Chapter 2
You are so inspirational, Penny, they say to me. So brave. They don’t know how they’d cope if they were me. You’re strong, people say to me, and then I have to pretend to be strong, and that makes me weaker still.
We laugh about it on the Facebook group.
We call ourselves The Braves and admit to one another we don’t really feel brave at all.
We have a thread for those in the Five Star Hotel.
Whose turn is it this time, we wonder, to be pampered all day and all night, to sample the extensive menu.
Some of us visit the hotel more regularly than others.
Some push right to the front of the queue and get to indulge in its comfort far too much.
Like me. Grabby, that’s what I am, taking up more than my fair share.
We have a thread for those who don’t make it out, as well.
It doesn’t feel like a hotel this morning.
The ward sister is on her medication round and Nicki is in the ward with the breakfast trolley; what-can-I-do-you-for-today-flower?
Must be on a double shift. I like her, with her big warm smile she casts around so freely.
She’s the kind of nurse patients always hope for: tender and funny all wrapped up together.
She grins at me. ‘Back again, then, Penny?’ I nod, because I haven’t got any words in me this morning.
‘You look pale, flower. Can I do you some porridge? Bit of sugar?’
I shake my head.
‘Toast?’
No.
‘You sure? Anything? What about some yoghurt? Need to keep your strength up.’
I shake my head.
‘Okay, lovely. Just shout if you want something later, won’t you?’
My oxygen mask bites into my face and I move it away for blessed seconds until the air is sucked out of the room. The ward sister looms up out of the choking haze. ‘Got to keep that on, Penny. You know that.’
I know her. Sister Harris. She’s been here for years. Abrupt but kind.
‘Come on, love. Put it back.’
‘Can I have a nasal cannula?’
She sighs, shaking her head at me as if she is a teacher scolding a difficult child. ‘You’re on the high flow, dear. You know that. Don’t want CPAP, do you?’
I know that. And no, I don’t want the positive air pressure machine. I know it’s essential to fill my lungs, but it makes me feel like my face is trapped in a wind tunnel.
I roll onto my side to reach for the bed remote to sit myself up a bit.
The healthcare assistants will be round in a minute to get the beds made before the doctors come on their ward rounds, but I’m not sure I can make it out of bed.
I hope Jake’s up, getting ready for school, not skiving off like he did last time I was in.
I close my eyes, sink back down against the thin pillow.
‘You just get in yesterday?’
Open them again. It’s the girl in the bed to the left of me, the one with the Frozen nightshirt in the night. The one I woke up.
I nod. ‘Was in the acute unit.’
She grimaces. ‘Like a nightclub in there, just as noisy. Not as fun, though.’
‘Mmm.’
‘What you in for?’ Her accent is heavy west country, her skin shockingly pale. Her blue eyes are almost translucent, stark with her tale of sickness. ‘I been in a week already.’
I try to form the word. ‘Pneumonia.’
‘What?’
Daggers are stabbing me. Piercing my side.
She shakes her head. ‘Don’t worry, my lovely. You’re in no state, are you? Get to sleep. I’m Jodie, by the way.’ She sticks her hand out, as if to shake mine, then pulls it back and does a little wave. ‘I’ll leave you alone now.’
Looks like she’s forgiven me for the early wake-up call.
I glance over into the far corner where an elderly lady lies still, a huge mask the size of a dinner plate pressed to her face, screwed on at the sides.
The Mask, the staff call it, and patients always dread it; much worse than a mere oxygen mask.
She is like a bundle of sticks, so diminutive the pillows almost swallow her whole, her eyes skittering wildly below the mask.
Rescue me, they are shouting. Get me out of this thing.
Jodie catches me looking. ‘That’s our Barbara. Been in longer than me. Not so good today, but she has better times.’
The one other occupant of the ward is in the bed in the far-right corner. A middle-aged woman with a purple scarf draped over her head. Jodie follows my gaze. ‘That’s Amina, I think she’s called. Don’t say much, though. Only came in yesterday.’
The lines on Amina’s face cut deep with exhaustion. She’s picking at a bowl of porridge, an oxygen mask lying by her side. She sees me staring and smiles gently.
I close my eyes and drift back into the fog.
???
The doctor comes in trailing his entourage of registrars and students.
