by Rosie Lewis
Zadie was wonderful with the baby. As the weeks went by she grew in confidence, some primal knowledge guiding her along so that she was able to soothe the baby effortlessly, with a hum under her breath, often even just a light touch on the head. If Nailah so much as squeaked Zadie was beside her in seconds, cooing, singing, rocking, singing lullabies. Quietly tenacious, she had managed to overcome her difficulties with feeding, and whenever we were home Nailah was breastfed. Too shy to feed her baby in public, we took bottles with us whenever we went out.
At our foster-carer support group I had heard of mother and baby placements going badly wrong. Foster placements were sometimes offered to expectant young parents to give them the opportunity to learn the skills needed to care for a young baby but sometimes young mums used their foster carers as on-site babysitters and went out clubbing, even before their milk came in. Zadie couldn’t have been more different. She was so attentive that I barely got a look-in.
It was a joy to watch the two of them responding to each other, their bond strong against all the odds. Zadie had coped with all that life had thrown at her and came out fighting. I couldn’t have been prouder. But there was another challenge that I felt she needed to confront, and when Nailah was eight weeks old, just a few days into the New Year of 2012, I felt the time had come to bring the subject up.
‘You have a life full of possibilities ahead of you, Zadie,’ I told her one afternoon, while she was leaning over Nailah, distracted from the task of changing the little one’s nappy by blowing raspberries on her tummy, the pair of them giggling. I remembered what Sofia had said about some women living a life full of regret – I didn’t want that for Zadie. Her life had changed immeasurably but that didn’t have to mean that her dreams were now out of her grasp. ‘I could look after Nailah for a few hours each day while you go to school,’ I ventured. ‘You’d soon catch up on what you’ve missed. You could still be a vet, if that’s what you wanted.’
Zadie fastened the poppers of Nailah’s vest and lifted her gently to her chest, her palm cradling the back of her head. She was wearing a pair of casual black trousers and a loose smock top, one of the outfits she had chosen online a couple of weeks earlier. Her robes were tucked away at the back of her drawer, although whenever we went out she still chose to wear her headscarf. She chewed her lip, then nuzzled the baby’s neck. ‘I love her too much to leave her, though.’
I smiled and knelt beside her. ‘I know you do. But she’ll be right here waiting for you when you get back, honey.’
Everyone needed an outlet, something to put their creative energies into, however much they loved their children. For me it was the hour I spent writing, late in the evening when the children had gone to bed. For someone as young as Zadie, a life outside of home was even more important, especially if she wanted to build a brighter future for her and Nailah, one where she was able to support both of them without relying on anyone else.
And so less than a fortnight later, as I stood at the front door, Megan in one arm and Nailah in the other, Zadie planted kisses on the tops of their heads and ventured off to school on her own. Deciding whether she should make her own way to school had been a difficult decision. As a parent, setting the goal posts is a tricky enough task; is it safe for them to sleep over at a new friend’s house? Are they responsible enough to pop to the shops on their own? Would it be sensible or overprotective to refuse permission for them to meet with their friends at the local park?
As a foster carer, those decisions were usually complicated by all sorts of other factors. In the past, a child’s social worker would shoulder the burden of making everyday decisions, but recent changes in practice meant that they were able to delegate their responsibility to the foster carer. In some ways the change was helpful; children were much less likely to miss out on school trips or sleepovers without the delays that come with waiting for the all clear from social services. Fortunately, Peggy was more than happy to discuss my plans for Zadie, particularly in the light of the teenager’s background and previous concerns about her family. Together we decided that she was old enough to make her own way to school. She was 14 after all and it didn’t seem fair to deny her the small freedoms that other children her age enjoyed. I drilled her on staying safe, as I did my own children, and bought her a mobile phone to take with her for extra peace of mind.
