by Casey Watson
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘She’s proving to be a dark horse, this one, isn’t she?’
Mr Kanski kind of rustled. John noted it. ‘And thanks so much for coming at such short notice, Robert,’ he said to the other man. ‘It really is much appreciated, even if we didn’t manage to get very far.’
‘Which is understandable,’ I added. ‘I should really have called you and stopped you coming. I would have, had I realised soon enough. She’s clearly got some sort of virus, bless her …’
Which was when I got that sense of it again with Mr Kanski. Just a slight tweak in expression, the sense of words thought but unspoken. ‘Well, that may be so,’ he said, glancing at me through narrowed eyes. ‘But she’s lying through her teeth.’ He smiled a grim, humourless smile, which included both of us. ‘But I imagine you already knew that.’ He put a fist to his mouth and cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, nothing unusual there, eh?’
He checked the clock on his mobile, then slipped it into his coat pocket. ‘Shall we, John?’
It was awkward, and strange, and I pondered it as I saw them out. Even with John’s light-hearted, even jocular ‘You got it – in our line of work that’s pretty much a given!’ there was something. Like there was something we didn’t know about him.
‘You know what? I should invite Vlad to tea tomorrow, shouldn’t I?’ Tyler, home from school and football practice, had obviously been giving the language barrier serious thought. ‘I was thinking it would probably be better – you know, like in she might open up more, if she could speak to someone Polish who’s her own age. Not some old, disapproving crusty,’ he added, causing me to stifle a chuckle. I had, of course, filled him in as much as was appropriate. Perhaps too much, I decided, pressing the chuckle down.
‘You know, that isn’t a bad idea,’ Mike said, holding his hands out for Tyler’s filthy football boots. One of my most favourite rituals in a relationship that seemed to thrive on them was Mike’s undying devotion to cleaning Tyler’s muddy boots. It was a kind of symbiosis, even – it meant Tyler felt loved and cared for (which he was) and also filled the Kieron’s-football-boot-shaped hole in Mike’s life. On such seemingly small things are great strides so often made.
‘I know,’ Tyler said. ‘And he’s stoked about meeting her. Shall I text him?’
‘Hold your horses, love,’ I cautioned. ‘Let’s be sensible. One, she’s not well – and it’s probably contagious – and two, she might not be quite up to meeting Vlad yet.’ I spoke with feeling, Vlad being one of the more memorable of Tyler’s friends. He was a big lad, in all ways – he had a big personality, and also found it difficult to cross a room without knocking something over. Not so much uncoordinated as a force of nature, barely contained. ‘Tell you what. Keep him on standby. Tell him we’d love to have him over, but that we’ll hold off till next week, when whatever this bug is has run its course. Which I’m sure it will.’
Mike ran a hand over his throat. ‘Hmm. If we’re lucky.’
And we were lucky – well, in the short term, as whatever it was didn’t seem to touch us. But Adrianna herself continued to be really poorly. She spent the remainder of Wednesday in bed – only surfacing to sit with us in the living room to watch David Attenborough for an hour that evening, and barely got out of it at all on Thursday.
‘You know what I’m going to do?’ I said to Mike before he left for work on Friday morning. ‘I’m going to call the GP surgery and see if I can get a home visit. I think she’s poorly. As in sick. With a virus or something. Which I know he won’t be able to help with,’ I added, before Mike could. (He was something of a pedant when it came to people going to doctors when they had viruses, having seen a programme on telly about how the over-prescription of antibiotics was causing all the terrifying superbugs in the world.) ‘I just think it wouldn’t hurt for her to have a bit of a once-over, would it? Specially if she’s been sleeping rough for a while. And she’s so thin. And let’s face it, we don’t know the first thing about what she’s been up to or who she’s been with. She could have anything wrong with her, couldn’t she?’
‘No, I think that’s a good idea, love,’ he said. ‘Put our minds at rest, too. We can’t just keep feeding her paracetamols, can we? She needs to be up and eating. Can’t be doing her any good, being holed up in that bedroom morning, noon and night, can it?’
Which sentiment I agreed with, even given the usual teenage propensity for sleeping the day away. Adrianna, however, seemed to have other ideas.
