The Girl Who Just Wanted to Be Loved by Angela Hart

Author:Angela Hart [Hart, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509807130
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

18

‘You and Jonathan are bullying me’

Ever since her arrival we’d continued having trouble trying to encourage Keeley to shower on a regular basis. I’d noticed that her knickers and school trousers were often damp when I came to wash them too, and she was still hiding wet knickers in her bedroom from time to time. I was constantly reminding Keeley to go to the toilet as soon as she needed to, and not to wait until she’d had a bit of an accident, but she clearly didn’t listen and refused to acknowledge there was even a problem.

‘But there is a problem, Keeley,’ I’d said on more than one occasion. ‘Your knickers are wet and your school trousers are damp.’

‘How can they be?’ she’d say. ‘I always go to the toilet when I need to.’

‘Well they are wet, Keeley, so you need to be more careful. It can’t be nice for you, walking around with damp clothes on.’

Even when I found wet knickers hidden under her toys or in the corner of her room, which I did on a fairly regular basis, she wouldn’t admit a thing.

‘I don’t know how they got there,’ she’d say defiantly. ‘It wasn’t me.’

‘But who else was it, Keeley?’

One time I was actually holding the wet underwear in my hand but Keeley still claimed she had no knowledge of how her knickers could have possibly got wet, or how they came to be stuffed under her rows of dolls.

‘Someone must have come in and spilt water in my room when I wasn’t looking,’ she said, and on another occasion she tried to completely ignore me and started talking very loudly to her dolls instead.

‘Who is doing this?’ she said to Jinty. ‘Somebody’s messing with me, and I’m going to get them for this!’

She said the same thing when I tackled her about her hair, and why it looked like it had been cut in several random places, which I’d noticed after she was sick in the car.

‘No idea,’ she said brazenly, and even when I eventually found clumps of hair stashed under her pillow and rug she still claimed total ignorance.

‘I’ll get them,’ she said, waving her fist. ‘Whoever’s doing this to me, I’ll get them. Nobody messes with me!’

The day after Keeley had agreed to go to the police interview house I told her she really needed to have a shower, as she’d made excuses the day before and I had reluctantly let her off because of the social worker’s visit. Now, though, her hair was overdue a wash and she didn’t smell very fresh at all. Despite the problems we’d had with the wet knickers and her resistance to take regular showers, up until now I’d tried to avoid getting into personal conversations about how Keeley smelled, because it’s such a sensitive issue and I didn’t want to upset or offend her. Most of the time she didn’t smell too bad – just not especially fresh – but on this particular day I couldn’t ignore it, as she smelled very strongly of urine.

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