Читать книгу A Stolen Childhood: A Dark Past, a Terrible Secret, a Girl Without a Future - Casey Watson, Casey Watson - Страница 9

My room wasn’t like a regular classroom. For one thing it was half the size, and for another, it wasn’t even a classroom. It had been once, back in the dark ages, when the school had first been built, but after a spell as a learning support room, it had gone the way of many a backwater space – home to a small, motley collection of tables and chairs, and not a great deal else. It had been passed over, forgotten, trapped in a time warp at the end of a corridor, and it suited my purposes perfectly.

The headmaster, Mike Moore, who showed me various options when I’d first secured the job, had expressed surprise; in terms of size and spec he’d definitely shown me better. But there was something about that little room that had chimed with my sensibilities, both as a work space for me and as a safe space for my pupils – who I had an inkling would know all about being passed over and forgotten.

Best of all – and, to be honest, it was probably the deal-breaker – it had double doors that opened out onto a lovely grassy area, tucked away at the back of the school. Oh, the things we could do out there, I’d thought.

And, if I did say so myself, I thought I’d made it quite special. I sectioned off an area at the front for myself, which contained a desk, a set of drawers and (important, to my mind) space to make hot drinks and toast. This last addition had caused a few raised eyebrows. In these days of health and safety consciousness, one couldn’t just turn up and plug in a toaster as one might do at home – no, Mike Moore had been required to call an engineer in specially, to test and ‘pass safe’ my two electrical appliances, which I heard on the grapevine caused a ripple of mild disgruntlement in some quarters, due to the ‘unnecessary’ expense.

I believe I then made matters worse (no, to be fair, I know I did) by going out and spending some of my precious teaching budget on such fripperies as bright emulsion, half a dozen floor cushions and a selection of potted plants – all of which I deemed essential too. Essential to the creation of the warm, calm environment I was after, so, knowing all about politics after years spent working with vulnerable young adults for the local council, I simply ignored the whispered grumbles and exasperated glances, which, once it became common knowledge that my Unit would mop up the most challenging children, did not continue very long, to no one’s surprise.

I had several large display boards and had got to work on them quickly, taking down what remained of the previous bunch of students’ work and, while I was at it, wondering how they were all doing. Being out of school for a few weeks meant being somewhat out of the loop, and I made a mental note to try and track them down when I could. In the meantime, I decided, surveying the newly barren walls, I’d hang on to the gold card frames that we’d put up for Christmas but would be perfectly serviceable for a while yet. I could then turn my attention to my ‘quiet’ area.

A good number of the children who came to me had a tendency to become volatile, so a ‘chill out’ space was another essential. It was a place I could send kids to calm down if they needed to and, equally, it was a place that might prove preventative on that front – not to mention being somewhere a shy child could escape to, should the bustle of the classroom get too much.

It was a simple space – the only seating being those half-dozen floor cushions – and bound on two sides by a pair of bookcases at right angles, facing inwards. There were books, of course, but also a selection of stationery: trays of paper, pens and pencils, in case creativity blossomed and the urge to be artistic took hold.

The knock at my door came just as I was deciding if I had time to rearrange the muddle of books, while putting a new label on the crayon tray. I bobbed up to find Donald Brabbiner, the deputy head, had put his head round the now open door.

‘Casey, do you have a minute?’ he asked, looking stressed. Not that Don looking stressed was anything unusual in itself, currently. The school was in the middle of preparing for an OFSTED visit, and there wasn’t a member of the senior staff who wasn’t stressing about it – the furrowed brow and frazzled expression was very much the look of the moment.

But, no – he looked more stressed than even that, I decided. ‘Yes, of course, Don,’ I said, pulling myself upright and brushing chalk dust from my skirt. ‘I don’t have any children in till tomorrow, and I’m about done here. Is there a problem?’

He nodded grimly. ‘Apparently so.’

