“That’s where you’ve got to. I’ve been looking for you.”
“Do you need me?”
Marc shook his head, eying the little girl. “Nope. Where are you taking this little lady?”
“Upstairs somewhere. There’s an interpreter coming from a local children’s charity to help social services sort them out.”
“Shame I don’t speak much Levantine Arabic or I could’ve chipped in.”
“Levantine Arabic?”
“The families in the block that caught fire were from Homs,” Marc said. “Most of my Arabic is Iraqi.”
He said something to the girl that Rhys didn’t understand. She said something back and hid her face in Rhys’s neck.
Rhys frowned. “What was that?”
“She basically told me to piss off.” Marc smiled wryly. “And she isn’t the first girl to do that, but... anyway. I was looking for you to tell you the chopper won’t be fixed till morning. I’m going to jump on a train home, but there’s another doc coming on shift here tomorrow who’ll fly back into London with you.”
“Am I kipping here?”
It wasn’t unheard of for Rhys to spend the night in a random hospital, but Marc shook his head. “They’ve booked you and Pater into the Travelodge across the road. Grab what you need from the helicopter and check in whenever you’re ready. Be safe, man.”
Rhys knocked Marc’s fist and continued on his way, hurrying to catch up with the rest of the children. The trudge upstairs seemed to go on and on, but eventually, the front of the line began to file into an open door. Rhys shifted the child on his hip. “Nearly there now.”
The little girl ignored him, but he hadn’t expected a response, so it took him a beat to realise that she was staring over his shoulder at something behind him. Rhys turned and goosebumps rose on his skin, tingling on his forearms. He blinked. Refocused. But the reaction made no sense untilJevonrode past him on a fucking unicycle.
Four
Jevon sat on the floor, his most colourful building blocks spread out in front of him. Most of the children in the room were too old for the game, but experience taught him that distraction therapy worked best in young minds when the leap wasn’t too great. Colours. Pictures. Songs. Even the unfamiliar seemed familiar when it was offered so simply.
The children closest—the youngest—were starting to respond. Light sparked in eyes that had been glazed with trauma when Jevon had arrived.
“Come on,” Jevon said softly in Arabic. “I’m trying to build a den. Will you help me?”
A small boy inched forward, still out of reach, but further from the shadows than he’d been before. “What kind of den?”
“A safe one,” Jevon said.
“Will it protect you from the bombs?”
“There are no bombs here, but yes, it probably would.” Jevon laid another block on the brightly coloured wall he was constructing. The hospital officials had clearly thought him mad when he’d arrived with a sack of giant Lego, but as more children crept forward, Jevon stuck the officials an invisible middle finger.
“They’re in A&E,” the social worker had said when she’d contacted him. “Sitting on the floor.”
Jevon had suppressed a growl. “Is that the best you can do? They’ve lost everything twice over and you can’t find them a beanbag and somewhere quiet to sit?”
By the time Jevon had reached the hospital, a room had been found, but he got the feeling that he wasn’t the kind of interpreter they’d expected. As he continued to work with the children, he sensed unease behind him. Murmurs. Shuffling paperwork. The clip of footsteps coming and going. At some point he’d have to appease them and extract the necessary information from the Syrian children, but not yet. They weren’t ready to tell him, and despite a lifetime of this kind of work, Jevon and the goosebumps on the back of his neck weren’t quite ready to hear it.
* * *
Jevon filled out the penultimate form and passed it to the waiting hospital official. In the hours he’d been on the floor with the Syrian children, more and more corduroy suits had appeared, clutching clipboards and stacks of paperwork. There were dozens of them now, all eying the makeshift shelter Jevon and the children had fashioned from Technicolour building blocks. The structure was small, but just big enough to hide a child as they helped Jevon fill out their forms.
Child by child took a piece of Jevon’s heart as they gave up their names and drifted away with the waiting social workers. Many of them had been orphans before they’d fled to Britain. Now they’d lost whoever they’d had left—grandparents, cousins, brothers, and sisters. What would become of them now?
Jevon sighed and turned to the last child—a tiny girl with grubby hands and huge eyes. She’d grafted diligently on the building work but hadn’t looked Jevon’s way even once. Elsewhere, he’d perhaps have the time to leave her be, to wait for her to come to him, but it wasn’t going to pan out like that today.
A pretty pink cloth was poking out of Jevon’s play sack. He nudged it towards the girl with his foot. “Can you bring me that?”