Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all. Torey Hayden
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Название: Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all
Автор: Torey Hayden
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007373949
isbn:
Another pause intruded. She was no longer watching me, so I took the opportunity to study her. In spite of her guarded aloofness, I was finding it harder to dislike the woman. There was something vaguely pathetic about her, sitting as she was, nearly the whole distance of the table away from me. Shoulders hunched, arms in close around her body, her steely beauty gilded over her like chain mail, she looked less the aggressor than the victim.
“I was wondering,” she said very quietly, “what you thought might cause Leslie’s problems.”
“You mean her handicap in general?”
She nodded.
“It’s hard to say. There’s a lot I don’t know about Leslie.”
A slight nod, as if I’d given her an answer.
“My gut feeling is that it’s some kind of organic dysfunction. Like autism. Her behavior’s somewhat similar to that of other children I’ve worked with. But I don’t really know for certain.”
Her long hair had fallen forward against the side of her face, and she took a strand and twisted it. She glanced over briefly. “What’s that mean?”
“What? Organic dysfunction?”
She nodded.
“It means that something isn’t working right physically. Because we still don’t know much about these things, we don’t know why handicaps like Leslie’s happen, but evidence seems to indicate it’s an inborn matter. It’s not the result of an emotional disturbance.” I looked over at her. “I don’t mean to say such children don’t have emotional problems. Often they do. These are inordinately hard kids to live with. They can upset even the most well-adjusted family, simply because it’s so difficult to accommodate their needs. I mean, look at your case. From my reckoning you’ve had about five years of continually broken nights. No one functions well under such circumstances, so it’s fairly understandable when things get in a twist, as a result.”
She looked down, and for a flicker of an instant, I felt she was near to tears. It was just a sensation I had, more than anything concrete in her behavior. She was still twisting her hair around her fingers, releasing it, twisting it again.
“We’re coming out of an era of psychiatry and psychology that has been very cruel to the parents of children with these kinds of handicaps,” I said. “There’s been too much emphasis on whose fault it is when the child has a problem, and I don’t think it’s done anyone any good. Blaming’s a pretty fruitless exercise all the way around, to my way of thinking. I don’t care what did it. It’s happened and become history. What I care about is the present. What’s the problem now? What can I do to help make it better? That’s all I’m really interested in: making it better.”
She nodded slowly without looking up. “I was just wondering.”
“You’re going to kill me,” said Frank, as he came into the classroom.
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’m going to tell you you’re getting another kid.”
“You jest.”
“Nope,” he said. “’Fraid not. Moreover, it’s Irish Kid, Mark III.”
Pausing from my activities, I looked over. “Oh, come off it, Frank. You must be joking.”
“Nope. Sorry. The Lonrhos seem to have acquired another one.”
“What is this? Some kind of import business they’re starting?”
“Seems that way.”
“I didn’t think there were any more,” I said.
“This is a cousin or something. A boy, thirteen.”
“And he’s coming in here? Into this class?”
“Well, from the sound of things, he does definitely have problems.”
“Good heavens, they do pick ’em.”
Frank grinned and reached a hand out to thank me chummily on the back. “Cheer up, Torey. Mrs. Lonrho specifically asked that the boy be placed in here with you. She thinks you’re brrrrrilliant,” he said in an exaggerated Irish accent.
“Oh, thanks.”
Shamus, or Shamie, as he preferred to be called, was the son of Mrs. Lonrho’s sister Cath. Mrs. Lonrho came in to see me shortly before Shamie’s arrival. His school records weren’t going to be forwarded on for some time, she said, so she hoped she could help me prepare for the boy. And she did help. From her came a picture clearer than anything I would have gotten from a school file.
Shamie was the last of eight children, a gentle, artistic boy who’d been doted on as the baby of a large family. He wasn’t what could be called a bright lad, Mrs. Lonrho said. None of Cath’s were geniuses. But he was good hearted and hardworking.
Shamie’s family, like Shemona and Geraldine’s, was deeply embroiled in the politics of Northern Ireland. Two of his brothers were “Provies,” members of the Provisional IRA, complete with prison sentences to show for it. His mother still worked in a pub that had been bombed twice in the previous four years by opposing groups of loyalist and republican supporters. Shamie’s family had been close to Geraldine and Shemona’s. They lived only a few hundred yards apart on the same street, and indeed, it had been in Shamie’s garage that his uncle had committed suicide. Shamie himself had been very close to this uncle. He had intended to apprentice into his uncle’s electrical business when he came of age, and he had spent a lot of time at his uncle’s house, helping him with his work. Thus, after the uncle’s arrest and release, the boys at school had begun taunting Shamie and calling him an informer too. It was nothing serious, Mrs. Lonrho said. They wouldn’t have really hurt Shamie, but he’d always been an oversensitive lad. He took it seriously. He began to suffer bouts of depression, insomnia and restlessness. He became convinced that he and his family, like his cousins’ family, would be killed.
While listening to Mrs. Lonrho, I developed great sympathy for Shamie. To be taunted as a traitor in a place where people were killed for doing no more than selling building supplies to the opposing side would give me a fright too. Where did the abusive mouths of schoolboys leave off and the real threats begin? Shemona and Geraldine and their family lived only three houses down the street from Shamie. His fears seemed fairly realistic to me.
In the end, Shamie decided that he too wanted to come live with Auntie Bet and Uncle Mike in America, as Geraldine and Shemona had. He wanted to get away from Belfast altogether. And immediately. He couldn’t wait, he’d told his parents. He couldn’t last it out until school-leaving age at sixteen. He said he knew he’d be dead by sixteen.
Shamie arrived in my room six days later. He was a thin, bony boy, looking considerably younger than thirteen, with black hair cut in a style reminiscent of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock. His features were soft and feminine, the femininity accented by the thickest, longest eyelashes I’d ever known СКАЧАТЬ