He was obviously keen to return to it, too, I decided, as he was already turning and heading back out into the corridor. I quickly followed him, opting for grabbing my satchel, rather than spending time finding my key and locking the door. There was nothing in there worth pinching currently, after all. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. I was having to jog intermittently to keep up with him as we headed off down the corridor, and not just because I was five foot nothing to his six foot two. He was the sort of man who was born to lead and a great asset to the school, and with his brisk manner and his ‘everything must be done yesterday’ attitude, he was hard to keep up with at the best of times. But he was well liked by both the staff and the students, because he was down to earth, fair to a fault and enjoyed a laugh with the children, attributes that made for the best kind of teacher – well, in my humble opinion, anyway.

‘Year eight assembly,’ he said, directing his words half over his shoulder. ‘Some sort of incident going on involving two of the pupils. I was told I was needed and so were you –’ He turned and smiled a grim smile. ‘And as you were on the way, I thought I’d scoop you up en route.’

So he was on his way to it. Which meant he must have been sent for or paged. ‘A fight?’ I asked.

‘I believe so. Though I’m not yet quite sure … Ah –’

He didn’t need to finish whatever it was he was about to say as we could hear the commotion before we saw it; well, the tell-tale sound of massed kids who, as our eyes soon confirmed, were all being herded out of the hall, most of them over-excited, chatting nine to the dozen about something exciting that had obviously gone down – and which probably livened up their morning no end.

‘Settle down,’ Donald barked, to no one in particular. He didn’t need to – just his presence in the area was enough. The various form teachers were busy trying to wrestle back some order too, but the decibel levels suggested that whatever had happened was something more serious than just some radiator-related unrest.

That too was soon confirmed, as Andrea Halstead, one of the year eight form tutors, emerged from the hall and beckoned us to both follow her in.

‘Oh, Mr Brabbiner,’ she said, sounding as if she was still getting her breath back. ‘Casey, hi. Bit of a to-do, I’m afraid. Might have been something and nothing, but Thomas over there’s hit his head and Mr Reynolds and I were thinking that someone will probably need to take him down to A and E.’

‘A and E?’ Donald went straight into accident mode. ‘What sort of head wound? Any bleeding? Did he pass out at any point?’

I looked across to where a group of assorted teachers, teaching assistants and one of the school secretaries, Janice Wells, were forming what looked like two separate human cordons around what must have been the two pupils in question, neither of whom I could properly see yet. What I could see, however, was a large muddle of chairs, several of them overturned, around which Barry, the caretaker, was methodically working, stacking the unaffected rows of chairs both in front of and behind the groups, and dragging them to their positions back against the walls. It was a circle of devastation that looked a little like something had been dropped in the middle of the hall from a great height. A fight, then, for definite.

Or perhaps not. ‘I’m not sure,’ Andrea said, ‘We don’t think so. But it’s been bleeding rather copiously. It’s up in his hair at the back –’ she gestured to her own head to illustrate. ‘Just above the back of his neck. Quite a nasty gash.’

‘Wouldn’t an ambulance be simpler?’ Donald asked.

‘We weren’t sure,’ Andrea said. ‘I was going to call one, but then Janice reminded me about the roadworks on the way to the General. We were wondering if it wouldn’t be easier for someone just to take him in their car. Mr Reynolds seems to have got the bleeding under control.’

‘You want me to take him down in my car?’ I asked. ‘Who is it, anyway?’

‘Lad called Thomas Robinson,’ Andrea said. ‘You probably haven’t come across him – he’s only been at the school for a couple of weeks or so, bless him. But, no, we were hoping you’d be able to take charge of Kiara, there. She’s in no fit state to go back to her friends.’

She nodded towards the second of the two huddles, at the centre of which I could just make out a second pupil, who I now realised wasn’t the gender I expected. ‘Kiara?’ I said. ‘So it’s a girl?’

Andrea nodded while Donald strode off to take charge of the patient and decide how best to get him to A and E. ‘Kiara Bentley,’ she confirmed. ‘Have you had any dealings with her?’

As if to underline that even if I hadn’t I might well do very soon, the subject of our discussion then started shouting. Shouting quite loudly, in fact; and making a great deal of noise for what looked like quite a small amount of pupil.

‘What happened?’ I asked Andrea, at a loss to work it out. ‘Did the pair of them have a punch-up in the middle of assembly?’

