Same Time Next Week

Chapter 30

Amanda raced to the hospital. Thank goodness at that time of night there were plenty of parking spaces, because during the day the whole area was always gridlocked with traffic. Bradley had said that Ingrid was in the acute medical unit, which was where they took people in the first instance, she knew that from previous visits with her mum. She caught the lift and then walked in and saw her brother and sister-in-law sitting on chairs outside a bay.

‘How is she? What happened?’ she asked, taking the third seat.

‘Well, as I said on the phone, she fell, we believe.’

He had a really annoying way of talking, almost slow-mo, as if he was thinking about the position of every word before putting it down next to the one before it. ‘Dolly, the neighbour, went round. She’d rung to tell her about a TV programme and Mother didn’t answer so she decided to check on her and heard her calling for help. Luckily she has a key for emergencies, Mother said she’d missed her step and fallen. Dolly rang an ambulance and then Mother asked her to phone me. We came straight here because there was no point in going to the house, we’d have missed her if she was being blue-lighted.’

It wasn’t the time nor the place but Amanda felt yet another a stab of hurt that their mum had asked for Bradley before her. It was the story of her life, to be put in second place and she should have been used to it, but still, it never failed to sting, this son superiority.

‘And what have they said? Where is she?’

‘She’s having an X-ray; we’ve been told to wait here. She’s hurt her head and side and legs and arm but she was talking fine, if a little disorientated.’

‘I don’t like hospitals,’ put in Kerry. ‘Everything always takes so long.’

‘I will have to go and find a toilet,’ said Bradley.

‘There’s one for visitors by the exit,’ said Amanda. She was at the age where every jaunt out involved a recce for where the nearest loo might be.

Bradley stood up, hoisted up his trousers. These days they either sat above his mighty pot or well below it.

‘We’ve got private health care. Platinum level,’ said Kerry as they waited together.

‘Lucky you,’ said Amanda. Something else for them to brag about.

‘Bradley had it through his job but we’ve carried it on. He got it free for long enough, so it all evens out now we’ve to pay for it.’

‘Nice perk to have.’ Out of sheer devilment, she was tempted to say that Mon Enfant had its own private hospital on site just to top her, but she couldn’t be bothered.

Bradley returned. Amanda heard him before he came around the corner. He was half-man, half-battered accordion. It was a good job he already had private healthcare because they would never have taken him as a new customer.

Bradley sat down, sighed, looked at his watch. ‘An hour and a half,’ he said in a laboured whisper.

‘That’s hardly anything in an NHS hospital,’ replied Amanda. ‘I’m surprised she wasn’t still in A and E on a trolley.’

They heard a trundle, the noise getting louder and then saw a bed nosing out from around the corner, heading towards them. Ingrid was lying on it. She had a dressing on the side of her head which was blanking one eye.

‘Bradley?’ she called.

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘Is that you, Amanda?’ Ingrid added as she was wheeled into the bay. The porter manoeuvred the bed into position. There were three other people in the bay, all elderly, all supine and sleeping.

‘There you go, darling,’ said the porter to Ingrid.

‘Thank you,’ Amanda said to him because no one else had acknowledged him.

A nurse appeared. Young, but with an undeniable air of efficiency.

‘Hi, I’m Rashida. I’ll be looking after Ingrid. Is she your mum?’

She looked at Amanda first.

‘Yes, and this is my brother.’

‘Have a seat. Can I take down some history from you?’

Bradley huffed tetchily. ‘We’ve already done this once.’

‘It’s just a few extra details,’ said Rashida, with more patience than Amanda would have shown him.

‘Yes, you fire away,’ she said, because she would have bet her bottom dollar that Bradley answered ‘don’t know’ to most of those questions already asked. He wouldn’t have had a clue about his mother’s dosage of lacidipine and darifenacin for instance. Amanda sorted out all the tablets for the week and put them in a pill organiser for her.

Rashida took down the details she needed, including some things to write on the whiteboard above Ingrid’s head, conversation starters for medical staff to engage her with. ‘What does she like?’ she asked, addressing Bradley.

‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘ Coronation Street maybe.’

