A Stolen Childhood

by Casey Watson

  But it was pointless to speculate. All I could do was watch and wait and wonder – and try to tune into what it might be that gave her that look – as if she had the weight of the world on those narrow shoulders. That and the evident fatigue. What was that about?

  ‘Now that’s a very serious Casey face,’ came a voice from behind me. ‘I can see it in the screen. You want a coffee before the off?’

  I swivelled around on the swivel chair to find Kelly in the doorway, brandishing my mug. There was an encouraging tendril of steam coming from it, too.

  ‘Just concentrating,’ I told her, accepting it gratefully. ‘Been trying to find out a bit about trichotillomania. Tricho – yes, I got that right. Trichotillomania. Did you hear about the hoo-hah in the year eight assembly?’

  ‘Sure did,’ Kelly said. ‘All poor Donald needed.’

  ‘Well, the girl, Kiara Bentley – I took her back to the Unit with me. Hence the search. She’s got quite some bald patch in her hair. And the whole business – I mean, just how tired d’you have to be to end up with your head in a boy’s lap?’

  ‘Assuming that was the case. He’ll probably say differently.’

  I shook my head. ‘He might well, but I’m pretty sure I believe her.’

  ‘And you know what?’ Kelly said, pointing a finger towards the screen. ‘That does figure. Yes. It really does. One of the Maths teachers – whatshisface – was talking about Kiara the other day – yes, I’m sure he said the name Kiara – and saying that she kept falling asleep in lessons. Yes, I’m sure it was her. I’ll double check.’

  ‘Would you? And if you run into anyone else who might have dealings with her, ask them about her as well. I just have this sense that there’s more to this whole thing than meets the eye. Anyway, she’s coming back to me after lunch. Maybe I’ll get something more out of her then.’

  ‘And some cheap labour too,’ Kelly said, winking. ‘Nice work, Dr Watson!’

  Kiara was already outside my door when I returned after the lunch break, having let her form teacher know she’d be with me for the rest of the day. Once again, I was struck by how doll-like she looked, from her petite, elfin face, to her nicely pressed school uniform, which looked as if it had only recently been bought. Now she was composed again, she positively gleamed with grooming, and I mused that if the school had to select a poster girl to reflect their sartorial benchmark, then this little girl would be she.

  ‘Ready to roll your sleeves up?’ I asked her, as I unlocked the door and opened it. ‘What are you getting out of this afternoon anyway?’

  ‘Double English,’ she said, without hesitation.

  ‘Well, we’ll be doing double decorating instead,’ I said. ‘That okay with you?’

  ‘That’s fine, miss,’ she said, taking the pink backpack from her shoulders and parking it on a nearby chair. ‘I’m good at decorating. I painted a whole bedroom wall last weekend, all by myself. Pink,’ she added, grinning.

  I smiled at her. ‘How did I know you were going to say that? So, what would you like to do, sweetie? My walls all look bare, the glass in my door looks boring, and all my plants need a watering and a talking-to, so – take your pick. What are you best at?’

  She chose to create some artwork for the door, which suited me fine. Doing something physical was often key to getting kids to open up. Rather than sit them down and start interrogating them, I’d learned over the years that a softly-softly, lateral approach was usually better – get them doing something alongside you that kept half their minds occupied, and a child would often relax enough to open up a little.

  I was quite the expert at it, in fact. With my son Kieron, who had a mild form of autism called Asperger’s Syndrome (as it was known back then, anyway), I had become well practised in winkling out the nuts and bolts of anxiety in a child who preferred to bottle everything up. If he was struggling with something, I’d nag him to help me with something in the house or garden and then, once he was ‘in the zone’ of whatever he was doing, he’d be so much more receptive to sharing what was on his mind and we’d be able to find a solution together. It was never quite as simple as that with the kids in school, obviously, because we didn’t have that history and mother/son bond. But, eventually, after building up that all-important trust, they usually did start to talk.

