Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2023 23:13:23 +0100
From: AP Webb <pjalexander1753@gmail.com>
Subject: D'n'M Part 6 Chapter 9

All the characters and events in this story are fictitious.  Any
resemblance to real people, either living or dead, is entirely
unintentional.

The story is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any way without the
express permission of the author who can be contacted at:

pjalexander1753@gmail.com

PJ

D'n'M Part 6a

From Chapter 8:

And that's why Dan was wandering the apartment in the early hours and how
he came to find Nico on the floor of his room, curled up under the bottom
bunk, fitfully asleep and murmuring words that were too quiet for Dan to
make out.

"Shit!" he said to himself.  "That's all I need -- first M and now the boy.
How do I deal with the both of them?"

**********

Chapter 9:

After that first, uncomfortable and confusing day a new pattern of living
began to develop, and over the following weeks an unfamiliar and often
uncomfortable dynamic established itself in the
strange-to-everyone-involved household of Dan, Milo and Nico.  There was a
lot to get used to for everyone, including some additions, such as
Mrs. Bolton, the tutor that Gerry had managed to find at very short notice,
and others, like Milo's boss, Shania Margelles, who began to play a bigger
and more hands-on role in the process of integrating Nico into the family.

Mrs. Bolton had recently retired from nearly thirty years at Ashfield
Middle School where she had taught both Milo and Dan as twelve year-olds.
("I remember them as such sweet boys, you know.")  Tragically, just weeks
after she'd cleared her classroom and emptied her locker for the very last
time, her husband suffered a massive aneurism and died whilst mowing the
lawn of their neat little house on the western edge of town. ("He was a
good deal older than me you know.")  As Mrs. Bolton explained, for years
they'd been making plans and saving for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the
Caribbean and then to West Africa in the hope of learning more about their
shared history and ancestral roots.  ("Just like that TV programme, you
must have seen it - `Who Do You Think You Are', you know"). Suddenly,
finding herself with more unoccupied time on her hands than she knew what
to do with and having abandoned all plans for the trip ("I just hadn't the
heart for it after poor Leon passed, you know"), she was more than happy to
answer the ad. that Gerry had placed on a local on-line forum ("I may be
old but you can't spend hours every day with children these days without
getting to know your way around social media, you know"), and Gerry had
been more than happy to give her the job on the spot.  He well remembered
her from all those years ago as a teacher who was warm but demanding of the
children in her class and one that both M and D had always responded to
very positively.  When Gerry first announced Mrs. Bolton's appointment,
with a wide `I'm-very-please-with-myself-for-finding-someone-so-quickly'
smile on his face, Helen wasn't entirely convinced by his choice of a
middle school teacher for Nico who, unless Gerry had forgotten, was of
high-school age.  But Gerry hadn't been friends with her for more than a
quarter of a century without learning a thing or two, and had his answer
well-prepared.

"Okay, so, yeah, Nico is a high-schooler, but he's missed so much of his
education.  He needs someone who can help fill in the gaps but without
treating him like a little kid.  A middle school teacher will be perfect."

"Hmm, you may well be right."  Helen had to reluctantly agree.  "It's
obvious that he's already pissed off enough.  Being made to feel small
would only make an unhappy situation even worse."  There was a pause.
"Good call, Ger."

Gerry's smile got even wider and Mrs. Bolton (no-one could bring themselves
to call her Betty like she repeatedly asked) became a regular, if
temporary, addition, visiting the apartment for three hours every weekday,
Monday to Friday.  As far as anyone could tell the sessions went
well. Helen, Roger and Gerry (mostly Gerry) who'd labelled themselves the
Nico Minders (though not if they thought he was in hearing distance), took
it in turns to be on site during the day while Dan and Milo were out at
work, and they clearly heard two voices coming from behind the closed door
of Nico's bedroom.  Mrs. Bolton's regular written reports also expressed
her delight at his progress, suggesting that it might only be a few weeks,
two or three months at most, before Nico would be ready to transition to
Greenside High.  In Dan's view that happy day couldn't come too soon.  He
was struggling to adjust to all the disruption (his word) that Nico's
arrival had created and hoped regular schooling would bring with it a very
welcome degree of normality.  However, Mrs. Bolton made it clear that Nico
would continue to need additional educational support once he started at
Greenside High ("I'll most certainly be available, you know) but she was
definitely of the view that he was a bright boy, keen to learn and in need
of social interaction with his peers.  ("In my professional opinion, you
know.")

