Runaway Girl

by Casey Watson

  She fell against me sobbing, and, thinking of Tyler’s start in life, I could have cried too. ‘It hurts so much,’ Adrianna cried. ‘So much.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Shhh … come on, chin up. You can do this. Remember, your baby is safe and well and happy. He does not hurt. As a mother, let that give you strength.’

  ‘And to forget.’

  ‘To forget?’

  ‘For me. For my life. How much I would like to be able to forget. Some chemical I could take – drug –’ She raised a finger to her temple. ‘And then – kapow – it’s all gone. All the bad. Just the good left. My father.’ Almost a whisper now. ‘I would like that so much.’

  It was the first time she’d really shared any of the emotion about what had happened to her. And being a bright girl, she’d got right to the heart of it, too. Rub it out. Take it away. Kapow. All gone.

  If only it could really be that simple.

  Back in the present, the next few days saw the emotional temperature in the Watson household move from The Glums to a version of Within These Walls. Though she tried her best to keep smiling, it was like watching a plant wilt. Nothing I could say seemed to lift Adrianna’s spirits. If she had looked pale and drained before, she now walked around as if the very life had been sucked out of her.

  It was a natural reaction. I knew this. She was pining for her baby and there was nothing anyone could do to stop that happening. I understood the mechanism, too. She’d spent the best part of three months now running on adrenalin. Always looking over her shoulder, always worrying that she might be found out. But as soon as she had been, it was as if a dam had opened – adrenalin whooshing out, and the reality flooding in; the baby that she had carried for nine months was gone, and although she could concede that she had done what she thought was best for him, she now bitterly regretted giving him up.

  ‘You know, Casey,’ she said the following Friday afternoon. ‘In my head I named him. I named him Jakob.’

  It was said out of the blue, while I was reading the paper.

  ‘What?’ I said, not having quite heard her the first time.

  ‘My boy,’ she continued. She was at the sink, washing up our lunch things. Staring out of the window. ‘In my head he was Jakob. And they do not know.’ She turned around. ‘Casey, you know, I once saw a movie where a lady gave up her baby girl, and she wrote the baby’s name on a label and pinned it to her vest. So her new parents knew what to call her. What her name was. I should have done that. Oh, how I wish I had done that.’

  It was such a sad thing to say, and I knew she wasn’t expecting an answer. It was simply another reason for her sadness; another regret.

  I went to the sink and hugged her. ‘Darling, please don’t upset yourself like this. It won’t help you. Yes, you’re right, he will have another name; a name you didn’t give him. They will have had to do that, of course. But you know, you have to remember that what you did, you did for him. You showed incredible maternal love in giving him away. Beside that … well, does a name matter so much? And, in time, there’s no reason why you can’t add the name Jakob. Make it his middle name, perhaps.’

  The thought seemed to console her. ‘I had not thought of that.’

  ‘Well, there you are. Something nice to think about, eh? To help keep you strong. Because you’ll need to be, sweetheart. So we need less regret, okay? And to see more of that independent Polish girl! Well,’ I added, ‘not too much.’

  She knew what I meant, and I felt her smiling against my shoulder. ‘I will try, Casey. I promise. For my little Something Jakob.’

  It was so hard for her, though. How could it not be? I knew because we’d been here before with another girl we’d fostered, Emma. A girl who’d come to us with her new-born but had him taken away, so I knew full well how much pain Adrianna must be in. Especially knowing he was so far away. Not a million miles away, true, but a long way out of reach, and I hoped there might be some chance of John speaking to the authorities and persuading them to have him moved closer. That would at least be a start.

  But only a start. There was a long way to go. The next step would be the huge task of making the decision about whether Adrianna might actually be allowed to have her baby back. Without that, there would be no next steps.

  But I knew I mustn’t get too ahead of myself. That was in the future. Right now I had a broken 16-year-old to deal with, and I was at something of a loss.

