Chapter 4
Early evening Jake is visiting me again. ‘Grandad dropped me off,’ he says around mouthfuls of Twix. He sees my eyes on it. ‘Want some? I was hungry. Nan makes rubbish food.’
This is true.
‘No thanks.’
‘Still can’t breathe too well?’
I shake my head. Wish I could ask for a drink. Some squash, maybe, something cold, something that’s not hospital tea or tepid water. But the words get stuck in my iron-clenched gullet.
Jake shrugs his shoulders and turns his attention back to his phone.
Jodie sits on the edge of her bed, watching us. ‘Oy,’ she says, kicking out at Jake, ‘you should talk to your mum more. She’s well poorly.’
Jake grunts. ‘Whatever.’
Jodie gets up, kicks him again, and he laughs. How does she get away with that? If I did that he’d cry child abuse. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says, instead, and turns back to me, laying the phone down on my bed. ‘Sorry you’re feeling so crap.’
I try to smile.
‘You look like Helena Bonham-Carter,’ he says randomly.
‘What?’
‘All mussed-up hair and pale as a ghost, and this weird kind of not-smile.’
True, I suppose. But I wouldn’t actually mind looking like Helena Bonham-Carter, so I’ll take it.
There’s a commotion at the doors. A bed being delivered, another patient, a full house in Bay C.
Two of the healthcare assistants move the empty bed out of the way in the space opposite me.
A logjam is forming at the door of the bay; Nicki hovering with a commode for Barbara, several of Amina’s family just arrived in for visiting.
The porter pushing the new patient’s bed rolls his eyes.
‘Give us some space?’ A different porter to my rainbow hipster one.
Amina’s sons move back, apologising, all polite and sweet and toweringly tall.
Kat, the new patient from the night before, is fast asleep with her back turned to us, as if she is trying to shut out the world.
This new patient is probably mid-sixties, a close-cropped bob of greying hair fighting a battle with garish yellow dye, pursed up mouth, and frown lines slashing her face into ragged slices. A nasal cannula sits lopsidedly in her nostrils.
‘I don’t want to go here,’ she says to the porter and the nurse wheeling her bed into place. The effort of speaking sends her into a convulsion of hacking coughs and I wince. Do I sound like that?
The porter and the nurse ignore her and chat among themselves. How are her wedding plans, he is asking. Good, she says. Except her fiancé hasn’t sorted the caterer and promised her he would. Men, hey! Yeah, useless creatures, the porter says.
‘Excuse me,’ the new woman says. ‘I know your conversation is… cough – vital – cough, but I actually said I don’t want to go here.’
Her accent is a jarring mix of try-hard King’s English and earthy west country twang.
The nurse just smiles. ‘Right, Violet, let’s get you sorted and checked in then, shall we? Be back in a min to do you.’
Violet’s pasty face turns shades of red vivid against the slight blue tinge of her lips, her several chins wobbling along with her outrage. ‘I want my own room.’
Jake clears his throat. ‘Boomer.’
Most people over forty are boomers to Jake.
His lips twist in a sly little grin. ‘Bet her middle name’s Karen.’
Jodie splutters in the corner.
I sigh. I cannot find the energy to berate him about his careless use of the name Karen as a misogynistic slur for a certain type of middle-aged woman.
I’ve done the spiel once too often – how do you think it makes all the lovely people feel who happen to be called Karen?
What about Aunt Karen? Case in point, he always says, and smirks louder at me.
He stares at me now with one eyebrow raised, as if to question my poor parenting in its lack of challenge to his unwarranted attack on the personality of someone he does not know. I close my eyes.
The nurse blithely ignores Violet’s plaintive and increasingly loud demands, shoving the bed brake down with her foot and bustling out of the ward, bantering with the porter. Her husband-to-be apparently forgot to ring the vicar like he promised he would. Men!
Nicki delivers Barbara’s commode, pulls the curtains round her space and grabs the observations trolley from the corner by Jodie’s bed. She strolls over to the new patient, winking at Jodie. ‘Hello there, Mrs Oddens. Violet, right? Is it Vi? Just going to get your sats done, flower.’
Violet’s narrow mouth puckers itself even further in. ‘It’s Oh-dens. And no, you may not call me Vi. Violet is my name. And I’m not a flower, thank you.’
