The Girl Without a Voice

by Casey Watson

  Simon nodded. ‘And it’s far from unusual, I’m afraid. If I had a pound for every case I’ve seen where the guilty party has been able to do something like this entirely under the radar – entirely without anyone suspecting a thing – then I’d be a very rich man indeed, believe me. But we’re dealing with someone with profound emotional problems. This is a woman who’s something of a narcissist. Someone whose own mother abandoned her at a very young age and has, in the main, been brought up in care – a succession of children’s homes, by all accounts. And though, superficially, she’s quite charming, and seems to have done okay for herself, this is a woman for whom the word “empathy” might as well be written in Mandarin; someone who uses and abuses as a default. And we all know how it works, I’m sure –’ He glanced around the room and he was right. We all knew exactly what he was talking about. ‘These people are often very charismatic and independent-minded, aren’t they? They certainly don’t wear a badge saying “avoid at all costs”, do they?’

  And also shrewd. Imogen’s father, cuckolded and left and hurt as he was, would have been an obvious target. Was she holidaying alone on one of his coach trips when she snared him? ‘So what will happen to her now?’ I asked, managing to feel only marginally less forgiving of her. Though, given her background, I knew I should, I still couldn’t forget what she’d done to Imogen.

  ‘She’s been charged and she will be prosecuted for cruelty and neglect. And if she doesn’t exactly learn the error of her ways, we can at least hope it will deter her from striking up any new relationships with men who have children to consider. We’ll obviously let you know how things progress, but as far as Imogen is concerned this period is over and we’re going to be working with the family to get her life back on track. And – hopefully – that will feed into progress with her speech therapy.’

  I was just about to ask if there was anything in particular that I should or shouldn’t be doing with Imogen in the light of recent developments, when the meeting was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  It was a delicate knock – one that immediately said child rather than adult – and, had anyone been talking, we might not have even heard it.

  Don, being closest to the door, went to see who it was, and seeing him looking down – I couldn’t actually see who was there – I knew my hunch had been correct. I also recognised the voice. It was Shona.

  Don ushered her in. ‘Miss Vickers sent me,’ she said nervously, eyeing the strangers in the room. ‘She wondered if it would be possible for Mrs Watson to come down to the Unit …’ She glanced at me and then back to Don. ‘Only it’s Ben, and he’s …’

  ‘What’s happened, Shona?’ I began. But Jim was already rising. ‘No, no, leave this one to me, Mrs Watson,’ he said, shrugging his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘You carry on. You’re the one who’s going to be working with Imogen, so it makes much more sense for me to go and deal with it – whatever “it” is. What’s he been up to, Shona?’

  I could see Shona looking doubtful. She glanced at me again. ‘It’s him and Henry,’ she said. ‘They’ve been fighting, and now Ben’s locked in the art cupboard. The one by the water fountain … but Miss Vickers said …’

  ‘Locked in?’ Gary asked her. ‘By who?’

  Shona shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Miss Vickers didn’t tell me. Just that she needed Mrs Watson to come.’ She glanced at me again.

  Jim had come around the table now, and I found myself in something of a quandary. I knew Jim could handle it – I knew Jim could handle anything (better than I could, in many cases) – but I got the distinct impression that it was specifically me Kelly wanted to come and sort it. And knowing Ben so much better now, I also thought I knew why. But to point that out, in this company, would have been highly inappropriate, so I held my tongue.

  But Gary must have seen something in either my or Shona’s expressions that made him realise it was me who needed to go.

  ‘No, no, thanks, but I think it’ll be best if you stay here, Mr Dawson,’ he said decisively. ‘We’ve still got Josh Harrison to talk about, haven’t we?’ He nodded towards me. ‘Go on, Mrs Watson – we’re all but done here, anyway, I think. We’ve got another meeting scheduled next week to discuss the action plan for Imogen, haven’t we, Mr Swift?’ He looked at the senior social worker, who nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘We’re just waiting on the speech therapist’s report, basically.’

  I needed no further invitation. I stood up, grabbed my bag, said my farewells and left with Shona.

