A Stolen Childhood (3 page)

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.