Introduction to Selkie

Child,
a girl,
sitting with
dangling feet
a foot off the ground.
So much confidence for
someone so young in a room
full of grumpy, hefty builders.
You order beans on toast with a smile.
Little black girl all alone; where's your mum?

She's upstairs, fast asleep in a locked room.
She's a bedside table of tissues,
and a sleep-grumpy request for
her complimentary snack.
So you come down alone,
leave by the front door.
Bright purple coat,
black pigtails,
just a
child.

Let me introduce you to Selkie.
Selkie is a little black girl staying here with her mother while they find a house. She's been here for about a month now, and has settled in really quite well, considering. The first time I met her, it nearly broke my heart.
She was sitting alone at a table in the middle of the breakfast room at 8 15am on the dot. She was surrounded by strangers. At the tables around, a business man frowned at his coffee cup, an eldery couple muttered at each other over a pot of tea, and the rest of the tables were taken up by grumpy builders who sleep-moodily plowed their way through their full English breakfasts, large frames spilling over the small chairs. She seemed perfectly at ease - her feet dangled above the floor in their sturdy school shoes, a glass of orange juice in hand. She smiled at me and said good morning when I approached her, and asked me for beans on toast and bacon.
No child should be having breakfast alone. And in a guest house? She ate her breakfast happily enough, said thank you prettily, asked after Marmaduke the dog. Then she placed her glass in the centre of her empty plate with her cutlery, and disappeared upstairs to her mother. Ten minutes later she was down again with her school bag, her black frizzy hair in two plaits, and, saying a sweet goodbye to me through the breakfast room door, all alone she left the guest house for school.
This routine is normal. Her mother never comes down for breakfast. Alone, this ten year old gets ready for school, alone in a breakfast room surrounded by strangers she eats her breakfast, and alone she leaves the guest house each morning for school. She's lonely, I can tell. She hangs around in the breakfast room with me and the other guests as long as she can afford to when she's finished breakfast. She talks about her home in Africa, and her pet dogs that she's left behind, who she misses and wishes she could have brought to England. She talks about the summers there playing with her pets, and her weekend swimming trips here with her school friends. She never talks about school. At the weekends she comes to the door of Katherine's flat and asks to see Marmaduke. On Saturday morning she even asked if she could help me set the tables againn after the breakfast shift, and she took alot of pleasure in copying my movements, and making sure the cutlery and plates were straight and in the right places.
She's the one person in this guest house who stands out to me - this small black girl with the shy smile who's grown up too fast - and I know I'm going to miss her when they move out.

Her mother is more difficult to get along with. She has a tendency to look down on us who work here - she repetitively refuses to let the other ladies in to service her room, and nit-picks about the little details when she does. The one example I have of this was when I forgot to put out a complimentary biscuit on her tea-tray; she sent Selkie down to ask me for it. I've found her fussy and at times irritating, but she's always polite. However I know from Mary-Jane's tales that this politeness seems restricted to me - I wonder if it's because when I first met her I told her how lovely I thought her daughter was, I don't know. She spends alot of time in bed, with the curtains drawn, and is always asking for more boxes of soft tissues. Selkie seems to spend quite a bit of her time looking after her mother. Which, along with the current lack of own housing and being uprooted from her homeland, may explain her independance.