A Stolen Childhood (15 page)

I’d even learned that he was a ‘waste of space’ – that had been one of the first things Kiara’s mum had told me about him, and it stuck. Living in squalor, unemployed, reliant on benefits – it wasn’t the most encouraging CV out there.

But I was prepared to be open-minded because that was the only way to be; there were two sides to every story, after all. Yes, Kiara’s mum might look down on him, but her domestic standards were right up there with my own and, from what I’d seen when I’d visited, she had a similar cleaning obsession. Even worse, perhaps; at least I allowed my kids to make a mess before bustling round to clear it all up.

There was also the inescapable fact that whenever Kiara spoke about her dad, there was a real light of love in her eyes, and that she enjoyed spending time with him wasn’t in question. Which reminded me that good parenting went on all over the planet, often by adults who struggled in many other aspects of life, but found maternal or paternal love the easiest thing in the world.

I also knew how fiercely loyal Kiara was to her father. So much so that I got the impression that she’d fight his corner over pretty much anything; and perhaps that, too, was the result of the acrimonious nature of the relationship between her parents. With her mother so down on him, she felt she had to stand up for him.

And perhaps that was because he was genuinely trying to do his best. Yes, he might have been absent for a chunk of her childhood, but perhaps now he was trying to make good the lack – perhaps he was trying to be a genuinely good dad to her. And that was surely a major new positive in her life; something to be cherished and encouraged. It just needed to be tempered by some good old-fashioned guidance about the importance, when she was with him, of making sure she attended school.

Such was my mindset as I parked the car and locked it the following Wednesday afternoon; that I was there to help make Kiara’s dad see where his responsibilities lay and help him to help us in helping her. He didn’t actually live very far from Kiara and her mother, as the crow flies, but the distance travelled, in terms of affluence, was far. Mr Bentley lived in a part of town I was already quite familiar with: a mix of elderly people, who’d lived there for most of their lives, living side by side with flat dwellers, these being the sort of houses that, over the years, had been bought up by developers and converted into apartments for the rental market. It was therefore a previously grand street, now down at heel, and with only a precarious sense of community – one that could all too easily be crumbled by a single all-night party, or altercation about parking or bins.

I had lived in such environments and knew what a melting pot they were, and as I climbed out of the car, I tried not to see the negatives that seemed to shout out from my immediate surroundings. The abandoned mattress half slumped again a wall on the opposite pavement, the broken glass (legacy of a thousand abandoned beer bottles?), the graffiti’d brickwork, the bits of rubbish that were light enough to be picked up by the breeze wafting in idle swirls along the street.

Try as I might, however, I still felt like a duck in a shooting gallery as I crossed the road to the house I’d identified as the correct one; the run-down Victorian terrace being indistinguishable from most of the others in the street, which had presumably been converted into three or four separate flats.

There were three buzzers, in fact, when I fetched up at the porch, which was separated from the pavement by no more than four or five feet of ‘garden’; in reality enough space for a quartet of council wheelie bins and a healthy profusion of weeds. The panel of buzzers was sufficiently faded that the names written to accompany them had all but vanished, but the number scrawled in marker pen led me to the correct one. The top one, so presumably the top flat.

I pressed the buzzer and the speaker crackled into life immediately, whereupon a soft male voice said hello, the same one I’d heard on the phone.

‘I’m Casey Watson,’ I explained, wondering if he’d watched my arrival. ‘From the school? Here to have a chat with you about Kiara?’

‘I’ll come down,’ came the reply. ‘The entry buzzer’s broken. Hang on a tick …’

The speaker went dead then, but within seconds I heard a rumble from inside that was unmistakably the sound of someone clattering down the stairs. The door was then opened, with the rattle of a security chain and a squeal of protesting hinges, presumably long starved of grease.

The same could not be said for Mr Bentley. He couldn’t have looked more different from Kiara’s mother, his sex notwithstanding. Where she was pin-sharp and straight-backed, he was sloppiness personified; there was no part of him that suggested he had any sort of grooming regime, bar getting out of bed and raking hands through his hair.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said, automatically holding a hand out to shake and then trying to push away the thought that sprang to mind as he looked at it, namely: ‘Shaggy from
Scooby Doo
! That’s who he looks like!’