But across town, at Margelles and Associates, Nico's willingness to break
his self-imposed silence was not repeated.  Two afternoons each week Gerry
drove his grandson across town for an hour with Shania Margelles herself.
Obviously, there was no way that Milo could take on professional
responsibility for his own nephew's therapy and he had been both relieved
and surprised when his boss offered to add Nico to her limited client list
when he'd spoken to her on the phone from Buenos Aires.  Dan knew from his
own painful experience with Mr. Roberts all about the devastating impact of
being abused as a teenager, and also about just how good Shania Margelles
was at helping young people to begin the process of repairing the damage it
inevitably causes. He had no difficulty at all in bringing to mind his
sessions with her, including the frequent changes of the pictures on her
office walls and to the colour of her hair.  "There's no-one better, I
promise you," he had assured Milo, whilst feeling a familiar tightening up
of his insides as memories of that awful time suddenly barged their way to
the front of his mind yet again.

Whether Shania really was the best, they had no chance to find out.  Nico
put up no resistance to being driven by Gerry to his twice-weekly therapy
sessions.  In fact, over the course of a few weeks, he seemed to become
fairly comfortable in his grandfather's company and sometimes almost happy.
True, he never spoke on the journeys to and from the office but he appeared
more comfortable with Gerry than with any other member of the group, apart
from Mrs. Bolton.  However, as soon as they arrived at the door of
Margelles and Associates, Nico's habitual body language -- tense and closed
down - would assert itself.  Shania told Milo and Dan that this didn't
change at any point in any of their hour-long sessions.

"What, not at all?  Not ever?" Dan asked.  "Not even a little bit?"

"No, his body language never changes.  He's as tight as a wound-up spring
from start to finish, and his face takes on a completely blank expression."

"Shit, that's bad.  But things will get better, yeah?"  The desperation in
Milo's voice was unmissable.  He knew that blank look on Nico's face only
too well.  "Cases like this often need a lot of time before the kid starts
to trust the therapist, and like D says, you're the best."

"Hm.  I don't know about that.  Though there is something that I'm hoping
is a good sign."

"Yeah?  What's that?" asked Dan.

"He does, very occasionally, answer one of my questions."

"But that's great," Milo responded, a sudden note of optimism creeping in.

"Well, I'm not so sure."

"Huh?"  This was Dan.

"His answer is always in Spanish, and I know that he knows that I don't
understand or speak Spanish very well.  Pretty ironic, eh, given my
heritage.  He speaks way too quickly and with a heavy accent for me to get
much, if any, of a handle on what he says."

"So why's he doing that?"  From his experience with very damaged children,
Milo suspected that this behaviour wasn't accidental.  "Do you think it
might be a deliberate wind-up?" he asked.

"Could be.  For all I know he's secretly pouring out his heart to me and
getting all sorts of emotional and psychological benefit from the simple
act of being able to tell someone about all the bad stuff that's happened
to him, in whatever language.  Equally possible is that he's calling me
every bad name under the sun and giving me the verbal finger, but I've got
no way of knowing which it is."

"So, he speaks to Mrs. Bolton in English, you in Spanish..."

"Sometimes."

"Yeah, sometimes.  And me and you, M, not at all.  Or my parents.  Or your
dad."

Dan turned to Shania.  "So what next?  Have you got a therapist who speaks
Spanish?  Maybe Nico would talk to them."  Dan, typically, was desperately
trying to come up with a solution rather than simply dwelling on the
problem.

"When I suggested that," replied Shania, "Not only did he clam up again but
he also turned his back on me.  I got the message."

