Rat, mid her discomfort, appreciates the generosity of the offer. She reflects, then says finally, “I’ll let her know we’re here, and we’re safe. I promise.” In her head, she’s thinking she’ll e-mail Jérôme, ask him to pass on the message. She’s not ready yet to talk to Vanessa.

Chapter 3

Over the next couple of weeks, the newcomers’ life at Hawkridge Road settled into some approximation of routine.

In the mornings, when Artemio was at school and Kate and Gillem were at work, Rat hung out with Mirjana, helping her around the house, while Morgan played on the computer.

Mirjana was thirtyish, but she seemed closer to Rat’s age than Kate’s. She wore her hair dyed cotton-candy pink and teased into a kind of pagoda buttressed by chopsticks, and she dressed in artfully ripped and sequined jeans cut low to reveal her thong. When she was doing the housework, she liked to blast girly music.

Mirjana came from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer existed. She was a war refugee, but the fact that horrible things had happened to all her friends and relatives during this war that Rat had never heard of, only seemed to make her the more determined to have fun. She was smart: she’d been studying law when the war broke out. In London, she joked, you needed at least a doctorate in civil engineering from your home country to get a job cleaning loos.

Mirjana thought France a far more civilized place than England, and was always trying to get Rat and Morgan to teach her French phrases. What she chiefly wanted to know was fancy ways of telling men to fuck off, an aim which to Rat’s mind defeated the purpose of all those jeans cut halfway down her bum.

Mirjana had a boyfriend named Zoran whom she’d met when he was the manager of an after-hours club. Now he was opening his own cybercafé in the East End. Zoran wanted Mirjana to come work for him, but Mirjana was pretty happy working for the McKanes, and didn’t know what they would do without her.

Kate and Gillem both worked very hard during the week. But on the weekends or whenever they had a free moment, they made a point of showing Rat and Morgan around London—generous tours that ranged from the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace to Hamleys, a multistory toy emporium on Regent Street where they treated each child to a present of his own choosing, and afterward bought Rat and Morgan a set of warm clothes and Wellington boots from the Gap next door.