A Stolen Childhood

by Casey Watson

  ‘Oh, you’ve got a signal, then,’ she observed as the phone tootled from inside my backpack.

  ‘Seems so,’ I said, wondering what it might say. I pulled it out, at which point Chloe asked Kelly if she’d go with her to the toilets, and I gave thanks that, assuming it was Gary who’d sent the text, I’d be able to keep it to myself for at least the rest of the outing.

  It was. U were right, the text said. Call me if U can. If not, we’ll CU@school. This was back in the days when a whole shortened vocabulary had sprung up for texting, now long extinct. Something invented by teenagers and, looking down at it, making us middle-aged texters sound adolescent too – as if our parents, on seeing what we’d written, would chastise us: ‘Whatever happened to proper spelling? Tsk!’

  I texted back ‘OK’, then looked over at Jim glumly, and made the decision to slip away and call Gary as soon as they’d headed off to the assault course. In just over an hour we’d be on our way back, and I wasn’t quite sure how to handle things. Should I forewarn her? Give her a chance to prepare herself on the way home? I tried to imagine the scene on the minibus if I did that, and I couldn’t. Every instinct, in fact, told me to do nothing – to just let it happen. But at the same time, doing nothing just felt so wrong.

  Why today of all days, as well? Could there really be a worse day for this to happen? But then I reminded myself why I’d been so keen to pick Kiara up this morning. It was precisely so I’d be in a position to have a chat with her, if a chat was what she felt like having – trouble was, what I’d really been hopeful of doing, was putting my niggling concerns, the result of my spidey sense, to bed. I’d actively been seeking answers to a question I’d posed myself – but, God, had I been asking myself the wrong question!

  And now I had my answer. QED.

  It was every bit as bad as I’d expected it to be – worse, in fact. I’d been braced all the way home, even as I joined in with the singing, but when we pulled into the school entrance I was mortified to see that Gary was actually standing out front with Kiara’s social worker, together with a man – presumably someone else from social services – who I hadn’t seen before.

  So it would probably be played out in the car park, I thought miserably, because as the minibus turned, and Kiara saw the reception committee, she placed both hands on the window and gaped. I was sitting behind her, next to Morgan – she was sitting with Chloe – and I could almost sense the vibration as her mind began to whirr. Then she turned to me. ‘Miss, what’s going on? What’s happened? What are they doing here?’

  I had no idea what to say to her, which made me feel more unequal to my job than I’d ever been before. ‘Kiara, I …’ I began. Kiara, I don’t know? Could I force that lie out of my mouth? ‘Oh, love …’ I tried again, as she spun around again.

  ‘Miss, what’s going on?’ she said again, the pitch of her voice rising. The minibus shuddered to a halt. ‘Miss,’ she shrieked. ‘Tell me!’

  The other children, all bemused now, and with their own thoughts probably whirring, stood up, gathered bags and coats, and, following Kelly’s brisk directive, started shuffling forwards, to the front of the minibus. Kelly looked over the seats at me, and all I could do was sigh regretfully, and I now wished I had filled her in.

  As it was, all I could hope was that there would be no ugly scene. That we’d be able to take Kiara inside, explain what was happening to her in private and, though I didn’t think in a million years that she’d go with them willingly, that it could be done without her getting into too much of a state.

  Which was naïve of me. ‘Come on, love,’ I said, as she remained transfixed by the minibus window. There were just the two of us left on board now, Jim having known what needed to be done here, and having, along with Kelly, ushered the others away.

  ‘They’re going to take me away again, aren’t they?’ she said, her voice now a whisper, quashing my faint hope that she wouldn’t immediately leap to that conclusion. Of course she would leap to that conclusion; that was exactly what had happened last time a brace of social workers turned up at school, wasn’t it? So there was no point in trying to sugar the pill. ‘To take you back into care,’ I said quietly, ‘yes.’