By mid-afternoon on her first day I bundled the babies up in coats and blankets and strapped them into the double pram, too eager to hear how her day had gone to stay at home and wait for her return. We took a slow walk to the park and, after giving Megan a few minutes in the swing, we made our way to the bus stop to meet Zadie.
One glance at her face as she stepped off the bus told me that I needn’t have worried. Besides her excitement at seeing her baby daughter, there was an energy in her face that I had never seen before. As she lifted Nailah out of her pram and planted a dozen kisses on her face, I was certain, mistakenly, as it happened, that her struggles were finally over.
With just myself and the two babies at home, time slowed and the days seemed endless. It was ironic, then, that there was never a moment to get anything done. Within a week, the house was covered with a fine layer of dust. If I took too much notice I knew the disorder would have bothered me so I chose to ignore it, hoping that social workers wouldn’t decide to swoop on the house to conduct one of their unannounced checks. Babies turn into toddlers in a flash, and I wanted to enjoy them; Megan was already crawling. Besides, I literally had no spare time. It was enough to keep up with the washing, shopping and cooking, and if I could fit in a hair wash every few days I was doing well. If ever I managed to co-ordinate Megan and Nailah’s naps, which seemed a Herculean feat that was mostly beyond me, I tended to either catch up on writing my daily fostering diary or treat myself and join them.
It was when my mother visited, after the new arrangement had been in place for ten days or so, that I actually noticed how bad the situation was; in the living room every surface was covered with little clothes, cloth books and wooden toys, the flowers I had grabbed on my last whizz around the supermarket hanging mournfully from their vases. ‘Oh my goodness, have you been burgled?!’ Mum exclaimed, throwing her coat off and pulling up her sleeves, ready for action before she’d even reached the living room.
‘I haven’t had time,’ I said lamely, a baby perched in the crook of each arm.
Mum tutted. ‘Well, if you’d put them down for a minute you might find you get more done.’
‘I was about to,’ I said, ‘but as soon as I do one of them wakes up.’
Her eyes swept over the sleeping pair and her expression softened. ‘Ah, look at them,’ she whispered, taking Megan from me in one smooth motion and settling herself on the sofa, the baby snuggled in the crook of her arm. ‘Here we are,’ she said, reaching out her spare arm. ‘Give the little dot to me and you put the kettle on.’
I got more done in the next couple of hours while Mum nursed ‘the twins’ than I had all week.
Chapter 21
By the end of a gloriously warm March, Nailah was nearly five months old and thriving. Already sitting up, she would wiggle in excitement when any of us passed by but saved her open-mouthed smiles for her mummy. Megan, at almost nine months, was able to walk around the furniture and delighted Nailah by her very presence.
Zadie had managed to catch up on all she had missed in the curriculum by studying well into the evening and even continuing after giving the baby her dream feed at ten o’clock. How she managed it I couldn’t say, especially since Nailah still fed through the night, every three or four hours.
It was the third week in April, just when I thought nothing could disrupt our happy, if a little unconventional, family, that things went horribly, drastically wrong.
The Easter holidays had passed quietly, unusually heavy winds and driving rain keeping us inside. At the beginning of the new term, Zadie walked away from us as we waited at the gate, turning when she reached the end of the road to raise her
hand in a little wave. She scrunched her shoulders up, caressing the babies through the air with an affectionate smile.
And then she didn’t come back.
The police sergeant arrived at 7 p.m., just after I had put Megan to bed. The worry hadn’t really set in until after Emily and Jamie got in from school. The mobile I had bought for Zadie when she started travelling alone was switched off and she’d never been late before, but as I got tea ready I ran through all the reasonable scenarios: the battery was flat, her bus had broken down or perhaps one of her teachers had asked her to stay behind. It was only when I rang her school at just after 5 p.m. that I began to panic – the school receptionist, sounding quizzical but distracted, told me that Zadie had been absent all day.
Nailah, not due for a feed for another hour or so, was lying on the rug making contented noises. I sat nearby on the sofa, wringing my hands and trying my best to explain to the officer what Zadie was like.