Jake mouths Ohhhdens at me and I try not to grin.
Nicki laughs. Nicki always seems to laugh easily, a flower herself, open to sunshine and dragging it into the ward for the rest of us.
‘Don’t you dare make fun of me,’ Violet says. Nicki winks back at Jodie who is on the edge of her bed, drinking it all in with her direct blue gaze.
‘I want my own room,’ Violet says.
‘This is the NHS, not the Hilton,’ Nicki says, and I smile to myself.
Violet narrows her pale eyes, grabs Nicki’s arm and gives a non-too-subtle sideways nod towards Amina. ‘I don’t want to be next to her.’
Everything about Violet is a scream of brashness, from her faded and smudged blue eyeshadow through to her loud floral polyester nightie and bright pink fluffy slippers.
Jodie catches my eye and I lower my gaze, but not before seeing the mischievous grin playing around her lips.
This one is going to be interesting, I think.
She’s like a real-life Hyacinth Bucket, all bluster and faux-posh accent, and now adding bigotry to the mix.
‘Boomer,’ Jake says again. His voice is as smirky as a voice could be if it was a smirk. He leans over towards Jodie. ‘Plus she has Lego hair.’
Jodie cackles.
Amina says nothing but her face tells the truth of a long litany of similar comments poured over her through years. I want to go to her, to say we’re not all like that, but my energy is drained like water wrung from a cloth.
One of her sons stands up, stretching himself taller than before, if that were possible, his head almost touching the curtain rail. He stares hard at Violet. ‘What’s your problem with my mother?’
Violet does not seem troubled by his words or by the presence of the other three equally large young men. She pouts like a child and then huffs, ‘She’s one of them Islams.’
Nicki has the blood pressure cuff wrapped around Violet’s arm, and I’m sure she yanks it off harder than she should. ‘Stop it.’ She’s the formidable primary teacher to Violet’s stroppy five-year-old, scolding her for her petulant silliness. ‘That’s the end of that kind of talk in my ward.’
Surprisingly, Violet simmers down and says nothing more, just casts a disdainful glance over at Amina, and then, for some reason, turns and nods at me, curving her mouth in a kind of tortured smile. Jake laughs out loud. ‘You’ve made a friend, Mum.’
I hope not.
Amina’s sons gather around their mother’s bed and speak quietly to her. One of them grabs the curtain and yanks it along its rail, screening out Violet.
‘My boyfriend’s coming in today,’ Jodie announces, scuffing her bunny-slippered feet on the floor beneath her bed.
I don’t know what kind of response she wants, so I say, ‘That’s nice.’
‘You’ll love him. He’s wicked, really cool.’
Jake snickers. ‘No one says ‘wicked’ anymore.’
Jodie shrugs. ‘No one says ‘Boomer’ anymore.’
‘Boomer,’ Jake says.
A shaven-headed man as broad as he is tall with a tattoo of a snake crawling around one arm and an arrowed heart with ‘Jodie 4 eva’ inked on the other bicep struts into the bay wearing a grubby vest top and low-slung Adidas joggers.
Jodie stands up, smoothing out her long blonde hair. ‘Everyone, this is Kane. My boyfriend.’
When she says ‘everyone’, she really means me and Jake.
Barbara is snoring in her corner, without visitors once again, Amina is concealed behind her curtain, Kat is sleeping and Violet is lying back against her pillows, her face a picture of disapproval as she stares at Jodie’s boyfriend.
He is oblivious, not because he’s drinking in Jodie with love in his eyes but because he is staring at his phone.
‘Hi, Kane,’ I say.
‘S’up,’ he says, or at least I think he does. It’s more of a murmured grunt, much like Jake’s preferred manner of communication. He slumps onto the chair by Jodie’s bed, splaying his legs out wide, and continues to scroll through his phone.
‘You on that game again?’ Jodie says.
Nothing.
Jodie sinks back onto her bed, her face fallen in on itself, as if all the hope she was storing up for his visit has been extinguished and she’s facing reality again. She pulls at his arm but he bats her away. ‘Just got to finish this level.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
Jodie is different with him. It’s as though with the rest of us she’s a rose in bloom, all opened out to the sun, but with him her petals wilt.