  So,’ I said, hotfooting it down the corridor alongside her, ‘as they say on American cop shows, what’s been going down?’

  Quite a lot, it seemed. Shona, as it turned out, could tell me very little. Only that Ben and Henry had started fighting and it had all got very ‘shouty’, and Miss Vickers had stopped it and made the boys apologise to each other, but then Henry had done something and Ben had attacked him with a pair of scissors and he was now locked in the art cupboard by the water fountain.

  I.e. the one just down the corridor from my classroom. Where there was a drawer with a key in it that opened the art cupboard. The question was, who’d done the locking and who had the key now?

  ‘Oh, Ben himself,’ Kelly told me, once we’d settled the children with their workbooks and had popped just outside the door to discuss it out of earshot. ‘No one’s locked him in there. He’s locked himself in. Little tyke must have slipped round and grabbed it while my back was turned. He was out of the classroom like a flipping whippet and it was only because I wasn’t far from the door that I followed him out in time to seem him go in there. Had I not, he could have been there indefinitely, because it was the last place I would have thought of looking – I’d have assumed he’d have scarpered altogether.’ She glanced down the corridor. ‘Mind you, he still might be in there for an indefinite period because, Ben being Ben, he’s intent on staying there, as well.’ She smiled, albeit grimly. ‘Currently he’s running it like a kind of hostage situation. Refusing to negotiate terms for the release of sugar paper and poster paint till his demands are met.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Straightforward. That he won’t get’ – she raised fingers into quote marks – ‘’scluded.’

  Her expression became more serious, then. ‘He went for Henry, Casey. Didn’t hurt him badly, as far as I can see – no flesh wounds or anything. But he has definitely gone at him with a pair of scissors – Molly witnessed it – and, of course, he’s had his nine lives, hasn’t he? And he knows it. That’s what I’m guessing this is about.’

  I realised I’d been right in my hunch that this was something I should deal with. This was something I had a better chance of diffusing – or at least minimising, or not making worse, anyway – than Jim did, because the one thing that I’d learned in the weeks Ben had been with us was that Ben didn’t react to discipline from male teachers nearly as well as female ones. In fact, from his notes – which I’d read – there was a definite pattern. He would invariably lash out, and make things worse for himself. It was almost instinctive, I reckoned, and in all probability related to his home life; one in which the primary male in it – the only male – spent much of his time shouting at his only child and, from what the paperwork said, more often than not while inebriated.

  Not that Jim would shout – far from it; he was one of those effortlessly authoritative teachers who barely needed to raise their voices, ever – but with Ben and I having such a rapport building between us now, I knew I was best placed both to coax him from the cupboard and glean enough information to make an informed judgement about how serious an incident this had actually been. Though it couldn’t be that bad, surely? Yes, we had scissors in the classroom, but they were blunt-ended and blunt. They could barely manage medium-grade card. Still, it was a dispiriting bit of news, this, and potentially another blot on his copy-book, and I hoped his crucial ninth life hadn’t quite expired yet.

  ‘And I’m sor
ry to call you away from your meeting,’ Kelly added. ‘Only the caretaker’s nowhere to be found – I sent Shona up there first – and I thought it better to drag you out of your meeting than start calling out the cavalry. Given the situation with him and everything …’

  ‘You did good.’ I grinned, touching a finger to my temple. ‘You used your nous. You will go far, my child. Right, then. If you can hold the fort, onwards to the cupboard!’

  What was it with me and keys lately? I thought, as I stationed myself outside the art cupboard door and gently knocked. First Imogen, locking me in, and now Ben, locking me out. Was there some sort of message I should be taking from all this?

  ‘Ben, love,’ I called softly, grateful that we weren’t quite at the end of the second period yet and that the corridor was therefore empty of marauding teenagers. ‘Ben, it’s me.’

