A Stolen Childhood (22 page)

There were eight of us going – my four Unit children, plus Jim, Kelly and I, as well as Morgan, who had been given a special dispensation to return to school for it; something that had involved Granny Giles threatening her father with a very big stick if he didn’t let her. Granny Giles was definitely my kind of woman. And, despite my baulking slightly at the early start, and the lengthier than sensible journey, the kids’ excitement about it was reason enough to suffer such vicissitudes, pop a travel sickness pill and get on with it. It would be fun when we got to it. As long as I came home in one piece.

I chose some suitable clothing while waiting for Mike to come out of the shower, and, as had been happening here and there lately, my mind returned to Kiara’s situation and
that
phone call. We’d not heard another peep from Mrs Bentley, and as far as I knew there had been no further development, but I was glad I’d offered to come and pick Kiara up to go on the trip (it was too early for the school bus, obviously) because I might get a chance, particularly as I’d been generous with my timings, to have a quiet chat with her on our own; one which might shed more light on what her mother had said about her dad. It was her choice of words that kept nudging at me –
out of the frying pan and into the fire
. There was something about what she’d said that had taken me right back to when I’d first met Kiara – that same itch I’d tried to scratch, and kept itching nonetheless. Deep down, I didn’t quite agree with Gary’s take on things; that was the bottom line. There was something else, I was sure of it – something social services might not know.

‘Well, let’s look at the evidence you’ve already given me,’ Mike had said, when I’d talked to him about it. ‘He’s still mostly unemployed, though he’s perfectly articulate and reasonably personable, and doesn’t have any apparent learning difficulties. He’s living in a rented flat in relative squalor, he’s middle aged but seems to have the life skills of a teenager, lives off junk food and seems to have the motivation of a particularly demotivated slug. I wonder if he’s a dopehead? Just an educated guess …’

And, of course, it was a pretty sensible guess. Kiara’s dad was nothing like the vulnerable adults I’d spent years working with for the council. He just seemed like one of life’s drop-outs. And everybody knew that an addiction to substances like cannabis could, though not in the same league as the sure-fire killer drugs like heroin and crack cocaine, still cause a person to lose all ambition and become almost completely non-productive.

And, yes, he’d been vetted and interviewed, and had cleaned up his home a bit, and there was no doubt that Kiara had blossomed now she was back with him, but monitoring the situation was only that – monitoring. Plenty of scope for someone who put their mind to it to maintain an unsavoury habit in between. After all, what did Mr Bentley do when Kiara was at school and he wasn’t at work? Stalk the job centre, looking for a better job than he’d currently managed to find as a labourer on an ‘as and when’ basis, or see his dealer and get routinely stoned?

It was all of it – every bit of it – just idle conjecture, and perhaps I should stop imagining negative scenarios in my head. Kiara seemed to be thriving, and Mrs Bentley’s rant was just probably revenge – tit-for-tat stuff, as Gary had said. Though what had prompted it – bar her being drunk, perhaps – was a mystery in itself, and I kept coming back to the same question – since she was perfectly happy to relinquish her daughter, why this sudden need to dish the dirt all this time later? It didn’t really seem to make sense.

Perhaps she was just keen to get back at her apparently feckless former partner and, fuelled by alcohol, made the call to me on impulse. I pondered it all as I pulled out my heavy-duty boots and placed them atop my jeans and T-shirt. Perhaps she just grabbed a chance to boot him in the proverbials. Wasn’t that supposed to be her speciality anyway?

There wasn’t so much as a wisp of cloud in the sky as I pulled up in a space across the road from Kiara’s dad’s house, and in the bright light of a perfect summer morning, just after dawn, perhaps anywhere would show its best face. The house itself, bathed in sunshine that winked off the windows, looked a little different to how it had when I’d last come to visit, with the bins in a neat row behind the low, crumbling wall, and the buddleia and other weeds now all gone. I had no idea if this was anything to do with Mr Bentley and/or social services, but it was cheering to see that at least one ‘act’ had been cleaned up – a process that had presumably being going on indoors as well.

