A Stolen Childhood: A Dark Past, a Terrible Secret, a Girl Without a Future

‘You’re making a rod for your own back, Casey!’ my mother was rather fond of saying, and even though I’d huff and puff at her, I was inclined to agree. Not that I’d have it any other way of course. I secretly loved still being needed by my two older teens, no matter how much I pretended to protest.

Right then, Casey, I said out loud to myself, since there was no one else to talk to. Best get cracking – these walls aren’t going to sort themselves out! I then rolled my sleeves up, both actually and metaphorically, and, after placing a hopeful hand on the nearest radiator and having my hopes dashed, prepared to do battle with the displays. With any luck, I’d have an uninterrupted hour and a half now, so, before tackling the remaining backlog of paperwork in my pigeonhole, I could do a good job of stripping down all the previous students’ work, and prettying it up again, ready for the work my new charges would produce.

But that’s the thing about school life; it was almost always unpredictable. So much so that I could probably have predicted that the sudden rap on the classroom door 20 minutes later would mean a complete change of plan.

And it did.

Chapter 2 (#u10c92795-2028-5623-bcd0-026eb462cc4d)

My room wasn’t like a regular classroom. For one thing it was half the size, and for another, it wasn’t even a classroom. It had been once, back in the dark ages, when the school had first been built, but after a spell as a learning support room, it had gone the way of many a backwater space – home to a small, motley collection of tables and chairs, and not a great deal else. It had been passed over, forgotten, trapped in a time warp at the end of a corridor, and it suited my purposes perfectly.

The headmaster, Mike Moore, who showed me various options when I’d first secured the job, had expressed surprise; in terms of size and spec he’d definitely shown me better. But there was something about that little room that had chimed with my sensibilities, both as a work space for me and as a safe space for my pupils – who I had an inkling would know all about being passed over and forgotten.

Best of all – and, to be honest, it was probably the deal-breaker – it had double doors that opened out onto a lovely grassy area, tucked away at the back of the school. Oh, the things we could do out there, I’d thought.

And, if I did say so myself, I thought I’d made it quite special. I sectioned off an area at the front for myself, which contained a desk, a set of drawers and (important, to my mind) space to make hot drinks and toast. This last addition had caused a few raised eyebrows. In these days of health and safety consciousness, one couldn’t just turn up and plug in a toaster as one might do at home – no, Mike Moore had been required to call an engineer in specially, to test and ‘pass safe’ my two electrical appliances, which I heard on the grapevine caused a ripple of mild disgruntlement in some quarters, due to the ‘unnecessary’ expense.

I believe I then made matters worse (no, to be fair, I know I did) by going out and spending some of my precious teaching budget on such fripperies as bright emulsion, half a dozen floor cushions and a selection of potted plants – all of which I deemed essential too. Essential to the creation of the warm, calm environment I was after, so, knowing all about politics after years spent working with vulnerable young adults for the local council, I simply ignored the whispered grumbles and exasperated glances, which, once it became common knowledge that my Unit would mop up the most challenging children, did not continue very long, to no one’s surprise.

I had several large display boards and had got to work on them quickly, taking down what remained of the previous bunch of students’ work and, while I was at it, wondering how they were all doing. Being out of school for a few weeks meant being somewhat out of the loop, and I made a mental note to try and track them down when I could. In the meantime, I decided, surveying the newly barren walls, I’d hang on to the gold card frames that we’d put up for Christmas but would be perfectly serviceable for a while yet. I could then turn my attention to my ‘quiet’ area.

A good number of the children who came to me had a tendency to become volatile, so a ‘chill out’ space was another essential. It was a place I could send kids to calm down if they needed to and, equally, it was a place that might prove preventative on that front – not to mention being somewhere a shy child could escape to, should the bustle of the classroom get too much.

It was a simple space – the only seating being those half-dozen floor cushions – and bound on two sides by a pair of bookcases at right angles, facing inwards. There were books, of course, but also a selection of stationery: trays of paper, pens and pencils, in case creativity blossomed and the urge to be artistic took hold.

