A Stolen Childhood

by Casey Watson

  Jim shook his head sadly. ‘If only,’ he said. ‘No, she’s in there because she had to take the class after I reported it, and she’s spoken to Kiara about it. Though I obviously don’t yet know what she had to say.’

  Poor, poor Jim. What a start to his week. Though it was hard to take in that Kiara would do that, there was plenty of reason to believe it. The way she’d dealt with Tommy so swiftly, and so painfully, back in that assembly. My mum showed me how to do that. Wasn’t that what she’d said? The ‘fact’ of what sort of ‘carer’ her mum might conceivably be. That knowing, ‘older than her years’ look she’d always had. Tommy being so adamant that he hadn’t actually said the lewd things she’d accused him of. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, I thought, as we hurried along to the deputy head’s office. Everything about it was beginning to make my antennae start to twitch.

  Two minutes later they were twitching fit to bust, just by virtue of the expression on the deputy headteacher’s face. It was deemed that due to the nature of what Kiara had said subsequently there was no reason why Jim and I couldn’t hear it.

  At first, it seemed she’d simply denied everything. ‘Vehemently, in fact,’ Kelly explained. ‘But come yesterday morning, it seemed that she’d had a bit of a change of heart, actually asking me if she could stay behind and talk to me at break time, and then admitting to me that she’d behaved inappropriately.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ I couldn’t help interrupting her to say.

  ‘Indeed,’ she agreed. ‘But there’s more. Once I pressed her about why she’d even thought of doing such a thing, she told me she knew that most men liked girls who could do blow jobs, and that Mr Dawson had been so lovely to her that she wanted to be sure he wasn’t one of them.’

  ‘Come again?’ Jim said.

  ‘A “nice” man,’ Kelly supplied. ‘She wanted to be sure that you were really a nice man, as opposed to the kind of men her mum knew. Testing you, in effect. She said that herself.’

  I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘She actually said that, about the men her mother knew? Oh my God, so Mr Bentley was telling the truth then?’

  ‘It seems so,’ Donald said, and I could tell there was still more. Everyone suddenly had their Very Serious Faces on. ‘Casey,’ Don started, addressing me directly, ‘Gary’s been investigating things further, along with social services, naturally. He’s just been making a couple of calls and should be with us at any moment.’ He checked his watch. ‘And I was thinking that perhaps it’s best if Kelly goes back to look after your pupils, so that we can all sit down together and we can put you properly in the picture; Gary might well have some further updates from overnight.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, my brain going nine to the dozen. Where was Kiara now? What ‘updates’ was he expecting? ‘Whatever you say,’ I added as Kelly left the office, thinking vaguely what a shame it was that I wasn’t there for class again, but at the same time hungry to know what the heck was going on.

  And learn I did. And the first thing I learned – and learned good – was that you should never judge a book by its cover. I felt so stupid that I’d been completely taken in by Mrs Bentley. I hated to think that I was apparently so shallow that her impressive show of ultra-cleanliness had dazzled my vision, clouding my judgement, and had prevented me from looking beyond the sterile environment she called a home.

  To be fair to myself, I’d had my reservations, and I’d definitely voiced them; that feeling that I was missing something, even though I hadn’t known what it was – but still, I shouldn’t have left it there.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself, Casey. That’s just silly,’ was almost the first thing Gary said when he’d arrived and I told him how much of an idiot I felt. ‘How were any of us to know? And though Jim’s possibly the last person who’ll thank me for saying it, it’s actually a blessing that she came on to him the way she did.’

  He then filled us in on what he’d since found out. In fact, what he’d already started investigating over the half-term break, by having a quiet word with a close contact of his in social services. A contact who’d revealed that Mrs Bentley had indeed been in trouble in the past for this kind of thing, but their involvement had ended several years back, after monitoring her for three years, during which time it appeared that she’d cleaned up her act and was concentrating on being a good parent to her daughter.