Kiara must have been looking out for me because there was no need for me to get out of the car and go and ring the buzzer. The front door opened and she emerged almost as soon as I’d switched the engine off. There was no sign of her dad, however, so I immediately switched it on again.

It was only the second time I’d seen Kiara out of her school uniform, and her outfit of skinny jeans – with artfully ripped knees – pale pink T-shirt and matching pink trainers made her look much more like the teen she was soon going to be – just after school broke up for summer if I remembered rightly. She waved back at the upstairs front window as she crossed the road, and though I couldn’t see him, due to the sun winking off the window panes, I assumed Dad was there and waving back.

I was disappointed because I’d have liked to have seen him for myself, but it was early, I supposed, and there was no reason for him to come down – well, bar common courtesy, in order to thank me for picking his daughter up.
Stop it
, I told myself, mentally readjusting my position. A few social faux pas do not necessarily a ne’er-do-well make.

Kiara jumped in. ‘You look nice, love,’ I said.

She beamed. I think she knew it, too, bless her. ‘Thank you!’ she trilled. ‘These are my new jeans Dad bought me. And I remembered my lunch, miss,’ she added, grinning as she waggled her bag. It was another backpack, but a smaller one; the kind kids use when going swimming. ‘Peanut-butter sandwiches, for extra energy,’ she explained. ‘Oh and Dad said to thank you soooo much. He’s really grateful. He’s got a shift at the building site in a bit, so this is a real help. He’d have come down, but he’s not showered yet and his dressing gown is, like,
such
an embarrassment, so I wouldn’t let him.’

She giggled. So that was me told.

The journey to school wasn’t a long one and as we set off I wondered quite how to start a conversation that, if I wasn’t careful, might immediately alert Kiara to the idea that I was fishing for facts. But I didn’t wonder long. Kiara placed the answer right in my lap.

‘Is Mr Dawson coming today?’ she asked me once we’d dispatched the usual dialogue about how lovely the weather was, what I had in my own lunch box – rather boringly, just an egg sandwich and a bag of crisps – and how exciting, if slightly scary, the day was going to be.

‘Yes, love,’ I said. ‘He is. But don’t be anxious about that. All water under the bridge now. It’s fine.’

‘I just feel so embarrassed about it all,’ she said, reaching into the bag between her knees. She pulled out a little cloth purse and opened it.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But he’s a teacher, remember. A professional. He knows the circumstances. And perhaps this will be a chance to build bridges – which is appropriate, isn’t it? Given we’ll be crossing some rope ones, God help us – and you can stick close to me anyway, if that’ll help.’

‘It’ll help sooo much,’ she said. ‘Thanks, miss. I just cringe every time I think about it.’

I watched her pull out what was probably a chapstick but actually looked more like a pale pink lipstick, then flip down the sun visor to apply it. It made my mind immediately return to her ‘outings’ with her mother, particularly as I noticed the precise way she used it; with a chapstick, you normally just sling it on, unseen, but she used deft strokes to define the two bows of her top lip, like a woman would if applying a vivid scarlet. It was a sharp poke in the ribs for me. A reminder that someone had stolen her childhood.

‘I’m sure you do, Kiara,’ I told her, ‘but you know, you must try and put it behind you, as I’m sure your counsellors have told you. Those days are gone now …’

‘I wouldn’t have actually done it, you know, miss,’ she said, putting the chapstick back in her bag and flipping the visor back up. ‘I never would have done it.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think that for a minute.’ Which wasn’t quite true. I didn’t know any such thing. I didn’t know the detail of her various forays to get clients with her mother and on balance I was glad
not
to.

‘I was only testing him, that was all,’ she continued, as we approached the school gates. There was no sign of any of the others or the minibus yet. Good.

‘Testing him?’ I asked her. ‘In what way?’

‘Just to know,’ she said. ‘Just to check if he was a safe man or a bad man. You never know. You can never tell from looking.’

I felt another mental poke in the ribs. ‘Clients’. They came in all shapes and sizes, all creeds and colours. It had often struck me how impossible it was to tell who bought sex from prostitutes. Not from looking. I got that. You really could never tell.

‘So that was how you went about it?’ I asked her.