Mr Bentley put his own hand in it, and his handshake was surprisingly firm. And, despite the look of him – elderly jeans, frayed T-shirt, greasy shoulder-length hair – his smile was welcoming and his manner engaging. ‘Come on up,’ he said. ‘Follow me. I’ve already put the kettle on.’

I duly did so, skirting round the piles of junk mail that formed a drift against the hall skirting board, and placing my feet, as did he, in the centre of the stair treads, which were darkened in colour on either side by what looked like a year’s worth of dust; clearly no one took responsibility for cleaning the ‘common parts’ here. I doubted anyone in residence owned a vacuum cleaner.

My impression – that Mr Bentley lived in what would once have been called a ‘hovel’ – didn’t change on entering the flat itself. It was as filthy as Kiara’s mum’s home had been clean, as poorly furnished as hers had been fitted out like a show home. He led me down a short hallway – carpet coloured as on the staircase, a kind of ‘greige’, striped with ‘dust’ – into a back room that obviously served as kitchen-diner. As we drew nearer, I could see out onto a small balcony atop a fire escape, which presumably led down to a back garden. There was a single black refuse sack sitting squat like a beanbag by the glass-panelled back door, perhaps evidence of a hasty tidy up.

‘Tea or coffee?’ Mr Bentley said brightly, brandishing two blue mugs. Spying that the jar on the counter wasn’t some icky bargain-priced coffee ‘blend’, I opted for the latter. As a fully paid-up member of the coffee-addict community, I took great interest on where I got my fixes.

‘Black,’ I added, noting that despite the down-at-heel nature of my immediate surroundings the surfaces were freshly wiped, at least. There was a small formica-topped table and I wondered if this was where he and Kiara sat and ate their take-aways. ‘And thanks for agreeing to see me,’ I said, matching his chatty tone – at least here I didn’t feel I was on pins. ‘Kiara tells me you’ve not long moved back to the area, and that she’s really been enjoying spending time with you.’

Mr Bentley had his back to me, spooning coffee into mugs, but now he turned and nodded. ‘Only six months or so,’ he said. ‘I’m, um, trying to find some work. I used to work in haulage, and it’s, well –’ He shrugged. ‘Work’s hard to come by everywhere, isn’t it? Sorry,’ he added, casting around the room as he spoke. ‘You know, for the state of the place. The mess and that … it’s not that easy to make ends meet some weeks …’

I realised then that, despite his chirpy smile, he was actually quite nervous. Intimidated by me, even, which was novel. But seen from his perspective, perhaps I did cut an intimidating figure; smartly turned out, business-like, sent from Kiara’s school. I doubted that, in his current circumstances, he got lots of visitors like me – only had dealings with them at the job centre, in council offices and so on, where I didn’t doubt he’d be routinely judged. I felt sorry for him suddenly, and keen to put him at his ease. Which meant moving things along to Kiara.

‘Oh, believe me, I’ve been there,’ I reassured him, putting my bag down on the little table, noticing as I did so that there was a piece of paper with a shopping list on it, written in Kiara’s hand. ‘I’m not here to pass judgement on your soft furnishings,’ I added grinning. ‘Just keen to chat about Kiara. She speaks very highly of you in school.’

‘That’s nice,’ he said, and again I thought of Shaggy – he gave the impression of being something like a gauche teenager in a thirty-something male’s body, and I couldn’t imagine him and Kiara’s mum together at
all
.

The coffee soon made – true to his word, he obviously had already boiled the kettle – he then ushered me into a second, bigger room at the front, allowing me a brief covert glimpse into one of the bedrooms, which seemed to sport little more than a cheap-looking divan bed (unmade) and one of those hanging rails you can buy to hang up extra clothes. The bedside table was an upturned plastic storage box.

The living room fared little better. There was a sagging sofa, a matching chair and a low wooden coffee table, which boasted so many cup rings it looked like an Olympic-themed art installation.
Oh
, I couldn’t help but think, as Mr Bentley placed our mugs on it,
what I could do for that with some vinegar, some wood stain and a big tub of wax
. For all that, though, the room felt a million times more homely than Mrs Bentley’s gleaming kitchen, not least because evidence of human occupation was all around me, and, more specifically, evidence that Kiara spent time here. As well as a photo-montage of her propped up on a battered cupboard in the corner, there were teenage girl-mags, obviously well thumbed, a pair of girly pink slippers and, in the centre of the coffee table, a bottle of nail varnish and a hair-bobble sat beside the TV remote.