  Gary had then done some other snooping around – he didn’t go into details – and had apparently found out one of the neighbours had recently put a complaint in to the council about the stream of men going in and out of the house at all hours. The police also had a record of another neighbour (a local neighbourhood watch official) reporting a child being left alone late at night on a regular basis.

  I was shocked. And not just by the facts that were being put before me. I was shocked that a jigsaw hadn’t started to form in anyone’s mind; that the authorities hadn’t put all the pieces together. Incredible or not, though, it simply hadn’t happened. The incidents were all spaced out over too long a time and no one had connected the dots. On their own, none had been serious enough to warrant removing a child, and no one had managed to put them together.

  Till now. ‘Now it’s happening,’ Gary continued, his expression grim. ‘Later today, someone will be calling into school to collect Kiara, and she will be placed with a foster family till this is all sorted out.’

  I gasped. For all my ‘action, action, action’ bluster prior to half-term, now it was going to be done I couldn’t believe it could all happen so fast. She’d left her mum’s house, come to school and then … and then what? They’d swoop in and claim her? Just physically take her away, whether she wanted to be taken away or not? It just seemed so brutal, and I couldn’t quite imagine standing by while they dragged her off with them. I couldn’t quite conceive that, however much she professed to hate her mum, she would just meekly trot off with strangers. I couldn’t quite conceive that she did hate her mum, come to that. She was a 12-year-old girl; she’d obviously have her spats with her mother and, given the terrible state of play when it came to her parents’ warring, I don’t doubt she had more spats than most. But this was still her mum, and her home, and, bar her dad’s place, all she knew. It seemed more than brutal, in fact. It seemed too horrible to actually be happening, and I really couldn’t imagine being a part of it. What if she clung to me, traumatised, pleading for them not to take her?

  But I also knew that it couldn’t be any other way. I took a breath and tried to rationalise, to help calm myself down. Mrs Bentley was a prostitute and probably had been for a number of years. No matter how well she provided for her daughter financially, she was breaking the law, and, from the sounds of things – and the evidence I’d seen with my own eyes – her mother’s choice of ‘career’ was impacting very badly on Kiara, and that was just given what we knew – there might be more.

  There was more. ‘Just one other thing you should know, Casey,’ Gary said. He was clearly not blind to my distress at what was going to happen; to the gamut of emotions that were tumbling over one another inside my head. ‘One of the neighbours I spoke to myself – and she’s going to make a statement to the police, too – said that she’s watched Kiara being taken out of the house very late at night, wearing her school uniform, full make-up and with her hair in pigtails. Casey,’ he added, ‘I think it’s probably even worse than you’re currently thinking. Right now, I think it’s probably safe to assume that Mrs Bentley has been taking Kiara out on the streets with her.’

  I felt sickened. And to my consternation, I felt sick as well. With my stomach empty, bar two coffees, I realised I actually felt nauseous. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, standing up. ‘I think I need some fresh air. I’ll be okay. This is just so hard to comprehend …’

  ‘Of course,’ Don said, also standing up. ‘Take as long as you need, Casey.’

  I nodded and somehow made my way to the door without heaving, not quite believing that I really might
throw up. I’d heard about it and read about it – but me? It couldn’t be happening. But with the images that were insistent on invading my head, it seemed it was.

  I made the staff restroom and vomited into the nearest toilet.

  Chapter 14

  Kiara was, at first, perfectly amenable. Two social workers arrived at the school just before the bell rang for lunch break, so that Kiara could be spoken to and taken away – how horrible that expression was – without causing too much disruption to the afternoon’s class.

  I had a lump sticking in my throat for the rest of the morning, naturally, and was eternally grateful that Kelly was able to hold the fort in the Unit for me, while I kept myself distracted with paperwork and lesson plans and sorting out some past papers for our new student, Morgan, who’d be my priority once lunch was over and Kiara was gone, and I could sit down and get to know her a little better.

