Chapter 6 #2
I worked at an advertising agency after college, all fresh and new and full of resolve, ready to take on a world that hadn’t been so kind to me so far and so surely owed me something now.
Maybe I would, in the end, be a children’s book illustrator, as I had once hoped, back when I was small and my paintings made people gasp.
Perhaps now my parents might be proud of me, at last.
It was during my first sickness absence review meeting, just six months after joining the company, that reality crashed the party.
We expect your attendance to improve from now on, the HR lady told me.
I took my union rep to the next meeting, but I’d just not worked there long enough, HR lady said.
Sorry, Penny. Dismissed, I was alone and adrift in the world, my shattered dreams lying in shards at my feet.
That’s when Marcus saved me. Exercise, my doctors said, that’s what will help you with all this, just try it. So I did. I tried, and joined a gym where, it turned out, a man named Marcus worked, a man who wanted to collude in the bettering of me.
‘I’ve been ill all my life,’ I say to Dan.
He nods and smiles at me as if he gets it.
But he doesn’t, really. ‘You should pursue your dreams,’ he says gently, his voice all empathy. ‘You can do anything you want to.’
No I can’t.
‘He’s well fit,’ Jodie says as Dan strolls out of the bay, leaving me lying there failing to catch my breath. She hunches on the edge of the chair by my bed. ‘Wouldn’t mind him doing a bit of pummelling on me.’
My laugh comes out like a strange gurgle.
She doesn’t seem to notice. ‘I had that woman do mine. You know, the one who looks about six.’
They all look about six.
‘She’s good though. So how you feeling?’
‘Better,’ I say. ‘You?’
She shrugs. ‘Just waiting to get sent home. Doctor said it might not be too long. Been in nearly two weeks now.’
I sit myself up a bit, gather myself together. ‘What were you in for?’
A line carves into the smoothness of her forehead. ‘Just the usual.’
‘Usual?’
‘Like you, I guess. Chronic lungs. COPD and all that.’
She’s young to have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. ‘Oh. Yeah.’
‘I know, I’m only young. Well, thirty, anyway. Been chesty most my life, though.’
‘Me too.’
We sit quietly, allowing the unspoken understanding to pass between us, the magic of solidarity.
‘That must’ve been really hard.’ It’s Kat, propped up in her bed, leaning over at us, a little less pale than yesterday. ‘Suffering like that, even as a kid.’
Jodie doesn’t seem to care that Kat was listening in. She’s up on her feet again, wandering over to sit on the chair between Kat and me. She’s like a pinball machine; back and forth, back and forth. ‘What about you? What you in for?’
‘Pneumonia,’ Kat says. ‘Never had it before, it was a complete shock. Can’t imagine living with that kind of thing.’
I look at my bitten-down fingernails and say nothing. It’s strange, hearing the kindness in her voice. Not something I’m much used to.
Jodie says, ‘But you’re getting better now?’
‘Bit. Doctor says I’ll be in another week or so.’
‘Me too,’ I say.
Jodie looks over to Amina, as if inviting her to take her turn in this great revelation of our diagnoses and terms of stay. ‘What about you? Amina?’
Amina is silent, her face deep in a book.
‘What’s with her?’
‘She’s probably just feeling ill,’ Kat says, and Jodie shrugs.
Amina lays the book down. ‘I don’t have such good English.’
‘It sounds good to me,’ Kat says.
‘I do not really always understand. Sorry.’
Kat smiles at her. ‘You don’t have to be sorry. We were just wondering how you are doing.’
Amina stares at Kat, and then at me and Jodie, eyes widened, hands curling and uncurling in her lap.
‘I… thank you. I am doing well. But the doctor, he says I will be in here more days. I want to go home to my family.’ And just like that, where the light was in her eyes the tears begin to gather, shimmering and then spilling out.
She brushes them away. ‘Sorry. I have felt so ill.’
Violet tuts loudly. ‘Well, don’t we all want to go home? None of us are exactly loving this.’
Nobody replies, but I watch as a shade of anger crosses Kat’s eyes.
‘Where’s that boy of yours?’ Violet says to me. ‘I need him to take me down to the shop and outside for a little cigarette.’
I find myself smirking exactly how that boy of mine does, at the sheer entitlement of her. Jodie catches my eye, and I wheeze out a cackle, and then I hold my ribs, grimacing.
‘He’s hardly going to be here at this time of day, Vi,’ Jodie says. ‘He’s not your personal porter, you know.’
Violet fixes her with a look that might kill a lesser person.
Amina grunts as she rotates her body round and stumbles out of her bed, her face grey with the effort.
She’s wrapped in a blue silk dressing gown, a loose floral turquoise scarf covering her hair.
She shuffles towards the toilet in her jewelled flip-flops.
A nurse I vaguely recognise comes into the ward, pushing the white medication cart ahead of her and smiling at Amina on the way, telling her to take it easy.
She looks kind, grinning widely around at us all, dark eyes full of sparkle.
‘Hello, ladies! I’m Sister Joy. I’ve got your nice lunchtime tablets. ’
‘There is that man in our toilet now, again.’ Amina is back, eyes troubled, spreading her hands wide.
Jodie blows out her cheeks. ‘Not again.’
I hadn’t noticed, but I haven’t made it as far as the toilet yet.
Sister Joy looks up from the chart she is studying. ‘Again? That man is so naughty. He has his own toilet.’ Her soft Caribbean lilt becomes more pronounced in her rising tones of disapproval. ‘I will sort him out, this man in your toilet.’
This man in our toilet lurches out, flinging the door wide with a loud creak.
He is wobbly on his feet, sparse white hair all askew, sprouting in odd places over his mostly bald head, blue striped pyjamas loose around his lanky frame.
