The World at My Feet

by Catherine Isaac

  But the most disturbing thing of all was not the smell, nor the squalor, but the silence. Child after child sat or lay in rows, but none of them cried, nor played, nor made any noise at all. The first lesson they’d learnt in their short lives was that it was pointless to cry out, so they were either entirely still, or rocked back and forth soundlessly.

  Her eyes lowered to the cot next to her, where a little boy sat. He looked about eighteen months old but was almost certainly older, his pale blue eyes fixed on the wall. He wore a knitted bonnet tied underneath the soft skin of his chin and was so still that if it hadn’t been for the faint rise and fall of his little chest Harriet wouldn’t have believed he was a living, breathing person.

  She stooped down, and reached through the rusty bars for his hand. His tiny fingers were icy cold. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ she said softly, stroking them. ‘Hello, darling boy. I wonder what your name is?’ It was as if she wasn’t there. He made no noise; his eyes didn’t even flicker.

  ‘They’re never picked up or played with.’

  Harriet gently released the little boy’s hand and stood up to face a young man in his early twenties, wearing jeans and a smart jacket. He was tall, at least six foot three, with sensitive brown eyes and what her mother would approvingly have called ‘a good head of hair’.

  He introduced himself as Andrei Rucarenu and, though he spoke with a Romanian accent, his English was impeccable. He had been working as an interpreter for Unicef for the last few weeks. He had the look of a man who was deeply, irreversibly affected by what he’d encountered.

  ‘It doesn’t help that they’re hopelessly understaffed,’ he explained. ‘There are forty children to every one of the women who are supposed to be looking after them.’

  Andrei told Harriet that the little girls and boys were not just physically deprived but emotionally too. This dark, disgusting, cold room was where they ate, slept, existed. ‘To call it living would be entirely the wrong word,’ he added.

  * * *

  The next few days involved a lot of hard work. The volunteers and charity representatives knew they were barely scratching the surface of the multitude of problems, but dwelling on that would’ve been no good to anyone. All their band of electricians, plumbers, nurses and paediatricians could do was knuckle down to the task in hand. They managed to get the lighting up and running and made a start on fixing the roof. They scrubbed algae from surfaces and blasted the shower room with an acid descaler to remove the limescale, behind which a layer of excrement had been trapped. There was corrosion in every pipe. Dirty rags in every room. One by one, the children were examined by medical staff, given vitamins, food and clean clothes.

  ‘It feels like all too little in some ways,’ Harriet told Andrei as they sat on the steps at the front of the building, bright sunshine overhead.

  ‘It is, but it’s at least a start,’ he said.

  Harriet had met many exceptional people in her time as a news reporter and she now classed this urbane, intelligent Romanian man among them. Not just because of the quiet efficiency with which he worked, nor even the spontaneous singing sessions he instigated with the children, filling the orphanage with the sound of their voices. It was his determination to make a real difference. Being an interpreter was simply not enough for him.

  ‘I’ve wanted to be a police officer since I was five years old,’ he told Harriet. ‘It was all I ever wanted to do. I found out yesterday that I have been successful in my application to join the local force.’

  ‘Oh Andrei, that’s amazing,’ she gasped. ‘Congratulations.’

  He nodded and looked at the floor. ‘I don’t think I’m going to take it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I want to do something about this.’ He nodded towards the door. ‘I’ve never felt a stronger calling in my life.’

  * * *

  What happened over those early days came to transcend the tools, equipment and elbow grease. The volunteers played games and involved the older children by getting them to stir pots of paint and pass them tools.

  Harriet was due to fly back to London on the evening of the third day, while most of the others remained. This included Colin, who wouldn’t be home for another three weeks. He’d already asked if he could take her out when he returned, and she’d accepted.

