Runaway Girl Page 10

  ‘To London?’

  She nodded. ‘Eventually, yes, to London. I moved around a lot, at first. I was terrified they would find me. But then, in London, as the weeks passed, I began to feel safer. I had now made friends. And went to live with them. In a squatting house. You know squatting?’ I said I did. ‘And then it happened. I found out that I was pregnant.’

  ‘By him. The man who brought you here?’

  She nodded. ‘Only him. Always. With the clients … It was still early and I told them I had an illness. That there were only some things I could do.’ Her accompanying expression made it clear what sort of illness. So she’d been resourceful. Thank God. A small mercy.

  ‘So, what then?’

  She looked sad. ‘My friends were so kind to me. They looked after me. They wanted me to go to the women’s shelter they knew. But I couldn’t. I dared not. I thought they’d tell the police. Or that – I don’t know – that he’d find me. That he’d know somehow, that I’d gone there. He’d told me of another girl. Who had run. And who he’d found in such a shelter …’ She paused. ‘So silly. I know that now. So silly. But I was so scared … That’s why I told them I was 14. When I saw the people. So I’m too young to be taken to detention. I’m so sorry …’ She plucked a handful of tissues from the box.

  ‘And the baby?’ I asked gently, while she blew her nose.

  She crumpled the tissue, then began to twizzle it between and around her slender fingers. ‘I had him in the big disabled toilet in that big park in London. The big one with the lake. The very famous one. There.’

  So it could be one of two or three, I thought. Not that it mattered particularly. ‘All on your own?’

  She took another tissue. ‘Not exactly. My girlfriend Ffion – she was the guard. To be sure no one came. She stole clothes for me. Because it was so, so cold. For the baby,’ she added quickly. ‘Only so he would be warm.’ She said the words with such love.

  I was about to ask – but how? How could a young girl – what must she have been by now? Fifteen? – how could a teenage girl simply lie down and give birth in such circumstances? I knew it happened – happened all over the bloody world, in fact, probably every minute – but I still couldn’t quite get my head round what she’d done. What about the pain? What about the hygiene? What about the umbilical cord? The placenta? I knew I was a product of my own environment – a world of birth plans and hospitals and midwives and pain relief – but even that taken into account, I really, really couldn’t begin to take it in.

  I began to say so, but Adrianna was still deeply immersed in her memory. ‘I cleaned him with baby wipes and dressed him in the new clothes. He was so beautiful, Casey. So perfect. So tiny. And I walked with him. It wasn’t far.’

  I was still stalled on the ‘cleaned’ bit. What about her? What about the placenta? What about the battleground between her legs? ‘On your own?’ I asked. ‘Why on your own? Where was Ffion now?’

  She shook her head. ‘I made her go. I had to. Because I’d already decided what to do. She wanted me to go to hospital. She wanted for both of us to go to hospital. Me and the baby. There was one not so far away, she said. But I knew I couldn’t go there. I dared not. I would be sent to detention and he would be taken from me anyway.’

  I reached out and squeezed her hand. She was right. That would have been exactly what they’d have done. Not detention, no, but she and her child would most probably have been parted, because at 14 – assuming that’s what she’d have told them – she would have been deemed too young to be able to look after him herself, and there were obviously no family members to call on for help. No question. They would have had to have separated them – what choice would they have had? Yes, the slim chance of a mother and baby placement, but where ‘slim’ equates to ‘virtually no chance’. This mother and baby would therefore both have been assigned social workers – one for her, another for him, and he would have been spirited away to an emergency foster family forthwith. And she elsewhere. While enquiries ensued.

  Which was the rub of it, really – though I wasn’t about to tell her. Because if she’d told them her real age, i.e. old enough to work, there was a much higher chance that they would have been placed in foster care together – in a specialist family, as a mother and baby placement.

  No, she mustn’t know that. It would only upset her further. ‘So?’ I prompted, anxious to move on.

  ‘So she agreed to go. I told her I would find somewhere for the baby and then return.’

  ‘You didn’t consider taking him back with you?’

