The Flowers of Bay C (The Flowers #1)

Chapter 1

I can tell the man by my bed is judging me. Probably because I’m wearing a scraggy nightshirt emblazoned with the pink-sequinned words Sorry Not Sorry. Then again, perhaps I just think everyone is judging me these days.

I always mean to pack a bag for these occasions – silk pyjamas, a fluffy dressing gown, like I’m actually staying in a lavish hotel. But I don’t own any silk pyjamas, my dressing gown died in the noughties, and I’m in hospital. Again.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say to the nurse, who maybe isn’t judging me at all. Maybe he’s thinking about something else entirely, like when he’s going to get off this endless shift. And I don’t even know why I’m apologising.

‘You’re not sorry,’ he says, pointing to my nightshirt and grinning.

I try to smile at him, but my lips are too cracked. ‘Sorry,’ I say again.

He shakes his head, winking at me as he walks away.

I didn’t think I’d end up in here tonight.

It was a normal day, really, Jake in school and me at home, a little more tired than usual.

It was only after lunch when it smashed into me suddenly, the infection, whipped me off my feet and slammed me to the ground.

‘Again?’ Jake said when he got home, tossing his bag into the corner and opening the fridge. ‘Hospital?’

Hospital.

Jake grunted, checked me over and moaned at the lack of anything in the fridge. Then he called the ambulance. Then he held my hand while we waited. Then he asked if we had any biscuits.

We didn’t.

The air is too thick in this ward. Cloying waves of disinfectant and over-boiled cabbage. All around me it presses in, spattered walls and faded concertinaed curtains, with its discordant symphony of buzzers beeping, phones ringing, machines singing.

‘You. You, girl.’

I pull my brain out of its fog and cast a glance around the ward. What girl? What You?

‘Yes, you, girl, I said.’

Turns out it’s me, even though I left the girl in me behind over twenty years ago. She’s still there somewhere, though, desperate to be something more than I’ve made her.

The elderly woman in the bed next to me is pointing at me, her bony finger quivering. What does she want? What does she think I can do for her from here?

A healthcare assistant shushes her. ‘Come on, Edna lovely. Settle down. Leave the nice lady alone.’

‘Go away,’ she says to the healthcare assistant, her voice so reedy the words are almost swallowed by her breath.

‘I only want her.’ She tries to sit herself up; her face is grey round the edges, her eyes ringed with shadows.

She sags back down, sinking into her pillow.

‘I only want her. Eighteen, she is. We had a nice cake.’

The healthcare assistant sighs, flicking her glance upwards. ‘She’s a patient, Edna my darling. She’s poorly. She can’t talk to you now.’

She doesn’t say, and there’s no way she’s eighteen, but I’m sure she’s thinking it. She shoots a weary grin over at me, rolling her eyes. I can’t smile back and can’t do anything much else, either. I’m hemmed in by an oxygen mask, a drip, and agony like knives needling my skin.

I couldn’t say anything even if I were eighteen.

I’m forty-five and I want to go to sleep. I want to sink into wide-open night spaces where I am allowed to live in colour.

???

Someone is touching my arm.

I open my eyes and the light batters my pupils.

Was I asleep? Jake’s face is in my mind, his eyes that shimmered when he left me here earlier.

Has he had a good dinner? Maybe he’ll be cooking for my parents, perhaps his famous enchiladas; I catch the scent for seconds and want to wrap myself up in it.

‘Nurse.’ Edna is weeping, and no one takes any notice.

‘Miss Fielding?’

A heavy weight presses down on my eyelids, and I try to fight against it, to focus on the person speaking to me, the soft, uncertain touch on my arm.

A man in scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck hovers next to my bed, clipboard in one hand, iPad in another, clearing his throat.

He looks about sixteen. ‘I just need to talk to you for a few moments, if that’s okay?

’ His voice is kind but he flutters with tension, his gaze flicking around the busy ward as if there are far more important things to do.