‘Not quite a full-on fight,’ she said. ‘But it certainly got physical. I didn’t have the best view because they were halfway along a row, quite a way behind me. By the time I got to it, it was hard to make out what was going on. And she’s still in a right state about it, as you can see. Come on, let’s go and see if we can calm things down a bit, shall we? Then we can all get back on with our days.’ She gave me a wry grin as we walked across the hall. ‘One of those days, eh? Still, at least it’s stopped everyone whining about the radiators.’

I’d already been involved in quite a few fight situations in the course of my job, and some things were common to all of them. The adrenalin rush, the urgent need to lower the emotional temperature and stop fists flying around, and the equally important need to establish the facts.

In that regard, coming into this one after the event left me at something of a disadvantage. On the one hand was this beefy-looking, scruffy, long-haired lad, clutching what looked like a tea-towel to his head, his white(ish) school shirt liberally splattered with blood and with the unmistakable pallor of a child who was in shock. And on the other hand was what seemed like a slip of a girl who seemed to be alternately sobbing and raging at the huddle of staff who were trying to calm her down.

But there was no point in trying to establish quite what had happened, not till the lad had been taken off to have his wound looked at and not till the girl – Kiara Bentley, that was it – was on a more even keel.

‘This is Mrs Watson,’ Andrea said, as we joined the small group surrounding her. Toni, the teaching assistant who’d been sitting beside her, immediately jumped up. ‘Here,’ she said, gesturing towards the seat she’d vacated.

I would have sat on it, too, the better to communicate with the girl, had it not been for the fact that at that exact moment Donald was leading the boy and his retinue out of the hall, which meant walking past us.

‘You’re a fucking dick!’ the girl screamed suddenly, leaping up from her own seat, and only being stopped from lashing out at the boy again by Andrea’s swift arresting arm.

‘Kiara!’ she barked, blocking her route to him. ‘Stop it!’

‘You’re a fucking bastard!’ she screeched, ignoring Andrea completely. ‘And I hope they shrivel up and fall off as well!’

Hope what fall off? I wondered as I helped Andrea gently restrain her. ‘Come on, love,’ I said. ‘This isn’t helping anything, is it? Come on, how about you come with me, eh? Then you can tell me all about it, and –’

She ignored me as well. ‘I’ve got more balls than you’ll ever have anyway!’ she yelled, shouting loud enough to make my left ear hurt, as Donald, with a short barked instruction of ‘Enough!’ disappeared with Janice and Thomas through the double doors. The boy, whose arresting mop of shoulder-length hair was flopping over his face, obscuring it, was half-doubled over, I noticed, and clearly in pain. I didn’t need to see his face. I could hear him.

The penny dropped. Balls. That was what the girl said, hadn’t she? Ouch.

‘Enough, now!’ Andrea repeated as between us we managed to guide the girl back to the seat she’d been sitting on, though, rigid with fury, she refused to sit down.

‘You get back,’ Andrea said to the two young teaching assistants still remaining, then turned her attention back to Kiara. ‘Now, are you going to go with Mrs Watson nicely, my love? I know you’re upset, but nobody can help you when you’re screaming and hollering like this, can they? Come on, try and calm yourself down, okay?’

With the boy gone, all the fight seemed to have gone out of the girl anyway. ‘I hate him!’ she said, but it was a last angry parry, before dissolving into the latest of what looked like a few bouts of tears; she was wearing mascara – well, had been. By now most of it was on her cheeks.

‘Kiara?’ I said, trying to get her to focus her attention on me. ‘What a pretty name. So, come on, how about you come to my classroom with me? You need something to drink, and to calm yourself down. Sort yourself out, eh?’

Not that she had anything with which to do that as yet, and I suddenly remembered that while delving into my bag earlier, I’d seen a half packet of tissues. I rummaged around for it and passed it to her so she could wipe her eyes and blow her nose on something a little kinder than the wodge of rough paper towel someone had obviously run and got from the loos.

