A Stolen Childhood: A Dark Past, a Terrible Secret, a Girl Without a Future. Casey Watson
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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.
Knowing that, in all likelihood, I wouldn’t now get the chance to have lunch in the dining hall, I nipped into the staff-room to grab a sandwich from the new vending machine, and of course another coffee to warm me up. It was safe to say that the heating, or lack of it, was the hot topic of conversation, even if the grumbles and complaints were all about the cold. After waiting for a minute or so for the corridors to clear of the last remaining children making their way outside, I went along to the learning support department to see Julia Styles.
‘Ah, Casey,’ she said,