Changeling

by Matt Wesolowski

  It feels like hours, we sit there. Stalemate. I remember thinking, Fine, just fine. I’ll get plenty of stories from the staffroom.

  That’s when I hear it.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  I almost drop the book. It sounds like it’s coming from right under Mrs Moss’s desk.

  I look straight at Child A, expecting not to see him in his seat, but there he is. The same position, no sign of movement. I stare at him for a little while longer, willing him to raise his head, to grin … anything.

  Nothing.

  I’m shaken, a little bit. You see with kids, when they do something naughty, they can’t help looking at you, to see if you’ve noticed.

  Crafty, I think. Not like a normal child at all.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  Louder this time, and I nearly cry out.

  I swear, it’s like there’s someone underneath the desk. I even push my chair back to look – to see for myself that someone isn’t lying there, tapping the underside of the desk with a pencil. That’s what it sounds like.

  Of course, there’s no one there. Of course there isn’t.

  I look back up, pull back into the desk.

  And I see that Child A has moved. He’s taken himself to the back of the room and is sitting there, his back to me. Is he trying to tell me something? I don’t know, but I have this strong notion that in some way he is reaching out, that he’s asking me for something. Asking me to understand.

  And I can’t.

  During the rest of the afternoon, we both heard it, Mrs Moss and me. We both heard that tapping. I looked at her once. I wanted to tell her, but she just raised her eyebrows at me and I knew what she would say. Ignore it. Pick your battles. Thing was, I had my eye right on him, and he was quiet all afternoon, kept his head down, got on with his colouring. But every time I was looking anywhere but at him, every time my eye moved off him, it came again.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  This is probably one of the oddest of all the recordings.

  As you’ll recall, tapping features strongly in Callum Wright’s account in episode two, and, of course, Sorrel Marsden reported tapping coming from his car engine. I cannot even attempt to give an explanation for these apparently similar phenomena. And Emyr tells me that his mother wasn’t in any way superstitious and had no belief in the supernatural.

  We’ll come to more strange occurrences that surrounded Alfie Marsden in due course, but I want to stay on slightly more earthly matters for now. Clearly, Alfie had behavioural problems. I cannot say with any certainty but it sounds like he might have been somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and possibly suffering from ADHD.

  Let’s listen to another recording, which shows the difficulty that staff had when dealing with some of Alfie’s more extreme behaviours. I don’t play it for any gratuitous reason. I just hope by sharing these recordings that they paint a picture of the depths of Alfie’s problems.

  —Case study. Child A. 21st of October, 1988.

  Oh dear, oh dear. I just sat down to get this recorded and it hit me. I’m so tired I could just sleep right now and it’s – what? It’s only half past seven. Dear me.

  I knew it was going to be a bad day from the moment I got in. It was raining. Hard. There was a nasty icy wind and it was darker than usual. The kids go mad when it’s like this. That’s what everyone says. Poor little Alfie. He came in wearing his plimsolls again when the rest of the kids were in their wellies. The little thing’s feet were soaked through. Mrs Moss said nothing. Just helped him peel off his socks and trousers, and gave him some fresh ones from the spare-clothes box. I didn’t know until later on that day that Mr Camberley took Alfie’s trousers and socks to the laundrette at lunchtime, they were that filthy with mud. Poor lad. It was like he’d been walking to school through the woods!

  Well, the rest of that day he was all out of sorts. Wouldn’t sit still on the carpet. Wouldn’t even sit with his back to the rest of us in a chair. I could see Mrs Moss’s patience was wearing thin from the moment she came in, so when Child A started playing up, I knew it was all going to go wrong.

  So Child A’s coiled up in a little ball of anger – half in and half out of the bottom shelf of the bookcase. Feet sticking out.

  ‘You can just stay there then!’ Mrs Moss calls out, and the rest of the kids look confused, scared. Some of them cry when Mrs Moss gets angry.

  When I say I’ll help, she just gives me the slightest nod. So off I go, skirting around the edge of the room, singing that harvest song about the cabbages, just to get a bit closer to him.

