‘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.
‘No, no. You did the right thing,’ Dr Joe said as he rolled his sleeves down and pulled his jacket back on. ‘I’m inclined to think it’s a viral infection, so I won’t prescribe anything just yet – not without taking a proper look at her – but I agree with you; it might be worth you looking into some sort of counselling service – preferably one with a translator. I don’t know what you’ve been thinking but I wonder if her reaction to me could be a sign of some kind of abuse?’ He frowned. ‘I mean, if she’s a runaway and has been sleeping rough … Well, it’s not exactly unlikely, after all.’
I told him I’d been thinking exactly the same thing and that I was going to speak to John Fulshaw as soon as I’d logged his visit. ‘And in the meantime,’ I asked, ‘should I give her anything at all? You know, for her temperature or anything?’
‘Just paracetamol if she appears to need it, and obviously keep her well hydrated, but, seriously, if she’s no better by Monday, do give me another call and we’ll see what we can conjure. And, as I say, call the out-of-hours service over the weekend if you’re concerned. It’s always better to be over-cautious when there’s a language barrier. She might not know the words to tell us what’s wrong, mightn’t she?’
And more to the point, I thought – but didn’t say, since the doctor had a busy afternoon ahead of him – didn’t seem to want to find the words to do so either, which struck me as the oddest thing of all.
I went straight back upstairs as soon as the doctor had left, to find Adrianna where we’d left her, curled up under the duvet, seemingly unwilling to ever relinquish it again. Was that her plan? To just stay there till someone commanded her to go elsewhere? What was going on in this enigmatic teenage girl’s head?
‘Przepraszam,’ she said quietly. ‘Casey, I am sorry.’
I didn’t need the translation. I knew what przepraszam meant because Tyler had already told me (though it sounded like a spell off Harry Potter). It was one of the words on the list he had painstakingly written out for me. A list of words and phrases, I noted, that he had also copied for Adrianna in reverse, but which, these few instances of courtesy aside, she seemed to have little interest in studying. She had little interest in improving her English at all, it seemed. Why? Since she didn’t seem to want to go home, why wouldn’t she?
I experienced a moment of frustration. This was surely one of the ways in which she (and immigrants generally) could only strengthen her position. I knew what people could be like. You saw it everywhere. It genuinely irritated people when immigrants appeared not to want to integrate; a point of view with which I had sympathy.
But this poor child – for child she was – obviously had a great deal more going on in that head of hers than we knew, and now was probably not the moment to start grilling her about her lack of vocabulary. She’d been with us less than a week. She was scared and traumatised, and also suffering from a probable virus. So what harm was there in her sleeping the days away till she was well enough to see past that? At least the doctor had been, and his reassurance had done its job and reassured me.
‘It’s okay, love,’ I told her, patting her. ‘I just don’t understand, that’s all.’ I smiled. ‘But you don’t understand me either, do you? So there’s not much point in me rattling on at you, is there? You get some sleep now.’ I mimicked the praying movement the doctor had made earlier, then pointed floorwards. ‘I’ll be downstairs if you need me.’
And, in the meantime, I would go down and log the doctor’s visit. And perhaps call John Fulshaw to see how he felt we should best proceed. Because, for all that this was seemingly a clear, temporary brief (and to which my usual ‘Yes I can’ response still felt like the right one), something was beginning to make me think there’d be complications down the line. In short, my fostering antennae were now twitching.
And they continued to do so as I sat at the dining table typing on my laptop, coffee at my side, pondering the question of quite what to do next. I could hardly get online and teach myself Polish in a couple of hours, just as surely as I couldn’t teach Adrianna English – even should she express any enthusiasm for learning it. Not that I should get ahead of myself; the answer to the question might equally be ‘nothing’, as John might call any day to announce she was leaving, having found a suitable foster family for her long-term. Or, less likely, but still one of a range of possibilities, a friendly relative who’d popped out of the woodwork and come to take her home.
In the meantime we could only keep on doing what we were doing, and – in my case, because it was my antennae that were twitching – be alert to anything that might shed more light on our secretive girl’s situation.
I was just committing that thought to the keyboard when I heard the front door, closely followed by a shouted ‘Cooooeee! Get the kettle on, sis!’
I smiled and lowered the screen on the laptop. We’d had one of those huge budget supermarkets open at the end of our road the previous year – a circumstance that had caused quite a lot of disgruntlement among the neighbours, for fear of parking issues, littering and a general ‘lowering of the tone’, as if we were some posh middle-class suburb, which we weren’t. Even so, there was the usual snobbish annoyance at the council for letting them do it, something which, not being as perfect as we liked to