‘No, no. Am ok-ay,’ she assured me when I went up to suggest it mid-morning, Tyler having long since left for school. ‘Am ok-ay. No problem.’ She rubbed sleep out of her eyes. ‘Please. No doctor.’
But there was no dissuading me, not least because of the uneaten sandwich from the previous evening currently curling on the bedside table, the sheen of sweat on her brow and the faint but still palpable smell in the room. It wasn’t exactly fetid, in the usual teenage-boy’s-trainer-pile kind of way. Just distinctive and familiar. A smell every mother learns to recognise. The smell of sick child. Of fever and sweat – of malaise.
And something else. Something familiar but which I couldn’t quite put my finger on. A sweetish smell. Odd. Definitely not right. ‘Yes doctor,’ I said firmly, picking up the plate and the empty mug beside it. If there was one thing she could clearly stomach, it was coffee. ‘Just to check you are okay,’ I added gently. At which she pushed back the duvet.
‘I get up,’ she said. ‘Am okay. See? No doctor. I have bat?’
It took me a second. Then she pointed towards the bathroom and I realised. ‘Bath?’
She swung her legs out of bed and stood up, her pale feet looking stark against the hot pink of her pyjama bottoms. ‘Bath,’ she confirmed, nodding. ‘I have bath. Am okay, Casey. No doctor.’
I stood aside so she could pluck her fleecy dressing gown – formerly Riley’s – from the back of the dressing-table chair. ‘I don’t know, love …’ I began, my mind now filling with a whole new set of questions. Why the great reluctance to see a doctor? What did she imagine he’d do to her? Was it a reticence born out of fear of further questioning by someone in authority? She was clearly terrified of being sent away again, after all. Or did she have something else to hide – something physical, that she didn’t want him to see? Scarring, perhaps? Bruising? I couldn’t help but wonder because, these days, such thoughts kicked in so automatically; I’d seen so many damaged children – as in burned, battered and beaten – that now it was an instant response in me. Where had she come from? Had she perhaps been abused?
‘Dzieki,’ she said, as she hurried across the landing and went into the bathroom.
‘Adrianna!’ I called before she slammed the door. I’d just had another thought and slipped into the bathroom as she stood there looking surprised. I opened the bathroom cabinet and gestured with my hand that she should look, so that she could see I had a stock of sanitary protection in there, just in case. I could have kicked myself – perhaps that was all it was after all. She was the right age, and if I remembered correctly, Riley had suffered terribly with her periods as a young teenager – cramps, fatigue and a roaring temperature. Why hadn’t that occurred to me before now?
I went downstairs and called the doctor anyway.
Chapter 3
Though we’d moved twice in the last decade, we’d stayed with the same GP surgery, not least because Dr Shakelton, who was now approaching (his long overdue) retirement and only working part-time, was such a brilliant and caring GP. Just not an available one right this minute, as it turned out. Despite it being one of his days in the surgery, he was off work with a virus himself. So the doctor who appeared on our doorstep at the end of morning surgery was one of the newer partners, a young, fresh-faced GP I’d seen a couple of times around the surgery but had never had any dealings with before. Stepping into the hall, he introduced himself just as ‘Joe’, in the modern way they usually did now.
He looked like a Joe, too. Bright and frien
dly and approachable. ‘She’s not a refugee, exactly,’ I explained to him, once we’d dispensed with the usual pleasantries and I’d given him the lowdown on why Adrianna had come to us. ‘She’s been in the country a while now, as far as we know – albeit under the radar – and she’s by all accounts Polish, which makes her an EU national obviously. But she’s not well. Hasn’t been right since she came to us. She spends most of her time sleeping, and lives off little more than coffee and paracetamol. And she’s definitely feverish.’
Joe nodded. ‘Any vomiting?’