  I put my ear to the door. Nothing. Was he even still in there? Was there a chance he could have scarpered while the coast was clear? No, I realised. Imogen – oblivious, ironically, that she was the subject of our meeting – had been stationed by my classroom door when we’d got back there, no doubt with the express instruction from Kelly to keep it in view. ‘Ben,’ I said again, more forcefully, ‘it’s me and I need to speak to you. Come on, at least let me know you’re there. One knock for yes, two for no …’ I paused. ‘And three for …’

  There were two knocks. So he hadn’t lost his sense of humour.

  ‘Okay, then,’ I said. ‘So we have two choices. Either you come out, or I come in. I don’t mind which, but you need to choose one or I am going to have to go and find the caretaker and that’s going to put him in a very bad mood.’

  ‘I didn’t do it!’ came the unequivocal response.

  ‘Didn’t do what?’ I asked.

  ‘Didn’t do what Henry said I did. He’s a liar!’

  ‘What did Henry say you did?’

  ‘He said I stabbed him, an’ I didn’t!’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to Henry yet, Ben,’ I said. ‘I wanted to speak to you first. I want you tell me what happened. From the beginning.’

  There was a pause, and I could hear a bit of banging and scraping. ‘You on your own?’ he demanded finally. ‘You haven’t brought no one, have you?’ It seemed I wasn’t the only one who watched cop shows.

  ‘Entirely alone,’ I said. ‘Though the bell’s due to go in … let me see … 12 minutes. At which point I won’t be on my own any more. There will be several dozen pupils passing by, thinking I’m talking to a door. So. Shall I come in there, so you can tell me?’

  More bangings and scrapings. He’d obviously used his time productively, by barricading himself in. Then, to my delight, I heard the key scrape in the lock.

  ‘Shove along, then,’ I said, as the door opened to reveal one rather dishevelled and tremulous 11-year-old boy, with a face streaked with tear tracks and chalk dust.

  It was a bit of a squeeze, there having been a recent delivery, but I managed to perch my backside on the bottom-most shelf, cushioned by a pile of coloured A3 sheets of card. Opposite me, the shelves were crammed in preparation for the usual New Year display drive with rolls of foil paper, border ribbon and big plastic bottles of poster paint, as well as the more workaday packs of sugar paper, modelling clay and white cartridge. It smelt good, a smell I always associated with enthusiasm and creative endeavour. Though with a definite top-note of sweaty pre-pubescent boy.

  ‘So what happened, Ben?’ I asked him. ‘Truthfully, okay? No making up things. Everyone was in the classroom, so people saw it, okay?’ I held his gaze, to be sure he took in what I was saying. ‘So, go on. Let’s have it. From the beginning.’

  And it seemed Ben was happy enough to tell me. Henry had started it (predictably – it was rare for these kids to ever confess to ‘starting’ anything) by taking a particular felt pen, which Ben had been using and had only put down for a minute, and when he’d tried to take it back Henry had grabbed it, and somehow it had ended up making a mark on the desk, and of course, it being a permanent marker and there being rules about permanent markers, both boys had accused the other of marking the desk and it had got out of hand, culminating in a full-on fist fight, which Kelly had called a halt to.

  As often happened, however, even though both boys had apologised, there’d still been some residual needle about who’d been most at fault, and somehow – Ben was characteristically reticent about precise details – it had flared up again. And as Ben had had scissors in his hands at the time, he’d jabbed them towards Henry – but only in retaliation (honest, Miss!) after Henry had poked him in the ribs with a recently sharpened pencil.

  ‘An’ no one saw that!’ Ben protested, beginning to cry now. ‘No one saw that, Miss – an’ it was sharp and it hurt! And I didn’t hurt him – I only threatened him an … they were plastic scissors, anyway! An … an …’ he could barely speak for crying now, ‘an’ if he tells and says I did,’ he gulped, ‘and I get ’scluded from this school as well, I’m gonna be put in a children’s home!’

  The last word came out as a sob – the tears were streaming down his face now – and it occurred to me that nowhere, in this tiny temple to paper of all kinds, would there be anything as useful as a tissue. Tissue paper, yes, but nothing he could blow his nose with.

