SCARLETT

I met Scarlett in the garden of a friend’s house in London.
She was worried about changing her school after the summer.
I told her not to worry about the new school and added that she would be OK.
I asked her about the new subjects she would be studying,
and she told me that she was worried about learning French.
Then a little while later, she told me that she already knew five languages.

‘Five languages!’ I shouted. ‘That’s impossible! How do you already know five languages?’
She told me that it was because she had five languages in her body!

I asked her what that meant, and she started to tell me the story of her family.
Her grandfather was from Scotland; he was a sailor, but he only got as far as Portsmouth,
a big navy town on the south coast of England. When he got to Portsmouth, he stopped there,
left the navy and became a boxer. Soon, he met a woman who came from Laos.
Nobody really knew how this woman had ended up in Portsmouth, but Scarlett told me that she still lived there,
and I told Scarlett that she had to find out her grandmother’s story.

‘No, she’s too old now,’ said Scarlett, ‘and anyway, she’s lived in Portsmouth nearly all her life.’

Scarlett’s grandparents had a son, probably one of the only Scottish-Laotians in the world. They called him Bill.
Bill inherited his father’s personality and his mother’s looks,
so the only thing he thought he could do was to become a rock star.
He never really managed to become a rock star, though, so now he works as a graphic designer.

I asked her to tell me about her mother. ‘My mum’s Polish,’ she said.
‘Well, actually she was born in Brighton, but her mum and dad are from Poland.
But I know that her mum was from somewhere in Germany and then came to Poland,
so she’s really German, I suppose. So, that’s another language that I’ve got in my body.’

I asked Scarlett if she could actually speak all the languages that she said she had ‘in her body’,
and she looked at me as if I was an alien. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But I’ve still got them in me!’
We counted up her ‘languages’: Scottish, Laotian, German and Polish. ‘That’s only four!’ I said to her.
‘No, there’s English too!’ Finally, I asked her, ‘And you Scarlett, where are you from?’

She thought for a long time, such a long time that I thought perhaps she hadn’t heard my question.
However, then before I could repeat it, she looked at me. ‘I’m from here,’ she said. ‘I’m from London.’