The knock at my door came just as I was deciding if I had time to rearrange the muddle of books, while putting a new label on the crayon tray. I bobbed up to find Donald Brabbiner, the deputy head, had put his head round the now open door.

‘Casey, do you have a minute?’ he asked, looking stressed. Not that Don looking stressed was anything unusual in itself, currently. The school was in the middle of preparing for an OFSTED visit, and there wasn’t a member of the senior staff who wasn’t stressing about it – the furrowed brow and frazzled expression was very much the look of the moment.

But, no – he looked more stressed than even that, I decided. ‘Yes, of course, Don,’ I said, pulling myself upright and brushing chalk dust from my skirt. ‘I don’t have any children in till tomorrow, and I’m about done here. Is there a problem?’

He nodded grimly. ‘Apparently so.’

He was obviously keen to return to it, too, I decided, as he was already turning and heading back out into the corridor. I quickly followed him, opting for grabbing my satchel, rather than spending time finding my key and locking the door. There was nothing in there worth pinching currently, after all. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. I was having to jog intermittently to keep up with him as we headed off down the corridor, and not just because I was five foot nothing to his six foot two. He was the sort of man who was born to lead and a great asset to the school, and with his brisk manner and his ‘everything must be done yesterday’ attitude, he was hard to keep up with at the best of times. But he was well liked by both the staff and the students, because he was down to earth, fair to a fault and enjoyed a laugh with the children, attributes that made for the best kind of teacher – well, in my humble opinion, anyway.

‘Year eight assembly,’ he said, directing his words half over his shoulder. ‘Some sort of incident going on involving two of the pupils. I was told I was needed and so were you –’ He turned and smiled a grim smile. ‘And as you were on the way, I thought I’d scoop you up en route.’

So he was on his way to it. Which meant he must have been sent for or paged. ‘A fight?’ I asked.

‘I believe so. Though I’m not yet quite sure … Ah –’

He didn’t need to finish whatever it was he was about to say as we could hear the commotion before we saw it; well, the tell-tale sound of massed kids who, as our eyes soon confirmed, were all being herded out of the hall, most of them over-excited, chatting nine to the dozen about something exciting that had obviously gone down – and which probably livened up their morning no end.

‘Settle down,’ Donald barked, to no one in particular. He didn’t need to – just his presence in the area was enough. The various form teachers were busy trying to wrestle back some order too, but the decibel levels suggested that whatever had happened was something more serious than just some radiator-related unrest.

That too was soon confirmed, as Andrea Halstead, one of the year eight form tutors, emerged from the hall and beckoned us to both follow her in.

‘Oh, Mr Brabbiner,’ she said, sounding as if she was still getting her breath back. ‘Casey, hi. Bit of a to-do, I’m afraid. Might have been something and nothing, but Thomas over there’s hit his head and Mr Reynolds and I were thinking that someone will probably need to take him down to A and E.’

‘A and E?’ Donald went straight into accident mode. ‘What sort of head wound? Any bleeding? Did he pass out at any point?’

I looked across to where a group of assorted teachers, teaching assistants and one of the school secretaries, Janice Wells, were forming what looked like two separate human cordons around what must have been the two pupils in question, neither of whom I could properly see yet. What I could see, however, was a large muddle of chairs, several of them overturned, around which Barry, the caretaker, was methodically working, stacking the unaffected rows of chairs both in front of and behind the groups, and dragging them to their positions back against the walls. It was a circle of devastation that looked a little like something had been dropped in the middle of the hall from a great height. A fight, then, for definite.

Or perhaps not. ‘I’m not sure,’ Andrea said, ‘We don’t think so. But it’s been bleeding rather copiously. It’s up in his hair at the back –’ she gestured to her own head to illustrate. ‘Just above the back of his neck. Quite a nasty gash.’

‘Wouldn’t an ambulance be simpler?’ Donald asked.

‘We weren’t sure,’ Andrea said. ‘I was going to call one, but then Janice reminded me about the roadworks on the way to the General. We were wondering if it wouldn’t be easier for someone just to take him in their car. Mr Reynolds seems to have got the bleeding under control.’

‘You want me to take him down in my car?’ I asked. ‘Who is it, anyway?’