"Aaargh!" growled Dan. "This is so fucked up.  What's he playing at?
What's he trying to achieve?"

Ever since his conversation with Tom, Dan had managed to give the
appearance of being fully on board with the whole `Nico situation' but his
frustration with the prospect of everything blowing up in their faces was
never far below the surface.  Now it was in danger of breaking through his
carefully-constructed veneer of unquestioning support.

Unbeknown to her, Shania, came to the rescue before it could erupt.

"I'm not sure he's actually trying to achieve anything, at least, not
consciously or deliberately.  Remember what he's come through, what he's
had to do to survive.  What you know of Nico's life up to now would be
barely believable even in some tedious tale on one of those crappy on-line
story sites.  You probably don't know the half of what that boy has had to
endure and is having to deal with every day.  Playing us all off against
each other by speaking to some people and not others, well, that could
easily be a way of maintaining some kind of control.  It might seem
fucked-up to you, Dan, and I can't pretend to understand it myself, but the
one thing I do know is that the impact of the trauma that Nico has
experienced has formed a knot inside him that's going to take a very long
time to even loosen, much less untie.  You're in it for the long haul,
guys.  I hope you appreciate that."

"We know that," said Milo, "And we definitely know how hard it already is
and is gonna be.  But he's family, Shania, and we're all he's got.  So
however long the haul is, we're gonna be there for Nico every step of the
way.  That's right, isn't it D?"

Dan could only nod his head, not very convincingly it seemed to Shania.
Milo either didn't see, or chose to ignore D's barely-disguised lack of
enthusiasm, maybe because he was beginning to believe that his initial
conviction that it was the right thing to do, giving a home to Kate's boy,
wasn't quite as 100% rock solid as it had been at the start.  Shania
couldn't help wondering if Milo was making a big mistake by deliberately
choosing not to question D's level of commitment.  Well, time would tell,
but looking every which way to avoid catching sight of the elephant in the
room wasn't going to make it disappear.  She knew that from her years as a
professional therapist.  What she didn't know was that Dan was beginning to
build up dangerous levels of resentment towards Nico and the havoc (his
word, again) that he had brought with him.  And not just towards Nico.  In
Dan's head M deserved equal, if not more, blame because it was M's stubborn
refusal to see any course of action other than accepting his sister's dying
wish to take in the boy that had resulted in the current, increasingly
unbearable, situation.  Dan wasn't sure how much more of it he could take,
especially with Milo's continuing emotional distance and also because the
therapy sessions with Shania weren't turning out to be the key to unlocking
Nico's trauma that they'd all been hoping for.  As things stood it was only
Mrs. Bolton's confident prediction about Nico being able to start at
`proper' school that was keeping Dan from telling M just exactly what he
was really thinking and feeling.  What he didn't know was that, had he been
able to look inside Milo's head, he would have seen some of the same
anxieties and frustrations mirrored there.  Ironic or what?

*****

Hamza Rashid, the replacement social worker, was another of the temporary
additions to the de Beer-Reed family.  He made several visits over those
first few weeks after Nico's arrival.  As far as Dan and Milo were
concerned he started with one big advantage in that he wasn't Ms. Veronica
Lamar, and that meant that he'd got both `nearly-dads', as he called them,
on his side right from the outset.  Not that he didn't have to lay down
some markers, just so that everyone knew where they stood in terms of his
work with the family.  He told them all, including Nico, that his job was
to prepare a report for Social Services, just like his predecessor had
started to do.  In that respect, he explained, his task was exactly the
same.

"It's my job to make an assessment about the suitability of this as a
long-term home for Nico and to make a recommendation regarding the question
of his care and guardianship until he reaches the age of 18."

"Yeah, but we're paying for this report so you're gonna say it's all good.
Isn't that right?"  Gerry's business-focused mind-set had clearly decided
what the outcome of Hamza's final report would be.  As far as he was
concerned, money talks.

"Dad!  You can't be saying stuff like that."

"Why not, son?  He's on our side.  Isn't that's right Hamza?"