  Thank heavens for Tyler, then, who burst into the kitchen at precisely that moment and though momentarily dumbstruck to see Adrianna crying, soon rallied, in that endearing can-do way he had.

  She sprang away from me, grabbed a sheet of kitchen roll to wipe her eyes with and, seemingly as anxious as Tyler to normalise things, said, ‘You have a good day at school? Oh, and guess what? I have finished the book!’

  I might be fanciful, but I reckoned all was well on the Tyler front. However he had rationalised this new reality since that initial period of awkwardness, I’d have said their relationship had become even closer. I definitely think he had a new level of respect for Adrianna.

  He threw his school bag on the floor. ‘Then we’ll have to choose you a new one. Though it’s a hard act to follow. And, yeah, was all right. But, hey, listen.’

  Adrianna nodded and sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Of course,’ she said, just as I said, ‘To what?’

  ‘Well,’ Tyler started, ‘I had this idea. I watched this episode of CSI last night, and it was all about this lady who left her baby on a bus to be looked after by the lady who she left it by.’

  I digested this, then looked at Tyler in horror. What was he thinking? But before I could stop him, he carried on.

  ‘Anyway, the lady took the baby to the police and left it there, but eventually the real mum came forward and confessed, and in the end she got the baby back and they didn’t throw her in jail, because that’s, like, an offence you know? Abandonment? I didn’t know that.’

  I was torn between holding my breath and rugby tackling him. What on earth had possessed him to tell her such a tale? Still, it had been said now, and there was obviously no way of unsaying it. So all I could do was wait for Adrianna’s reaction.

  Which was typically understated and sensible. ‘Is this true, Casey?’ she asked me. ‘Did I do an offence?’

  I gave Tyler one of my very specific looks. ‘Tyler, what are you thinking?’ I asked him, trying to match Adrianna’s composure. ‘Giving Adrianna something else to worry about! It was just a TV show. And, no, Adrianna, I’m not sure it is. Not in your circumstances. And anyway, the show’s set in America.’

  Tyler looked indignant. ‘Hang on! I didn’t get to my idea yet!’

  ‘You have an idea?’ I asked him, wondering what was going to come next.

  ‘Of course! I’m not stupid! It’s a very sensible idea. If the police come asking questions, she just needs to tell them she wasn’t in her right mind. Just like the woman did. And you probably weren’t in your right mind anyway, were you?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ Adrianna agreed, with feeling.

  ‘See?’ Tyler said to me. ‘Sorted. Specially as she’s fine now. They can’t pin a thing on her.’

  Adrianna looked at me quizzically. ‘Is this right?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘It is. Not that I was expecting the boys in blue to be arresting you anytime soon in the first place,’ I stressed, giving Tyler another pointed look. ‘But yes, it’s true. Although you were doing the very best for your baby, at the time, you weren’t well after having him, and not in a fit state to think straight. So no, I don’t think you need worry about any of that.’

  To my surprise I watched her then grin at Tyler. ‘But if they do,’ she said, ‘I now know the drill. I tell them I was cuckoo and ga-ga then. Sweet!’

  At which they both burst out laughing, like any normal, run-of-the-mill, everyday teenagers would. So perhaps he hadn’t been so stupid after all.

  Now we just needed John to come and wave
his magic wand.

  Chapter 14

  I hadn’t seriously imagined that Adrianna would be charged with anything, because we were living in the twenty-first century, not the twelfth, and, besides, she hadn’t abandoned her child anyway. Far from it. She’d done the responsible thing in an appalling situation and had left him in a safe place, to be taken care of by the authorities.

  And it was so easy to forget, given her unfailing self-possession, just what an appalling situation it really was. She’d been forced to run away from home (and that in itself must have been harrowing enough), only to fall victim to a predatory male intent on trafficking her, becoming his – and his gang’s – virtual prisoner, and then finding the wherewithal to run away a second time, only to find out she was pregnant with his child.