She mumbled a thank you, and abruptly sat down again. It was almost as if her legs had given way beneath her, and I wondered if she was actually starting to faint. She was certainly pale enough. I sat beside her. ‘We’ll be fine if you want to get off as well now,’ I said to Andrea. ‘I’ll take Kiara down to my classroom,’ I said, glancing up at the big wall clock. Almost 12.15. It wouldn’t be long till the bell went for lunch and the crowd outside – now dispersed presumably – would all be thronging back again, on their way down to the adjacent dinner hall.

‘Come on, Kiara,’ I said firmly as she dabbed at her eyes. ‘Let’s get out of here as well, eh?’

She looked up at me as if only properly seeing me for the first time. ‘I hate him, miss,’ she said.

Kiara Bentley was a tiny thing, slight in every sense. Which was to say she was my height but there was almost nothing of her. She also looked young for a year eight – was almost doll-like, in fact, with a small oval face which was currently half hidden behind a mass of curly, chocolate-coloured hair. She looked so forlorn too, now the fight had gone out of her; like the proverbial rag doll that gets parked in the corner by a child who’s gone off in search of more interesting things to play with – a look enhanced by the two flaming spots on her pale cheeks. But the doll-like impression was at odds with the look in her eyes; a strange knowing look, causing the phrase ‘old head on young shoulders’ to pop unbidden into my mind.

‘Am I in trouble, miss?’ was the next thing she said to me, a full minute or so since Andrea departed for her tutor room, and we’d left the caretaker to finish clearing the hall. Still, at least she’d come with me readily enough.

‘That’s not going to be easy for me to answer, sweetheart,’ I told her. ‘As I have absolutely no idea what you’ve done.’

I waited, to see if she’d start to tell me the story. In my experience, kids either maintained a sullen silence or it all came rushing out, in one long torrent of denials, accusations and bitter recriminations, from which you then had to winkle out the facts.

‘I never hurt his head. That wasn’t me,’ she said firmly. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking. Just so you know. It wasn’t.’

‘I wasn’t thinking anything,’ I said mildly as we reached the door to my classroom. I opened it and stood aside to let her in. ‘I’m completely in the dark. So how about you put your bag down and grab a chair, while I grab you a glass of juice, and you tell me all about it. How about that?’

It seemed Kiara Bentley had no problem with that at all. She had fallen asleep in assembly, she told me. She hadn’t meant to – how could she? She hadn’t realised she’d been asleep till she woke up.

Which was logical. I agreed she had a point. And when she’d woken up, she went on, it was to find her head was in Thomas’s lap and that everyone around her was sniggering at her. ‘And he’d been saying things,’ she said, her voice now beginning to wobble, ‘and messing about with my hair, miss, and …’

Her hand went to her hair then and as it did so I noticed that close to her temple there was a bald patch about the size of a ten-pence piece. ‘Doing what things?’ I asked, trying to visualise the scenario, all too aware that not all modern 12-year-olds were the sexual innocents their pre-teen status might suggest. Particularly groups of boys in close proximity to one another; it was a myth that it was only girls who got attacks of the giggles whenever it came to matters of sex. But what about that bald patch? Had he been responsible for that?

‘Doing what to your hair?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t know, miss, but something. You know. Messing about. Putting his hands in it. Pretending that I was giving him a, you know, a blow-job or something.’

Though it was slightly startling to hear such a phrase coming from what superficially seemed such a young innocent’s mouth, this I could visualise all too easily, sadly. The sort of pubescent nonsense that young boys got up to everywhere. But one thing struck me. That must have been some nap she was having, for her to fall asleep so completely that him doing something like that didn’t wake her up. That was odd. But then, I reasoned, he’d have had to be pretty quiet about his silliness, given that they were slap-bang in the middle of an assembly.

‘And then you woke up,’ I prompted, still wondering about the head wound and the hair and the hapless lad’s testicles.

Kiara took a gulp of the orange juice I’d now poured for her before nodding. ‘And I realised where I was and what was happening, and they were all saying stuff, like “Ooh, can I have a go next, Kiara?” Stuff like that. And he was, like, “Thanks for that. You’re really good,” and laughing at me and making faces and being an absolute dick.’ Her eyes narrowed, her tears forgotten. ‘So I got him back. Where it hurts.’