Kiara nodded as I pulled up in the staff car park, in the corner nearest to the school itself. ‘Like I said to the social worker lady, I would never have actually done it, not even if he’d said yes. I just wanted to know that he’d say no, that was all.’

I undid my seat belt and swivelled in my seat. ‘Ah, I see. I get it,’ I said. ‘But, love, what do you mean by “a safe man or a bad man”?’

She looked as if she was surprised that she even had to explain it. And, of course, she didn’t. But I wanted to hear it described in her own words. She obliged. ‘The bad men are the ones like Mum brought home. They want you to do stuff to them –’ she nodded towards her lap, pulling a face – ‘and it’s disgusting. My dad’s told me all about them now.
And
how to spot them.’

‘Your dad?’ I pricked my ears up. Perhaps he was being more proactive in protecting his young daughter than I thought. A helpful brownie point that would help me to re-position him more favourably in my brain. ‘And what does he say about it?’

‘That safe men – like him, and like Mr Dawson,’ she added, ‘they would never,
ever
make you do things like that for money. It’s just the bad men that do things like that. That’s why if you ask them you can tell. You can tell in their faces when you say it. Like,
so
easily. Anyway, I don’t have to worry any more, miss,’ she said, pulling together the drawstring on her bag, ready. ‘Because dad’s my
only
man now, for ever.’

‘For ever?’ I asked, smiling at her. ‘I’m not sure about that. One day soon, in a year or two, you’ll see a boy across a crowded room …’

‘No chance,’ she said immediately. ‘He
is
, miss. For ever. He’d never hurt me. He’s gentle. He really loves me. He loves me
much
more than he ever loved my mum.’

The poke in the ribs had suddenly become a hefty punch in my gut.
He’d never hurt me
.
He’s gentle. He’s GENTLE.
The word – that word particularly – dislodged itself from the others, and settled in the pit of my stomach, with a whump. This couldn’t be happening. What I was suddenly thinking. It couldn’t be right, what I was thinking, could it?
Could
it?

‘Gentle?’ I asked.

‘
Always
,’ she confirmed. I could hardly bear to look at her in case of what I might see in her face. That, oh, so-knowing face. I didn’t. I stared ahead again.

‘Kiara,’ I said next, and as lightly as I could – so lightly that my words could almost have been carried out of the car window and away on the breeze. As if I’d never said them. Never had to. And how I wished they would. ‘Do you do some of those things with your dad?’

Now I did turn. She looked shocked. ‘No, of course not!’ she said, almost indignantly. ‘Don’t be silly, miss. I told you, my dad
loves
me. When
we
do it, it’s called making love.’

Chapter 18

In years to come, sad to say, I would hear things, and witness things, and deal with the fall-out from things that no child should ever have to endure. In years to come hearing things of the kind Kiara had just said to me would still affect me deeply, but with greater experience under my belt and greater exposure to life’s horrors, I would have registered the enormity of it without gasping or cringing or flinching. I would have merely listened, filed it away in a temporary storage facility in my brain and then, at the earliest opportunity (I never waited), I would open up an official log book and record everything I’d been told, in as much detail as I could remember and, where at all possible, verbatim. I would do this calmly, in a measured way, conscious of the importance of following protocol in the case of a looked-after child making a ‘disclosure’.

But that was for the future. Right now, it was difficult not to gape at Kiara, mouth
Oh, my God!
, and feel fearful that I’d be violently sick again.

It was okay. I knew I wouldn’t actually
be
sick, because that level of shock had already happened to me. Which was in itself interesting; had I already become slightly desensitised to the sheer gut-churning vileness of the deeds that were being done to her? In any event, I was still nauseous enough to have to take a couple of deep breaths, grateful for the fact that as soon as she’d delivered her bombshell, Kiara had undone her own seatbelt, opened the passenger door and started getting out of the car. And why would she not do that? We were having a little ‘girl-to-girl’ chat and her comment had been throwaway, I felt sure of it. All she’d done was to gently put this misinformed older woman straight on the relationship between love and sex where her loving,
gentle
dad was concerned.

I gripped the wheel, appalled and stunned, my brain once again flooded by images that I really didn’t want parking themselves up there.