Hannah, what would I want, what would I need?
As I approached, Hannah began stamping her feet. It was as if her vocal cords were already making all the noise they could and now, with a new danger, she needed another source of sound.
Two sides of the jungle gym were against the walls. Hannah clung to the third side, shaking it and stamping her feet. With no plan at all, I climbed up the fourth side.
Hannah’s screaming stopped and I took advantage of her surprise to reach the top, away from her clawing fingers. I lay flat on the top platform, trying to listen with my whole being, not just my ears. Nothing. There was absolutely no sound from below. I leaned over the platform and there was Hannah, bent over, her head pressed against the bars, great pink wads of gum stuck in the red-gold of her hair, I talked to the back of her small, grimy neck.
‘Hiya, Hannah.’
There wasn’t any answer, not a twitch of response, but somehow I had the feeling that she’d heard me.
‘Listen,’ I continued, ‘this isn’t your class. You’re supposed to be with us, in the room down the hall on the other side. We’ve been waiting for you down there.’
Hannah didn’t make a sound, but she turned her head just a fraction of an inch. I went on.
‘Shirley, your teacher last year, didn’t want to leave. She liked our school and she liked teaching you. But her husband was studying to be a doctor and he was sent to a hospital a long way away – and so she had to stop teaching here to go with him.’
The muscles in my neck were getting tired from dangling my head over the edge of the platform, and I longed to get down and stand beside her, get a closer look, maybe even hold onto her square, solid body and let some of her anger drain out. But Hannah seemed nowhere near ready. I was going to have to wait.
Suddenly she turned and twisted her neck and body to peer up at me. For an instant she hung outside the wooden bars with her face turned up towards me and then she was gone, out of the jungle gym, out of the door that Ellen had left unlocked when she let me in, and down the hall. I climbed down quickly and followed, Ellen’s door clicked behind me and the bolt slid back in place.
Hannah ran up and down, back and forth in the hall, like a fat mouse in a maze. She was dressed in a woman’s cotton housedress that was tied at the waist with a string. The dress reached to the tops of her heavy brown shoes and she stumbled around, banging against the walls, letting out periodic snarling howls. Once she turned back towards me and I could see that both her face and the front of her dress were wet – stained with tears, or sweat, or maybe both. She opened the door to our room, more by accident than design. The boys and the Director stood up simultaneously as Hannah crashed in. I was only a step behind and closed the door behind me. We needed a little space, a little time to ourselves.
It was hard to tell who was more frightened, Hannah or the boys. They stared at each other silently until the Director called out cheerily, ‘Well, Hannah, I see you’ve found your room. Good enough. Now that we’re all set, I’ll get back to work. Phone never stops ringing, a thousand things to do. Have a good day.’
The Director was out the hall door and gone before any of us moved, but just as the door clicked shut Hannah ran towards it. Brian and Rufus had huddled together in front of the outside door. Jamie whimpered and ran to where I stood by the hall door and buried his head against my legs. Without previous planning, we had formed a barricade to the exits. There was no way out for Hannah. Like it or not, she was with us.
Hannah backtracked and then made one dash for the hall door, and I captured her as she came by. ‘Gotcha. Enough now, okay?’
I said it as much to reassure the boys as to steady Hannah, but while it may have helped them to hear a familiar tone in the room it did nothing for her. She slid out of my arms to the floor, propped herself on her hands and knees inside her long housedress, and with a moaning, keening noise began rocking back and forth, back and forth, like a tormented infant in a crib.
The safety we had begun to build was gone. Trouble, trauma, violence and fear had invaded our room. I muttered a silent expletive in the direction of the departed Director, but it wasn’t of any use. She was gone; Hannah was here. We’d just have to get through somehow.
I turned to the boys. ‘Hannah’s going to be in our class this year. She feels badly about missing her old teacher and some other things. It’s going to take a while for us to get used to each other, but it’s going to be okay. We just need a little time. Now let’s get busy. Rufus, Brian, bring your books on over here and let’s see what we’re going to be working on.’
As I spoke there was a dull, heavy thud and I turned back towards Hannah. She was not only rocking, she was banging her head, bringing it down hard against the black tile floor at the end of each forward thrust. I knew that part of this head hanging was to test us, but part of it was also an attempt to destroy the torments inside her.
I sat down on the floor next to Hannah and pushed my leg beneath her head to cushion the blow. ‘No. In this room you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else. And no one hurts you. You can rock if you have to, but no banging.’
She brought her head down again, drove it hard into my thigh – and then, as the noon whistle wailed, suddenly she was still. We sat without speaking. I leaned against the wall with Hannah spread out, drenched in sweat, inert against my leg, while the three boys watched us silently from the other side of our room.
Jamie was the last to leave our room that first day. We were both limp from emotion and heat, and we sat in a chair by the windows watching for his bus. But as soon as his driver arrived and he was safely aboard, I went down to the office, unlocked the file cabinet, and took out Hannah’s folder.
The Director was in the office, a calm oasis in the midst of confused bus drivers, anxious mothers and tired teachers. She was at her best here, soothing and at the same time encouraging. She had founded the school fifteen years before and had worked harder and harder each year, raising money to keep the doors open, raising standards, coping with the ever-increasing publicity, the long waiting lists of children. Finally, with the death of her husband, the school had become her life. For years it had existed in rented and borrowed buildings, but now the dream was almost reality: within a few months ground would be broken for a spacious new school building, built to the Director’s specifications. Nothing escaped her, and she nodded to me as I took Hannah’s file back to the quiet of my own room.
I spread the folder out on one of the tables before the open windows. Small air currents stirred through the room and riffled the edges of the papers. I was eager to read the reports, hoping to discover what had happened to make Hannah so angry, so frightened. She was more like a young animal than a little girl. Why wouldn’t she let anyone near her? Where had the rage and self-destruction come from?
The folder contained a school form filled out by Mrs Rosnic, a health form from the paediatrician, a report from the principal of the public school Hannah had attended; there were also a joint report by a psychologist and a social worker at a mental health clinic, a final report by another psychologist from the public school, and a half-page year-end report written by Hannah’s teacher from last year. From these I gradually pieced together Hannah’s history.
She had been born eight years earlier in a hospital in New York City. Her life had been filled with violence from the beginning. She had cried constantly through her first days and nights, eating little at first, finally refusing to eat at all.