He’s my favourite consultant, Doctor Chowdhury, who sees me in clinic and tells me to go easy on myself but remember to do more exercise, and I always nod and smile, like I’m going to turn over a new leaf first thing in the morning and start couch to 5K, like I will suddenly snap out of all this and feel able to take on the world.
‘Penny Fielding! In here again?’ He spreads his hands and smiles at me. ‘We see far too much of you. No offence.’
I pick at the loose skin around my fingernails and wish I wasn’t wearing this nightshirt. Karen bought it for me for Christmas once. Let’s get you out of all that black, she said. Bit of sparkle, that’s what you need. It was the only one I could find when the ambulance came for me.
Some place inside me I want sparkles, but I don’t want to sparkle at anyone else in case they see me.
He’s serious, all of a sudden, scanning the x-ray and blood results. ‘Hmm. Have you done us a sample yet?’
‘Sent one in, few days ago.’
‘Okay. We’ll need another now you’re in, too.’
He picks up my hand, scrutinises my fingernails with his brow furrowed, his face all shifting in great vivid worry-lines like Van Gogh’s self-portrait. ‘More signs of clubbing than before.’
I look at my nails, at the white blotches, the unnatural curve, the tale told of long-term lung disease.
‘Your infection markers are up, high white blood cell count. You’ll be in for fourteen days, at least.’
I slump even more than I was slumped already.
‘I’m a bit concerned about your x-ray here. It’s showing too much fluid. Here, see, you have fairly severe pleural effusions. We could do a chest drain, but we could try a pleural tap first – a procedure where we insert a needle into your pleural cavity to see if we can drain enough out for you.’
Not that, again. Last time they tried that one they decided it was a good idea to make me a practice dummy for a junior doctor who couldn’t get the needle – the biggest, thickest, longest needle ever – into the right place, and I yowled like a cat in the night.
‘You’ll do it?’ I implore him with my eyes, which are most definitely the furthest from enticing as eyes can get right now; reddened, veiny and raw.
‘Someone will be round.’
Oh good.
I sleep in snatches, between nebulisers and pills and IV drips, Jodie’s strident voice loud into her mobile, shouted conversations between staff, the screeching of machines, the constant shrilling of the phone out by the nurse’s station.
The cycle of meds, observations, drinks and food passes me by in my daze.
The tap gets done and the phlebotomist takes five vials of blood.
I refuse the bed change and refuse a wash, refuse another cup of tea (the first still sits, untouched and tepid, on my table) and the toast Nicki keeps offering me.
Just leave me alone. Just give me more morphine and leave me floating in my ocean of far away.
It’s only Jake who wakes me from my stupor, loafing into the ward with his earbuds in and his phone stuck out in front of him.
He scans the beds, settles his gaze on me and then grunts, raising his chin at me slightly, and if I’m making generous assumptions this might be interpreted as something like, ‘Hey, Mum, I miss you and hope you’re feeling better. ’
‘Did you walk here?’
‘Bike.’
Jake is not easy to have a conversation with at the best of times. He is my darling boy, but he is fifteen and doesn’t yet know how to use multisyllabic words, or entire sentences. And his ability to use any words at all varies with his mood, which in itself varies as much as the English weather.
He removes his earbuds, at least, and slouches onto the bed.
Nicki will give him a ticking off for that if she sees him.
He sweeps his long fringe from his eyes and glances around the bay at the other patients.
Barbara is fast asleep in the corner, pinned under her mask, and Jodie is not here.
Amina is surrounded by four great tall lads who are all talking at once in soft but animated voices, and a smaller older man sitting on the blue plastic chair by her side, holding her hand.
He looks about ten years older than her.
They are ignoring the boys and staring at one another as if they have been starved.
‘You okay?’ Jake says at last, having summoned up a great amount of energy to bring these arduous words forth from great depths.
I nod. Then shake my head, because it’s no use lying to Jake. It’s only ever been me and him, and so he knows if I am okay or not.
He narrows his eyes at me. ‘You’re not.’ I stare up at him, at the darkness slicing into his smooth forehead. He still has a baby face in so many ways, round at the edges and yet just sharpening that tiny little bit as adolescence morphs him out of childhood and into the stinking, grumpy unknown.
‘No,’ I say. ‘But I… I’ll be all right.’
My fingers are crossed under my blanket.
He gazes at me. Looks at my oxygen mask, my chest rising and falling too quickly, my face that I know will be pasty and flushed all at the same time, my hair all mussed up and unbrushed.