‘I’m Doctor Wood, I’m a medical junior doctor. ’

‘Oh.’ I slump a little bit inside. Junior doctors: sweet and young and serious and a little bit na?ve.

‘On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest, what would you say your level of pain was?’

The question crashes into my foggy mind.

What is my level of pain? My eight might be someone else’s four, my five might be someone else’s ten.

How do you quantify pain? I think back to when I was in labour with Jake.

I would have given that a sure ten. But this is a ten too, just a different kind of ten.

This is a ten without joy at the end of it, without the hope of it being over soon, without my body knowing what to do with it.

This is a sharper ten, a ten that might crush me into tiny little pieces.

My pain is lots of colours, but they are all harsh ones. A purple so deep it is the depths of blackness, a bruise of despair. A red so bright it slices me open. A green so bitter it clinches me into spiky embraces I do not want.

Fifteen and a half, I think.

‘Eight,’ I say.

He writes it down. ‘Okay, so I have your x-ray here.’ He shows me the tablet, tracing his fingers over the image of my messed-up lungs. ‘You have a pneumococcal infection here, you see. Both lungs. I’m afraid we’ll have to keep you in a while. We’ll get you started on some IV antibiotics.’

I try to find words. I could reel off the drugs and the dosages, the times they should be administered, but fog wraps up the words and smashes them away. I squeeze my eyes closed.

He clears his throat and I force my eyes open, force myself to focus on his face, all floppy hair and black-framed glasses, a blur of youth and newly minted authority, a fight between arrogance and uncertainty.

‘We’ll start you on one gram amoxicillin.’

I shake my head. ‘No.’

He grips his clipboard tight, his shoulders rising and falling, as if he is weary of patients who tell him that they can do this better than he can, as if he knows that he needs to learn bedside manner but it’s sometimes just too hard.

I swallow and my throat is choked with razor blades. ‘Not that.’

He frowns at me and then glances at my notes and starts flicking back through the pages and murmuring words to himself.

I know he’s going to tell me what I’ll have now, as if it’s his idea.

It’ll be tobramycin that makes you tired and sad, once a day for fourteen days.

And then ceftazidime that tastes like rotten onions in the back of your throat as it sears through your veins, three times a day.

‘Right.’

I close my eyes as he collects up his notes and his ruffled dignity and shuffles away to another poor weary patient who probably won’t argue with him about medication.

‘We’re just taking you to Ward Nine, Mrs Fielding,’ someone says. A porter in blue scrubs with a hipster beard and a rainbow lanyard. It’s Miss, I want to say to him. Not married. Not anymore. But I don’t want to think about that, because it might make me sink and I have to hold on.

Edna squawks as he wheels me away. ‘Where’s the eighteen-year-old going? Where are you taking her? I need her.’

She’s leaking bewilderment as the porter wheels my bed away, tears creeping down hollowed-out cheeks. I turn my gaze away, longing to be more for her.

The temperature drops as we push through the acute medical unit doors and into the long hallway.

This is the Victorian wing of the hospital – an infinite corridor, harsh strip lights surging above.

I can’t breathe. I see Jake’s trainers kicked off by the front door at home and wish I hadn’t wasted so much time nagging him to clear them away.

We stop at a set of lifts and wait. The hipster porter hums a tune I vaguely recognise, tapping his feet.

Somewhere in the bowels of the building a clanking, grating sound starts up, as if the lift has woken from a hundred-year slumber.

It arrives with a sulky hiss that sounds like Jake’s grumbles when I make him do homework.

Doors opening, the automated voice chants, the doors crawling open with a suck of air. Doors closing. Lift going down.

‘Here we go,’ the porter says, pausing at double doors and buzzing the intercom. He shifts from foot to foot and rubs his hands together as we wait.

A nurse looks up as we enter. Ward Manager, it says on her badge. Official dark-blue tunic and trousers. Weary piercing eyes. I know her.

‘Where for Mrs Fielding?’