Which still didn’t explain what happened next and I said so. Upon which Kiara explained, with a definite edge of pride, that she’d grabbed his balls so tightly that he’d actually screamed. ‘Right in the middle of everything,’ she said, the memory obviously firing her up all over again, ‘because I did it just like my mum showed me. And he jumped up then, but I hung on and he kind of fell backwards and then – well, I don’t know, really, because I’d let go by now and I didn’t really see properly, but he was grabbing his balls and crying and then his chair tipped up somehow, and he fell back and then someone obviously stopped him, but then he slipped and – well, I don’t know how really, but he, like, proper banged his head. On the edge of another chair I think it was. And that wasn’t anything to do with me, miss. But then everyone started yelling and shouting and there was blood going everywhere, and then his mate Connor – he’s a dick too – he went and grabbed me; grabbed my hair and started yelling in my face –’

‘And pulled that clump out?’

‘What?’ She looked confused now. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, raising a hand to where I’d pointed then shaking her head. ‘No, that wasn’t him. That’s nothing to do with it. Anyway, I told him I’d do the same to him as I’d done to his idiot friend and he let go. And then the teachers were all shouting and everyone round me’s shouting at me too, saying I did it, but I didn’t do it, miss. He fell over by himself. He banged his head by himself. Not that he didn’t deserve it, miss. He’s a dick.’

The lunch bell went then, as if to underline this assertion. And as it did so, I watched Kiara’s hand go to the bald patch, seemingly unconsciously, and watched as she wound a single strand of hair around her finger and, with a sharp tug, plucked it out. I don’t know why but something she’d said suddenly popped into my mind. Just like my mum’s showed me. I filed the thought away.

‘Doesn’t that hurt you?’ I asked.

‘Doesn’t what hurt?’ she asked, her confusion at the question evident.

‘When you pull out your hair like that,’ I said. ‘It must hurt when you do that, mustn’t it?’

She looked down at her hand then let the hair go. She blushed. ‘I know, miss,’ she said. ‘I really need to stop doing it, don’t I?’

Kiara didn’t go straight off to lunch. She didn’t feel quite ready to face the world again yet, and I was happy to let her stay for a bit while I finished my coffee. She was on school dinners, and as there was always an enormous queue at the start of lunch-break, there was no particular urgency anyway

And now she’d got everything off her chest, she looked much brighter. ‘Wow, this is cool, this place is, miss,’ she observed, draining her juice. ‘It’s not at all like I thought it would be.’

‘Oh, really?’ I asked her, smiling. ‘So you know all about my Unit, do you? So what did you think? What’s the word on the street?’

‘I dunno, miss,’ she said, getting up and placing her cup back on my desk. ‘Like a sort of cell or something – you know. Like a detention room. Not all nice and bright like this. It’s lovely,’ she added, surprising me with a smile that lit up her face. ‘Really nice. What do you teach?’

‘All sorts of things,’ I told her. ‘Though not the sort you might be thinking of. I’m not like the other teachers – we don’t do the regular lessons in here.’

She walked across to the quiet corner. ‘This is nice,’ she said, peering round the side of the bookcases. ‘Reminds me of being in the infants. You know? When you’d sit on bean bags for story time and stuff. And fall asleep halfway through,’ she added, grinning across at me.

I laughed. ‘And it’s like that in here sometimes, as well. No one’s ever too old to have a story read to them, are they? And yes, sometimes we do have the odd person nodding off. And we don’t mind too much. As I say, this isn’t like normal school.’ Something occurred to me then. ‘How about you this morning,’ I asked her. ‘You must have been out for the count and then some. Did you have a late night last night?’

I noticed her hand drift back to the same spot on her head again. It seemed to be entirely unconscious. ‘Erm, a bit,’ she admitted, but the pause before she answered was sufficient to spark a thought in me that there was possibly more to know. ‘So how do you, like, end up here?’ she added. ‘I mean not you, miss. I mean the kids who get sent here. Why’d they come to you?’