I hate it when my hair is messy but don’t have the energy to do anything about it. And I don’t want to put that on Jake.
‘You be in here two weeks again?’
I nod.
‘I hate being at Nan’s. She fusses too much.’
‘I know.’
I hated growing up with her, too, and I hate having to rely on her for Jake when I’m in hospital.
He shrugs and rams his earbuds in again, lost too soon in the world of his phone. The conversation, such as it was, has run dry. I stare at his thumbs working so frantically away, wishing he was small again, the little lad whose smile lit a room and who never stopped talking.
But that little lad was heartbroken every time I had to go into hospital.
My father would wrap him in his arms and drag him kicking and screaming out of the ward.
Maybe he’s still kicking and screaming inside, but just doesn’t know how to show it anymore, in his great scary brave new adolescent world.
I want to kick and scream, too, to pummel my fists into someone’s chest.
Jodie shambles back through the bay, dragging an oxygen cylinder on wheels with one hand and a drip stand with the other, her tatty fleece dressing gown gaping open to reveal a T-shirt with the words ‘OK Millennial’ printed in great big black letters.
She holds her curves like a proud goddess, sticking out her chest, her copious belly hanging out over her pink leopard-skin print pyjama bottoms.
‘Cool T-shirt,’ Jake says, and she stops and stares at him.
‘You her son then?’
Jake makes a noise that might mean yes in some strange alien language but sounds more like ‘duh’ in ours.
‘I’m Jodie.’
‘Jake.’
‘What you playing?’
Jake cocks a sardonic eyebrow at her.
‘Go on, let’s see.’
He shrugs and shows her his phone.
She narrows her eyes, leaning in and scratching her head. ‘That’s a rubbish score.’
Jake’s mouth twitches. ‘Actually, I’m in the top one hundred.’
‘Get you!’ Jodie sheds her dressing gown and sinks onto her bed. ‘I’ll show you what I’m on.’
Jake shifts closer to her bed, and I feel like he’s interacted more meaningfully with a stranger nearer his age in thirty seconds than he has with me in twenty minutes. I close my eyes and lie back. I’m done with this day.
I don’t hear Jake leave.
???
It’s late evening and I’m waiting for the last IV round when I hear the raspy voice. ‘Have you seen my mouse?’
I open my eyes. Try to focus. What? Is someone saying something to me? Jodie is here but she’s quiet, on her phone with headphones in. Amina snores gently across the ward.
‘You! Have you seen my mouse?’
It’s Barbara, mask-less, speaking in urgent tones, eyes flicking around the ward, her white hair wild. Is she talking to me?
‘You there. Girl. Come over here.’
She means Jodie, or maybe she wants one of the nurses.
But she’s beckoning to me. She’s sitting bolt upright with her mouth hanging open, like a baby bird waiting for dinner, her limbs like twigs, shipwrecked on a great island of cotton wool whiteness.
I drag myself up to a semi-sitting position and look at her, raising my shoulders.
‘Yes. You. Come over here, please, darling.’
I don’t have the strength to leave my bed, let alone make it across the ward.
I try to say something, but my voice is stuck in my throat.
I think about Edna from the night before and think about how I seem to be regularly letting down elderly women at the moment.
Sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I am just failing you, like all the other times.
Like I fail my son and fail myself. I look down as a flash of pain blazes through my finger and notice I am picking at my skin again, and it is red raw.
Barbara’s voice quavers as she calls to me, ‘You have to help. Help me!’
Jodie yanks out her earbuds and clambers off her bed. She goes to Barbara and pats her hand. ‘It’s okay, Barbara my love. She’s just a patient like you. She’s really poorly. Leave her be.’
‘But my mouse,’ Barbara says.
‘Don’t worry about your mouse. We’ll find it.’
‘She’s by the sea. I have to go to the sea. Why does no one ever help me? I ask everyone and no one ever wants to help. I say to them, I say please help me. Please do this one thing. But no one cares. No one left to care.’
Jodie tenderly takes hold of Barbara’s hand and whispers something to her. Barbara stares at the ceiling, mumbling something incomprehensible. Jodie turns to me, shakes her head and makes a spinning motion with her finger. ‘Bit dippy, bless her. Thinks she’s lost a mouse.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
I dream of hundreds of mice scurrying round the ward, calling to me in sad, quivering voices, in my tiny, restless snatches of sleep.