I shook my head. ‘Not that I know of. I’m sure not, in fact. I’m a bit of a sleuth like that,’ I added, grinning. ‘You get to be in my line of work. So I’m pretty sure I’d know if she had been sick. And no light sensitivity, either. And no rash, as far as I can see. Though I have actually managed to see very little of her.’ I spread my hands. ‘So it might be nothing – well, nothing more than a mild virus, anyway. Or she might just be exhausted – she probably is. Or depressed – that was my other thought. And then it’s just occurred to me that it might simply be that time of the month and she’s too embarrassed, or doesn’t have the language to tell me. It’s so hard when you don’t speak the same language, isn’t it? And there was no way in the world I’d be able to coax her down to the surgery …’
‘So the surgery has come to her,’ Joe the GP reassured me, grinning back at me as he hefted his heavy case. ‘Though I must confess I don’t speak much Polish myself. I was trying to think of a some words in the car on the way over – I do have a few Polish patients, so I’m not entirely clueless. I know “Polski”, of course – much use that’s going to be – and “czemu”, which means “why”, and “nie rozumiem”, which is Polish – or so I’m told – for “I don’t understand”.’ He laughed as he shrugged off his jacket and began rolling up his shirt sleeves. ‘Which both come up quite a lot, as you can imagine. But which aren’t going to be a whole lot of use to us, are they? But that’s okay. Let’s take a look at her. That’s the main thing. Check her over. Upstairs, I presume?’
‘Upstairs,’ I confirmed, leading the way up the stairs. ‘And, doctor, I’m so sorry if it’s something and nothing and I’ve got you here on a wild goose chase.’
‘Oh, think nothing of it,’ he said, smiling. I decided I liked Dr Joe.
Adrianna was back in bed again when I pushed the bedroom door fully open, having noted the welcome development that at least she had left it ajar. She was a small S shape under the covers, curled up with her head facing the wall, and her hair, which was obviously still wet from her bath, gathered up inside a turban of towel.
‘Sweetie,’ I said softly as I entered, ‘are you awake?’
Clearly yes. She turned over to face me with a wan smile. Then saw the doctor behind me and stiffened.
‘It’s okay,’ I soothed. ‘Now, I know you don’t think you need to see a doctor, but you’re not well, and I’m afraid I don’t agree. So here he is …’
I trailed off then, conscious both of the anxiety on her face and the fact that she probably only understood one word in four. If that. Which made my twittering pretty pointless. It made me suddenly remember watching a foreign film with Mike one evening. It was subtitled but something went wrong with the TV while we were watching and the subtitles disappeared. It was a strange experience watching something and trying to follow the plot, when all the time the background sounds of people talking in a different language actually put you off what was happening.
‘Hello, Adrianna,’ Joe said brightly, stepping round me. ‘I’m Joe. I’m a doctor. And I hear you’re feeling poorly. I’ve come to see how you’re doing. Is that okay?’
He didn’t seem to care that she could barely understand him. And he probably had a point, because some things are universal, aren’t they? His bright but brisk tone was saying it for him well enough. And though I knew she probably couldn’t understand many of the actual words, Adrianna shuffled herself up to a sitting position and made her own feelings known by pulling the duvet up to her chin, her eyes darting mistrustfully between the doctor and me. It was a reaction that only heightened my sense of her anguish and dislocation. Where were her parents? Where were her loved ones? Why was she so far from home?
I remained in the doorway, nodding encouragement and watching as the doctor said ‘May I?’ and then plonked himself down at the edge of the single bed. Adrianna pulled her legs up even further.
‘Polski?’ Joe said, placing his bag down by his feet and opening it. Adrianna nodded, her eyes following his every movement.
‘And not much English?’ Joe continued. ‘So we’ll have to do our best with each other, won’t we? So, what I’m going to do is take your temperature –’ He pulled an ear thermometer from his bag. ‘You’ve seen one of these?’
The gesture he made with it was obvious enough, and Adrianna nodded.
‘I’d like to use this to take your temperature. In your ear,’ he explained, indicating his own. ‘Like this. Is that okay?’
Adrianna nodded again, albeit reluctantly, and allowed the doctor to place the thermometer in her ear, pulling the towel off as she did so and letting her hair coil down her back.
‘Well, it’s certainly up,’ Joe said, after the machine beeped its answer. ‘High, but not dangerously so. So, most importantly, how do you feel?’ he asked Adrianna, making gestures as he did so. ‘Do you feel sick?’ He indicated this using two fingers. ‘Any stomach pain?’ Rubbing his own and pulling a face. ‘Does your head hurt?’ He pressed his hand to his temple and groaned. ‘Dizzy?’ He made a brief spinning motion with his hand. ‘How about your chest?’ he asked finally, placing a hand across his own chest and coughing.
