked all the rest completely out of kilter. He’s not a happy bunny. He’s been counting seconds for the last ten minutes and he’s hit out a couple of times, so watch your face. Oh, and he tried to bite Gracie, so while you’re watching your face you might want to keep an eye on his teeth.

            Shelly laughed. ‘Traffic light sequencing, that’s a new one. Oh boy, we’ll suffer for that when he decides to re-play it. Batten down the hatches.’ Both women laughed again. ‘Come on, you, let’s get you inside,’ Shelly gave Sammy’s hand a squeeze.

            ‘Red,’ Sammy said, lifting his head and rolling his eyes from one corner of their sockets to the other. The eye rolling movement was the first thing that set him apart. Sometimes he did a decent job of normal, it was only when he made the exaggerated eye movement that strangers would get their first inkling that something wasn’t right. ‘Red,’ he said again. Here we go, thought Shelly, sooner than expected but we might as well get it over with. ‘Green, green, green, green, red, amber, green, green.’ He said in an expressionless voice, and then, to demonstrate the depth of the emotion behind the flat words, he punched Shelly hard on the arm.

            ‘No, Sammy. No.’

            ‘Should have been green.’

            ‘I know, honey, I know it should. Just goes to show you can never trust a green light, eh?’

            ‘Samuel May must write to the highway authorities. This can not be allowed to happen in this country in Europe called Great Britain. Samuel May knows it is not right. On those eight sets of lights it is always green, green, green, green, red, amber, green, green.  Samuel May must write and tell them that green, red, red, red, green, amber, red, red, is bad.’ His echolalia kicked in and he recited the traffic legislation appertaining to the history of traffic lights. ‘Traffic lights, which may also be known as stop lights, traffic lamps, traffic signals, signal lights, robots, or semaphore, are signalling devices positioned at road intersections, pedestrian crossings and other locations to control competing flows of traffic. Traffic lights were first installed in 1868 in London and today are installed in most cities around the world. Traffic lights alternate the right of way of road users by displaying lights of a standard colour and using a universal colour code and a precise sequence to enable comprehension by those who are colour blind.’ And then as quickly as he’d appeared, her erudite fifteen year-old was gone. The flat expression, which was his default setting when something had upset him, was back, the light had gone out. He dropped his head and counted seconds with an intensity that might lead people to think that he was working on a mathematical equation so great that it had stumped every genius in the land, but he was only counting seconds. It gave him comfort. She walked him up the path and into the house.

            ‘Hey Sammy. How you doing, fella? How was school?’ asked his father as Shelly led him into the living room. John rose from his seat and spread his arms as though to fold Sammy into an embrace. He made a hug motion with his arms while being very careful not to touch any part of his son. Sammy stiffened his core and withdrew from the implied embrace without actually moving away at all. It had always been like this. John called it the cuddle version of an air kiss and said that it was the way forward for Tinsel Town. Sammy didn’t respond to John’s question about school and John lifted his eyes to meet Shelly’s. She shook her head. They’d never been able to decide which mood was worse, on a good day when he asked this question; Sammy would spend ages taking him, minute by minute, through his day. When this didn’t happen he knew that something had upset his son. It didn’t bode well for introducing him to the dog.

            Shelly made him a snack. She ensured that the milk in his glass came exactly to the half pint level and that the glass above the milk line was spotlessly clean.  She laid out four biscuits keeping the Jaffa cakes and the pink wafer separated, only plain biscuits were allowed to meet. She waited until Sammy was at the downstairs computer desk before taking the milk and biscuits in to him. He’d hung up his coat and had taken his homework out of his satchel. He placed his books and a pencil, pen and rubber on to his homework desk. The books were positioned squarely an inch from the edge of the desk and the pen and pencil were laid next to each other a quarter of an inch apart along the top of the books with the rubber horizontal to the end of the writing implements. He’d been to the upstairs bathroom, washed his hands, urinated, and had washed and thoroughly dried his hands a second time. ‘You do not touch your penis with dirty hands, which is how infection spreads.’ Shelly handed the snack to him so that he could position them correctly. It was easier that way.

            If there was one thing that Sammy couldn’t tolerate, it was surprises. Surprises were by the nature of the beast, unpredictable and predictability was what made Sammy’s sun rise in the east and set in the west. Anything that was contrary to order and routine was anything but a surprise; it was a disaster waiting to happen. With this in mind, John and Shelly cautiously broached the subject of the puppy with Sammy.

            ‘Honey, you know we’ve talked about getting a puppy for you to play with? We talk about that every day when you get home from school, right?’ Shelly began tentatively. ‘You’ve been reading books about it, haven’t you?’

            ‘When you get your pug puppy it will require four small meals a day. Feed your pug puppy one ounce of food for every pound that he weighs. For example, if your pug puppy weighs three pounds, give him three ounces of food. Every part of your pug puppy’s body is growing and developing at this stage so feed him…’

            That’s right, son,’ cut in John, ‘but mate, we didn’t get you a pug. We got you a German shepherd. Well, technically it’s a German shepherd crossbreed. I know you like to be precise about these things.’ Shelly gave him a warning look and John shut up to allow Sammy time to process the information that his brain had just taken in.             John had put the pup in the garage until the time for proper introductions could take place. This had to be done at Sammy’s pace, it was too important to rush, but the pup had other ideas. He’d had time to mooch about the garage a bit and sniff out all the interesting smells. He’d probably peed and pooped to establish himself as belonging in this new place and he’d whined just a little bit, for attention. When the attention didn’t come he started scratching at the garage door and yelping in earnest. 

