Mia is Blue and Laurie is Red

Mia is Blue and Laurie is Red

I'm trying to read a book on the train to work when I see Mia. My vision flickers from the word palatable, to her face. Her nose is longer, her cheeks slimmer and her eyes are framed with the same dark eyelashes; not the kind you forget. She's had braces and well, I'm glad, she needed those. Rudely, she's grown up without me. I shift in my seat and take off my scarf. Her hands don't move from her thighs, and her gaze doesn't crack.

She nods at me with her sharp chin. A short nod. As if to say, ‘Christ, stop looking at me, do I know you?’

It’s better now that years have passed between us. The last time I saw Mia, she was crying.

It's four years prior when we first meet. She's lying in a hospital bed. Must've been about early August. Cubes of glossy light slip across her bed sheets. Her bloodied clothes lie crumpled on a chair, as if they've been shifting to get comfortable. Mia wipes her upper lip when she sees me. She probably hasn't slept all night. Her soft downy hair is sticking up in tufts, and her cheeks are red. Hospital rooms like that are always hot and thick, like they want you to feel like you're slowly cooking.

'Hi Mia. I'm Laurie. It's nice to meet you.'

I dart out my hand, like an arrow, and she takes it. Her tiny palm is doughy and wet. The more I treat children like adults, with respect, the easier they are with me. Especially only 10 year olds, like Mia. If I treat them like they're idiots, they wilt, like that overwatered aloe vera plant mum gave me that I won't admit is dead. Plus, kids aren't idiots. They've got that sparky beginner's-mind intelligence we lose as adults.

'I'm a social worker. Do you know what a social worker is?' She frowns. 'I'm here to check you're safe and happy and, if there's anything you'd like to change about your life, you can tell me.'

My spiel about being a social worker always comes out a bit blunt, warped from years of reeling off the same thing. But she nods and wipes her upper lip again.

There's a box of toys in the corner. I pull out some plastic dinosaurs and set them on her bed. She picks up the velociraptor.

'This one's my favourite,' she says.

'Mine too,' I lie.

When Mia talks, her eyebrows bend and fall in tiny swoops. She talks fast, like she's scared I'm going to interrupt her. She makes the velociraptor walk across the bedsheets, before falling over.

‘Do you know why you’re here, Mia?’

'I sleep-walk a lot. I woke up accidentally in the back of my Grandma's car. The police took me to hospital.' She pauses. 'When can I see my Grandma, and my brothers?'

'I'm not sure,' I say, because it's the only honest thing I can think of saying, 'why don't you tell me more about why you're here?'

Her eyes are red, and her nose all snotty and crusty.

She makes the plesiosaurus attack the velociraptor, which seems entirely unrealistic.

'I woke up with some blood on me. Think I tripped up before I got in the back of my Grandma's car. I hit my back on the side of the road.’

It's the same story she's told the police. An interesting explanation of the deep laceration wounds across her back. The police Child Abuse Investigation Team sent me photos of Mia's back, telling me it was some of the worst physical abuse from a belt they'd ever seen.

'When can I go home?' she asks.

'We're checking that home is safe for you to go to.' It's true. Need to be honest, at least.

'But I prayed all night. I prayed to God that it was just a nightmare and I'm gonna wake up.'

I ignore the God comment. Not much I can say to that. But I can't leave her in this state. I sit with her for a long time, and we talk about dinosaurs and the fact they probably had feathers, until she seems to have levelled out. I get up to leave and ask if I can come back tomorrow, again, as if she has a choice.

I leave the hospital and call my manager. Then I spit out paperwork. I write a statement to file for an emergency court order to legally remove Mia from the home she's grown up in. It takes me 5 hours. I hone in on the significance of the injuries, and Mia's Grandma's bloodied fingerprints which were found on Mia's body, and on a leather belt in the back of the car. That’s it. That’s all I know about Mia’s life.

Mia moves to a foster carer's house in Bell Green. The house is fat and square, and matches every other house, lined up next to each other. It's the kind of street I would've idiotically dreamt of living on as a kid. Inside the plants are fake, permanently twisted into plastic shapes, as if they're screaming to become real. The blue carpets are thin, patterned with brown diamonds, like old pub carpets from the 90's.

The foster carer's name is Marsha. She pisses me off because she’s a poor communicator. Never picks up her calls and replies to some texts and not others. When I visit, she complains about the extra laundry costs because Mia wets the bed.

Mia is always waiting for me. She often stands up in one quick motion, as if she's being electrocuted, smiling from ear to ear.

I bring coloured pencils and paper. We sit at the table and draw.

'Do you see people as colours?' she says. It's random. Out of place. She waves her hand to hurry me up, 'why are you making that face? Do you?'