  She turned to face me. ‘But why, miss? I don’t understand. Why? My dad’s taking care of me, isn’t he? Is it my cow of a mother?’ She seemed galvanised by this thought. ‘It’s her, telling on him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Kiara, come on. We need to go and talk to them, sweetheart. They’ll explain everything to you.’ I moved to take her hand, but she batted me away.

  ‘Explain what? He’s been taking care of me. We’re fine. I want to stay there! I’m not going. I’m not going! They can’t make me!’

  I became aware of the minibus rocking slightly and turned to see Gary climbing aboard. ‘Kiara, love,’ I said again, groping for some words that might help. But there were none that would make any of this any better. ‘Kiara, I know you love your dad, and that you think he loves you, and I know this is all incredibly painful for you to hear, but, love, the things you do together … the things in bed … well …’ I was finding it difficult to get the words out, because my mouth and throat felt so parched. ‘Well, they are bad things, Kiara. Things he shouldn’t be doing with you. He is your father, Kiara, and he shouldn’t …’

  ‘You!’ she cried, her eyes wide with realisation. ‘You! It was you!’

  Gary began moving up the minibus, his expression grim. ‘Kiara,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry, but –’

  ‘I’m not going!’ she shrieked at him, grabbing her bag and shuffling out of her seat. I was sitting sideways in the seat on the other side of the aisle and, confident Gary would arrest her progress, let him block her way. Which he might have done, had she not screamed ‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ as he tried to place a gentle hand on her shoulder – and as it was she was out of the minibus in seconds.

  ‘Shit!’ he said under his breath, turning to chase her, with me close behind him, as she jumped down the steps and started sprinting off towards the open school gates.

  ‘Shit,’ he said again, clambering down. ‘Mike! Try and head her off!’ but I could see there was little chance of either of them catching up with her. She was fleet as a fox and a good few yards ahead. And beyond the gates the main road loomed. I set off after her as well.

  Fate was with us, however, because, in her haste to escape, Kiara took a short cut through our patch of ‘garden’, in reality a single elderly oak and some long-dead grass, which was once a year accessorised by half a dozen daffodils. It saved us. She tripped on a tree root and went headlong into a vacant parking space adjacent, giving us all the precious seconds we needed to catch her.

  And that would be my memory of her, as I tried to hold and soothe her and she fought and fought against me … the fresh rip in the right knee of her new skinny jeans and the smear of filth and oil across her baby pink T-shirt.

  And then there she was, gone. There was almost everyone gone, in fact. Well, bar myself, the headmaster and Gary Clark.

  I slipped to the staff toilets to freshen up, as did Mike Moore, and I also took the opportunity to call home. I only got myself at the other end of the line, chirpily telling me no one was home and that I was the burglar, but at least it reminded me that there was a jolly home to return to after the inevitable post-mortem, which, once Gary had finished making calls to various people, I had already been summoned to.

  ‘Will she be coming back?’ was the first thing I wanted to know once Gary, Mike and I had assembled in Mike’s office. ‘To this school, I mean? Ever? Is that it for good now?’

  It was even more shocking than it had been the last time, because this time it really was so final. When she’d been taken from her mother’s to go and stay with the foster family, she’d at least the knowledge that, all being well, she’d be allowed regular contact with her dad. But not this time. She was all out of parents now, it seemed. This really was it. For keeps. Whole new life.

  And Kiara knew
it. The devastating look she’d had on her face as she was led away to begin it had made a bore-hole into my soul. It was really upsetting me. Stupidly so – just thinking about her jumping into my car, a vision in pink, wreathed in smiles, waving up to her father, skipping away, looking forward to coming home and telling him all about it – oh, I could so easily bring all those images to mind. And now gone – no going home, no watching telly together on the re-covered sofa. Because he’d gone and killed it – killed all the good things she thought she now had in her life, with his filthy, perverted notions of ‘love’.

  Which was why it had to be done; why there could be no unravelling, no supervised contact, no point in the process that had already begun happening that would allow so much as a chink of him to remain in her young life. ‘But he loves me! You can’t do this!’ She’d kept saying it over and over. But, of course, nobody could begin to explain in words she could understand, even if she heard them, that the nature of love – fatherly love – wasn’t like that.

