Casey Watson - Runaway Girl - A beautiful girl. Trafficked for sex. Is there nowhere to hide?

‘I’m expecting her within the hour,’ he explained. ‘Are you and Mike able to take her in? More to the point, are you even around? I did try the house phone.’

I explained that we were round at my son Kieron’s house, babysitting his and his partner Lauren’s baby daughter. ‘But that’s no big stress,’ I added. ‘They’ve only gone to the cinema. They’ll be back in less than that, and then we can shoot home.’

‘I’d be enormously grateful,’ John said, and he sounded it. ‘As I say, I’ve no idea what the deal is. The girl’s apparently quite distressed, says she has nowhere to go, and has obviously been sleeping rough for a while. But I’m told she’s otherwise healthy and seemingly sane; says she’s not been harmed in any way.’

‘D’you know any more than that?’ I asked him, already forming a mental picture. Otherwise healthy and seemingly sane . I wondered what it must be like to be a 14-year-old girl all alone in a big, scary city.

‘Not really. Only assumptions. You know what it’s like. She says she has no parents, and nowhere to go back to, but that’s probably questionable. We’ve seen it before, to be honest; parents sending their kids over here when they can’t support them, with little more than a note with their name and age. And the kids are usually savvy enough not to give any details. But we shall see, eh?’

Indeed we would, I said, feeling the usual first stirrings of intrigue. ‘So, what’s her name?’ I asked him.

‘Adrianna. Or so she said. Anyway, thanks for stepping in, Casey. Doubt you’ll have to have her long.’

I smiled at that as I disconnected. Or so he said.

The previous year had been a rather different one for us. We still had Tyler, of course, who we’d taken on permanently, and who was now a lanky 14-year-old. And he was so much a part of the family now, the ‘foster’ part of ‘foster son’ no longer even passed our lips. But after several intense years of fostering – and some harrowing experiences – we’d stepped temporarily off the hamster wheel as far as new long-term placements were concerned, and, having seen our last long-term foster child into her new forever home the previous March (a little girl with foetal alcohol syndrome called Flip), we’d begun a short fostering break.

Mostly, this was to support our son, Kieron. With him and Lauren’s first baby, Dee Dee, coming along shortly after Flip left us (she who was currently not troubling the baby monitor, thankfully), we’d decided to focus on helping them as much as possible, as we had no way of knowing how well Kieron would cope with the upheaval in his life. Kieron had Asperger’s syndrome, which was a mild form of autism, and though we were confident that, between them, he and Lauren would manage as well as any other fledgling parents, there was always this thought in the back of my mind that a safety net would be no bad thing at all.

So, since Flip had gone, we’d only agreed to accept short-term emergency placements, and had had only three, although each had lasted considerably longer than had originally been planned, which was often the way with short-term or emergency placements. We’d taken in an eight-year-old handful (to say the least) called Connor, then a little lad called Paulie whose mum and stepfather had rejected him, and another eight-year-old, very recently – over Christmas, in fact – who’d been in such terrible circumstances (her parents had groomed her to simulate sex acts on camera for a paedophile website) that, even with our lengthy experience of, and exposure to, the sharp end of life, we were still reeling from the very thought of what she’d been through.

So something like this, we agreed – be it for a short time or a longer one – would actually be a form of light relief.

‘So they won’t deport her?’ Kieron wanted to know once he and Lauren had returned, and we’d explained why we had to leave in such a hurry. (Kieron would have happily shared the entire plot of the film with us otherwise, that being very much one of his favourite things.)

He seemed anxious to be sure about it, too. I shook my head. ‘No. Well, certainly not at this stage. If she’s homeless and a minor, the first thing will be to make sure she’s safe, obviously. Plus she’s an EU citizen, so she has rights here, in any case.’

Kieron unzipped his jacket. I could feel the cold coming off it. It was a bitterly cold evening. ‘I knew it,’ he said.

‘Knew what, mate?’ Mike asked him.

‘I knew they didn’t just deport people like that.’

‘Well, they do in some cases …’ I said. ‘Depends very much on the circumstances. But in this case, of course not. They first need to establish what she might be going back to . We don’t yet know how she got here – even how long she’s been here, come to that. Why, anyway?’ I asked, curious.

‘Oh, it’s just there’s this idiot at football I train with,’ he said. ‘He’s a complete racist.’ He glanced at Lauren. She obviously knew about this character already.

‘Amongst other things …’ she added. ‘All-round nice guy, isn’t he? We hear a lot about Idiot Ben,’ she explained, smiling at me.

Kieron huffed. ‘Because he is an idiot,’ he said, shrugging the jacket off. ‘Anyway, he was telling me they changed the laws so no one can come here any more.’

‘I’m not sure he’s right about that,’ Mike commented, putting his own on. ‘Though there’s a fair few who’d agree with him, if they had.’

‘But why?’ Kieron seemed genuinely to want an explanation. ‘I don’t get it. We all live in Europe. We’re all humans on the planet. And, anyway, no one stops us going to work there .’

‘I’m not sure working there’s the issue,’ Mike said.

‘Yes it is,’ Kieron said. ‘He’s always banging on about how they take all our jobs.’

‘When he’s not banging on about them taking our benefits,’ Lauren added drily.

‘Except do they?’ Kieron asked. ‘And they can’t do both, can they?’

Mike touched his arm. ‘I’m with you there, son. Though I think that’s a discussion for another day, don’t you? We’ve got to get a move on or your mum’ll start getting ants in her pants. There’ll be at least a dozen specks of dust lurking that she’ll have to send packing …’

‘Huh,’ Kieron said. ‘I flipping knew I was right. I really hate it when people assume I don’t know anything about anything.’

‘Which he will doubtless be addressing at the next football training session …’ I whispered to Mike as we hurried out of the door.

We returned home to find Tyler exactly where we’d left him – engrossed in the latest episode of CSI: NY , which was his latest ‘must-see’ TV show. And no sooner had we filled him in on our imminent young visitor than my mobile rang again, to alert us that the girl was now with John, and that, assuming we were okay with it, he’d be round with her in half an hour.

‘It’s a point, you know,’ Mike said, once I’d delegated jobs, and sent Tyler off to the kitchen to do his washing up and generally straighten things up downstairs. ‘You know, about her status here. Will she really be allowed to stay? What’ll they do with her if she’s got nobody and doesn’t speak any English?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I said. ‘This is a new one on me, although I’m sure John knows the protocols. But I suppose at the moment, like we were saying, it’s a case of a roof over her head, bless her. I wonder what her story is. I mean, how did she find her way here? She’s a hell of a long way from home.’

My instinct was that that her being Polish would make no difference in the short term. There were generally two options with young people found on the street: the police would either take them home again or, if this was neither possible nor appropriate, call in social services to take over from there. In other cases, kids who’d run away to escape abuse became so exhausted and traumatised from not eating and not sleeping (or, worse, being beaten up or raped) that they’d take themselves to social services, pleased to be taken into care. It sounded like our young runaway fitted into the latter category, bless her.