The way she acts is a little familiar, a little uncomfortable.
But I don’t want to think about that. I’m probably reading too much into it, anyway.
Maybe Kane is just finishing a game off, and then he will sweep Jodie up in his heavily muscled arms and hold her tight and tell her he loves her and she is beautiful.
Violet is faffing round with her overhead TV system.
I thought those things were obsolete, with their old-fashioned phone handsets, the coiled wire that snags your hair with its vicious grip.
With the pointless little keyboard that was too tiny for the tiniest fingers and never quite succeeded in calling up the internet.
When Jake was born I tried to announce his birth online using one of those things because my phone was out of charge, but it flickered and froze until I slammed the wretched thing back in its cradle, my frustration mixing up with post-birth shock, leaving me a curled-up heap on my bed, staring at this tiny new life in his plastic crib beside me and wondering how on earth I was ever going to do this thing on my own if I couldn’t even work this stupid machine.
Violet is grappling with it now, stabbing at the keyboard, brows knitted together in vexation.
‘You. Young man,’ she shouts, gesturing to Jake with the phone, ‘can you make this work?’
‘Please,’ Jake mutters under his breath, but dutifully stands, lumbering over the bay to Violet and studying the unit, a sneer creeping over his features. ‘What even is this thing?’
‘I want to watch Eastenders.’
‘You’ll be lucky.’ Jake takes the phone off her and hangs it up, then fiddles with the buttons on the TV. ‘This thing came out of the ark. Don’t you have an iPad?’
‘Don’t like those new-fangled things. They don’t have buttons to press.’
Jake raises an eyebrow and fiddles round some more. ‘You need to get a payment card for this, or use a credit card to pay for it. Damn! They’re ripping you off.’
Violet is unruffled. ‘Just get it working.’
‘Okay Karen.’
‘I don’t know what that means. My name is Violet.’
‘Nothing. Look, can you get your family or whatever to do the payment for you? Or do you have a card?’
‘But my husband won’t be in until tomorrow, and Eastenders is on in ten minutes.’
Jake shrugs. ‘Sorry.’
‘Youngsters today have no staying power,’ Violet mutters, and shoves the unit away from her at Jake, who stumbles back.
‘Woah. Okay then. Good luck.’ Jake comes back over to me, slouches down onto the chair by my bed.
I muster up my strength and the edges of an outrage that isn’t as large in me as usual. ‘The Karen thing is tedious and offensive.’
Jake laughs. That worked well, then.
Jodie leans over to Jake, ignoring Kane who is immersed in his phone, all morose and silent. She tilts her head over at Violet, her eyes wide and dancing with mirth. ‘She’s gonna be a right one.’
‘She is that,’ Jake says.
‘I need a fag.’
‘I’ll come with,’ Kane says, leaping out of the chair and hightailing it out of the bay, leaving Jodie in his wake, struggling with all her paraphernalia.
‘I do, too,’ Violet says, unexpectedly. ‘You got one I can have?’
Jodie stares at her. ‘You look like you should stay here.’ Violet’s lips are bluer than before, her face pale as the moon.
Violet shakes her head, as if Jodie is being ridiculous. ‘I know what I can and can’t do. I’m high up in the National Trust, you know.’
Jodie and Jake gaze at one another with snarky grins dancing on their lips.
Violet turns her body away from us. ‘Nurse!’ she shouts at Nicki, who is hovering over by Kat’s bed. ‘Take me outside in one of those chairs. I need a cigarette.’
Nicki takes a long breath in and puffs out her cheeks. ‘Righto, Mrs Oh-dens. If I could just finish what I’m doing—’
‘I’ll take her,’ Jake says, dragging himself to his feet.
I stare at him, taking in the sheer wonder of him, his gawky teenageness, endless arms and legs all sharp awkward angles, dark hair swept low over his eyes in messy disarray.
‘Not to talk to her or anything. Just ’cause they’ve got enough to do round here without her demanding her rights all the time. ’
‘I’ll look after him,’ Jodie says, hovering in the doorway and winking at me. ‘C’mon, Mrs National Trust, let’s find you that chair.’
Jake says, ‘We should put a thistle on it.’