  And hopefully Kiara would, too. ‘Right then,’ I said as I clapped my hands together. ‘The door it is. I’ll leave the design ideas to you.’

  Kiara threw herself into the work with gusto. Within ten minutes, she was carefully cutting out the giant cardboard Easter egg shapes she had decided would be perfect. She’d made four of them in total, having checked with me first, one for her to write her name on – ‘Kiara woz ’ere!’ she joked – and one for each of the three children who I told her would be joining me in the morning. She was using different coloured card for each and decorating them with contrasting borders. ‘You can explain to them that they have to write their names across this middle bit,’ she said. ‘And then they can stick them to the glass in the door. That should brighten the place up a bit, miss, shouldn’t it?’

  A girl after my own heart, I thought, as I remembered the flowers that had previously adorned the door, all decorated by my last brood of children. I also noted that she seemed both alert and engaged and, with her hands fully occupied, was refraining from absent-mindedly fiddling with her hair.

  ‘That’s a great idea,’ I agreed, having a bit of a re-think, ‘and since you’re so good with the art stuff, you can put up some new borders round my display panels, while I get on with sorting out the books.’

  ‘I’ve always been good at practical things,’ she said. ‘I get it from my mum. That’s what she always says – that we’re both really good with our hands. But I’ll help you sort the books out as well, once I’m done. I’m good at that too.’

  But it turned out there was something Kiara Bentley was even better at. The decorations made, she did indeed join me in the quiet corner and between us we pulled out every single book in there, dusted them off, categorised them and put them all back in their new positions, after which I left her to it, putting labels on the front of the shelves so everyone who borrowed a book would know where to put it back, while I had a quick clear-out of my desk.

  I hadn’t gleaned a great deal, only snippets of rather bland info; that this slight and pretty 12-year-old liked pink, enjoyed pop magazines and wearing make-up, that her mum didn’t like her dad so they got divorced when she was little, and that, mostly, she didn’t really have friends round the house because her mum didn’t like the place being messed up when she was out at work. There was nothing much, all told, to inflame the itch further, and perhaps, despite the hair-pulling, there wouldn’t be. Perhaps she was just a lonely-ish kind of kid, living a less than perfect childhood, with a mum who worked long hours, and who wasn’t getting enough sleep; she wouldn’t have been the first and she wouldn’t be the last, after all.

  I’d try to keep an eye on her, as far as I could, and I had shared my concerns. But I knew that, come tomorrow, I’d have three new demanding charges, all with problems needing interventions that would probably fill both my time and my head. ‘You want another orange juice, love?’ I asked her as I flicked the switch on the kettle. And when she didn’t answer, I immediately went over to the quiet corner, already knowing what I would probably find there.

  And I did. I put my head round the bookcases to find her curled up on a bean bag, fast asleep again and gently snoring. I stepped away again, made my coffee, finished clearing my desk, and only when it got to five minutes before the bell was due to buzz for home time did I return to the quiet corner and shake her gently awake.

  She woke up wide-eyed, disorientated, blinking.

  I smiled, hands on hips, as she rubbed her eyes and stood up. ‘You are definitely burning too much midnight oil, young lady,’ I told her. ‘Early night for you tonight and that’s an order.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just sat down
to do the labels on the bottom shelf and … well,’ she added sheepishly, ‘I must have drifted off.’

  ‘Tell me, Kiara,’ I said, driven by a sudden and very powerful instinct, ‘would you like to come back here tomorrow?’

  It would prove to be the best instinct I’d had in a long time. A life-saver, almost. A childhood-saver, definitely.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said. And thank God she did.

  Chapter 4

  I slammed the car door with my usual gusto as I got out of it on our drive. Not because I wanted to make any sort of statement, but because it was the only way to be sure of it actually shutting. My poor little Fiesta was 12 years old now, but despite its little ‘idiosyncracies’ (well, that was how I liked to think of them) I was still resistant to Mike’s endless tutting and head-shaking, and banging on about how I should really look for something newer.