"Mr. de Beer ..."

"Gerry."

"Gerry.  As you rightly say, you are paying for my professional services,
but they are exactly that -- professional services.  Key to my role is my
independence which means that I am on no-one's side, not even Nico's, even
though my number one consideration is for his well-being and long-term
future.  I have to remain neutral and objective."

Hamza could not have made himself any clearer but it looked as if Gerry
still had a thing or two that he'd like to say, but before he got the
chance to even open his mouth Helen spoke.

"Yes, I'm sure we all understand that, but thank you, Hamza, for making it
so clear.  I think I speak for everyone when I say you can rely on full
co-operation."  Here she paused and looked directly at Gerry.  "From all of
us."

Gerry felt the full force of Helen's gaze and looked down at his feet.  He
nodded.

Hamza's visits were usually arranged in advance (but not always) and
invariably included, as a minimum, a confidential conversation with Nico
(no-one even knew whether or not the boy actually spoke during their time
together) and another with one of the adults involved in his care.  Also
often included were questions about the living arrangements, bedtimes,
diet, screen time to name just a few.  Hamza often enquired into the amount
of time The Minders spent with Nico and what were their opinions of how he
was settling in.  What seemed to be a constant focus of Hamza's questions
was the state of Dan and Milo's relationship, of how they imagined their
future as a couple and what sort of impact they thought becoming legal
guardians to an abused and traumatised teenage boy would have on it.

Inevitably there came the time when Dan's own experience of abuse was the
focus of Hamza's questioning.  It was something that the whole family tried
to avoid, saying that it was all in the past and could have no bearing on
Nico's future with them.  But Hamza was adamant that no aspect of Dan's, or
Milo's, history could be ignored. Helen was appalled that her boy should be
expected to relive his traumatic past, but when it became obvious that
Hamza wasn't going to change his mind, she rang Shania Margelles.  As a
result of that call, and another made by Shania herself to Hamza's
superior, in place of a face-to-face interview, Dan was sent a list of
questions which he was then allowed to answer in writing.  He still found
it incredibly stressful and for days afterwards he was touchy and distant
from everyone, but reliving this part of his life did have one very
significant outcome.

`Fuuck!' he thought, as he typed the last letter at the end of the last
word of the answer to the last question.  `Fuuck!  I was only ever abused
by Roberts, and he didn't even lay a finger on me.  But I was still totally
screwed up for months.'  He had to take a pause and look away from the
screen and what he'd written there.  `I could even have killed myself.  I
certainly thought about it.  Probably would have done without M and mum and
dad being there for me.'  He remembered how he'd refused to leave his
bedroom, even after he'd trashed it, about how he'd not been able to so
much as think about playing soccer ever since, even though he'd loved it so
much back then, and about how M had remained the truest, the most loving
friend, all through the whole, fucked-up time.  `But Nico,' he thought,
`According to Kate's letter, he's had it so, so much worse.  How has that
boy even survived?  His head must be so messed with.  Poor kid.  Poor kid.'
Dan realised he was crying as he pressed the key to send his answers.
`Poor kid.'

So, there was nothing that Hamza didn't want to know about, nothing that
was off-limits, no aspect of their lives that was too small or trivial to
be questioned and recorded.  Milo was always on tenterhooks for several
days in advance of each of these pre-planned visits, with the tension in
the apartment ramping up to almost unbearable levels.  During those days,
if he wasn't at work, he'd set off on long cycle rides around the town,
always alone, trying to take his mind off the approaching visit.  It didn't
work, of course, because his mind was determined not to be ignored, with
one half of it intent on convincing him that something would be said or
seen or heard to persuade Hamza that Nico should be immediately removed and
taken to a children's home or foster placement and not be allowed any
further contact with his birth family.  All attempts by the other half to
explain that Hamza was both experienced and fair-minded and to stop Milo
from imagining every possible doomsday scenario had no effect at all so it
simply gave up and stayed silent.