  This takes until break time, because when Child A is like this, no one can get anywhere near.

  The rain lets up and so we let the kids go outside. Coats on, wellies on. Mrs Moss has them lining up just as I manage to get about three feet away from Child A. He’s looking at me this time, glaring through his squinty eyes. His face looks all puffy, as if he hasn’t been to bed. He looks sick too. I feel a huge wave of sorrow for him.

  The other thing that I was doing right then – and I’m not writing this down, because if I do, they’ll put me away in the nuthouse – the other thing I was doing was trying not to hear that tapping. Like I say, all the kids were getting ready to go outside, so it could easily have been one of them with a pen or a ruler against the radiator pipes. But I was sure, I was sure I could hear it, over everything, as if it was … I don’t know, mocking me somehow.

  I looked away, over the kids’ heads, waiting for them to leave, and when I turned around, Child A had his back to us. He was more or less inside the bookcase.

  You know, I just thought it best not to try and move him. At least he was quiet. I let the noise and the bustle of the kids die away before I started over to him. Slow and steady. With the rest of them gone, the room was quiet as the grave. I braced myself, ready for an explosion, or else that infernal tapping.

  But it never came.

  Eventually I get close enough to see what Child A is doing in that bookcase. I fully expect him to be curled up, red-faced and furious. But this time he isn’t. This time he’s sat, cross-legged, with a book open on his lap. A book! I didn’t even think the boy had the capacity, never mind the patience, to read. Anyhow, he’s just sat, staring at his book and from where I am I can see which one. It’s one of the kids’ story-time favourites, this big battered hardback of The Faraway Tree. Child A’s opened it to the picture of the angry pixie leaning out of the window in his little pointed hat, shouting at Jo, Beth and Fanny.

  I follow Child A’s gaze and stare at the picture. A few seconds of silence pass. It shouldn’t be funny. I shouldn’t have laughed. That’s why it all went wrong. Oh dear.

  I still don’t know how he knew what I was thinking. But the longer I stared down at that picture of the angry pixie – his turned-up nose, his scowl … I mean, it just … it looked so much like Child A. If Child A had pointed ears he would be the double of him … those round, red cheeks, that pinched little mouth. I knew, I knew that if I mentioned it to anyone, that’s what they would all begin to call him. That would become his name from then on.

  So I just stare at that picture and I can feel the laugh coming, unwanted and unwelcome. And out it comes – a snort, a giggle. And I wish I could take it back.

  In that moment Child A looks up. He looks from the book, to me and back to the book again. It’s like he knows! It’s like he’s read my mind!

  I open my mouth to say something, anything, and I see that little face of his go from the angry pixie to furious pixie. He snaps that book closed and flings it at me. It hits me in the shin and it hurts. It really does. It still hurts now.

  I didn’t say anything to him. I felt so bad for laughing. Maybe I felt I deserved the pain.

  Oh, how on earth am I going to explain all this? I’ll just write down that he threw a book at me. That’s what I’ll say. And I’ll say that I wound him up; that it was my fault.

  But I’ll leave out the bit that really worries me, the bit about how afterwards, at home t
ime, when I stayed behind to tidy up, I couldn’t find that book anywhere. That it had simply vanished.

  It’s still missing.

  Emyr shrugs and tells me if his mother told him this particular story, he doesn’t remember it. We both doubt she did.

  I wonder if the claims of fairies, ghosts and witches in Wentshire Forest weren’t known to me, what I would think about this recording. Obviously, the tapping features again. But what can we really infer from this? Are these simply the delusions of an exhausted trainee teacher left to deal with a very challenging pupil? A Google image search for the characters from Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books show a myriad of peculiar fairy-tale characters – Moon-Face, the Saucepan Man, Silky the Fairy.