  Really, it was a miracle that she wasn’t in total meltdown – a seething cauldron of deep-rooted psychological issues; the proverbial, not to mention, profoundly damaged, troubled young person with whom psychologists would ‘have a field day’.

  I tried not to think about it, but a part of me wondered where down the line all this was going to manifest itself. Because how could it not affect her at a fundamental level, to have been through so much hurt and anguish so young? It seemed impossible that it wouldn’t in some way.

  Trafficked. I tried to blot the word out, very consciously. Because it had just become altogether too ubiquitous. And when words become that common they often lose their power. ‘Oh, she’s been trafficked’ hasn’t half the emotional power of ‘She’s been groomed and then kidnapped and then held a virtual prisoner and forced to perform sex acts on strangers.’

  Which was why I was actually pleased to hear John was bringing the police round. Yes, it might traumatise Adrianna initially, but it was very welcome evidence that they were going to take what had happened to her very seriously.

  That said, it didn’t make for restful sleep. And when I was still tossing and turning at twenty to six the next morning, I gave up, and got up and showered.

  It took a good ten minutes under the showerhead to get me going, during which time I speculated – pretty pointlessly – on what might happen next. Since John had phoned I had spent half the time assuring Adrianna that everything would be fine and that we could just take each day as it came, and the other half playing out scenarios in my head – none of which had even remotely happy endings.

  It had been the word ‘urgent’ that had made me prick up my ears. ‘We’d like to meet tomorrow, if you can do it,’ he’d said. ‘That’s the best time for the police.’

  It had been the first time he’d mentioned that they’d wanted to interview Adrianna and it had hit me that maybe I’d been wrong. Despite my many assurances, I’d nevertheless done a bit of googling and had stumbled upon a report of a trafficked girl who’d been brought into the country illegally, and who went to the authorities and rather than being helped – or, according to the report, even believed – she had been put in a detention centre. But the girl in question had come from Somalia, which made the situation different. Somalia was not part of the EU and, without a visa, she had fallen victim to the business of immigration ‘procedures’ – which, in this case, involved popping her in the detention centre, out of the way, and investigating what had happened to her from there.

  This absolutely didn’t apply to Adrianna. As she too had come in illegally and would be unable to produce a passport, in theory, yes, she could be contravening some identity-related law. But as both a victim of a crime and a certified EU national (thank heavens for her birth certificate), on what basis could they even think of charging her with anything?

  But what did I know? Seriously? Almost nothing. ‘She isn’t going to get in trouble, is she?’ I asked him, Tyler’s pronouncements ringing in my ears.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ John said. ‘Not for a moment. But they do want to question Adrianna about the paternity of the baby. They want to know more about the man she came into the UK with, apparently, so they know what, if any, action to take.’

  ‘If?’ I replied. ‘There’s even an if about it?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said again. ‘But the theory and the reality might be poles apart – if you’ll excuse the pun. These characters are probably as slippery as eels, don’t you think? I guess it will depend on how many man hours they can devote to the problem, won’t it?’

  He had a point. Foreign pimps running foreign girls; would it really be a priority? There was enough ‘home-grown’ crime, with similarly ‘home-grown’ victims, to keep the police busy for for ever and a day. But they were investigating, at least at this point, which had to be a good thing. I said so.

  ‘Plus it’s a great opportunity for Adrianna to meet her social worker,’ John went on.

  ‘So you’ve found one? Fantastic. That was quick.’

  ‘Wasn’t difficult. Not now we don’t need one who speaks Polish. She’s been allocated Jasmine Erskine. Kids call her Jazz. She’s nice. Adrianna will like her. Have you come across her before at all? I couldn’t remember.’

  ‘I don’t believe I have,’ I said. ‘Oh, but I’m so glad we have someone on board now. This whole police business is going to unsettle Adrianna, I know. She’s not said as much, but I’m pretty sure she is going to be terrified at the prospect of helping them with their enquiries. I really think she is scared of those men, and what they might do to her.’

