The Human Touch: Chapter Three

                                                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 hands and guided 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 Shelly saw that he was withdrawn, that always signified a bad day.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 gate to meet him, she pulled hard on her maternal strength. Today she needed a good one, but it wasn’t going to happen. 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?’

            ‘No, the traffic light sequence was wrong. They were 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 too, but what with being messed about with, they were on red, which knocked all the rest 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 replay it. Batten down the hatches. Come on, you, let’s get you inside,’ Shelly gave Sammy’s hand a squeeze.

            ‘Red.’

Sammy lifted his head and rolled 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.’

Here we go, sooner than expected but we might as well get it over with.

‘Green, green, green, green, red, amber, green, green.’

His voice was without expression, but to demonstrate the depth of emotion behind the flat words, he punched Shelly on the arm. It was hard enough that it would leave a nasty bruise.

            ‘No, Sammy. No.’

            ‘Should have been green.’

            ‘I know, honey, I know it should. Just goes to show you can never trust a traffic 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 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.’

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, from one until he reset. It gave him comfort. She walked him up the path and into the house.

            ‘Hey Sammy. How you doing, fella? How was school?’

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 careful not to touch any part of his son. Sammy stiffened his core and withdrew from the implied embrace without 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, John knew that something had upset his son. It didn’t bode well for introducing him to the dog.

            Shelly made him a snack. She made sure that the milk in his glass came exactly to the half pint level and that the glass above the milk line was spotless.  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 to him. He’d hung up his coat and had taken his homework out of his satchel. He put his books and a pencil, pen, and rubber on to his homework desk. The books were positioned 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 dried his hands a second time.

‘You do not touch your penis with dirty hands. This is how infection spreads.’

Shelly handed the snack to him so that he could position them. 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 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? 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…’

            It was a long speech and John knew better than to cut in, he let him recite his website information until he got to the end. It could have been worse, Sammy might have been reading a book about pugs.

That’s right, Son, 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 taken in. An overload of data would cause Sammy’s circuitry to blow—and that was never pretty. 

John had put the pup in the garage until the time for proper introductions could take place. It was crucial that it was 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 and sniff out the interesting smells. He’d peed and pooped to establish himself as belonging in this new place and he’d whined for attention. When the attention didn’t come, he scratched at the garage door and yelped 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 likened his eye rolling to 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.’

            ‘Yes, we did, Sammy, but only a little puppy dog, we got him especially for you.’

Shelly busied herself with moving things on the coffee table so that Sammy wouldn’t pick up on her nervousness.

            ‘I’ll go and see to him, Shelly he’s probably frightened,’

            ‘So, what do you think, honey? Do you want to meet the new member of the family?’

Shelly didn’t think 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. 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’s hands stilled and he was 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 not good.

            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 found adjectives hard to grasp because he couldn’t picture them in his mind. Words such as please and thank you 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. Oh shit.’

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 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 didn’t move his gaze from 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 to Sammy and leapt 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. 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 without looking. He wasn’t trying to hurt the animal, it had 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 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?’

            John picked the whimpering puppy up, scratching him behind the ear and making soothing noises. He checked him over to see that he hadn’t been hurt.

‘Yeah, he’s fine, He’s just frightened. It’s okay. It’s all okay, isn’t it, buddy,’

He talked into the dog’s ear as it 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 his 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. That is his 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. She was 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. Carthenage needs to learn some manners. That’s what Cathenage needs,’ Sammy lurched into pages of text that he’d read in a book on dog behaviour.