  What’s significant here is the disturbing behaviour of Alfie Marsden. Today, I feel the situation would have been different. Schools have better and more extensive child-protection training, and although this kind of training for teachers was beginning to become more prevalent, perhaps Alfie Marsden slipped through the net. Ostracised by his teachers and separated from his peers, there is no sign, from these recordings, that there was any adequate intervention for the boy.

  The next recording I want to play follows on chronologically from the previous one. Significantly it features mentions of Sorrel and Sonia. Whatever opinions we may already have about Alfie’s parents, I think that, after listening to this next recording, we have a better picture of Sorrel and Sonia when they were still together.

  —Case study. Child A. 6th of November, 1988.

  What a day. I know I keep saying it, but I feel like I’m asleep on my feet. Still, I’m nearly done with this placement and I can say goodbye to the place for good. I have enjoyed it, though. And I’ve certainly learned a lot. Has it put me off teaching? Mrs Moss asked me that after the meeting. She said it was OK, and that some trainees think the kids are all going to be sweetness and light, until they get this bit of insight into school life. She looked right into me, and said, ‘It’s more common than you think to have to deal with kids like Child A. Well, maybe not quite like him, but…’

  I wanted to tell her no, that, if anything, dealing with him had made me more interested in the job. I wonder how many others there are like him? Hundreds, I imagine. I don’t know why, but even though he is the way he is, I feel we have something, some connection. I want to help him. I wish I could stay and work just with him. Maybe when – if – I qualify, I’ll come back.

  So … the meeting.

  I don’t know what I’ll be able to write about this in my dissertation, but so long as I don’t use names, it might be useful for context. I just want to talk through it now, though, to get it all out.

  Things had come to a head. There was no doubt that Child A was getting worse. There was the incident with the goldfish. I don’t want to get into all that again, but it was the final straw, and Mrs Moss called in his parents. Now we all knew that they were split up, but Dad made the effort to come all the way over from Wrexham to help out. Everyone said that was the sign of a good father. I agree. I don’t know if there’s many who’d make that sort of effort. I tell you now, there was a bit of me that was hoping, that was praying, I’d get invited to the meeting. I just wanted to speak to them. I wanted some insight from his mam and dad. If he was like this at school, what on earth was going on with him at home?

  Mrs Moss said to me that there’s two types of parents: the supportive ones who are interested in their kids, and the ones who don’t give a stuff – who think that teaching their children manners is all down to us. She’s told me about kids who come here and sit under the table to eat, who can’t walk properly because they’re never let out of their buggies. There was a little girl, she said, who had to have a nap in the cloakroom after lunch. She didn’t sleep at home because her father had let her watch The Exorcist, for Christ’s sake! Mrs Moss says it’s difficult with these sorts of parents because they either think it’s all our fault or else they just don’t care.

  I was dying to know what the Mar … which type Child A’s parents were.

  So I was pleased when Mrs Moss told me that I had to be there as I’d been working with Child A. I expected her to give me some kind of warning – some insight about the parents, but she didn’t say anything.

  We had the meeting at lunchtime in the head’s office. It had taken a while to arrange because the dad works funny hours. That’s why Child A stays with Mam. But this was Dad’s day off and Mrs Moss said that she wanted them both in together. Child A is now spending his lunchtimes in his classroom with Mrs Evans. Mrs Moss won’t have him in her room anymore, unless she is there. That makes sense after what he did to the goldfish.

  I could tell that Mrs Moss was nervous. She went quiet and her lips were pressed together, two thin lines. I didn’t know what to expect. When a car pulls up outside the front gate, we were all stood there, watching them out of the office window. He got out first and opened the door for her. I thought that was nice. He wasn’t a tall man, not much to look at either really. But there was something about him. Something in the way he moved maybe? He’s a chef, they told me. He had a suit on. He cared. I could tell that from the moment I saw him. He’d made the effort.