  That morning, she ought to have been gathering last snippets of colour for her piece, but she found herself seeking him out. She located him on the second floor, where he’d been painting since daybreak – covering the grimy, crumbling walls with a white emulsion that looked like cream cheese when it was smoothed on. It was a vast dormitory and she watched him from the door as he’d stopped to chat with two little girls. He was making them smile by drawing pictures for them on an unpainted section of wall with his brush. Neither of the girls spoke English, of course, and Colin only knew a few words of Romanian, but they were managing to communicate somehow.

  Harriet had encountered the two girls a couple of times since their arrival. They’d stood out because they were inseparable, so much so that at first she’d assumed they were sisters. The taller girl was clearly the more streetwise and the self-appointed protector of the other child, whose eyes were full of trepidation whenever she couldn’t immediately see her friend standing next to her, ready to square up to anyone who meant trouble.

  Harriet watched as Colin drew a flower on the wall before handing the smaller girl his paintbrush, inviting her to make her own picture. She hesitated, looked confused. It struck Harriet that no British child of her age – seven or eight, she’d guess – would be short of ideas about something to draw. A heart, an animal, perhaps a little house. But she didn’t seem to have ever held a paintbrush. If she’d been in the orphanage since she was a baby, as so many of them had, she would almost certainly have never even seen a little house. There were no days out or jolly trips from here.

  So the little girl didn’t draw anything and instead put the paintbrush firmly back in its pot. Harriet wondered if she detected some annoyance or irritation, but then the girl cast her big eyes up at Colin and did the most extraordinary thing. She reached out for his face, pressing her fingers against his cheeks as if she was checking he was real. He blinked, not knowing how to react. Next she wrapped her arms round his waist and squeezed him. He froze, unsure of what to do, and Harriet moved to join them.

  ‘Hello there,’ Harriet said gently, as the little girl looked up. ‘What are your names?’

  Neither understood, so Colin, who’d been introduced to the children by Marie earlier, answered for them. ‘Harriet, I’d like you to meet my new friends. This is Tabitha,’ he said, gesturing to the taller girl. She stepped forward, accepting Harriet’s hand to shake without hesitation.

  The other little girl didn’t move at first. But eventually she lifted her eyes to Harriet and a smile flickered at her lips. ‘And this is Elena,’ he said. ‘I call her Ellie for short.’

  Chapter 26

  Harriet, 1991

  Harriet couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when she’d realised that she might be in love with Colin. But she knew when the first unsettling rush had come – when she’d watched him put his arms around those little boys. She’d seen kindness amidst the worst atrocities before, of course. Those were the glimmers of light that made her job possible. So why it should have pressed some unseen button inside her this time was never clear, especially as she’d already discovered that he drove like an old woman and was still living with his mother, which ought to have been an automatic turn-off.

  The truth was, she couldn’t get enough of him and the feeling seemed to be mutual. Plus, once she’d met her, it turned out she liked his mother very much, assuring Colin that he had no need to keep apologising for this absolutely temporary arrangement, one that would only be in place until he’d saved the deposit for his own flat. Far from being an omnipresent force at Chalk View, Hazel Heathcote was hardly ever in, preferring the company of her bridge club or church friends. She went on a �
��retreat’ every so often, which Harriet initially thought sounded dreadful, but the way she’d describe it made it seem more like a girls’ holiday, involving lots of country walks, gossip and Cadbury’s Crème Eggs in between the praying.

  Colin slept in a room at the top of the house, which felt like an entity of its own. When Harriet wasn’t abroad, they were often there. In their first months together, it had been nice to go on dates in town, to catch a show and introduce him to friends, before returning to her tiny flat. But Chalk View – with its garden, expanse of space, fresh air, birdsong and convenient position on the end of the Metropolitan line – had thoroughly won Harriet over. After she’d stepped off a flight feeling grubby and exhausted and in need of a strong cup of tea, it was there that she increasingly wanted to be.

  One Sunday morning while Colin’s mother was out, she drifted downstairs and found him at the kitchen table, flicking through a newspaper. It wasn’t the one she wrote for; Mrs Heathcote had been loyal to her favourite mid-market tabloid for years, leaving Harriet baffled as to how someone could read such bigoted bile and still manage to be as kind as she was.