‘I hear what you’re saying but I’m sure she just ran off,’ the sergeant who had cheerfully introduced himself as Paul offered as he flicked through his notebook trying to find an empty page. Without the uniform he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a gangster movie. He was a heavy-set man in his forties and the thin biro clutched between his meaty fingers looked in danger of snapping under the pressure. There was a kindness behind his cragginess but he just didn’t seem to appreciate the gravity of the situation. ‘We get this sort of thing all the time, believe me. She’ll turn up in a day or two. Lots of kids go AWOL from care.’
Beside him on the sofa, I pressed my lips together and swallowed down a rush of irritation. His response wasn’t really, on the face of it, all that unreasonable. Zadie had form for running away and, to an outsider, a 14-year-old girl with a baby of her own meant a likely rebel. ‘There’s no way she would leave the baby,’ I said quietly, almost to myself. It was at that moment that it really sank in. Zadie had been taken. I closed my eyes, the realisation making my stomach churn and my throat narrow.
When I looked up he was staring at me with concern, the professional façade gone from his face. He touched me on the shoulder. ‘You all right, love?’
‘She’s been snatched,’ I said, my mouth parched as the certainty settled itself heavily on my chest. ‘I’m sure of it. They’ve taken her.’
And then I explained everything, as quickly as I could: Zadie’s own fears, disclosed to me months earlier, before Nailah’s birth. My visit to Sofia and her stark warnings that the family would seek to remove the source of their shame. Paul listened carefully, scribbling intermittently and taking a note of Sofia’s contact details so that he could gather some more background information.
Reassuringly, before I’d finished talking he held up his hand to stop me, removing his airwave radio from his jacket pocket. There was a crackle as he fiddled with one of the dials and then he raised it to his lips. ‘Control? I need an urgent welfare check at …,’ he flicked back a few pages in his notebook and then read out Zadie’s home address.
‘Try not to worry,’ he said as he stowed the radio back into his pocket, although his own expression was now grave. ‘A squad car is on its way to check the home address and I’ll organise a warrant for the morning. We’ll search the house, the garage and all the associated premises. No stone unturned, Mrs Lewis.’
I nodded, eager for him to leave and get on with the job of finding her. Sofia’s warning about the girls who went missing, never to be found again, kept playing over and over in my mind, and suddenly I felt so light-headed that I closed my eyes, praying it wasn’t already too late.
My nausea faded a little as he snapped his notebook shut and made a move to pick up his black briefcase. ‘Are you sure you’re all right? You look very pale.’
‘Yes, I’ll be OK,’ I said, scooping Nailah up and resting her on my hip. My nausea had faded a little with the knowledge that the police had already taken some action, but as soon as I closed the door on the sergeant it surged again. I laid the baby down on the rug in the middle of the floor and ran to the bathroom, throwing up in the sink. Panting and gasping, I hurried back to the lounge and sat beside Nailah, patting my mouth with a tissue.
With each hour that passed my panic increased. It was a relief to tuck Nailah into her crib that evening, though she was tetchy, reluctant to take her bottle, perhaps because my trembling fingers offered anything but comfort. It was almost as if she could sense the danger her mother was in.
Running my eyes around the half-light of Zadie’s bedroom, my eyes fell on one of her headscarves, neatly folded on the top of her dresser. Reaching for it, I let it unfurl and then ran my fingers over and over the soft material wishing it were a talisman so that I could conjure her back. Aware of a pain in my throat, I wrapped it around Nailah, easing one of the corners into her curled fist. After stroking her head for a couple of minutes her eyelids began to flicker and she rolled onto her side, her small hand nestled beneath her chin. Securing more blankets around her, I began to hum one of the songs Zadie used to settle her, realising that her young mother could be halfway across the world by now, perhaps even already married. I shuddered, imagining the possibility that we might always be left wondering what had happened to her. Worst of all and so ironically, since it was the last thing Zadie would ever have wanted, little Nailah would grow up without the love of her own mother.