‘Lad called Thomas Robinson,’ Andrea said. ‘You probably haven’t come across him – he’s only been at the school for a couple of weeks or so, bless him. But, no, we were hoping you’d be able to take charge of Kiara, there. She’s in no fit state to go back to her friends.’

She nodded towards the second of the two huddles, at the centre of which I could just make out a second pupil, who I now realised wasn’t the gender I expected. ‘Kiara?’ I said. ‘So it’s a girl?’

Andrea nodded while Donald strode off to take charge of the patient and decide how best to get him to A and E. ‘Kiara Bentley,’ she confirmed. ‘Have you had any dealings with her?’

As if to underline that even if I hadn’t I might well do very soon, the subject of our discussion then started shouting. Shouting quite loudly, in fact; and making a great deal of noise for what looked like quite a small amount of pupil.

‘What happened?’ I asked Andrea, at a loss to work it out. ‘Did the pair of them have a punch-up in the middle of assembly?’

‘Not quite a full-on fight,’ she said. ‘But it certainly got physical. I didn’t have the best view because they were halfway along a row, quite a way behind me. By the time I got to it, it was hard to make out what was going on. And she’s still in a right state about it, as you can see. Come on, let’s go and see if we can calm things down a bit, shall we? Then we can all get back on with our days.’ She gave me a wry grin as we walked across the hall. ‘One of those days, eh? Still, at least it’s stopped everyone whining about the radiators.’

I’d already been involved in quite a few fight situations in the course of my job, and some things were common to all of them. The adrenalin rush, the urgent need to lower the emotional temperature and stop fists flying around, and the equally important need to establish the facts.

In that regard, coming into this one after the event left me at something of a disadvantage. On the one hand was this beefy-looking, scruffy, long-haired lad, clutching what looked like a tea-towel to his head, his white(ish) school shirt liberally splattered with blood and with the unmistakable pallor of a child who was in shock. And on the other hand was what seemed like a slip of a girl who seemed to be alternately sobbing and raging at the huddle of staff who were trying to calm her down.

But there was no point in trying to establish quite what had happened, not till the lad had been taken off to have his wound looked at and not till the girl – Kiara Bentley, that was it – was on a more even keel.

‘This is Mrs Watson,’ Andrea said, as we joined the small group surrounding her. Toni, the teaching assistant who’d been sitting beside her, immediately jumped up. ‘Here,’ she said, gesturing towards the seat she’d vacated.

I would have sat on it, too, the better to communicate with the girl, had it not been for the fact that at that exact moment Donald was leading the boy and his retinue out of the hall, which meant walking past us.

‘You’re a fucking dick!’ the girl screamed suddenly, leaping up from her own seat, and only being stopped from lashing out at the boy again by Andrea’s swift arresting arm.

‘Kiara!’ she barked, blocking her route to him. ‘Stop it!’

‘You’re a fucking bastard!’ she screeched, ignoring Andrea completely. ‘And I hope they shrivel up and fall off as well!’

Hope what fall off? I wondered as I helped Andrea gently restrain her. ‘Come on, love,’ I said. ‘This isn’t helping anything, is it? Come on, how about you come with me, eh? Then you can tell me all about it, and –’

She ignored me as well. ‘I’ve got more balls than you’ll ever have anyway!’ she yelled, shouting loud enough to make my left ear hurt, as Donald, with a short barked instruction of ‘Enough!’ disappeared with Janice and Thomas through the double doors. The boy, whose arresting mop of shoulder-length hair was flopping over his face, obscuring it, was half-doubled over, I noticed, and clearly in pain. I didn’t need to see his face. I could hear him.

The penny dropped. Balls. That was what the girl said, hadn’t she? Ouch.

‘Enough, now!’ Andrea repeated as between us we managed to guide the girl back to the seat she’d been sitting on, though, rigid with fury, she refused to sit down.

‘You get back,’ Andrea said to the two young teaching assistants still remaining, then turned her attention back to Kiara. ‘Now, are you going to go with Mrs Watson nicely, my love? I know you’re upset, but nobody can help you when you’re screaming and hollering like this, can they? Come on, try and calm yourself down, okay?’