  But he’d already addressed that by the time I had checked all my pockets, by tugging down one of his frayed sweatshirt cuffs and raking it across his wet face.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ I said, ‘whatever makes you say such a thing? Who said you’re going to get excluded?’

  ‘Henry did!’

  ‘Well, last time I looked the name on the headmaster’s office wasn’t Henry Davis. And what’s all this about being put in a children’s home?’

  This prompted a fresh bout of sobbing. ‘That’s what he said!’

  ‘What, Henry did?’

  ‘No, my dad did! He’s already been on to the child-catcher lady. He said if I get into any more trouble at school he’s ringing her and getting shot of me. He did!’

  ‘Ben, I’m sure he didn’t mean that –’

  ‘Yes he did,’ he gulped. ‘He’s made the ’pointment and everything.’

  ‘What appointment?’

  ‘He said he phoned the lady and they said that if he has any more nonsense he can ring the Childline and get me picked up in a van.’

  ‘Ben, listen to me. Childline’s for children. For children to call if they have problems and they need someone to talk to.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he sniffed, ‘but it isn’t, Miss. If you ring Childline they can come and take you away. And I know it because I’ve seen it, Miss. I have. There was a boy in our flats – he rang Childline and no one never saw him again. Never.’

  I took a deep breath then, feeling a familiar sense of frustration and impotent anger rise within me. Anger at the adults who could possibly think it a sensible idea to put such terrible nonsense in gullible children’s heads.

  ‘Ben,’ I said, standing up and placing a hand on each of his shoulders, ‘listen to me, now, okay? Firstly, Childline don’t take children away. They help children – help children who are in difficult situations, and sometimes, yes, that means that they do leave their homes – but only if they need to go to a better, safer place. And secondly,’ I added, hoping my instinct was correct, ‘I don’t think for a second that your dad wants to put you in a children’s home. Yes, he’s scared you,’ I said, ‘making you think that …’ I paused, knowing I shouldn’t go too far. It wasn’t for me to pass judgement on his disciplining style, after all – not to Ben, at any rate. ‘But that’s not going to happen, okay? And thirdly,’ – I knew I was on much surer ground now – ‘you are not going to be excluded for what happened with Henry, okay?’

  Ben sniffed. ‘Honest, Miss?’

  ‘Honest, Ben,’ I said firmly. ‘Yes, you did wrong – you both did. Because we don’t resolve our differences by fighting with each other, do we? Neither do we threaten each other with pencils
and scissors. And you will both come into school early for the rest of the week, to help clear leaves and litter-pick with the caretaker. And you will both apologise, too – firstly to Miss Vickers, for disrupting her lesson, and to each other.’

  He nodded again. And I was pleased to see that the sweatshirt cuff was now substantially wetter than his face was – because he had, at last, stopped crying.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘what we’re going to do is this. We’re going to go to the toilets, so you can wash your face, okay? Then we’re going to go back to the Unit, and while everyone else has their break you and I and Henry are going to sort this out.’

  And then I (a thought I didn’t share, while Ben wiped his face again) was going to go and make a mental note – and perhaps also an actual one – about speaking to Gary about us speaking to Ben’s father, to see if we couldn’t at least have a quiet word about what seemed, under the circumstances, to be a rather counter-productive approach to disciplining his only, not to mention motherless, child.

  Humph, I thought, as the bell went. ‘Child-catcher lady’ indeed. No wonder social workers got such a bad press.

  Chapter 19

  With everything calming down on the child-protection front now, we were in something of a lull; it had definitely become that in-betweeny time of year. The excitement of Bonfire Night (and the stress of it) now seemed like a distant memory and had been replaced with a period of time that seemed dark and interminable, but at the same time not quite long enough to get everything done for the run-up to Christmas.

  I was thrilled that everything seemed to be getting sorted for the most troubled of my troubled students, and now she was talking reasonably freely I was keen to get to know her better, but I never seemed to have a minute these days. It seemed there was an endless round of meetings, and the whiff of change was in the air; something that was a natural part of school life, and Unit life in particular, but it never made it seem less than unsettling.