I took the sofa, he took the chair and I picked up my coffee. It would be too hot to drink for at least ten long minutes, but I sipped on it anyway, conscious that there were few things more awkward than being done with whatever you’d gone to a place to do, and still having half a mug of steaming coffee to finish up.

‘So,’ I said, ‘first off, I do need to ask you about Kiara having missed three Mondays in a row. What do you make of that? Does she often complain of tummy problems when she’s with you?’

He hesitated, and I could see that this questioning was making him uncomfortable so I decided to use a different angle. ‘Mr Bentley, trust me, I know how girls of Kiara’s age can be at times. I have a daughter myself and I well remember that if she was desperate for a day off, rather than come to me, she would go to her dad and use the “tummy pain” excuse. They’re not daft, girls – they know that most men get a little squeamish about such things.’ I laughed then, and Mr Bentley nodded what looked like an admission that he’d been duped exactly like that.

‘Guilty as charged, probably,’ he agreed, picking up his mug.

There seemed little point in pursuing that line – I’d proffered a possible reason and he’d taken it – and my hunch was that when it came to Kiara he was as soft as he looked. Perhaps next Monday, however, he’d toughen up a little. And if not, well, then it would be time to become more pointed.

I was much more interested in Kiara’s issues, in any case. So I asked him what he thought might be the cause of her chronic tiredness, the hair pulling, the seeming lack of friends – but it seemed he had little to offer.

‘I honestly don’t know,’ he said. ‘She’s fine when she’s with me. We have
fun
. We go out, we stay in, we go shopping. She’s
fine
. She never pulls her hair and she never says anything about being unhappy – well, except what you’d expect her to – that she’s not very happy living with her mum.’

I was about to respond, to try and draw him on that particular dynamic, when he answered the question without me having to. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know she’s bound to say that – of course she is. I’m not stupid. But she’s got a point, hasn’t she? Spending all that time home alone when she could be here with me. It’s not like I haven’t got room for her. And can you blame her? Her mother out till all hours, no dinner, no one to put her to bed. It’s not right, is it?’ He spread his palms as if to entreat me to agree with him. ‘I know I’ve not got much –’ He smiled ruefully as he said this. ‘Though I’m working on that one, honest. But, come on,’ he finished, reaching for his mug again and draining it, ‘it’s not right her being there.’

I sensed a shift in Kiara’s dad’s tone as he said this, and recalled Kiara telling me how, as soon as she was old enough, she was leaving her mum’s and going to live with her father. Perhaps this was something they’d discussed at length. Perhaps this was key. Perhaps Mr Bentley was making plans to try and help grant Kiara’s wishes – to have her live with him full time right now.

But would Mrs Bentley ever allow that? I didn’t think so. Though she wasn’t helping herself if she was still working several nights a week leaving Kiara without a responsible adult. ‘We
are
concerned about the hours Kiara’s mum is working,’ I agreed. ‘But at the same time, we do understand that it’s hard; she needs to earn a living, and if she works in a job with unsociable hours, well, it’s difficult, isn’t it?’

I wondered if Mr Bentley would take that as a criticism of him, but it seemed to be water off a duck’s back. ‘Which is why she should allow Kiara to stay here more often,’ he said. ‘Look, I know I’ve been a bit soft on her, but that’ll stop, I promise –’

‘Mr Bentley, it’s not up to the school to dictate your living arrangements,’ I hurried to point out. ‘We’re just keen to ensure that Kiara is in the best place – emotionally, that is – to thrive and reach her potential, and our main concern currently is what appears to be a difficult situation between you and her mother; that …’ I paused, trying to choose my words, ‘… that the animosity between you and Mrs Bentley is taking its toll, on both her physical and psychological health.’

I drank some more coffee while Mr Bentley took this in. ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ he said eventually, drawing his hand through his hair to get it out of his eyes. It was longer than Mrs Bentley’s and I wondered if the bobble belonged to him. ‘I really don’t. I don’t know what she’s been saying to you, but you’ve said yourself that she’s out all bloody hours. Working her “unsociable hours”.’ He seemed to think for a bit then looked directly at me, pointedly. ‘I suppose she told you she’s a carer?’