Shelly John and Sammy heard him. The adults held their breath waiting to gauge Sammy’s reaction. He rolled his eyes from side to side. John always said that his eye rolling was like the LED display on a computer. It was indicative of the computer working to process the information passing through Sammy’s brain.

            ‘John May got a dog,’ said Sammy.

            ‘Yes we did, Sammy, but only a little puppy dog, we got him especially for you.’ Shelly busied herself with moving some things on the coffee table so that Sammy wouldn’t pick up on her nervousness.

            ‘I’ll go and see to him, he’s probably frightened,’ John said, referring to the dog.

            ‘So what do you think, honey? Do you want to meet the new member of the family?’ At first Shelly didn’t think that Sammy was going to answer her. His silence stretched out within a great cavern of expectancy. He was twining his hands in his lap and giving them his full attention. This wasn’t a good sign.

            ‘Is it a human being? No,’ Sammy said, answering his own question. ‘Does it share any linage with Samuel May’s ancestors? No. Does any part of its DNA string match any part of Samuel May’s DNA string? No. Is it a member of Samuel May’s family? No. So it is a pet belonging to Samuel May. It is not a member of Samuel May’s family.’ Sammy said, calmer now that he had sorted that out in his mind. Despite the negative questioning, the fact that Sammy was talking at all was good. Silence from him in the face of any new situation, was never a good thing.

            When he was a young child, Sammy had read a sentence in his father’s newspaper. It said, ‘People are identified by names, not by titles.’ He had always addressed people by their full names. Shelly and John had tried for years to get him to call them Mummy and Daddy and later, the grown-on versions, but those two words made no sense to Sammy. As well as titles, he often found adjectives hard to grasp because he couldn’t picture them in his mind. Words such as please and thank you, for instance, had no concrete meaning to him. Names he understood, because names were a means of identification. At school, instead of being addressed as Sir or Miss, his teachers had resigned themselves to being called by their given names.

            ‘He’s going to be your dog, sweetheart; you need to think of a name for him.’

Without a second’s hesitation, without even giving himself time to blink, Sammy said, ‘His name is Carthenage. That is his name.’ Shelly waited for Sammy to recite facts that he’d read about the name.

            He didn’t.

            They heard the back door open and the sound of scratchy claws scrambling on the laminate flooring in the kitchen. ‘No you don’t, come here, buddy,’ John’s voice wafted through to them. They heard him grunting as he bent to pick the puppy up and the panting of the excited dog. Sammy’s eyelashes fluttered erratically, a sign that he wasn’t comfortable with this variable to his norm.

            John came in with the squirming puppy in his arms. He walked over to Sammy and knelt down in front of him. Sammy turned his head to the left and looked into the far corner of the ceiling. He neither looked at nor acknowledged the dog.  His fingers twined and moved fast in his lap. He was processing. It was okay, so far.

            ‘You can stroke him Sammy,’ said Shelly, before turning her attention to John. Sammy continued to stare at the farthest corner of the room. ‘You should have put him on a lead,’

            ‘I tried; it’s impossible, have you seen how much this thing can wriggle?’

            As if on cue the puppy squirmed free and jumped from John’s hands. He bounded the two steps over to Sammy and leapt up at his legs, scratching and scrambling to try and climb onto his knee.

            Sammy’s eyes rolled and John made a grab for the pup but before he could get him out of Sammy’s way, the boy’s hand came up in a fist and lashed out at the dog. He did it blindly without looking. He wasn’t purposefully trying to hurt the animal, it had just invaded his space and when that happened to him, Sammy hit out.

            It was less than a second. The dog was half on Sammy’s knee, John was already reaching out to him and Sammy belted the dog off his lap and across the room.

            The puppy screamed once and then continued to yelp. Shelly’s hands flew to cover her mouth. ‘Oh my God. Is he all right?’ she asked.

            John went over to the pup and picked him up. He checked him over to see that he hadn’t been badly hurt. ‘Yeah, he’s fine, He’s just frightened. It’s okay. It’s all okay, isn’t it, buddy,’ he said stroking the dog and talking into his ear as the puppy calmed.

            Knowing that the pup was okay, Shelly stooped in front of her son. She didn’t try to touch him. It would have sent him over the edge. She just told him that everything was okay.

            Sammy was looking at his hands, they were in his lap twisting and turning, his fingers wiggled and he brought them up to his face where they floated and flittered in front of is eyes, twining and intertwining like butterflies. ‘Carthenage is his name. That is his name. Carthenage is his name. That is a good name. Carthenage is his name. That is a good name.’ He was on a loop and coming to terms with the change. Shelly was delighted to hear him repeating the dog’s name. It told her that, even after the frightening experience of having the pup scratching at him to get up, Sammy wasn’t denouncing the dog as a bad thing. She felt that by saying his name Sammy was claiming ownership of the dog. It could have gone better and the puppy was going to have to learn that Sammy couldn’t be jumped all over, but it could have been a disaster. Shelly was cautiously optimistic. ‘You know honey, he’s so small and fragile that we have to be very careful and try really hard not to hurt him. You should have put him on a lead,’ she shot at her husband.

            ‘Carthenage needs his lead. That’s what Cathenage needs,’ Sammy said before lurching into pages of text that he’d read in a book on dog behaviour.