  Out with the old, in with the new – that jolly quip kept coming back to haunt me. What a strange business it had been with Kiara thus far. I’d been so adamant that something had been going on behind those enormous brown eyes; now that I’d been proved right, and between us we’d hopefully been instrumental in putting an end to something bad, I felt no sense of achievement, or indeed relief – just this hollowed-out feeling in my stomach every time the reality of what was going to happen next kicked in.

  But, as I say, Kiara was at first perfectly calm about everything. Kelly brought her along to Gary’s office once the lunch stampede was over, and when she saw me sitting there, she smiled. I’d been brought in so that she’d feel a little more comfortable with strangers, and though I wasn’t looking forward to the trauma that was coming, I was glad to be included. I agreed it could only help.

  ‘Hi, miss,’ she said brightly, as I patted the seat of the chair next to me. ‘Did your house move go okay?’

  ‘Hi, love,’ I said as she sat down, neat as a pin, as she always was. ‘Yes it did. A smooth move.’

  She grinned, seemingly oblivious to the two strangers present; the middle-aged woman in the purple cardigan, and the younger, bespectacled man. ‘And did you get your way about the new curtains?’ she asked, with a giggle.

  I nodded and smiled at her, painfully aware of the lowered heads of the two social workers, and of Gary clearing his throat as an indication we should begin.

  ‘Kiara,’ he began, ‘we’ve asked you come in to talk to us about some concerns we have. Some quite serious concerns. I’m hoping that you can listen very carefully and try to be as honest as you can when you answer me. Do you understand?’

  Gary’s tone was incredibly gentle, but I could see the tension appearing on Kiara’s face. ‘I think so, sir,’ she responded, finally seeming to take in the presence of the two unsmiling strangers in the room with us. I reached across and gave her arm a squeeze of reassurance as I braced myself for what was to come.

  Gary then went on to ask Kiara what she knew about what her mum did for a living and, now that she understood why we were there and seemed to get what Gary was driving at, a change came over her; almost, if it’s not too fanciful, a kind of shedding of a skin. It was then that I realised that perhaps she had been waiting for just this moment – for the day to come when she could finally spill the beans, tell the truth. She must have been bursting with the keeping of such things, after all, and it suddenly struck me why she found it hard to have friends.

  And out it duly came. Yes, she understood what her mum did to earn extra money. Yes, that was the reason she was sometimes out late into the night. Yes, her mum’s ‘friends’ came to the house sometimes, but she usually stayed in her bedroom when that happened. Yes, in the last few months she went out with her mum sometimes in the evenings and yes – here she faltered, having to recount things she obviously found it traumatic to contemplate, let alone articulate – if she gave them blow jobs ‘and other stuff like that – not proper sex though’ – she’d be given extra pocket-money.

  I was in a room with a child protection officer and two experienced social workers, who had doubtless heard such stories many, many times before. But I don’t think I was the only one in that room who was physically recoiling at the images that were being painted in our minds by Kiara’s words. Perhaps had she been older, more fully adolescent, physically bigger, more on the cusp of womanhood – perhaps if that were so it wouldn’t feel quite so repellent. It still would be, of course. Any kind of sexual assault (and I counted her mother as one of the perpetrators here) is and always will be an act of violence against a woman, but sitting together in Gary’s office, looking at this tiny, doll-like child, made the thought of what she’d been subjected to so much worse.

  Yet Kiara herself, despite the sickening nature of what she’d disclosed to us, still had an air of lightness, of expectation, about her. And once she’d finished answering Gary’s questions I realised why.

  ‘So am I going to be allowed to go and live with my dad now?’ she asked Gary. And I don’t think she once thought – perhaps wouldn’t have, in a million years – that the answer coming was going to be ‘actually, no’.