She glances at the electronic board behind the nurse’s station, then points down the hall. ‘C Bay. Be there in a moment.’ She looks more closely at me, and I see the usual recognition sweeping through her eyes. ‘Oh, it’s you again, turning up like a bad penny!’

That’s me. Bad Penny. Waste of space Penny. Drain on the NHS Penny.

She flushes. ‘Oh! I didn't mean… I forgot.’

The porter turns and grins at me, working gum fiercely around his mouth. ‘You look tired. You get any sleep up there?’

I shake my head.

He makes a wry face. ‘Ward’ll be quieter, love.’

The ward isn’t quieter. A machine that sounds like a jet engine in trouble squeals from Bed 4, a cacophony of beeping wails out around the bay, and all the lights are on.

‘Has no one put these lights off?’ No one answers him so he deposits my bed in the middle on the left side, and strolls out, waving. ‘Hope you feel better soon.’

He doesn’t turn the lights off on his way.

I don’t want to be here. I want to be home in my bed with Jake safe in the next room. Will I see my boy again?

‘You woke me up.’

I peer through the half-closed curtains to my left where a blonde woman in a Frozen nightshirt is propped up in her bed, her stare a thousand daggers.

She shrugs at me and then shifts her body around, shoves her feet into huge fluffy bunny slippers on the floor by her bed. Grabs a ratty pink dressing gown from the plastic chair next to her bed. ‘Going for a fag.’ She staggers out of the bay, trailing an oxygen cylinder.

The world presses in and angry clouds shudder through half-waking dreams. There’s noise in the dreams, but it’s blurry at the edges. I don’t know where I am.

Something is biting my arm in two.

‘Miss Fielding. Penny. Sorry, flower, I’m just taking your blood pressure. Relax, now.’

I blink and glance at the clock on the wall above the door.

Four o’clock. Did I sleep? The main lights are still on.

A healthcare assistant in a light green dress looms into my vision.

‘Oh dear,’ she says, releasing the cuff.

She grabs my finger and places it in a pulse oximeter.

‘Eighty-eight.’ Her brow knits as she flips through my chart.

I try to form a word. ‘M…’

She lifts my wrist, placing a gloved finger on my pulse point. ‘You what, flower?’

My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. ‘Morphine… please.’

Marcus would’ve scorned me for that. Drugs are weakness, he’d say.

‘Sorry, petal, you’ll have to wait for the nurse. She’ll be round later with your IVs. Try and get some sleep. Just turn your head, lovely, just got to do your temperature. Oh. Thirty-nine point eight. Right, well, try and rest.’

Frozen woman is back in the bed next to mine, mouth open wide, pneumatic snores spilling out and reverberating through the bay. She looks lost there, like I feel, falling into a void. I am tumbling over myself, and somewhere down there I know it is quiet and I want more of it.

Weak sunlight straggles through the windows, and I remember I left the washing outside. Jake won’t notice; he has a great knack for ignoring those things. It’ll flap around out there for the next two weeks, lonely and cold and waiting.

‘Shh, now, flower.’ It’s the healthcare assistant from before. I know her, I think, from more stays in here. I recognise her spiky red hair and wide-open smile. ‘Just doing your obs again. Try to sleep.’

A nurse comes up behind her, drip-bag in hand. ‘S’cuse me, Nicki. She needs hydrating.’

‘Just give me a sec.’

She shows the oximeter to the nurse, who raises her eyebrows.

The nurse hooks the bag up to my drip-stand and connects it to my cannula. ‘There you go, Penny. That’ll help.’

I wonder what will happen if I allow myself to sink deep into the enticing murk, to drown. It is black as night and maybe it will hide me away forever. No one will miss me, not very much. Jake’s old enough to cope by himself more now, and that scares me.

Then, suddenly, I feel it: his hand in mine when he was small. He knew I’d always keep him safe, even when my body let me down.

Whatever’s dragging me down can’t win, because he has to be okay.

He still needs me, so I’m not allowed to go.