  ‘I haven’t persuaded your mother to jump ship then,’ she said, leaning down to kiss him.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t take it personally,’ he chuckled, turning over the page.

  The orphanages in Romania were still making front-page news, largely because, despite continued denials of their existence by the authorities, more were being discovered. Hospitals in which babies had been crammed into basements. Institutions for children with disabilities, where young boys, girls and teenagers were all mixed together with little supervision, drunk staff and an intermittent water supply.

  Harriet had been sent by the news editor to one of these places, a few months after her first trip to Romania. It was described as a ‘special hospital’, in which 250 children with varying degrees of disability were packed into six decaying rooms. The children had no more than the most basic education, wandered around aimlessly, and signs of abuse were barely concealed. The resident psychiatric doctor, a small white-haired man, had shown her round impassively. When they reached one cot, where a boy of around seven or eight was sitting silently in a grubby pair of pants, the doctor lifted the child’s arm then let it flop down. ‘Imbecile,’ he told Harriet, devoid of compassion. The experience had chilled her to the bone.

  Western governments were now sending aid, though packages were often going in the front door and out the back – donated goods were being sold on the local market or kept by employees for themselves. But all anyone could do was keep doing their bit. Colin’s fundraising efforts and those of his colleagues had continued apace since his first visit to the orphanage – and he’d used school holidays to visit twice since then. Harriet had stayed in touch with Andrei Rucarenu, who was now working tirelessly for a British charity, having been appointed ‘Country Director’.

  It was clear from what both told her that the building had improved significantly. The walls were clean and painted with illustrations of cartoon characters. The old, rusting cots had been replaced by new ones, donated by Mothercare. The toilets and showers were working and that dreadful, all-pervasive smell had finally gone. But the number of carers hadn’t changed and neither had something else more fundamental than any piece of equipment or newly painted window.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Harriet asked now, pouring herself a coffee as she sat down next to Colin.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ he shrugged. ‘Just thinking about all this.’

  ‘I’m going to speak to my editor about going back to the orphanage for a follow-up piece,’ she said. ‘To show him how far it’s come along since you first went there.’

  He took a sip of his drink and frowned.

  ‘What is it?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘I know it’s closer to habitable,’ he told her. ‘I know we’ve got the toilets working and the kids now have food to eat. But it’s clear to me that the problem isn’t just with the facilities and infrastructure. It’s that these children are stuck in these godawful institutions full stop. What they need goes far beyond a few teddy bears and a clean sheet.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ she asked.

  ‘They need a family, Harriet.’

  She lowered her eyes to the newspaper. MEET THE BRITISH COUPLES ADOPTING ROMANIAN BABIES, the headline read.

  When she looked up, Colin’s eyes fixed on hers and she felt an unpleasant skip in her heart. Her first instinct was to reach down and turn over the page, pretend she didn’t know exactly what was going through his mind. But for reasons that she would grapple with for a long time afterwards, she didn’t.

  ‘You’re still upset about that little girl, aren’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Ellie,’ he replied, though Harriet already knew her name. She also knew that the little girl’s best friend Tabitha had recently attracted the attention of an Italian couple. They had successfully applied to adopt her, which meant that, within a few short months, while one little girl would be flying off to start a new life in a comfortable home in a suburb of Bologna, the other would have to stay and face a bleaker future.

  ‘I can’t bear the thought of that little mite being left there,’ Colin confessed.

  There was no point in tripping out a series of glib reassurances and telling him the girl would be all right. Instead, she heard herself saying: ‘Neither can I, if it means anything.’

  He looked up. ‘Okay. Then the question is: what are we going to do about it?’