  ‘Not for a minute,’ she told me seriously. ‘It was not the right way. So I walked, and I found a box. By some recycling – it was a place with lots of offices. And I made a bed for him. It was still early morning. Not many people. Cold, but not so cold. And I took him into the police station.’

  ‘And no one saw you go in?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. I did not wait to be caught. I left him just inside the swing door. And then I ran. Well –’ She smiled a wan smile. ‘As much as I could run, which wasn’t much. And I got another coach. At Victoria. And I slept.’

  ‘And ended up where?’

  ‘Back in Hull. I knew Hull, so I went there.’

  I was finding it difficult to keep up, because I kept coming back to the same thing. That she had just given birth. All this, having just been through labour. This slip of a girl, who had been through so much. Her presence of mind simply astounded me. ‘Then what?’ I said. ‘What did you do once you got there? It’s now, what? Evening?’

  She thought for a second. ‘Late afternoon,’ she said. ‘Dark. I found a place to buy coffee. Then I made my decision.’

  ‘And found the council office?’

  ‘Job Centre Plus,’ she corrected. ‘I went in and said I needed to find help, and they took me.’

  I was intrigued, as much as anything by this turnaround in her plans. ‘Your thinking being?’

  She had obviously thought hard about it, too. ‘That if I’d gone with the baby to the hospital they would take the baby away from me and send me back to Poland. That if I took my baby home I couldn’t care for him, so he would get sick, and they would take him away from me and send me back to Poland. But if he was safe, and I could hide, I would at least be in the same country while I tried to decide what I must do to get him back again.’

  Once again I found myself lost for words. So much on such slight shoulders. So incredibly much. But I realised there was a great deal of steel in there too. I’d been right. She had a plan to reinvent herself, clearly. To make a life, and a home, and, presumably, to work here. And then, at some point, to get her baby back again.

  Then something occurred to me. ‘But you didn’t hide, in the end, did you? You didn’t go back to your friends, like you told … Ffion, was it?’ She nodded. ‘Why not? Why not go back, once you’d made sure the baby was safe?’

  Again she went quiet. Was it a decision she had agonised over? That she regretted?

  ‘I am so sad for my friends. That I lied to them. Ffion very much. She was like a sister.’ She sighed heavily. ‘She is 15, you know. No home. It is so bad for her. But I knew it was not a good life for me with her – with them. I knew I … I just knew I was not like them. I couldn’t stay.’ She seemed to struggle to say this, and it suddenly made sense to me. That much as she was grateful to the people who had befriended her, theirs – a life of petty crime, homelessness, hopelessness, drug use – was not a life she wanted for herself. Having the baby would have made her think. Would have been a watershed for her. Still, she felt terribly guilty. I could see that so well.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘you went to the Job Centre, to seek help.’

  ‘I just …’ She seemed unable to find words. ‘I just couldn’t hide any more. It was so cold. So cold and frightening. It was – suddenly, there was no one. I couldn’t do it any more. I had to go, but I was now alone. And I decided to take a risk. If I said I was 14, perhap
s someone would agree to take care of me … I had heard of places, and people – good people – and I thought I must just trust … Great Britain, great people,’ she added, trying hard to smile, but her face just refused to play ball. More tissues, more tears, a long, long moment of discomposure.

  I stretched. My back was creaking. I hadn’t realised how hunched up I’d been, listening so intently. ‘Blimey,’ I said, with feeling. ‘All hail that Job Centre Plus, then!’

  She nodded wanly through her tears, and dabbed furiously at her eyes again. ‘Because they brought me to you. You and Mike. And lovely Tyler. Which I do not deserve. And I’ve … I’m so … so …’ She held the tissue to her mouth and choked back another sob.

  We both heard the rattle of the trolley before we saw it. ‘What can I get you, love? Tea? Coffee? Milk? Glass of squash?’

  None of the above, I thought. Just her baby.

  Just her baby. Just that one little thing, really. No biggie.

  Chapter 10

  Over the rest of the weekend the dust began to settle on this astonishing new reality, but, at the same time, it was a lot to take in. It seemed Adrianna was going to be kept in hospital until the Tuesday and, in the meantime, Mike and I agonised over how much, if anything, we should tell Tyler.