  ‘Of course,’ John agreed. ‘I totally understand that. But, at the same time, her co-operation will go a long way towards strengthening her case re the little one, won’t it?’

  He made a very important point. It was exactly the sort of thing that would prove her to be a helpful, honest citizen. ‘You’re right. Any news about that, by the way?’

  ‘Well, actually, there is a bit of a silver lining here,’ he said. ‘I was going to wait until I had more specific details before telling you, but I’m guessing you’ll need a bit of a carrot to tempt Adrianna into co-operating tomorrow, so maybe you can at least share a bit of this.’

  John went on to tell me about the exciting developments that had been going on behind the scenes. The family that had been given temporary care of Adrianna’s baby had – amazingly – already been traced and interviewed. So that part of it really had been ‘simples’! They had been given chapter and verse about Adrianna, too; put in the picture about the circumstances of the baby’s birth, and also asked if it might be possible for Adrianna, together with a social worker, to go to London to meet them and be introduced again to her child.

  This was all very exciting, of course, and just the thing to lift Adrianna’s spirits. But John was right that I should only share this information with caution; I mustn’t make a big deal of it, in case it all came to nothing. It would be a long road, and one that had no definite destination. Every time she saw her baby – assuming regular contact was, as we hoped, agreed – she would be assessed as to her suitability to take sole responsibility for him again. Which was not a decision any council would – or should – ever take lightly.

  And in this case, though initially completely happy to say yes, the couple had apparently backtracked just a little, asking for a bit more time so they could run things past their own social worker. So, even though John was still positive, you never knew. And despite the fact that I wouldn’t say anything to Adrianna unless I thought I had to, there was always the possibility that the family would make a case for holding on to him; even in the longer term adopting him. There were many couples out there, after all, who were desperate to adopt a newborn child – a situation only exacerbated because there were so few around.

  So I was very mindful, overall, of the potential potholes along the road. Adrianna, however, had no such emotional regulator. Just the knowledge that her baby had been found and there was a potential visit on the table was enough to create another 360 degree turnaround in her mood; try as she might, she simply couldn’t keep a level head about it.

  I had to keep reminding myself – sh
e was only 16. A time of hormones in torrents at the best of times. She couldn’t see beyond seeing him, and her all-will-be-well gauge was set to max.

  She was also hyper and sleepless, like me.

  ‘Good morning, Casey!’ she greeted me, when I appeared down in the kitchen. ‘Your favourite beverage,’ she said, thrusting a mug of coffee at me. ‘I heard you in the shower,’ she explained, obviously noting my consternation. ‘And I do toast for you, also. You sit.’

  ‘You’re up very early,’ I said as she pulled out a chair for me. ‘And go on, then,’ I added, sitting down. ‘I’ll have a piece of toast.’

  ‘I think I was bitten by those bed bugs Tyler explained to me,’ she said as she bustled around the kitchen, ‘and I am just so excited for our meeting, I could not sleep a wink. When do you think it will happen? Will John know? Oh, I cannot wait to see Jakob …’ She immediately corrected herself. I mean my baby Something Jakob. I am very nervous to find out what’s his name.’

  ‘Come sit down,’ I said, patting the seat beside me. ‘And calm down. Before you make yourself ill again.’

  ‘I will, I will,’ she sang, peering into the toaster as she did so. ‘We must both eat. I understand. And I will sit down.’

  She duly came across and joined me with the toast and her tea. ‘You know,’ she said, unscrewing the jam jar, ‘I am so tense. Like a spring. I think I must also have the bed bugs in my pants.’

  I couldn’t help laughing. And also choking on my coffee. Tyler was obviously having his own field day with her. He was milking it, for sure. ‘No, darling,’ I explained. ‘That’s not quite how it works. It’s “Night, night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite” when you go to sleep. And it’s “ants in your pants” when you are jumpy and nervous. Two completely different sayings.’

  ‘That hardest bit of English is the bits that aren’t written. I remember my father telling me that. And he was right.’