had no idea how much Adrianna understood, but she clearly appreciated her feisty new champion. ‘Dzieki,’ she said. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much. You are so kind.’
‘And I’m hungry,’ I said. ‘So, speaking of cold soup, can you heat some up? Proper, mind. Or I’m straight off to TripAdvisor.’
We eventually sat down to (hot, delicious) soup and cheese toasties with salad, and spent a pleasurable hour putting the world to rights. ‘That’s why this bloody country is in the state it’s in,’ Donna ranted, warming to the theme, ‘through the ignorance and intolerance of bloody fools like them.’
Chloe grinned. Like mother, it now seemed, like daughter. She really would make an extremely good lawyer. As for Adrianna, perhaps more of a diplomat’s role. ‘But there are not so many like this,’ she said, in her soft, halting English. ‘Great Britain. Great people.’ She smiled at us all. ‘This is true.’
I squeezed her arm. I sincerely hoped it would prove to be.
It’s not up to me, obviously, to make such decisions, but the incident in Donna’s café made me doubly sure that I should push no one about moving Adrianna on for now. Yes, in financial terms, she was indeed ‘a burden on the state’, but she was a tiny one in the scheme of things. And, in reality, left to fend for herself, she might be costing society even more. As a runaway on the streets the costs might not be so obvious, but they were there nevertheless, both in the short term and the long term, because kids on the streets were so often the victims of greater crimes – drug pushers, who’d get them hooked and then force them to commit petty crimes, usually theft, to create a steady income.
And even if they weren’t sucked into drug use, they were still on course to become a greater drain on society; down the line, adrift and homeless, they’d often be unemployable, develop mental health problems and generally fail to become useful members of society.
And that was true of all kids who’d had a bad start in life. Most runaways were home-grown, after all – victims of a canker that was alive and well in our own country too. Which was why social services were always at full stretch.
‘Blimey,’ said Mike, when I ran my thoughts by him a couple of nights later. ‘Are you planning to stand for parliament or something?’
I laughed, but there was a kernel of truth in his comment. Having listened to Chloe, and the passion with which she responded to knee-jerk racism, I had thought long and hard about exactly where Adrianna should fit in, and how I could – or should – justify our taking care of her.
Happily, when I spoke to John and suggested we didn’t rush things with Adrianna, he agreed. ‘And you’re right,’ he said. ‘In terms of cost, she’s in the best place at the moment. So if you’re in no rush to move her on, I’m in no rush to try to do so. It sounds like she’s settling in well, and, from what you tell me, in no rush to move on either.’
‘Absolutely not,’ I agreed. ‘Though one thing – she’d love to go to school again. Is that feasible?’
‘Complicated,’ John said, ‘but quite possible. The thing is that we have no idea of her educational background. She might not have gone to school for years as far as we know, and she isn’t very forthcoming about all that, is she?’
‘No, but she might be – if she thought she could go to school with Tyler, she might be. Plus there are Poles at his school she can make friends with, don’t forget.’
‘Good point,’ John conceded. ‘Tell you what, leave it with me. I’ll speak with ELAC and see what they have to say.’
ELAC – yet another of the acronyms we bandied about – stood for the Education for Looked After Children team. I’d had all sorts of dealings with ELAC over the years, and, unlike CAMHS, who often felt like the proverbial stone you wanted blood from (not their fault, they were the very personification of the word ‘overstretched’), ELAC were always on top of their game, because schools often had spaces and everyone knew that a child in full-time education was in a markedly better place than one who was not. I mentally crossed my fingers. Her going to school might be key.
One thing was clear, though. That there was no need for an interpreter to return to us. Adrianna might only have basic English but with Tyler so keen to help her, and the extended family too (not least via the language of enthusiasm and encouragement), we could, I knew, get by just fine. And, I was sure – and I said as much to John – I would eventually get her to tell us more about her past. Not to mention, of course, that the only interpreter currently on offer was a grumpy old man. I’d rather muddle along as we were, thank you very much.
In the meantime, the present was looking good. Though Levi and Jackson were in school full time – as, obviously, was Tyler – there was always plenty going on with my two grandaughters. And Adrianna hadn’t just struck a chord with Marley Mae, either. She loved being around little Dee Dee as well. Which, with our youngest grandchild soon to be one and on the very brink of walking, was a great help – extra pairs of watchful eyes being very much in demand.
My relationship with Lauren, always good, had moved to an even deeper closeness since the baby had been born, and, to my delight, she and Dee Dee visited often during the week, when Kieron was at work. Lauren herself, to help make ends meet, was still working flat out as a dance teacher, running classes several times a week for three- to ten-year-olds, but during the daytime I felt blessed that she was around so much, and I could watch my youngest grandchild grow and blossom.
Adrianna seemed to feel the same and, over the next couple of weeks, it was all about little-girl stuff. If it was raining we’d stay in and play endless games of shops and ‘house’, and when it was fine we’d wrap the girls up and often visit the park to play on the swings, and usually – Marley Mae’s favourite thing, currently – to feed the park’s many ducks and swans, not to mention the flocks of geese that had come to spend the winter with us from more northerly climes.
‘To where it’s warmer,’ I heard Adrianna explain to Marley Mae as they threw bits of bread to the greedy web-footed hordes that ringed the boating lake. ‘This is why they come to Britain.’
‘Like you!’ Marley Mae enthused.
‘Like me. From far, far away. From the cold.’
‘Cold,’ Marley Mae parroted, stamping her feet in her little welly boots and going ‘brrrr’.
Adrianna looked across the boating lake. Wistfully, I wondered? ‘Very cold where I come from,’ she said. ‘Much more cold than here. Freeze end of your nose,’ she added, touching the tip of Marley Mae’s.
But where? Where in the north? I filed the exchange away.
And it was through Marley Mae that we had another small breakthrough.
An enthusiastic if not entirely graceful young dancer, Marley Mae enjoyed the privilege of being able to start early in Lauren’s once-a-week pre-schoolers dance class. It was for three- to five-year-olds really, and she wasn’t three till April, but in a ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ sisterly kind of arrangement, Lauren said she’d take her – she was desperate to go – and, in return, Riley was happy to take Dee Dee off Lauren’s hands for a couple of hours a week so she could go shopping.