  The noise brought Kieron to the door anyway. ‘Ah, Mum,’ he said, looking shifty, ‘just so you know, we got a half day today so I’ve brought Si home to work with me on some music. Which is important. Because it’s stuff we’re doing for college. So I don’t suppose you would put on some earmuffs or something, would you?’

  ‘Earmuffs?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, looking at me as if I was ridiculously slow on the uptake. ‘You know, so you can’t, like, hear us?’

  Lovely, I thought, wondering quite why Kieron thought I’d be able to whip up a pair of earmuffs out of nothing. As far as I could remember, I had never owned a pair of earmuffs in my life – a lack that wasn’t lost on me given that I’d spent most of the day lightly chilled, like the ready-meals in the local branch of Tesco.

  ‘It’s that bad, is it?’ I asked him, dropping my satchel onto the hall floor for the moment, to sit among the small gathering of abandoned trainers. It was certainly odds-on that it might be. Kieron was taking a media studies course at college and had recently developed an obsession with ‘mixing beats’, whatever that was. All I knew was that it had involved Mike spending a ridiculous amount of money on some turntables and a mixing desk, and then lots of noise. That was definitely the only word to describe what was floating down the stairs to me right now. Well, to be fair, that one word was a bit of a generalisation. ‘Strangled cat mixed with several hundred fingers being scraped down a blackboard all at once’ was quite a good description too.

  Si, aka Simon, was on the same course. He and Kieron had been friends since they’d both started high school, so I’d known him for years, but now I saw rather more of him than I ever did before; amazing how a pair of turntables (wash my mouth out – I must remember that they are ‘decks’) could totally take over a pair of teenage boys’ lives. Not to mention turning me into my mother. Much as I was horrified to realise it was happening, my new catch phrase seemed to be ‘Turn that down!’

  I bit my lip to stop myself from saying it this time. ‘Not a chance, kiddo,’ I said instead as I slipped off my jacket. ‘Tell you what – how about you and Si put on your headphones and listen to your “tunes” through those. How’s that for an idea? I need to get dinner ready, don’t I?’

  ‘Mother,’ Keiron said, shaking his head in disdain. ‘You are so old school! Fine, then,’ he added, in a voice heavy with resignation. ‘We’ll try to be quiet, then.’ He then turned tail and began heading back up the stairs. But not before adding that, where dinner was concerned, just pizza for him and Si would be fine. ‘Upstairs, yeah? So we can crack on with our work,’ he explained, without so much as the tiniest pinch of irony.

  What was it they said was a great leveller? Time? Death? Education? I wasn’t sure, but as I hung my jacket over the newel post, I decided ‘going home’ was probably right up there in the top ten of things that kept your feet on the ground, if not your chakras re-aligned. Evidence of recent occupation was strewn around my living room, where some living had evidently been done. My perfectly placed scatter cushions were now strewn across the sofa any old how, the TV, though muted, was playing some music station and as I looked through to my kitchen and dining area, I could see that I had the joy of a sink full of washing up that hadn’t been there when I’d left it.

  What planet had I been on when I looked forward to the time when my kids were older, confident that the working day might just mean exactly that? That I wouldn’t then have to come home and start work all over again? As yet, there’d not only been no sign of that happening – it seemed to be getting even worse. Because not only was I expected to feed my own husband and offspring – these days there was more often than not someone else wanting feeding; or who just happened to be around when it was dinner time.

  As a family, we’d swelled our ranks as well. Our daughter Riley was now going steady with her boyfriend David, so much so that they were currently saving up to buy a house. Which was wonderful, because he was a lovely lad, and a great foil for our feisty daughter, but with every bit of spare cash being directed towards their savings, their days of living the high life, gadding about, going out and eating in restaurants had been replaced with the more cost-effective and time-honoured tradition of either eating at our house or his parents’.

