a translator. I don’t know what you’ve been thinking but I wonder if her reaction to me could be a sign of some kind of abuse?’ He frowned. ‘I mean, if she’s a runaway and has been sleeping rough … Well, it’s not exactly unlikely, after all.’
I told him I’d been thinking exactly the same thing and that I was going to speak to John Fulshaw as soon as I’d logged his visit. ‘And in the meantime,’ I asked, ‘should I give her anything at all? You know, for her temperature or anything?’
‘Just paracetamol if she appears to need it, and obviously keep her well hydrated, but, seriously, if she’s no better by Monday, do give me another call and we’ll see what we can conjure. And, as I say, call the out-of-hours service over the weekend if you’re concerned. It’s always better to be over-cautious when there’s a language barrier. She might not know the words to tell us what’s wrong, mightn’t she?’
And more to the point, I thought – but didn’t say, since the doctor had a busy afternoon ahead of him – didn’t seem to want to find the words to do so either, which struck me as the oddest thing of all.
I went straight back upstairs as soon as the doctor had left, to find Adrianna where we’d left her, curled up under the duvet, seemingly unwilling to ever relinquish it again. Was that her plan? To just stay there till someone commanded her to go elsewhere? What was going on in this enigmatic teenage girl’s head?
‘Przepraszam,’ she said quietly. ‘Casey, I am sorry.’
I didn’t need the translation. I knew what przepraszam meant because Tyler had already told me (though it sounded like a spell off Harry Potter). It was one of the words on the list he had painstakingly written out for me. A list of words and phrases, I noted, that he had also copied for Adrianna in reverse, but which, these few instances of courtesy aside, she seemed to have little interest in studying. She had little interest in improving her English at all, it seemed. Why? Since she didn’t seem to want to go home, why wouldn’t she?
I experienced a moment of frustration. This was surely one of the ways in which she (and immigrants generally) could only strengthen her position. I knew what people could be like. You saw it everywhere. It genuinely irritated people when immigrants appeared not to want to integrate; a point of view with which I had sympathy.
But this poor child – for child she was – obviously had a great deal more going on in that head of hers than we knew, and now was probably not the moment to start grilling her about her lack of vocabulary. She’d been with us less than a week. She was scared and traumatised, and also suffering from a probable virus. So what harm was there in her sleeping the days away till she was well enough to see past that? At least the doctor had been, and his reassurance had done its job and reassured me.
‘It’s okay, love,’ I told her, patting her. ‘I just don’t understand, that’s all.’ I smiled. ‘But you don’t understand me either, do you? So there’s not much point in me rattling on at you, is there? You get some sleep now.’ I mimicked the praying movement the doctor had made earlier, then pointed floorwards. ‘I’ll be downstairs if you need me.’
And, in the meantime, I would go down and log the doctor’s visit. And perhaps call John Fulshaw to see how he felt we should best proceed. Because, for all that this was seemingly a clear, temporary brief (and to which my usual ‘Yes I can’ response still felt like the right one), something was beginning to make me think there’d be complications down the line. In short, my fostering antennae were now twitching.
And they continued to do so as I sat at the dining table typing on my laptop, coffee at my side, pondering the question of quite what to do next. I could hardly get online and teach myself Polish in a couple of hours, just as surely as I couldn’t teach Adrianna English – even should she express any enthusiasm for learning it. Not that I should get ahead of myself; the answer to the question might equally be ‘nothing’, as John might call any day to announce she was leaving, having found a suitable foster family for her long-term. Or, less likely, but still one of a range of possibilities, a friendly relative who’d popped out of the woodwork and come to take her home.
In the meantime we could only keep on doing what we were doing, and – in my case, because it was my antennae that were twitching – be alert to anything that might shed more light on our secretive girl’s situation.
I was just committing that thought to the keyboard when I heard the front door, closely followed by a shouted ‘Cooooeee! Get the kettle on, sis!’
I smiled and lowered the screen on the laptop. We’d had one of those huge budget supermarkets open at the end of our road the previous year – a circumstance that had caused quite a lot of disgruntlement among the neighbours, for fear of parking issues, littering and a general ‘lowering of the tone’, as if we were some posh middle-class suburb, which we weren’t. Even so, there was the usual snobbish annoyance at the council for letting them do it, something which, not being as perfect as we liked to believe, myself and Mike – ahem – were a part.
It didn’t take long, though, to realise how silly we’d been. For starters, we soon realised we were saving a fortune, and, better still, it meant I saw more of my sister.
Donna ran a café in town – had done for a few years now. And a very good café it was too. She’d called it Truly Scrumptious, and the fare she served obviously was, because it was heaving pretty much every day of the week. And with the new branch of the budget supermarket being so close to us, she could grab a cab there – she didn’t drive – and stock up on super-cheap tea, coffee and sugar, and then drop in for a coffee and a natter with me and, sometimes, a lift back as well.
I got up to find her in the hall, plonking down a load of straining carrier bags. ‘Only a quick one,’ she clarified. ‘I’ve just got half an hour. Carol’s in on her own, and I’ve dragged Chloe in to help, so I’d better be quick.’
Carol was the stalwart who’d worked for Donna almost since the outset, and Chloe was my 18-year-old niece. She was in the sixth form, and, in theory, was only supposed to work on Saturdays, but if it was a day when she didn’t have any lessons, and the café was busy, Donna would often let her come in and earn a bit of extra pocket money.
‘So. Where is she?’ Donna asked without preamble. My sister didn’t foster, but she always took an interest. So much so that I hadn’t ruled out the possibility that, if the café ever became too much or too samey, that at some point she too might take the plunge.
I indicated with my eyes as I poured us both a coffee. ‘Upstairs in bed. She’s not well. So there’s not much to report. She’s barely been downstairs since she came here.’
‘But she’s a teenager, isn’t she?’ Donna said. ‘So that’s just typical. Teenagers like hiding away in their bedrooms. I wouldn’t worry – you hardly ever see them at that age.’
‘I don’t think that’s it in this instance,’ I said. ‘She’s not right. She’s not right and she’s ill too.’
I told Donna about the doctor’s visit and Adrianna’s extreme, and unexpected, reaction to it. She laughed. She used the same surgery that we did. ‘Dr Joe? Well, he’d get quite the opposite reaction from me. Though, to be fair, she is 14. You know what girls are like at that age. Some strange man comes in, starts wanting to prod her around – and a foreigner, to boot … Seriously, what’s the story with her? I’m completely intrigued. I didn’t realise you could even foster foreign nationals. Stuff you hear about them being taken to detention centres and all that.’
I laughed.