I explained what the Unit was all about as I rinsed out my mug. How we took in the kids who were having problems of one kind or another and tried to help them rally their emotional forces and change some of the choices they made. ‘So really,’ I finished, ‘it’s a bit like a port in a storm. Because it can feel pretty stormy out there for some kids at some times. Well, a bit like it must have felt for you earlier on. Not to mention poor Thomas,’ I added. ‘He’s had a bit of a time of it as well, hasn’t he? Not that he didn’t deserve you being furious with him,’ I added. ‘But it’s a shame that he got hurt. Let’s hope he’s okay, eh?’

No pause this time. ‘He’s still a di – sorry, idiot. Sorry miss, but he is,’ she added firmly. ‘You should have him in here. He’s definitely a problem kid.’

I couldn’t help but smile at this. ‘Well, he certainly has a problem today, doesn’t he? But you know, Kiara, there’s something you might not have thought about when it comes to “problem” kids – you know, the ones who are always naughty. They’re almost always the ones that have the problems. That’s what makes them naughty. And it’s my job, once they’re with me, to try and work it all out – unravel it so we can see everything more clearly, if you like.’

Kiara’s hand drifted to her head again and, before I could distract her, she had wrapped her finger around another hair and tugged it out at the root. And as she absorbed what I’d said, I began to wonder. I wasn’t sure why but there was something tugging at me too; some instinct that as yet had no real shape to it, but was persistently knocking on the door of my brain. The hair pulling was obviously a well-established tic, and a tic was a mechanism for self-soothing. And a need to self-sooth was generally a response to stress. And for an apparently fit young girl to fall fast asleep mid-morning … I didn’t know what it added up to, but it did amount to something, as did what she said next.

‘Can anyone come here, miss?’ she said. ‘You know, if they ask to?’

‘That’s not quite how it works,’ I said. ‘It’s generally the teachers who decide. But to some extent, I suppose, yes. If a pupil obviously isn’t managing in normal classes, then, as I was just saying, they can come here for a bit …’

‘Like if they’re too tired to do lessons?’

She looked directly at me, and again I got a glimpse of that rather ‘knowing’ look she had, and it made me suddenly wonder if I was being played here. It wasn’t unheard of for a child to pretend they had problems just to escape the routine, or to have a regular pass out of some subject or class or teacher they didn’t like. I’d been there before – as had Kelly, as had my alter ego, the other behaviour manager, Jim Dawson; having boys and girls practically begging for counselling, floods of tears, the whole kit and caboodle, only to find out later that they weren’t distressed at all – had just forgotten their homework, or their football boots or netball kit or something and didn’t dare turn up to class without it.

But, for all that Kiara seemed perfectly fine now, my antennae were quivering and, me being me, I needed to know why.

‘I tell you what, sweetie,’ I told her. ‘Why don’t you go off and get your lunch now. And while you’re doing that, I’ll have a word with your form teacher. You’re still looking a bit pale to me, and I think you’re still tired, aren’t you? So, if you want to, how about I ask if you can come back here to me this afternoon? I’ve got new children coming in tomorrow and I need it prettying up a bit. How’s that sound? Would you like to do that?’

‘Could I?’ This development seemed to please Kiara enormously. She reached for her backpack, which was bright pink and enormous, stuffed to bursting with goodness knows what. She’d be pretty exhausted just carrying that around all day, I mused.

‘Yes, you could,’ I said, nodding. ‘Just go back to your tutor group for afternoon registration when the bell goes as normal, and then, all being well, she can send you straight back here.’

It was like magic. She fairly skipped out of the room.

I waited for a few seconds after Kiara left, then reached for my log book, so I could quickly scribble down the events of the past quarter of an hour, as well as get down the details of her version of events. It was such an automatic thing for me these days that I did it almost on auto-pilot. It was a vital part of my job and I was meticulous about it, too, because one thing I’d learned early on was that no matter how insignificant-seeming they might be at the time, the most mundane of facts, in conjunction with any timings, could end up being key ones at some point down the line. And though I obviously drew the line at writing ‘very curiously knowing eyes’ I still filed it in my brain, before grabbing my bag again and going in search of lunch and information. I had an itch now, and I was very keen to scratch it.