‘She hates Coronation Street ,’ said Amanda, butting in. ‘She likes going to the coffee shop around the corner in the mornings with her friends. She does all her own paperwork and bills, she’s always enjoyed doing that. She watches Sunrise Town every single day. It’s a soap from Australia. Very far-fetched but she never misses it. And Chuck Norris in Walker, Texas Ranger . She fancies him rotten.’

Bradley had a dense look on his face as if all this was news to him, because it was.

Ingrid had gone to sleep and she looked settled. The nurse explained that she’d been given some painkillers and fluids because she was somewhat dehydrated. She asked if she kept up her fluids at home. Again Bradley gave a shrug of ignorance. Amanda answered, ‘I’ve always made sure she has plenty of easy-access drinks in the fridge, she likes the little bottles of flavoured waters and I check the recycling bin for the empties to make sure she’s having them.’

‘When was the last time you saw her? She couldn’t tell us how long she’d been lying there.’

Amanda looked to Bradley. He’d been on duty that teatime.

‘Erm… I didn’t actually go today. I rang to make sure she was fine about… two—’ although Kerry mistakenly dobbed him in by saying, ‘eleven’ at the same time.

‘She was perfectly fine. I asked her.’ Bradley’s tone was abrupt and defensive because he could read the look of disgust on his sister’s face. ‘She was going to make herself some toast because she didn’t think she’d feel very hungry… later. She wouldn’t have starved.’

As soon as the nurse had gone, Amanda turned on him.

‘If you aren’t going to go up, you should tell me.’

‘She doesn’t need someone to visit every day. You’ve made a rod for your own back, Amanda, going up when she has been perfectly capable of making herself something to eat. Some of us have lives.’

The implication was that she didn’t. He was sort of right. And it was just bad luck that on the day when their mother didn’t have company, she’d fallen. Amanda apologised to her brother for snapping at him and he accepted it, albeit with a huff of resignation.

‘Well, if she’s sleeping, we should let her,’ said Bradley. ‘She’s in the best place, and needs rest.’

‘I’ll stay a bit longer,’ said Amanda.

Bradley and Kerry both leaned in and gave Ingrid a kiss on her cheek which she would have liked, Amanda thought. She was surprised she hadn’t woken up like Sleeping Beauty, but it was better she was out of it after what must have been a scary ordeal for her. She’d sign up to that Scopesearch site tomorrow and see what the up-to-date valuation on the house would be, because Bradley was unlikely to disagree with her now about selling up. How could he, when exactly what she had warned him would happen had.

She pulled up a chair and sat at the side of her mum, gathered Ingrid’s hand into her own, bones covered in crepe paper, wormlike blue veins standing proud. Old hands. Her mother still wore her gold wedding band, the one that Arnold had put on her finger, because she had never stopped calling herself Mrs Worsnip. Amanda thought back to a time, before Bradley, when they’d go shopping and Ingrid would say, Hold tight . In the days when her hand always gravitated to her mother’s like a magnet.

Ingrid’s mouth was a long open O and she was snoring softly. It was hard to see the young woman she was once, the one whom her father adored, the woman he couldn’t wait to get into bed on their wedding night. She couldn’t remember her mother crying when he died. Maybe she did at the funeral that Amanda wasn’t allowed to go to. She didn’t even know it had happened until after it had, and that decision had been wrong, not to let her say that last goodbye to a father she loved. A funeral was not the place for children, Ingrid had said by way of an excuse much later. Not because of the gravitas and sadness, but in case they disrupted it by being children.

The woman in the bed diagonally across started shouting for a nurse to help her. She needed to wee. She was shouting enough to wake the other two women in the bay, but at least not Ingrid. Amanda put her chair back on the stack of others by the sink, placed her lips against her mother’s warm cheek and whispered that she’d be back tomorrow. Then she crossed to the old lady who needed attention and pressed her buzzer for her.

At three a.m. in the morning, Amanda was nudged awake by a rogue thought.

What was it that Kerry had said about private health insurance? It was of significance but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was or why her brain had felt the need to wake her up to ask about it. She went back to sleep and the thought crawled away into the corner of her head, for another time.