Downstairs all was quiet but there was tension in the air. Emily sat staring into space as Jamie leaned over the back of the sofa, watching out of the window. And some people say that foster carers do what they do for the money. I looked at the concern on their faces and felt the tremble in my own fingers, the nerve pulsing above my right eye. No one could possibly need money this badly.
We sat quietly during that first evening, trying to distract ourselves from the worry by playing card games, though without any of our usual banter. At midnight I managed to persuade Emily and Jamie to go to bed, but without their company the restlessness really kicked in.
I wandered aimlessly from room to room, my eyes scanning the furniture, our books, trying to find some task I could settle myself to. Uncomfortable wherever I went, and faintly claustrophobic, I grabbed a blanket from the sofa and draped it across my shoulders, then walked to the front door and opened it. The air was crisp, sharp with a tang of frost. Taking a deep breath I sighed and sat down on the top step. A late evening mist was lowering itself over the hedges that bordered the houses opposite ours, stars glittering in the cloudless sky. Somewhere in the distance a dog began barking. Leaning my head against the door frame, I shivered and wrapped the blanket closer around myself, hoping that wherever Zadie was, she was tucked up warm.
For the rest of the night I sat on the sofa, my eyes flicking from the phone balanced on the armrest to the clock above the fireplace and then back again. Every so often my head would nod to my chest, only to jerk up at the tiniest noise. Peggy rang every few hours for an update, her voice thick with tiredness. By 4 a.m., as I relayed the latest message from Sergeant Nicholls, that there was no trace of Zadie at her family’s address, I was beginning to lose hope that we would ever hear anything from her again. The officer had reassured me that everything that could be done was being done – Sofia had been contacted and was working alongside the team to provide invaluable cultural knowledge and, I was pleased to hear, the local Islamic community leaders were on board to support the search. ‘We’ve not run out of ideas yet, love,’ Paul had said, but I could tell by Peggy’s hesitant tone, as I relayed his words, that she was as fearful as I was.
Saying goodbye to Peggy, I lowered my mobile to the coffee table in slow motion, reluctant to let it go. I thought of Zadie’s gentle kindness and humour, her timidity and the well of sadness underneath it all. Resting my head in cupped hands, I steered my anxiety towards anger. She didn’t deserve any of this, I raged, but then, what child did? Didn’t it always come down to that same basic fact – every child deserved to be cherished. It was difficult to accept that there were times
when, however hard outsiders may try to help, some children were always going to slip through the net.
In the morning, after persuading Emily and Jamie that the best thing they could do was keep to their usual routine and go to school, I tried my best to fill my head with mundane thoughts; what to cook for dinner, what games I could invent that Megan and Nailah might enjoy. It didn’t really matter what I did, I told myself, falling back on my trusted philosophy when everything seemed to be going wrong, as long as I was busy enough to keep the jitters at bay. Trouble was, my renegade stomach was having none of it, and every time I stopped for breath the awful churning would start up again.
After lunch and with still no word from Sergeant Nicholls, I strapped Nailah and Megan into their pram and set off for the shops. Every now and then I stopped, having imagined that my mobile was ringing, only to check and be confronted with the same blank screen. I passed several people I knew along the way and we exchanged nods and smiles. ‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you,’ I said several times over, wondering as I walked away why we all feel the need to keep up such a pretence.
By late afternoon I was so drained that I had already laid out Nailah and Megan’s sleep suits, willing for 7 p.m. to come. Megan, on the cusp of taking her first steps, loved nothing more than holding onto my hands and pottering around, helping me with whatever task I was doing, but with my nerves so frayed it was difficult to muster the energy to involve her. Usually so happy and generous with her smiles, she had spent the last couple of days studying me with a worried frown, no doubt wondering what had gone wrong. It was as if the whole house had gone into mourning.
