Free No Place for Nathan by Casey Watson Page A

of the school. Indeed, within just two terms, the head had realised that it was becoming a victim of its own success, the numbers slowly and surely increasing to a point where it would soon risk getting out of control. And perhaps that was inevitable; once the teachers realised I was happy for them to hand me their most disruptive children, they were understandably eager to refer them to the Unit rather than try to find a way to manage them in their classes. Which was not a criticism; I’d have been inclined to do the same myself, not least for the benefit of the other pupils.
    I was also, I soon became aware, my own worst enemy. And after realising that I was the kind of gal who just couldn’t say no, the head of the school, Mike Moore, informed me that he was hiring another behavioural manager, Jim Dawson. This, he said, was so that one of us could be permanently in situ in the Unit, while the other was free to wander the corridors and sit in on classes where a teacher had reported major disruptions. It also meant I had additional time to do more home visits with parents or guardians; something that was proving really constructive.
    Jim and I had soon become an efficient team. We would alternate who did this, and also work with the teachers, to show them different methods of handling disruptive behaviour, so we could at least partly stem the incoming tide. I got along great with Jim. In his fifties, he was diminutive like me, but also stocky, with a friendly face and a no-nonsense attitude. Having him around made my job so much easier.
    And it was a great job, no doubt about it; something I could really get my teeth into. Together with Jim, I looked after kids from all kinds of backgrounds, sent to the Unit for all sorts of reasons. They could be the bullied or the bully, the distressed and dispossessed, the lazy, the hyperactive, the angry, the apathetic or, in what seemed to be this case, the complete misfit. One thing united them and informed everything I did: they were kids who had troubles and couldn’t cope with school. We currently had 40 of them on our list, too – and usually around 10 in the Unit at any given time.
    Needless to say, no two days were ever the same, and each one – day
and
child – brought a different set of problems. And though, right now, little Nathan seemed completely sweet and biddable, you didn’t join our numbers for nothing. So, initially, my job would be to observe and assess him, slotting him into the routine and watching him carefully, to see if there were any obvious triggers or situations that would make him flare up and kick off.
    This, in the first couple of days, proved difficult. True to his word, Nathan had obviously taken a shine to me and wanted to be constantly at my side, using any excuse to leave his table and come to sit by me instead.
    Sometimes it would just be to come and smile at me or touch my arm, at which point I’d just acknowledge him and steer him gently back to his group. But at other times, he’d want to linger and I’d have to become firm with him, and it was during these exchanges that I’d get a glimpse of a darker side, as he clearly didn’t respond well to being spoken to sternly. It would be then, having been told in no uncertain terms that he must do as he was told and stay put at his desk like everyone else, that he would stamp his foot and glare and, having returned to his chair, treat me to a look of pure hatred – his lips tight against his teeth, like a dog about to growl, and his eyes narrowing, changing his face completely.
    He’d snap out of it almost as soon as he adopted it, but as we reached the end of his first week it was beginning to become clear that this was a strange and clearly complex little lad.
    He had other, quite arresting behaviours, too. He seemed to have a compulsion to touch and stroke certain women. I couldn’t exactly categorise it – there was no particular type or trigger that I could see, but he was very