To all of which, Adrianna, looking scared and suspicious, performed a series of equally clear responses. Head shakes, emphatic ones, to each enquiry. No. ‘I am tired,’ she said finally. ‘I am okay. I am tired.’
‘Perhaps because you’re sick, Adrianna,’ Joe persisted. He made another gesture, placing his palms together and raising them to his cheek. ‘To be so tired. Not good. So I need to examine you …’ He reached down again, to uncurl a stethoscope from his bag. ‘Check your chest. Check your stomach. Check your skin for any rashes …’
‘Should I leave you?’ I asked, conscious of Adrianna’s right to privacy. Her gaze shifted to me immediately, even though I doubted she understood what I’d said.
Joe looked at her enquiringly, then back again at me. ‘I’m sure you can st–’ he began.
‘But I am fine,’ Adrianna said again. She clutched the duvet even closer to her chin, as if to underline the point.
‘It’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Joe said reassuringly, placing the ear buds in his ears. ‘I just need a little listen of your chest and back with this. That’s all. Nothing to worry about. But if you’d like Casey to leave us …’
‘No touch!’ It came out almost as a shriek, making me jump. Like a noise made by a cornered, frightened animal.
Which, in effect, was what she was. At least, in her mind. ‘Sweetheart, it’s okay,’ I said. ‘You’ve nothing to fear, I promise. The doctor just wants to –’
‘No touch!’ Almost a scream now. ‘No touch me! Am fine!’
‘Adrianna –’ Joe began. Arianna’s hand flew towards the stethoscope, batting it angrily away from her, making the end flip up and hit the doctor on the arm.
‘No TOUCH me!’
‘Sweetheart,’ I tried, coming closer. She looked genuinely terrified. ‘What’s all this about? The doctor just needs to –’
‘No touch me! No TOUCH me!’ she yelled. Proper screams now.
Joe put his hands up. ‘Okay, okay. No touch. I promise. I’m not here to hurt you, Adrianna. Just to see if you need help. Need medicine perhaps. Medicine?’ he repeated, enunciating the word carefully. ‘You understand “medicine”? In case you’re ill?’ He raised the stethoscope again, and again Adrianna batted her hand at it. So he lowered it, then placed it back in his bag and raised
his empty hands. ‘All right. Fair enough then. Perhaps we’ll leave that for another day.’
‘No TOUCH,’ Adrianna sobbed. ‘Am ok-AY! Am ok-AY!’
Which pretty much confirmed it. She wasn’t.
‘Perhaps,’ Joe said once we were back downstairs again, ‘this is best left till she can be seen by someone who can communicate with her properly. I’ll ask Dr Shakelton if he can fit her in, shall I? He has quite a few Polish patients, and might be able to reassure her.’
I didn’t say so but I doubted it. Whatever had caused Adrianna’s outburst struck me as being less to do with the language barrier than with the gender barrier, which only reinforced my increasing worry that there was more going on than simple displacement or fear of strangers.
And it seemed Dr Joe was thinking along the same lines. ‘You know, something else strikes me,’ he said, just as I was about to suggest it. ‘Perhaps she’d be better off seeing a female GP. Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps that’s the way forward. Though, for what it’s worth, I’m not unduly concerned about her physically. Yes, her temperature is a little high, but I’ve not seen anything to ring alarm bells. She’s pale, yes, and she definitely looks run down, as you say, but I don’t think she’s confused. I suggest you keep a close eye on her and if you’re in the least bit anxious call the surgery again, or bring her down, of course – or I’ll come back to her. Or call an ambulance,’ he finished. ‘You know the drill.’
I nodded as I passed him his jacket. ‘I think there is probably a great deal we don’t know,’ I said. ‘And I think you might be right. Though on the face of it, I think I might need CAMHS more than I need a GP right now. I’m sorry to have called you out for nothing.’
CAMHS was the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, and I made a mental note to ask John what he thought about involving them with Adrianna. But even as I thought it, I doubted they would see her as a priority, knowing their workload, which was always immense. They tended to be more involved with children with behavioural problems rather than linguistic barriers.