  I didn’t mind all the extra work this entailed. I really didn’t. Well, I didn’t mind 99 per cent of the time, anyway; it didn’t go down well with my more rigorously twenty-first-century dwelling colleagues but I loved looking after my little family. But every day, for about five minutes, when I was feeling that enervating just-home-from-work tiredness, I wished I didn’t get home before Mike and Riley, so that it could be me walking in to the smell of something nice cooking, rather than them.

  Sadly, I had no access to that universe currently, and as I wouldn’t be letting Kieron loose in the kitchen any time soon (pizza was nice, but not every day for all eternity) I rolled up my sleeves up and cracked on. And as I did so, I wondered about Kiara and what sort of home she’d be returning to tonight. I couldn’t seem to help it. I had so little to go on, and what I had was hardly earth-shattering, but there was something about that girl that had really got under my skin.

  I’d not had a chance to catch up with Julia Styles after school the previous day so the following morning I set my alarm early and, having remembered to take a cardigan in case the radiators were still iffy, the first thing I did when I got into work was to pay her a visit.

  ‘You’ll never guess what,’ she said, almost the second I stepped into her office.

  I grinned. ‘Try me. Erm … no, hang on. Let me see. They’ve decided to cancel the inspection because they already know how brilliant we are.’

  She shook her head. ‘You wish. No, Thomas Robinson.’

  ‘Thomas who?’ I said.

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ I admitted. ‘No, wait. Hang on. Maybe it does. It’s definitely ringing something.’ I made a show of tipping my head from side to side to check.

  ‘It should do,’ Julia said, beckoning to the chair beside her desk. ‘He’s the lad who banged his head in the hall yesterday after that to-do with Kiara Bentley.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, the penny dropping. ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘Fine, by all accounts,’ she said. She pulled a file towards her as I sat down. ‘Apparently looked much worse than it was – often the case with heads, isn’t it? Bleed like the devil. They steri-stripped it apparently. No concussion or anything. So that’s good.’ She smiled. ‘Though not from Donald’s point of view. Three hours he was down there – the mum couldn’t be found, apparently, and there was no alternative contact in his file. He’s a new lad,’ she added, by way of explanation. ‘Only been here a fortnight or so, bless him. Something of a baptism of fire!’

  Certainly something of a reminder that silly, lewd behaviour was not the way to win friends and influence people – particularly girls. Though it was obviously good to know the wound was only minor. ‘Anyway, what about him?’ I asked, remembering Julia’s opening comment.

  ‘This’ll make you smile,’ she said. �
��He’s one of the lads you’re down to have joining the Unit. I only just realised. Only part time for the moment. To see how it goes. According to what Donald put here, he needs a bit of “socialising”.’

  I smiled. Socialising could encompass all sorts of things, though from the evidence of the previous days it sounded fairly cut and dried; he needed to learn how to behave himself. He’d gone slightly feral, his file said, the family having been steadily making their way north from London over the last couple of months, staying with friends and relatives and moving around a lot, in order to escape the abusive ex who was apparently still trying to track them down.

  For Thomas and his four older sisters this had meant nothing in the way of schooling, and having spent so much time away from structure and routine, he was badly in need of some boundaries and order in his life.

  ‘He’s been marked out as being a little “wild”,’ Julia clarified, ‘as you’ll have already noticed yourself. Wild and a little bit too streetwise for his age.’

  ‘Not to mention keen to make his mark,’ I said, remembering what Kiara had told me. Because I didn’t doubt all his nonsense had been much more about impressing his new friends than real sexual intention.

  ‘You said it,’ Julia agreed. ‘And now, given their confrontation yesterday, I’m wondering if we should have a bit of a rethink. He was only due to be with you for half the week in any case, but perhaps we should hold off? Kelly tells me you’ve suggested Kiara stay with you for a few days. Is that right?’