Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all. Torey Hayden
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had been on intimate terms with serious political strife or guerrilla warfare. It all seemed such a horrendous thing to me that I’d assumed it would somehow permeate every fiber of their beings. I had expected them to exude the tensions of Northern Ireland like breath, so that we would never be free of it. Indeed, I suppose I was as naïve as all those who had spoken to me of the girls before their arrival, because I expected their sad saga to overwhelm the children themselves. In fact, it didn’t. They were, for the most part, very ordinary children, filled with very ordinary concerns. Certainly all three had suffered as a result of their previous circumstances, but they had suffered in the way all children suffer—in bewildered silence. Only their accents and their occasionally strange-sounding phrases reminded us of their foreign origins. Geraldine, alone, brought Belfast directly into conversations. She was undeniably homesick and couldn’t keep from comparing her life here with her life there, but they were commonplace comparisons, of foods or different ways of doing things. They were the kinds of comparisons any homesick child would make. Belfast could have been Buffalo.
As the weeks passed and I grew more familiar with the children as individuals, I found their behavior very, very similar to that of severely abused children. They had that same quiet wariness about them, that same faint air of lost innocence, but they accepted their lives as normal and never raged against what had been stolen from them. Only on brief, incidental occasions did I glimpse the gray, gaunt specter of the abuser.
Geraldine, I discovered, was quite unwilling to mix with the other children on the playground. She stayed completely clear of Carolyn’s kids, which I could understand to a degree, as their ages and handicaps made them fairly unsuited to an eight-year-old’s activities, but she also refused to play with Mariana or Dirkie. Indeed, she didn’t even play alone. Instead, she spent the entire time standing with me or with Carolyn, depending who was on duty, and because she did, so did Shemona. The only way to get the girls to join in was to join in myself.
Geraldine was making a general nuisance of herself one morning when we were out. She was swinging on my arms, hanging on my clothes, stepping on my shoes. Then she was in back of me, arms around my waist, face buried into my down jacket.
“Look over there,” I said. “Joyce has gotten a game going. Why don’t you take Shemona over and see if you can play too?”
“Don’t want to,” Geraldine breathed into my jacket.
“It looks like fun.”
“They’re all babies. I don’t want to play a baby game.”
“Mariana’s over there. It looks like they’re playing Duck, Duck, Goose. If you were there, Mariana would probably choose you.”
Geraldine hugged me tighter. “Shemona wouldn’t like it, would you, Shemona?”
Shemona, standing beside us, looked up but gave no response.
I reached an arm around to disengage Geraldine’s bear hug. “Would it help if I went over there too?”
“Don’t want to, Miss.”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t want to.”
Shemona sat down on the asphalt and began to play with the Velcro fastening on her shoe. Over and over, she undid it and did it up again with an irritating rip. Geraldine pushed her hands into her pockets and stood beside me.
“Are you afraid of the other children?” I asked quietly.
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Geraldine replied, just as quietly.
Then silence. We watched the other children playing. Everyone was over there, including Shamie, and the game was growing exuberant.
“Do you know what they did to me once?” Geraldine said, her voice soft.
“What’s that?” I said, not knowing who or what she was talking about, but, noting the faraway tone of her voice, not wanting to ask.
“They put me in a dustbin.”
She drew nearer to me. I extended my arm to pull her in.
“I was up on the High Street. I wasn’t supposed to be there. Mammy didn’t let us go there by ourselves, but I had some money and I wanted to buy some sweeties at the newsagent’s. But when I saw their school uniforms, I knew I shouldn’t go in there, so I turned around and crossed the street and went down between the houses. But those boys saw me and they started to chase me.”
I looked down at her.
“I was running as hard as I could, but they were bigger than me, and they caught me. This one boy held me down and took my money. Then he and the others picked me up and put me in a dustbin. They sat on it and wouldn’t let me out.”
I pulled her close against me. “None of the children here would do a thing like that, Geraldine.”
She didn’t respond immediately, but Shemona rose to her feet and moved closer to us.
“I don’t know,” Geraldine said softly. “I’ve never gone to school with Prods before.”
On the following Monday, Tom Considyne again brought Leslie to school. Then, in the afternoon when I took the children down to their rides, there was Dr. Taylor’s familiar dark blue Mercedes. She got out of the car when Leslie and I approached, but she remained on the street side of it.
“Hello,” I said, and smiled politely. Bending down, I opened the rear door and helped Leslie in. I fastened her safety belt.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come in again last week,” Dr. Taylor said, as I straightened up and shut the car door.
“That’s all right.”
“I meant to.”
“That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
There came a small moment’s hesitation. She had her eyes averted. Feeling uncomfortable in the situation, I stepped back and prepared to return to the building.
“’Bye, Leslie,” I said, leaning down to wave to her. “See you tomorrow.” I looked over at her mother. “Good-bye, Dr. Taylor.”
“No, wait,” she said.
Opening the car door, she retrieved something off the seat. “I’m no good at talking about things,” she said in a weary voice. “That’s why I didn’t come in. This is all I could think of.” And she slid a green-covered spiral notebook across the roof of the car toward me. I had to move quickly to keep it from sailing off onto the ground.
She said no more. Getting into the car, she shut the door, started the engine and drove away.
I flipped through the notebook. It was a diary.
Going back upstairs, I returned to the classroom and sat down at the table. The notebook was completely filled in, from one edge of the page to the other, with no margins, each page, front and back. Virtually every line was covered in small, tight, very precise handwriting. The diary spanned a period of several months during the previous year. From glancing at its last page, I assumed it must continue on in another notebook.
Consuela’s gone to her mother’s for the weekend. I make Leslie supper. She throws it on the floor because I forgot to put on her red bib first. While I am trying to scrape it up, Leslie has a b.m. and it gets all over the kitchen chair. Tom comes in and yells at me because I haven’t gotten her to the toilet. He says I should know by now when she is going to go. He gets angry because the creamed corn has gotten all over the new carpet and the cat is licking it up. I say, if you don’t like it, you can help. But he slams the door and goes to the studio. He doesn’t come in for supper, so I have to give Leslie her bath and put her to bed alone. She hates this and does not go to sleep until 12:30 a.m.
“What’s that?”
Startled, I jumped and slammed the notebook shut. Carolyn was standing behind me. I’d been so engrossed, I hadn’t heard her come in.
Carolyn