‘Harold,’ Sister Joy says, rolling the r for seconds loaded with censure, ‘come on. You have your own men’s toilet.
You cannot take the ladies’ one. Poor Amina, she is waiting. ’
Amina looks down at her feet, blushing.
‘I don’t like the men’s toilet,’ Harold says.
Sister Joy lays her chart down and marches over to him, a finger held forth in admonition. ‘Don’t be naughty. You use your own. Why do you not use your own?’
‘It is too dirty and the men pee on the seat,’ Harold says sulkily, like a teenager being asked to tidy up his room.
‘Well, you pee on our seat,’ Jodie says.
Harold shakes his head. ‘I do not.’
‘Yes you do. Amina, look now, has he peed on the seat?’
But Amina is back on her bed, clutching her book, face hidden away.
‘I don’t. And I will keep going to this toilet. It’s my right to go to this toilet. I have paid my taxes all my life.’ He waves his arms around in great outrage.
Jodie snickers and tilts her head over at him, catching my eye.
He’s poking out through his pyjama bottoms, wizened and shrivelled.
Sister Joy sighs.
Violet says, ‘Put yourself away, man.’
???
After lunch I am drifting off into woozy sleep. Barbara is snoring in the corner. Jodie is not tired, though, it seems, and plonks herself down by Amina’s bed, much to Violet’s glaring annoyance. ‘So, what country you from?’ she says without guile, and I cringe a little bit.
Amina seems okay with it, but I wonder if deep down she’s just resigned to it. ‘I’m now from here, from this town, but I was living in Pakistan until I was eighteen years old.’
Jodie settles in, waiting for more, and I watch, curiosity cutting through a daze of weariness.
‘It was so beautiful, my country, it was always so filled with colour and big wide skies. Here the skies are too often grey.’
Violet tightens her lips.
‘Why’d you come to England?’ Jodie says.
Amina is quiet for a moment, smoothing down her blanket.
‘I was brought here to marry my husband, Bilal.’
Jodie is all outrage. ‘What, you don’t mean like one of them arranged marriages, do you? Like I mean like when you don’t even know him and you have to get married to him, ’cause your parents force you?’
Amina just nods.
Jodie is raging with wounded self-righteousness. ‘Well, why don’t you leave him now? Now, like, you’re older and all that, and you know you don’t have to be tied to some dude as his slave no more?’
Amina just smiles, and Jodie gets more riled.
‘I mean, it’s not as if you’d be penniless now, you’d get help from the state, right? Like most of us do. You could go live on your own and be happy. You could get rid of that headdress and all that.’
A shadow of a frown crosses Amina’s brow. ‘We made a life together, Bilal and me.’
Jodie is incensed. ‘But—’
Amina holds her palm up. ‘No. You don’t know everything, you know. It does not have to be like you think. And I like my hijab. I choose it myself.’
I sit up slightly, studying Amina’s face: earnest and, somehow, contented.
Violet mutters something to herself. I think it’s something about headscarves and the Conservative Party going all soft, but I can’t be sure.
Jodie rolls her eyes as she clambers to her feet. ‘Well, you stay in your controlling marriage then. Whatever.’
For someone usually so laid back and tolerant, she seems incredibly flustered. Is it that her worldview is being challenged, or is it that she thinks Amina really is an oppressed woman? Because she doesn’t look like one to me. But what do I know? I didn’t tell anyone about Marcus.
Jodie shakes her head as she makes her way to the bay entrance. She casts a glance back over her shoulder, at no one in particular. ‘Women shouldn’t have to be with men who control them.’
Has she looked at Kane lately?
Amina says, ‘Bilal has never controlled me in my life.’
???
I must have dozed off, because when I’m next aware Jodie is back on her bed, flipping through a magazine, and Jake is here, on his phone.
Violet is shouting about something, her tones caustic and whinging through the general clutter of noise on the ward.
‘Those nurses just sit and twiddle their thumbs all day. It’s not like they have anything better to do. ’
Her husband is there, too, nodding along at every word and exuding disgust like a haughty cat facing up to an overexcited puppy.
‘I’ve been asking for it for hours,’ Violet says. I’ve no idea what ‘it’ is, but guess that it’s something she feels should be rightfully hers right this minute.
‘It’s a disgrace,’ Mr Violet says.
Jake rolls his eyes at Jodie, but she is oblivious, her attention taken up by her magazine. ‘Lot of moaners going on about smokers in this article. I have the right to smoke if I want to.’
Violet picks up on that one. ‘All those anti-smoking types out there, wanting to take our rights away.’
‘It’s a disgrace,’ Mr Violet says.
Jodie nods fiercely. ‘Yeah, and they think we shouldn’t smoke in like pub gardens and that now. It’s all we’ve got left after they took our inside smoking away.’
Jake clears his throat. ‘Ahem millennial ahem.’
Jodie scrunches her nose at him, but a tiny smile quivers at the corners of her mouth.
‘Shall we go for one now, then?’ she says to Violet, who nods and instructs her husband in bossy tones to stop lolling around and go and get her a wheelchair.
Jodie and Violet are in the habit of going for their smoke together.
They huddle under my window in the Peace Garden because the smoking shelter is too far to walk and there’s a nice bench to sit on.
The smoke drifts up and curls through my nose and my lungs and the pain batters my chest. Can I close the window, I ask the nurse.
That one doesn’t close, she says. Can they not be told not to smoke there, I say.
No one takes any notice of us, she says.
So I shut up and say nothing at all to Jodie and Violet who are, after all, sick as well, and as deserving as anyone else of some pleasure in life.
‘You should say something to them,’ Kat says. ‘They’ll move somewhere else.’
But I can’t and I won’t. I am Penny who wants to please.