Casey Watson - Mummy’s Little Soldier - A troubled child. An absent mum. A shocking secret.

And that was all to the good, because if you didn’t start the school year full of optimism and energy, there was a fair chance you’d be burnt out by Christmas. ‘Come and sit by me,’ Gary Clark said, pulling out the chair beside him around the other side of the table. ‘Come join me in the naughty corner so we can whisper and pass each other secret notes.’

I slung my bag down on the seat next to him, gratefully spying the kettle and jar of instant on the desk on the corner. ‘Need a coffee first,’ I told him. ‘Can I get you one as well?’

Gary shook his head. ‘Coffee?’ he asked, nodding pointedly in Julia’s direction. ‘No way. I want a slug of whatever she’s having.’

That’s the thing about those sorts of days as well, isn’t it? That they always seem to have an infinite capacity to get worse. Though once we were gathered around the table, that was the last thing on my mind, because Julia went straight to work on her short but important agenda so that we could be finished before the children started ‘hunting us down’.

Her terminology wasn’t far off the mark, either. While mainstream school went about its business, most of the people currently in the meeting room were a hard-to-pin down sort of bunch, because that was the nature of the roles we all played. While the head, Mike Moore, oversaw his flock from the calm, tidy-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life environs of his huge office, Donald Brabbiner was invariably fire-fighting somewhere or other, while Julia and Gary, likewise, were out of their offices almost as much as they were in them. Jim Dawson, too, had a peripatetic schedule, his job being similar to mine, but also quite different, in that he roamed the school, also firefighting where needed, but mostly monitoring those kids who might, for whatever reason, need to be pulled out of lessons and come to me for a spell.

In fact, I was the only one in the room who stayed pretty much where I was most days – in the little ground-floor room that had been both my classroom and my office since I’d begun working at the school. Which meant I was easier to find, yes, but also that I was something of a magnet for all the kids who, strictly speaking, weren’t my responsibility any more, and who I regularly had to shoo back to their lessons.

Right now, however, ex-Unit kids were the only kind of kids I had, my last bunch having finished their stint with me at the end of the previous summer term, most to go back to mainstream lessons, one because she was done with school now, and one, rather distressingly, because her life had imploded and she was now in foster care a long way away. Her name was Kiara and she’d been on my mind a lot over the summer. I wondered how she was doing and hoped she was okay.

But today, as was the way of things, it seemed I was about to have my classroom repopulated – by three new kids, two of whom were new to the school as well. ‘And they’ve come with quite a hefty amount of baggage,’ Julia explained, opening the first of the files in front of her. ‘Which is why it seemed sensible for us to get our heads together before they get here.’

She began with a boy by the name of Darryl. Darryl, being eleven, was coming to us from his primary school, which was obviously a big transition in itself. But in Darryl’s case it was a little more complicated. He struggled academically, on account of having some learning difficulties, but also socially, because he had Asperger’s syndrome, which is a mild form of autism.

I knew something about this, because my own son, Kieron, had Asperger’s, so this was familiar territory. But there are degrees of difficulty faced by kids with Asperger’s and it sounded as if Darryl struggled more than Kieron – it seemed he was coming to us after a particularly fraught final year in primary, during which his behaviour and mood had gone markedly downhill.

‘He’s been badly bullied, by all accounts,’ Julia explained, not needing to glance at her notes, having doubtless already memorised the contents. ‘And he stresses about everything: crowded corridors, people touching him, loud noises, altercations …’

‘All of which he’s going to find in spade-loads here,’ Gary pointed out.

‘Exactly,’ Julia said. ‘He struggles with eye contact too. And he’s also developed several compulsions in the past couple of years apparently, which is going to make him a magnet for bullies here, from the outset. He has this thing about hair. Likes to touch it – needs to touch it – and not his own, either. Any hair in reach, according to what his former SENCOs passed on. It’s a self-soothing thing he needs to do when he’s anxious. You’ll have come across that sort of thing before, Casey, yes?’ I nodded. ‘Which, again, is going to mark him out and make life even more stressful for him. Which is why I thought – assuming you all agree, of course –’ she looked around the table – ‘he should start off splitting his time between learning support and the Unit, at least till he’s found his feet and his anxiety levels lessen. I was hoping you’d be able to work on his social skills, Casey.’

The kettle had boiled by this time so, having agreed, I went off to make a couple of teas and coffees; if an army marches on its stomach, a school definitely seems to run on its bladder – at least via the frequent application of hot drinks. Didn’t matter if it was blowing a gale or, like it was today, still positively summery; the soundtrack of any room in school that the children weren’t actually in was the click of switches, the ting of teaspoons and the shouts of ‘Who’s for a brew?’ Oh, and the accompanying rustle of various biscuit packets being opened.

By the time I’d returned to the table, Julia had opened the second of her folders of notes, this one markedly fatter. ‘Cody Allen,’ she said. ‘Thirteen. So she’s going into year 9, and I think she’s going to need a good bit of support.’ She then glanced at Donald, who nodded. ‘Julia’s right,’ he said. ‘I’ve already met her. And had a meeting with her new foster carers yesterday.’

This made me prick my ears up. ‘She’s just gone into foster care?’ I asked, thinking immediately of Kiara, and just how painful a business it had been, however necessary, for her to be dragged away from everything she knew.

But Donald shook his head. ‘Not “just”,’ he said. ‘She’s been in care since she was four, by all accounts. Her current carers are the latest in a long line who’ve looked after her, sad to say.’

‘She’s apparently the strangest child,’ Julia said. ‘Very complicated psychologically. Her mum has learning difficulties and the reason Cody ended up in care was because she used to shut her up in a cupboard for long periods when she was little.’ She gestured to her notes again. ‘According to what’s here, almost as one would put away a doll.’

There was a silence while we all tried to digest this. Didn’t matter how much you read about, or heard about or saw, some images were still difficult to process.

‘ Exactly ,’ Julia said, articulating what we were all thinking. ‘So, as you can imagine, she’s not the most straightforward child. We don’t have all the reports from her last school yet but social services have been very helpful and what we do know is that she’s … well, the notes I have here say she’s convinced she’s inhabited – well, I suppose the more correct word’s “possessed” – by the devil, and that when she’s not being a poppet, which she apparently can be, she tends to frighten other children.’

‘You don’t say,’ Gary observed wryly.

Julia acknowledged his comment with a trace of a smile. Then removed it. ‘But the most important thing is that she’s unpredictable, volatile and can apparently be very violent. She might have a kind of Tourette’s thing going on too – though that’s not been diagnosed – and we’re fairly sure she’ll end up having to go somewhere more specialised, but Mike’s agreed to take her temporarily – again, I hope you’re all happy with this, at least in principle, as long as she is manageable – so that she can be observed and formally assessed. Again, we’re thinking she should split her time between the learni– er,’ she stopped then, and listened. ‘Er … is that what I think it is?’ She then burst out laughing.