Mummy’s Little Girl: A heart-rending story of abuse, innocence and the desperate race to save a lost child. Jane Elliott
squeezed her teddy bear a little tighter and nodded her head.
She felt a bit better once Christian had left the room and she was alone, but only a bit. It all seemed so unreal: this morning she had been going to school as normal, and this evening she had been taken into care, away from everything she knew. It had been like one body blow after another, and more than anything, she missed her own home. It didn’t matter that her mum had hit her; it didn’t matter that Rebecca had been mean. Right now, she would even be happy to see Auntie Rose. All she wanted was her family.
Dani looked at herself in a mirror that hung on the wall. The familiar bruised face looked back at her. She touched the skin – it was a bit less sore than it had been yesterday – and for an idle moment she wondered if the other children in this place would look anything like her, beaten and battered. Then she remembered the two boys she had seen in the hallway. They had looked perfectly normal. No, she knew with a horrible certainty that she was going to be the different one here.
Just as that thought went through her head, the door opened, and she started. For a moment she didn’t turn round, choosing instead to look at the reflection of the room in the mirror. There were two girls standing and looking at her. They were dressed in trendy clothes, nothing like Dani’s. One of them, who had long hair and an Alice band, stood with her hands on her hips – a strangely adult stance – while the other, whose hair was straight but only shoulder-length, had hers firmly in the pockets of her trousers. They both had slightly pursed lips.
Slowly, Dani turned round to look at them properly. ‘Hello,’ she said.
The girl with the Alice band spoke first. ‘I wouldn’t spend so much time looking in the mirror,’ she said, ‘if I looked like that.’
Automatically, Dani’s hand touched her bruise again. ‘I was just—’
‘Yeah, we know what you were doing,’ the girl interrupted her. She strode over to Dani’s bed, sat on it and gave her a combative stare.
‘I thought that was my bed,’ Dani said, doing her best to sound polite.
But the girl wasn’t listening to her. She had found Dani’s teddy bear, lying there on the pillow. She picked it up by one ear and held it dangling in the air. ‘This yours?’ she asked with a sneer in her voice.
Dani nodded.
Suddenly the two of them burst out laughing. The girl holding the teddy bear threw it to her friend, who acted as if it was too hot to touch and threw it back.
As quickly as she had picked it up, the girl on the bed threw the teddy on the floor. Dani rushed to pick it up, but before she could get to it the girl kicked it out of her way. Dani turned to grab it again, and this time managed to. She held the soft toy close to her, but that only seemed to amuse the girls more.
‘You got any sweets?’ the second girl asked her.
‘No,’ Dani replied.
‘Ciggies? Money?’
She shook her head.
‘How old are you, anyway?’
‘Twelve.’
‘You don’t look like twelve to me. Look more like ten.’ She turned to her friend. ‘Looks more like ten, doesn’t she, Kaz?’
‘Yeah,’ Kaz replied.
‘How old are you?’ Dani asked.
Kaz tapped herself on the chest. ‘I’m thirteen, Vicki’s twelve. But you’re nearly thirteen, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ said Vicki. ‘So you’re the youngest. Least, you act the youngest with your stupid cuddly toy.’
‘I’m not staying here for long.’ Dani tried to say it defiantly, but it ended up sounding a bit apologetic.
The two girls started laughing. ‘Yeah,’ Kaz snorted. ‘That’s what they tell everyone. I’ve been here since I was ten.’
Dani blinked, and she felt the familiar wave of sickness in her stomach. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Well, I’m not you, and I’m going home soon.’
Kaz shrugged. ‘Whatever. Creepy Christian says you’ve got to come down to tea, and we’re supposed to take you.’
‘Why do you call him that?’ Dani asked.
The girls smirked elusively. ‘You coming or what?’ Vicki asked.
Dani looked down at her teddy bear, not knowing what to do with it. Just then, Vicki stood up from the bed and walked to the door, leaving Dani free to rest the soft toy on her pillow. She tried to do it nonchalantly, but when she turned round again she saw that the two girls were still sneering at her from the doorway.
They left the room, leaving Dani to run after them. She followed them back down the stairs and into the hallway, where other children were passing through. Dani recognised one of the boys she had seen on her arrival. ‘Who’s that?’ he shouted out to Vicki and Kaz.
The two girls looked back over their shoulders at Dani, and then over at the boy. Kaz made some kind of gesture with her hands that she couldn’t make out; whatever it was, it made the boy laugh as they walked through a door off the hallway, down a small corridor and into a dining room at the end.
There were two long tables here, positioned parallel to each other, and one shorter one. Against one wall there was a serving hatch where two chubby, red-faced women stood serving food to the line of children and a few adults who were queuing up for it. Some of them had already been given their food and were sitting down – the children at one of the two long tables, the grown-ups at the shorter one. There were perhaps twenty people in the room – five adults to fifteen children – but to Dani’s ears they made enough noise for fifty.
She stood in the doorway, watching everything happen. Not everybody had noticed her, but those who did cast curious glances in her direction; she felt her face flushing as she tried to avoid their eyes.
Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.
‘Hi, Dani.’ She recognised Christian’s upbeat voice almost immediately, and felt a small surge of relief that he was there. ‘Met Kaz and Vicki, have you, my love? Come on, let’s queue up. I’ll show you what to do.’
Dani’s key worker handed her a plastic tray from a pile next to the serving hatch and they waited their turn in silence. When they came to be served, Dani looked unenthusiastically at the spoonfuls of rice and something else that was served on to Christian’s plate.
‘Chicken curry,’ he said with a smile. ‘My favourite.’
Dani didn’t like the look of it at all, but she said nothing as the serving ladies filled her plate.
‘New girl?’ one of them asked with a smile, and again she could tell that the woman’s eyes kept flickering to the bruise on her face.
Dani nodded.
‘Ah,’ she commiserated, her voice dripping with sympathy. ‘Never mind. You’ll soon settle in.’
‘Come on, Dani,’ Christian interrupted. ‘Let’s find you a place to sit.’
Christian led her to one of the long tables and found her a place next to Kaz and opposite a boy she didn’t recognise. Neither of them looked particularly thrilled to have Dani sitting with them, but they kept quiet. ‘Look after Dani for me now,’ Christian said brightly. He put his hand back on her shoulder. ‘We’ll have a little chat after dinner, my love, and I’ll introduce you to some of the staff.’
Dani ate in silence. She didn’t like the food, but she didn’t want to make a fuss about it, so she held it down while the children around her made a special effort not to talk to her. She kept trying to think of things to say to break the ice, but nothing would pop into her head, so she sat there with a frown on her face as she concentrated on eating her dinner.
Gradually, the others