  We knew the drill – we’d dealt with similarly emotionally complex situations with Riley and Kieron (especially Kieron), and had been trained in some of the issues around such situations too. And Mike had already paved the way for things anyway; after speaking to me on the phone on the Friday evening he had prudently stuck to the basics with Tyler. All he’d told him was that it appeared that Adrianna’s time sleeping rough had finally caught up with her. That she’d collapsed, having been badly and chronically anaemic, but that once she’d had her transfusion she would be fine.

  Tyler would obviously now have to be told something more than this, though, and he’d need to know sooner rather than later. After all, he was no longer a child who could be whisked off to bed before the grown-up conversations took place. He was old enough to know, and should know, at least the bulk of what had happened, and, with the comings and goings that would result from these new developments, he would need to know the full picture going forward, as well.

  There was also the small matter of how he felt about Adrianna, which had become increasingly obvious to both of us. He had something of a crush on her – there was no doubt about it. And this news would throw all that out of kilter. We had no idea how it would affect things between them. Only that it would. And it was important that we be prepared for that.

  ‘But you know what?’ I said to Mike when we were alone on the Saturday evening (Tyler being at the cinema, seeing some superhero movie with his friends). ‘It’s felt a bit like that in any case – you know? A bit like an infatuation from the get go, don’t you think? Even when we thought they were around the same age.’

  ‘They’re not so very different in age anyway,’ Mike pointed out. ‘He’ll be 15 in a matter of months now, and we still don’t know when Adrianna was 16.’

  ‘I never thought to ask her that,’ I mused. ‘Of all the things I asked her, I never thought to ask her that one. Isn’t that strange?’

  ‘Not really,’ Mike said. ‘I’d say you had a lot more pressing questions to ask her.’

  ‘Hey, there’s a thought,’ I said, grabbing my mobile to check the time. ‘When’s that take-away supposed to be coming? (That was a bit of an oddity too. That we still called it a ‘take-away’ when more often than not these days it was actually a ‘deliver-to’.)

  ‘Twenty minutes or so. Why?’ Mike looked at me suspiciously. ‘What’s on that mind of yours?’

  ‘A bit of sleuthing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. So don’t look at me like that, because I don’t see the harm. Look, she told me she’d got her birth certificate hidden somewhere, didn’t she? And where is it going to be? In her handbag. So I’m going to find it. Why not?’

  Mike rolled his eyes. ‘You are seriously telling me you are going to go rummaging in her bedroom like a common thief?’

  ‘Yes, I am seriously telling you,’ I confirmed. I stood up, decided. ‘Look, what’s going to be the first thing she does when she’s home again? Get out her birth certificate for us. So where’s the harm? At least we’ll have one thing about her that we know is true. Anyway, I’ve got to update John, haven’t I? And presumably get something in motion about finding the baby for her. So as far as I’m concerned, the sooner we have some facts to work with the better. There’ll be information on there that he probably needs, won’t there? Information about where she was born, and who her parents are and who knows what else?’

  Mike raised his hands. ‘All right, all right – you can stop trying to convince me, Sherlock. Go do your sleuthing, with my blessing.’

  I was telling Mike the truth, too. As the day had gone on, and I’d began to absorb the enormity of what Adrianna had told me, I’d felt increasingly bullish about taking charge of a situation that, up to now, I’d had as much control over as I would have had over a runaway horse. Nevertheless, it felt strange going into Adrianna’s bedroom to snoop about. So strange that it struck me just how fully she’d inhabited it, and how completely we’d fallen in with her wishes in that regard. It was partly due to her age, of course, and my sensitivity to her right to privacy, but perhaps we’d been giving her too much for her own good.

  With other, younger children, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it in a similar situation, particularly if I had cause to be concerned that they might be hiding something with which they could do themselves, or another person, harm. Children who’d spent time in care, or in dangerous, insecure home situations, often learned to be secretive and sometimes sly. I could recall many situations where my occasional ‘sleuthing’ sorties bore both physical and/or emotional fruit. Which was not to say that I didn’t respect our foster children’s privacy; simply that, on occasion, it was necessary to follow my instincts and go further than what was obvious on the surface.

