He had gone straight out and bought several sackfuls of toys and handed a toy to each child. To his astonishment, there was no reaction from any of them. They stared at the toys blankly, and he realized in that moment that they did not know what to do with them. Not because they were mentally retarded, but because they had never been given toys before in their lives and did not know how to play with them. No one had ever taught any of these kids anything. Not even how to play with a fucking doll.
And he became determined, then and there, that he would do something for those kids.
Originally, he had figured on spending a few months out in Romania. He never thought he would still be here, seventeen years later, happily married to a Romanian woman, Cristina, and more content than he had ever been in his entire life.
Tilling looked tough and fit, despite carrying more than a few excess pounds around his midriff and he walked, exuding pent-up energy, with a copper’s strut. His face was craggy and lived in, with a toothbrush moustache and topped with close-cropped grey hair. Making few concessions to the weather, he was dressed today in a blue open-neck shirt, baggy fawn trousers and old brown brogues.
He stepped out into the hallway and smiled at a group of new arrivals from a care organization who were seated on the battered armchairs and sofas. Four dark-skinned Roma kids, a boy of eight in shell-suit bottoms and a sparkly T-shirt, a youth of fourteen in a baggy top and black tracksuit trousers that were too short for him, and two girls, a long-haired twelve-year-old in a mismatched jogging suit and a girl of fifteen in jeans and a holed cardigan. Each of them held a helium-filled party balloon, which they raised in celebration.
They were all from one family who could not cope and had placed them into an institution that they had run away from two years ago. They had been living on the streets since and now had the smiles on their faces he had seen so many times before, and which broke his heart each time. The smiles of desperate human beings who could not quite believe that their luck had changed.
‘How are you doing? All OK?’ he said, in Romanian.
They beamed and jigged their colourful balloons. Tilling had no idea where the balloons had come from, but he knew one thing for sure. Apart from the clothes they stood up in, these were the only possessions they had in the world.
The residents of Casa Ioana ranged in age from a seven-week-old baby, with her fourteen-year-old mother, to an eighty-two-year-old woman who had been tricked out of her home and her life savings by one of the many monsters who exploited Romania’s ill-thought-out laws. There was no welfare for the homeless in this country – and few shelters. The old woman was lucky to be here, sharing a dormitory room with three other elderly inmates who had met the same fate.
‘Mr Ian?’
He turned at the voice of Andreea, one of the social workers, who had stepped out of his office behind him. A slim, pretty twenty-eight-year-old, who was getting married in the spring, Andreea had a deep warmth and compassion, and tireless energy. He liked her a lot.
‘Telephone call for you – from England.’
‘England?’ he said, a little surprised. He rarely heard from England these days, except from his mother, who lived in Brighton, and to whom he spoke every week.
‘It is a policeman. He says he is old friend?’ She said it as a question. ‘Nommun Patting.’
‘Nommun Patting?’ He frowned. Then suddenly his eyes lit up. ‘Norman Potting?’
She nodded.
He hurried back into his office.
54
Lynn cursed as she saw two flashes from the speed camera in her rear-view mirror. She always drove slowly past that sodding camera opposite Preston Park, but this afternoon it had gone completely out of her mind. She was concentrating on getting home to Caitlin as quickly as possible and on nothing else. Now she faced a fine to add to her financial woes, and another three points on her licence, but she carried on without slowing down, a steady fifty-five in the thirty limit, desperate to get to her child.
Five minutes later she pulled into her driveway, jumped out of her car, jammed her key in the front door and pushed it open. Luke was standing in the hall, limp hair slanted across one eye, wearing a baggy top and trousers that looked like they might have come from the rear of a pantomime horse. His mouth was open and he had an even more gormless expression than usual on his face, like a man on a railway platform watching the last train of the night disappearing and not sure what to do next. He raised his arms by way of a greeting to Lynn, then let them drop again.
‘Where is she?’ she said.
‘Oh – er – right – Caitlin?’ he said.
Who the fuck do you think? Boadicea? Cleopatra? Hillary Clinton? Then she saw her daughter, standing at the top of the stairs, in a dressing gown over her nightdress, swaying as if she were drunk.
Dumping her handbag on the floor, Lynn threw herself up the stairs just as Caitlin stepped out into space, missing the top stair altogether, and tumbled forwards. Somehow, Lynn caught her, grabbing her thin frame in one arm and the banister rail in the other, and, clinging for dear life, managed to stop herself plunging backwards.
She stared into Caitlin’s face, inches from her own, and saw her eyes roll. ‘Darling? Darling? Are you OK?’
Caitlin slurred an incomprehensible response.
Using all her strength, somehow Lynn managed to push her back and up on to the landing. Caitlin tottered against the wall. Luke followed them, stopping halfway up the stairs.
‘Have you been doing drugs?’ Lynn screamed at him.
‘No, no way, Lynn,’ Luke protested, the shock in his voice sounding genuine.
Slurring her words, Caitlin said, ‘I’m like – I’m – I’m like…’
Lynn steered her back into her room. Caitlin half sank, half fell backwards on her bed. Lynn sat down beside her and put an arm around her. ‘What is it, my darling? Tell me?’
Caitlin’s eyes rolled again.
Lynn thought, for one terrible moment, that she was dying.
‘If you’ve given her anything, Luke, I’ll kill you. I swear it. I’ll tear your fucking eyeballs out!’
‘I haven’t, I promise. Nothing. Nothing. I don’t do drugs. I wouldn’t, wouldn’t give her nothing.’
She put her nose to her daughter’s mouth to see if she could smell alcohol, but there was only a warm, faintly sour odour. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’
‘I just feel giddy. I’ve got the roundabouts. Where am I?’
‘You’re home, darling. You’re OK. You’re at home.’
Caitlin stared blankly around the room, without any recognition at all, as if she was in a totally unfamiliar place. Lynn followed her eyes as she stared at the dartboard with the purple boa hanging from it, then at the photograph of the rock star hunk, whose name Lynn had momentarily forgotten, as if she was looking at them for the first time.
‘I – I don’t know where I am,’ she said.
Lynn stood up, gripped by a terrible panic. ‘Luke, stay here with her for a moment.’ Then she ran downstairs, grabbed her handbag and went into the kitchen. She pulled her address book out of her bag, then dialled the mobile phone number of the Royal South London transplant coordinator.
Please God, be there.
To her relief, Shirley Linsell answered on the third ring. Lynn told her Caitlin’s symptoms.
‘It sounds like encephalopathy,’ she said. ‘Let me speak to a consultant and either I or he will get straight back to you.’
‘She’s in a really bad way,’ Lynn said. ‘Encephalopathy? How do you spell that?’