  And Kiara hated me for it. I knew that. For being the one to whom she’d accidentally opened the trapdoor, only to reveal the hell-hole, and however much I knew I’d been acting in her very best interests, the opportunity to tell her so, to try and explain to her, was now lost to me. Oh, I could write to her, I knew that, but I so wanted to be able to sit her down and tell her face to face.

  Mike Moore shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not, Casey, not this time. I would be lovely if she could stay here, at least till she’s on a more even keel, and perhaps if the summer holidays weren’t imminent, they’d sort something temporary out – at least till the end of term. But not long term, no. The family that had Kiara last time are more than happy to have her again, long term, and as she knows them it wouldn’t make sense to try and shift her elsewhere right now. She has enough to adjust to as it is, doesn’t she? No, one good thing is that they’re prepared to hang on to her till she’s 18, all being well, and that’s a blessing. Far better than being shunted from pillar to post, isn’t it?’

  I looked at Gary Clark, still trying to take it all in. ‘So that’s it then? Because of what Kiara disclosed to me, she has been immediately removed and shipped off, no questions asked? Is this how these things work? What if it had been a child who was making all this up for some reason? Like you and I discussed this morning, Gary? And, at the risk of sounding like you, how can they be absolutely sure Kiara isn’t?’

  I was clutching at straws. And daftly so – I didn’t want her back with him, ever. I suppose it was just the finality of it all. Gary looked indulgently at me. ‘That’s hypothetical, and I’m not sure I can answer it, because each case is different. Speaking of which, you make a good point, Casey – we still haven’t told you what sealed the deal here. Not properly.’

  Which was true. I’d had only managed the briefest of conversations with Gary after he’d sent me the text, and all he’d told me was that social services had indeed spoken to Kiara’s mother and that, following that, they’d be taking Kiara into care again as soon as we returned. ‘And what did?’ I asked.

  ‘A previous conviction that’s only just come to light,’ he explained.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For possessing indecent images of children,’ he clarified. ‘It seems it’s not only Kiara’s mother who kept a picture library.’ He grimaced. ‘Seems the two of them didn’t so much spy each other over a crowded room as complete a business transaction together.’

  ‘You mean he was one of her clients?’

  ‘Back in the day, yes.’

  ‘But, hang on – how did social services not know this? Surely they would have had him police checked?’

  ‘That’s a good point, and something currently under investigation, I imagine, but, in essence, it seems Kiara’s father had more than one identity. That and some administrative cock-up along the way. Anyway, it was enough to make it clear that any monitoring was an irrelevance – she needed to be taken to a place of safety without delay.’

  ‘So that really is that,’ I said, sighing deeply. Job done. Problem solved. Criminals being dealt with by the law. Another young life pulled from the brink. Another stolen childhood returned to its rightful owner.

  Yet it just felt all so unfinished somehow. I knew we had done the right thing, reporting everything immediately, and there was no question this was the only way for it to end. But I couldn’t explain how bereft I suddenly felt. It was like I’d ripped open a part of myself, and I knew that nobody was going to come along and stitch it up.

  There was no closure for us as a school, either. Mike explained that other than forwarding on records and finding out which school Kiara would next be attending, our part was over; we wouldn’t find out anything else, any more than we would with any other pupil who walked out of our school for the last time. Not if they didn’t look back, anyway. Our part in a young life was always destined to be over. That was the nature of a school; that children passed through it.

  But at 18, not 12. Oh, I could probably find out more about how things were progressing, if I was vigilant. I imagined that at some point I’d read about both the mother and the father in the local papers, when they’d been to court and sentenced and dragged through the tabloid press, but I wasn’t bothered about them. They were horrible human beings, and I didn’t actually want to hear how they were getting on.

  It was Kiara I needed to know about. I wanted to follow her progress, hear about the help she was getting and, most of all, I wanted to know when the day came when she finally realised that what her dad had done to her was wrong. Then she would forgive us all, wouldn’t she?

