I rolled my eyes at him. ‘You know I am, John. Don’t be silly. Anyway,’ I said, eyeing the pad that was disappearing back into his briefcase, ‘what did you manage to get? You know, while I was out in the kitchen.’
‘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.