  Chapter 27

  Ellie

  ELLIE HEATHCOTE

  I love this time of year, when the last days of June roll into high summer and all the preparation we did back in early spring really starts to come together. I bought this gorgeous ‘Black Dragon’ wisteria from @GardensToGo_ and honestly cannot believe how well established it’s become in so short a time, with beautiful, long plumes of cascading flowers. The company have an incredible array of plants – I could while away hours scrolling through the ornamental grasses and herbaceous perennials on their website. You can find out more at www.gardenstogo.co.uk. All gardening equipment gifted by gardenstogo.co.uk – links in my stories. #Ad

  #Thisgirlgardens #Myhappyplace #digforvictory #beddingplants #wisteria #junefloweringclimbers #summercolour #Englishcountrygardener #gardener #gardening #garden #gardenlife #flowers #plants #gardens #nature #gardendesign #gardenersofinstagram #growyourown #gardeninspiration #greenthumb

  @rachelgreenfingers:

  Wow, they’ve grown since you first posted the seedling pic. What have you been feeding them – Shredded Wheat?!

  @EnglishCountryGardenista:

  Nothing but light and water – lots of it!

  I make a start on responding to the dozens of others but run out of steam, even though – as this post is an advertisement and therefore I was paid actual, hard cash for it – I really need as many people as possible to engage. The photograph that accompanies the sponsored post is quintessentially Instagram: a painstakingly constructed image of a woman who looks as free as a bird, without a worry on her mind. It bears little relation to the reality.

  Two days after my birthday, I have hardly heard from Guy beyond a response to a text I sent asking if he was coming over on Tuesday.

  Really busy this week, Ellie – sorry. We’ll sort something soon though. Looking forward to it x

  Great, me too. When are you thinking? x

  To which he didn’t reply at all.

  I snuggle into Gertie, as rain runs in rivulets down the windows, and decide to message Lucy to ask for advice.

  Should I press him about what ‘soon’ means? Should I even contact him at all?

  Oh, definitely. I would always text a man in this situation.

  Another arrived a second later.

  * Full disclosure: My response rate isn’t great. In fact, it’s possible I’m literally the worst person on earth to ask.

  I shift Gertie over a little and click on Guy’s account. This morning he re-p
osted an Instagram Story he was tagged in by @KellieYogini, who works in his studio. He’s lying, bare-chested, flat on his back in a trendy, stripped-brick room, his legs pointing to the ceiling. Above him, the dip of her hips balanced on the soles of his feet, is @KellieYogini, whose taut, tanned body stretches out horizontally like Captain Marvel in Lululemon.

  He’s added the caption:

  By nourishing someone we are advancing their vitality and nurturing their health. We are helping them on their journey, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Who will you nourish today? #yogaman #nourish #positivity #spirituality #mindbodyandspirit

  I resist the urge to swear and click off my iPad.

  ‘Come on, Gertie.’ She follows me, wagging her tail as I grab my waterproof coat and wellies. I open the door to find the rain torrential. The dog whimpers and backs away, leaping on the sofa and cementing herself between two cushions. ‘Oh, I see. I’m on my own then.’

  For the next two hours, I tend my garden as if it is a glorious sunny day, ignoring the fact that I am quickly drenched from top to toe. I also mulch the grass, stake out the plants by the back wall, prune a rampant forsythia. By the time I return indoors and have showered, I’m clear-headed enough to compose an email.

  Dear Guy,

  I’m very sorry for what happened on my birthday. It was true that I felt sick and also that my mum had prepared a dinner. However, there’s something else I haven’t been completely open about and I’d love it if you’d let me explain.

  Ellie x

  It sounds coy and mysterious in all the wrong ways, but in the absence of an alternative, I press send and head to my bedroom to dry off my hair. It only takes a minute before I am hit by a wave of self-doubt, obliterating every positive feeling I had when I stepped in from the garden. One thought in particular kicks me in the gut: Why am I so bad at keeping hold of the people who mean anything to me? Anyone, that is, except my family: my lovely mum and dad and, in Lucy, someone who doesn’t merely feel like a sister, but a better version of me.