  It was, to say the least, a difficult couple of weeks for me after that, mostly because I was now completely out of the loop. Not to mention learning a valuable lesson about how child protection worked. And it did what it said on the tin. I couldn’t understand this myself at first. When Gary had explained to Kiara that no, she couldn’t go and live with her dad, and she’d burst out with the word ‘why?’ I had to clamp my mouth shut before I asked the same question. After all, she’d been staying at her dad’s house regularly now, and was so obviously happy there, so I couldn’t see why she couldn’t just move in with him for the time being.

  The opposite was to be the case, however, and the female social worker gently explained why. Social services had a duty to put Kiara in a place of safety, first and foremost, and as her father was an unknown quantity to them – however lovely Kiara said he was, she’d added, nodding her understanding that he was – until he had been thoroughly vetted and assessed by them, she couldn’t be allowed to go there. Yes, in all probability she would been able to see him, and ‘as soon as we can arrange it, I promise’, but in the meantime it was important she was somewhere safe and secure, while they made all their enquiries. Kiara was naturally inconsolable at hearing this and, despite knowing that it was the only way to proceed in the short term, I felt I had badly let her down.

  Kiara had been taken from school that same lunchtime, flanked by the two social workers, destined for the home of a ‘lovely’ foster family some distance away, and in floods – and I mean floods – of frightened tears. Here, at least, I could try to provide some physical comfort; it was understandable, since I’d become the person at the school to whom she’d grown most close, that she’d choose me to cling to, to entreat, to beg and beg that they didn’t take her away. And how else was she expected to react? The bottom had fallen out of her world.

  The social workers were gentle yet firm, understanding yet immovable; again, they had been through this process many times and I didn’t doubt that it never got any easier. But, as with saying farewell to loved ones at airports, they seemed to know it was best to get it over with quickly and get away. So all I could do was try to reassure Kiara that, if she wanted, she could perhaps write to us at school; to Tommy, to Jonathan, to Chloe – specially to Chloe – and let us know how she was getting on.

  ‘And we’ll write back right away,’ was the last thing I could promise her, through my own drip-drip of tears, understanding, but not quite being able to believe, that there was a good chance that her life as she knew it was over, that tonight she’d be sleeping in a stranger’s bed, far away. That we might never see her again.

  Two weeks on, that was the thought that was still getting to me the most. Along with the fact that I knew nothing of what was going on. Yes, Donald had promised me that he’d let me know the minute we had an update, but two weeks on there was nothing to report, other than that Mike Moore ha
d returned and was as mortified by developments as everyone else was.

  Which didn’t change anything. Not that I expected to hear anything I couldn’t work out by myself. My expectation, born of what I knew of how things like this usually worked, was that all I’d hear was that Kiara would be settling into a new school in a new area – that was the way fostering usually worked; get them right out of the area, away from undesirable people who might wish to contact them and vice versa – and that, depending on what position her mother took about getting her back, there would then be ‘due process’; that she would perhaps have to prove to the courts that she could change her ways and become a good enough parent to have her daughter back, or (as seemed possible given Kiara’s disclosures that she was herself being made to perform sex acts on ‘clients’) she would not.

  As for Kiara’s dad, I could only hope that he would continue to be able to see her. He might well be found wanting in terms of his living and employment situation, but my hope was that they’d see that he was keen to be a dad to her. That was key, I felt, to her emotional well-being. That and the hope that I knew would burn brightly within her, that, once the dust had settled, there was a chance that she would be able to live with her dad. But would she? Now social services had care and control of her, would they really feel able to put her in such a place? There was no glossing over it – it was a dump.

  But now – just like that – she was no longer my problem. We’d finished what we’d started and she was gone, and that was that. It was almost the end of June now – only four weeks until we broke up for the long summer holidays, and though I was driving everyone mad at home, going on and on and on about it, I had to mentally switch gears and shift my professional focus to the kids I still had. As Mike had said at least three times in my presence (and possibly a few more times out of it), what did I expect? I was working with the challenging and challenged. This was the sort of thing that was bound to happen from time to time, and I probably needed to man up a bit.