  Her, though, the mam. Oh my dear God. Oh my word, what a mess. At first I thought she was ill or disabled or something. She stepped out of that car and nearly fell flat on her face. Lucky Dad was there to hold her up. Was she drunk? Mrs Moss made a little whistling noise through her teeth, and she and the head raised their eyebrows at each other. Mam had this mop of straggly hair that was stuck half to her face and was wearing these denim dungarees that were too big for her. Dad brushed her down and took her by the shoulders. We could see him talking to her, and she was nodding. Then he hugged her before taking her arm again. That was when we all looked away.

  We met Mam and Dad at the door and walked with them to the office. Dad was chatting away about his job and his funny hours. He was saying how glad he was about the meeting; all he wanted was to do right by their boy. Mam didn’t say a word. She didn’t even look at us. Kept her head down, that hair hanging over her face. So rude.

  The head sat Mam and Dad down, and Mrs Moss explained all about Child A’s behaviour since he started at school, and how they understood it was hard to come from a broken home and start afresh. The head said, at the end of the day, he wanted Child A to be part of the school. He wanted him to be involved.

  Mam just sat there, didn’t even look at any of us, couldn’t even be bothered to nod. I wondered if she even cared about that poor little lamb. Dad, though, he was on it. First off, he apologised to the head and Mrs Moss. He said he wished he could help out more, that he could be involved, but he had to work and provide for the boy. He came back from Wrexham when he could ‘to help out’. He was sincere, and I could see tiredness in his face. He said he hoped we could all work together to do what’s best for Child A.

  There was this silence in the room after he said that. It was suddenly dead awkward and tense. Then I heard something that made me jump out of my skin, and I nearly screamed in front of everyone. I managed to hold it in though, thank God.

  It was a tap. Just one. Quiet. Muffled. But I heard it.

  It came from the table where Mam and Dad were sitting. Under the table, I’m sure of it. If Mrs Moss or the head heard it, they said nothing. I thought I was going out of my mind for a second. It can’t have been … it just can’t have been the same as … no. Impossible. It was me. It was all me just tired and worn out.

  Mam heard it though. She must have done, cos just as I jump, she gives this little shake.

  He looked at Mam then, and she raised her head for the first time. Her face appeared from behind that curtain of hair and she tried to smile. She agreed in this reedy voice. It was like she was only pretending to care. Acting like a parent but not doing it very well. I’m still dying to know what Mrs Moss thought of her.

  We talked through Child A’s behaviour now – the running, the hiding, the climbing
up onto the roof – and poor Dad just looked distraught. He told us that he’d tried everything, that he did his best, but he worked odd hours – weekends and evenings. We all looked at Mam. We all knew Mam has custody of Child A. She’d offered almost nothing to the meeting so far. She just emerged from behind her hair again and Dad put his hand over hers. That’s when she smiled and I saw how young she looked. She looked younger than me! That couldn’t be right.

  Mam told us in her thin voice, barely above a whisper, about how she kept her house organised, tried to maintain a routine for Child A and how his behaviour was something that troubled and upset her. A little part of me felt sorry for her; she sounded like a child herself. Dad squeezed her hand and rubbed her arm. So supportive, so sensitive.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she looked us in the eyes for the first time. ‘I’m sorry for his behaviour.’

  Mrs Moss and the head nodded and said they understood, that some children are challenging, and how good it was that Mam and Dad had come to try and find a way forward. Mam looked grateful and nodded back. I could see her eyes were glassy, like she was about to cry.

  No one knew what to say.

  Dad broke the ice, cracked a couple of jokes and put us all at ease; he promised that the two of them would work together – they’d step things up at home and that it was easy for things like discipline to lapse. He said he shared our view that school and home have to work together. That’s when I noticed something else, something brief. It was a look between Mrs Moss and the head. I didn’t know what it meant, but it was there. For a fraction of a second, it was there.

  Then Dad looked at me. Right at me. He had these piercing blue eyes and he looked straight into mine and … oh my gosh … I felt something flutter in my chest, something I’d not felt for a long while!

  ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,’ he said. Mrs Moss apologised and said I’m Miss Rice who was a trainee and had taken it upon herself to work with Child A. I could have kissed her. Dad took my hand, looked me in the eye and gave me this lovely smile.