As the day of each of Hamza's visits approached, Dan watched M becoming
increasing edgy and withdrawn.  He knew, although M never actually told
him, that he was taking off on his bike to try to escape from the tension
and anxiety, and Dan even suggested that they could both go.  `Let's face
it,' he almost said, `We're not doing anything else together.'  But Milo
always brushed off D's offer, another item to add to his growing list of
grievances and frustrations.

Thankfully, at least as far as everyone else was concerned, Hamza's
unannounced visits were far less stressful, for the simple reason that they
were exactly that, unannounced, so Milo couldn't get himself into a state
about them in advance.  The same couldn't be said of the aftermath though,
which would always have Dan, his parents and Gerry creeping around for days
afterwards as if on eggshells, in fear of triggering a `Milo Meltdown', as
Roger named them.

Everyone assumed that Milo behaving like a cat-on-hot-tiles around each of
Hamza's visits was down to his fear of something going wrong and
scuppering, forever, the dream of Nico becoming a permanent and legitimate
member of the family.  But they were wrong, all of them.  What no-one
understood or even guessed, not Dan or Gerry or Helen or Roger, and
certainly not Mrs. Bolton or Shania (who, from a professional perspective,
at least, might have been expected to work it out), was that Milo was
screwing himself up because of his increasing doubts about his ability to
honour Kate's wish for him to take care of her son.  He had begun to
suspect that he had been way too keen to play the part of the hero,
sweeping in to rescue Nico from a life of fear and pain and misery.  He
really, really didn't want to admit to himself that he was starting to feel
that he had been too quick to dismiss the concerns of the rest of his
family, especially D's.  Yes, above everyone else, especially D.  More and
more often he found himself resenting Nico for the disruption he had
brought with him and, almost worst of all, he was becoming more and more
angry with the never-ending silent treatment which he interpreted as a
deliberate and personal act of defiant hostility on Nico's part.  He was
convinced that Nico was doing it to cause Milo the maximum possible hurt.
And it was working.

This growing resentment was eating him up, and Milo knew it, swallowing
great lumps of his strength and determination to do right by Nico and, of
course, by Kate.  Many times in his psychotherapist role he had needed to
carefully explain to the parents of his young clients that their kids were
deliberately testing them, alienating them, pushing them away in a perverse
and self-destructive attempt to prove that they were not loveable or were
bad or were unacceptably damaged.  Milo's professional self knew all this
but, no matter how hard he tried, when it came to his own nephew, all that
professional understanding and expertise vanished every time Nico looked at
him with his dead eyes and unspeaking lips.

In her role as one of the three Nico Minders, Helen was a frequent visitor
to the apartment. She was only too well aware of the boy's dead eyes, of
Milo's frequent cycle rides and of Dan's new-found enthusiasm for lengthy
site visits that might take him out of town for two or three days at a
stretch.  For more than a week now, she and the other Minders had been
sharing their concerns about D and M and Nico, and Helen had finally
decided that, "Enough's enough.  Things can't go on like this.  Something
needs to be done."  She set about doing it.

It was Wednesday, some four or five weeks after Nico's arrival, and Helen
was in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches to the fish and pasta
bake she was planning to leave to be warmed through for dinner.  Nico
himself was in his room with the door closed and the sound of Penalty
Shoot-out 3, his current favourite video game, clearly audible from inside.
Mrs. Bolton was long gone and Milo, having arrived home early from work yet
again, was out cycling around the neighbourhood.  Dan was away on another
distant site visit, having left the apartment almost before the sun was up
that morning.  It was that fact, more than anything, that had been the
final clincher in her decision to act.  It hadn't been unanimous, with
Roger, in particular, advising against.  But eventually they'd come up with
a plan that they could all agree on, the plan that Helen was about to put
into action.

********

I am grateful to my reader, Bruce, for pointing out that my attempts to
improve the accuracy of the written Spanish in this story have not been
very successful.  I apologise for this and hope it has not spoiled anyone's
enjoyment.  Thank you, Bruce.

I really appreciate and enjoy the messages I get from readers and I'll be
very happy to reply if you'd like to get in touch.

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