  Chapter 20

  I relayed everything to Mike later that night, as I lay on the couch, unable to eat or concentrate on anything other than my overwhelming sense of guilt. I knew it was irrational guilt but that didn’t seem to help.

  Mike left his armchair and squeezed in alongside me so he could give me a hug. And a lecture as well. ‘Case, I’m sorry, love, but you have to just get over it. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s not about you, or how you’re feeling. What you did, what everyone did, was the right thing. And it doesn’t matter if the girl hates you right now, you did it for her. And sometime in the future – even though it may be years ahead yet – she’ll understand, and she’ll be grateful.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I just hate feeling like this. It’s like this big cloud is sitting over my head and won’t go away. I need a holiday, Mike. Somewhere, hot and dry and warm and entirely cloud-free.’

  He rubbed his hand vigorously across the top of my head. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Gone. So now you can snap out of it and stop wallowing in self-pity.’

  He nearly got a dig in the ribs for that, but I resisted. Instead I sighed. ‘Mike, I’m not wallowing, I’m just upset! How can anyone do this job and not get upset? I’m serious, I don’t know if this job’s really for me. This thing with Kiara’s really brought it home to me. It’s just so emotionally draining.’

  Mike snorted in derision. ‘Casey, you’ve been moving towards a job like this for as long as I’ve known you. Of course it’s for you. You’re good at it and, trust me, you will get over it. Bloody hell, love, have you forgotten all the trials of the other kids you’ve had? Each and every one of them had some horrible past or present.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but this is different. Almost all the others, so far, are still in our school. I get to know the ending. And most of them are relatively happy endings, too. This just feels so unfinished, and it makes me feel … oh, I don’t know how to describe it … Yes I do, actually. Bloody empty.’

  I hauled myself up to a sitting position, tipping him off the sofa in the process. ‘Look,’ I know you’re right,’ I said, as I helped him back up. ‘I know I have to buck up and shut up. I’m just tired, that’s all. Tired and emotional. Perhaps I just need an early night, that’s all. And a holiday,’ I added, just to press my point home.

  He headed off to the kitchen then, and returned cl
utching half a bottle of red wine we’d had left over from the previous weekend, and two glasses. ‘Here we are,’ he said, placing the glasses on the coffee table and uncorking the bottle. ‘I had a thought. Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps you’re not quite tired and emotional enough.’ He handed a glass to me. ‘Here, this’ll sort you out.’

  Though it never seemed like a bright idea to deal with stress at work by necking wine of an evening, one glass does not an alcoholic make, obviously, and I slept like a baby that night. And though it was something of a struggle having to explain Kiara’s disappearance to the remaining three members of my current ‘team’, by the end of the day I was feeling much brighter.

  Chloe was, as could have been predicted, inconsolable, but, like me, as the day wore on (and helped enormously by Kelly ‘needing’ her to help her with the big display board we were making for the end-of-year assembly) even she had managed to dry her copious tears. Life moved on and, somehow, we all had to adjust to it, safe in the knowledge that Kiara was now in the best place.

  And now it was Monday, the first day of our week in school, and there was much to be grateful for.

  ‘Miss, miss, we’re back home!’ was Tommy’s excited greeting as I walked up to the school entrance that morning. He’d obviously come to school early and had been waiting outside for me. He looked happier than he had in a long time. ‘And guess what,’ he continued as he fell into step beside me, doing the hop-skip-and-jump I invariably had to do with Gary. ‘Mr Clark has only gone and given me mum a big bag of brand new school uniform for me for next term. I’m gonna look well dapper, aren’t I, miss?!’

  Ha! I thought. Gary Clark, the old softie. It was usually me that scavenged through all the best second-hand uniform for my Unit kids, and Gary Clark telling me off for being over-generous.

  ‘Did he indeed?’ I replied, filing that nugget away for future reference, ‘and yes, Tommy, I bet you will look dapper as well. Oh, I’m so happy for you and your mum and sisters, I really am. So you’re back in the same house as you were before?’