  But this hadn’t been the case with Adrianna. It really had seemed almost as if she’d been a paying lodger, rather than a foster child we were in loco parentis for.

  And now we knew the truth about her age, another thought struck me – we’d never fostered a ‘child’ of 16 before. And Adrianna had been right in her assessment of what would have happened to her if she’d come clean about her age from the beginning. At 16, it was unlikely she’d have been sent to a family, because the pressure on the service was simply too great. She’d more likely have been dealt with as would any vulnerable minor, and been put in some emergency bed and breakfast place.

  It always tickled me, that. The way the name ‘bed and breakfast’ still persisted. Because in reality, though beds and breakfasts were obviously a part of it, such places bore almost no resemblance to most people’s understanding of what a B and B would be. There would be no jolly landlady wielding a fish slice, for starters. No hearty breakfasts, no seaside, no residents’ lounge, no benign, kiss-me-quick, holiday-postcard feel.

  No, ‘B and B’, in this context, was a completely different animal. A room, with a Yale lock, in a house full of similar rooms, variously occupied by such members of society’s flotsam and jetsam as were lucky enough not to sleep on the streets or on a cheap bunk in a down-at-heel hostel. Not that any luxury could be expected. It would be a run-down house, too – probably in a hard-to-rent area, where only the hard lingered – with a largely absent landlord, and some meagre food offering in order to qualify for the necessary box-ticking with the council. It would be grim. It would be bleak. It would be horrible.

  And gentle Adrianna could so easily be there. The notion struck me forcibly as I pushed open the bedroom door. Had she come clean about her age when she’d trusted her fate to our social services, it was where she so easily could have been.

  I inhaled the smell of her. Which I realised was the smell of my current fabric conditioner. Bri
ghtly floral. Vaguely antiseptic. Pleasant. She could be there, if she had told them. Not in our sunny back bedroom. She could be in some dismal B and B place, with all hope bleeding away, and her thin veneer of optimism peeling away like the wallpaper. And how long, it then struck me, before distress turned to desperation? Desperation to depression? Independence to vulnerability to God-knew-what kind of predators? And the whole distressing cycle began again?

  No, there was no question that, in lying about her age, Adrianna had done the right thing. She had saved her baby. And then, showing a presence of mind that still astounded me, she’d done something remarkable, unlikely and nigh-on impossible. She had also saved herself.

  It felt slightly shameful that I located Adrianna’s handbag so easily. For all that she must have trusted no one when she’d arrived with us, the passing of the weeks had probably helped lower her defences; she probably never imagined I’d go looking for it. And there it was, almost as predicted – not quite under her pillow, but not far away. It was tucked beneath the mattress. She’d not taken it with her to Lauren’s dance class because she really had no need to. With Lauren picking her up, then the class, then Lauren dropping her off home again – well, in theory – there would have been no point in taking it.

  I pulled it out, and considered the lack of weight in my hands. It felt as if there wasn’t anything in it. She’d wrapped the shoulder strap around it and, as I unravelled it, I wondered just how far it might have travelled.

  Inside, there was very little. An almost empty travel pack of tissues, a couple of twizzled hair elastics, a small plastic tail comb and a coin purse that was embroidered with the London skyline. This I opened too, to find no more than a couple of pounds’ worth of loose change; no wonder, if this paltry sum reflected her monetary all, that she had arrived in Hull and thrown herself at its mercy.

  No wonder, anyway. She’d been immediately post-partum, hadn’t she? So she must have been in some pain, presumably exhausted, starving hungry and very cold. And the one thing she did have – the friends she had made in London – she had decided, for her baby’s and her own sake, to relinquish. I still wasn’t sure I followed her slightly cock-eyed logic, but I didn’t doubt her sincerity for a moment. Neither did I doubt that she’d done the right thing. How quickly would she have gone under if she’d returned to that squat? She’d have been babyless, heartbroken, physically at a low ebb. She’d not mentioned any dalliance with drugs or alcohol, and she didn’t look as if she’d had a drug habit, but how soon before the consolations of chemical oblivion would begin to look beguiling?