'Yes. I always ask this and usually people don't know what I mean.'

She sticks out her bottom lip. 'Are you taking the mick?'

'Nope. People,' I say, 'and numbers, letters, days of the week, places.'

'London is green,' says Mia, smiling with her gapped front teeth.

'London is green. One is yellow, two is red.'

'No, you're wrong! One is green, two is black…' Mia's giggles ripple after she speaks, the laughter escaping into the air above us.

'It's called synaesthesia. My mum and brother have it too,' I say. I don't usually tell kids about my life. It's not really fair, usually. But here it feels okay. I think.

'No one else in my family has it,' Mia says, looking down, before asking, 'what colour am I?'

I don't even have to think about it. 'You're blue.'

Mia's small doughy fingers splay out in front of us on the table, and she smiles wider than usual.

'What am I?' I ask.

'You're red.'

My heart skips.

'Why am I red?'

'I don't know,' Mia says, wriggling her small arms like she's putting on a life jacket, 'why am I blue?'

'Because you're calm,' I say, regretting it. If Mia doesn't want to be calm, she shouldn't.

She draws me in red crayon. All jagged lines and sharp edges. Then she draws herself in blue, smooth and round.

'What colour is God?' I ask.

'She’s red too.'

She colours God in, pressing hard. The red bleeds through the paper.

I visit again a week later. Me and Mia play in the room with brown diamonds on the carpet. I bring a board game this time. Snakes and ladders. Simple. Safe.

'When I'm hurt, my Grandma puts magic cream on my cut,' she says, moving her counter up a ladder.

'When do you get hurt?' I say.

Mia hesitates. 'Only when I do bad things?’

'What bad things?' I ask, feeling the familiar weight in my stomach. The kind of sinking I feel when a kid is talking and there's something really off and I know I'm only seeing a sliver of the truth.

Her counter lands on a ladder. She slides it up.

'I wanna go home. I wanna be back with Grandma,' she says, her eyes like little puddles.

We've had this conversation about five times. Mia has been having supervised contact with her Grandma and brothers every week, but whenever she leaves the contact centre, she crumples like she's been shot.

'Grandma's never hurt me,' Mia says, 'I dunno why you keep thinking she has.'

I don't ask Mia again how she came to have the bloodied wounds on her body that are still healing. She always stumbles, and trips, as if her own words are poisonous.

Once, I asked her what colour her Grandma was.

'She's red, like you, and God,' she said.

A week after that Marie, my manager, calls me. It's mid-morning. I'm working from home and haven't changed out of my pyjamas yet.

'I've got something to tell you, and it's going to be a shock, and I need you to not take this personally,' she says.

'Okay?'

'Mia has made an allegation against you, to Marsha.'

The walls around me melt.

'Laurie? Are you there? You wouldn't really be a fully fledged social worker without a complaint against you.’

'What did she say?'

Marie clears her throat.

Mia has told Marsha that I bully her and that I make her feel like 'poo'. That last time I came to visit, I pinched her when she asked if she could go home, and then I kicked her in the stomach. Mia has an unexplained bruise on her left arm. She'd told Marsha that I'd punished her in the way God will come to punish her on judgement day.

'Laurie, there's a process we'll now have to go through. This'll be referred to the LADO. There'll be a formal investigation… I've been advised that you should have no more contact with children until this has been investigated. But you can work from home, and catch up on your paperwork.'

Funny.

'What are you laughing at?'

'Nothing,' I say.

I've recently considered taking sick leave. Large dollops of my hair have fallen out. I always wake at 4am. But leaving Mia hadn’t been an option.

From across the train carriage, Mia looks at me looking at her.

Maybe quitting my job, in the end, had been a knee-jerk reaction. Obviously, I frequently think about who I was trying to punish by doing this. It was years ago now. The investigation had stretched on for three months, and I’d been interviewed, and then cleared, by a police officer with coffee breath who kept looking at my chest.

I retreated to work at the council in the electoral services, and I get to play at spending most days safely behind a screen. I sleep now. My hair is thicker. I take lunch breaks and have time to think about what to eat for dinner. I’m mostly carved and hollowed out.

Me and mum don’t talk about my job anymore, and she probably thinks about that time of my life as the moment that Laurie tried to save the world, and failed.

The carriage rattles on and squeals to a halt, like a little pig being kicked.

Mia blinks. I nod back.

Open eyes and closed mouths from strangers on the platform break my gaze. A cough. Woollen coats and stitched hats. A laugh. Breath against cheeks. The tack of gum in mouths.

Mia’s fingertips cradle the crucifix around her neck, before pulling the chain taut.

She smiles at me. Her toothy grin. Could mean anything, that smile. Anything at all. And I get to see it.

She walks off the train, and fades into the city.