Chapter 9
Dr Chowdhury is pleased with me the next morning. ‘You’ve been up, I hear?’
‘Well, as far as the bathroom.’
‘Good, good.’ He strokes his chin. ‘Everything is mainly heading the right way, although your temperature is still a little high.’
‘Oh.’
‘You should keep going on little walks. It will help your circulation and strengthen you a bit.’
I know I should, but my body heaves a great sigh at the thought of it.
‘I’ll ask the physiotherapist to come by again today,’ he says. ‘Get you clearing a bit more again. And a bit of moving, today, perhaps to the garden?’
The Peace Garden seems a million miles and another lifetime away, but in reality it’s only round the corner. And if Jodie and Violet can manage it, then I can, too.
‘Okay,’ I say.
Dan breezes in later with his usual purpose and vigour. ‘Penny, cariad,’ he says, playing up his Welsh accent. ‘I’m told we’re going to get you out into the sunshine today?’
I look out of the window at the grey November morning. ‘Hmm.’
‘We’ll do your drainage afterward, so as not to wear you out too much.’
As Dan leads me through the doors to the garden, the damp air hits me square in the chest and I bend over in a convulsion of coughing. Dan holds onto my arm and steadies me. ‘No need for the histrionics, my lovely.’
I roll my eyes at him and get my breathing back to a stable place. ‘Can I sit on the bench?’
Dan helps me over and supports me as I sit. It’s seen better days, this bench, all flaky green paint and exposed shards of wood. But it’s a place of wonder for me, after days enclosed in the warm heaviness of the bay. I turn my face up to the watery sunshine and close my eyes.
The garden is mostly bare in the winter months, a few hardy blooms clinging to life, the winter jasmine and cyclamen a welcome surge of colour through the grey.
In the spring and summer it blazes with vibrancy and soothes all those who sit in it, but even now it is what it says it is; a place of tranquillity and escape from the ravages of hospital life.
‘Good?’ Dan says.
‘Mmm.’
It’s good for a few minutes, and then it’s cold, and then it hurts, but I did it. I made it. Penny made it to the garden sounds better than Penny went to the toilet, doesn’t it Mother?
???
I’m woken later by the clatter of the tea trolley. ‘Tea?’ the plastic apron-clad healthcare assistant says to me. It’s not Nicki today, it’s a tired looking middle-aged woman with short brown hair and glasses held together with sellotape. She looks like she needs a holiday.
‘Yes please.’
A tiny elderly woman with a mouth full of teeth like chipped piano keys spread in the widest grin I’ve ever seen walks into the bay.
She’s going round all the beds asking patients if they want to come to chapel on Sunday.
Their team will come and fetch them in hospital wheelchairs, she says.
We all say no, thank you, apart from Kat who says she’d like that, and would they like her to lead the service?
The smiley lady chuckles, patting Kat’s hand. ‘Away with you. You are a one, you are. You’re here to get better, not take services!’
‘I might just liven them up for you. Wake up all those sleeping patients who snore through the sermon.’
Smiley Lady laughs harder, a great guffaw that matches her larger-than-life beam. ‘What are you like, Rev Kat?’
As she leaves the ward, Jodie is on her feet, cigarettes in hand. She stops at Kat’s bed. ‘Why are you a vicar?’
Kat suddenly looks weary, like the weight of everything comes crashing down on her all at once. She leans back, her head sinking into the pillows, closing her eyes. Jodie shrugs and starts to walk off.
‘Because I can’t not be,’ Kat whispers.
Jodie doesn’t hear her.
Violet says, ‘I’m coming. Wait for me.’ She shuffles out of the bay behind Jodie, leaning on her walking frame.
‘Brian brought it in for me,’ she says, seeing me watching.
‘Much better than those awful hospital ones. Filthy things.’ Her walker has a seat with a basket underneath it and looks like something I could do with but prefer to shun under denial along with mobility scooters and walking sticks.
You don’t need one of those things, Marcus said to me, you just need to strengthen your body.
It’s quiet in the bay, with Kat sleeping, Amina watching something on her tablet and Barbara on her chair, staring into space.
I pick up my book, neglected since Jake brought it in for me, the words swimming through my weary brain.
Maybe today I can get some reading in. I settle back on the bed, sipping my tea and finding my place.
It’s not a challenging book. Pappy chick-lit, Jake calls it.
Jilted quirky thirty-something called Emma with tumbling red curls who loves knitting and triathlons leaves the city and starts a bakery by the sea where she meets a mysterious, rich young man who wants to sample her baps.
He sweeps her off her feet and helps her save the bakery from the hands of the nasty man who wants to knock it down and build new houses over the site. And they all live happily ever after.
‘Hey! You, girl,’ Barbara shouts across the ward to me. I look around the bay, hoping for rescue. But no one is around.
‘Come over here, darling,’ Barbara says.
I breathe out slowly. I’ve spent days ignoring her plaintive calls to me, but now I have some strength I should show her I’m not heartless.
I drag my weary body across the ward, ignoring the rush of blood to my head, and hover near her chair, which is loaded with clothes and medical detritus. She pats her bed.
I shouldn’t sit. Infection control, the ward sister always says, stern little lines slashed over her face.
Patients must not sit on other patients’ beds or chairs.
The word Covid lingers in the air but never gets said.
No one wants to hear it. We all heard enough of it when it raged through the world.
I shudder, thinking about the months of shielding, trying not to go too near Jake, not to hug him.
Most of the staff turn a blind eye when we sit on one another’s chairs, but Sister Harris shoos us off, squawking like a riled-up mother hen.
And beds are a complete no-no. She’s here today, Sister Harris, on the warpath, eagle eyes scouting for any of her staff slacking off or making mistakes.
I have to sit now, though. My legs are water and I will splash to the floor in a few seconds.
I squat on the end of Barbara’s bed, anxiously scanning the station outside the bay like a schoolkid in trouble trying to evade a teacher.
Barbara grabs my hand and I can’t wrench mine away.
Can’t hurt her feelings. I’ve heard the doctors discussing her, the nurses in the night in hushed tones as they replace the mask she’s pushed away once again, the whispers of the short time she has left.
So I squeeze her hand softly. It feels like thin tissue paper wrapped around a bunch of those flimsy matches that always break when you try to strike them.
‘I want to go to the sea,’ she says, piercing into me with her watery gaze. ‘Just one more time.’
‘I know you do, Barbara.’
Her IV drip machine squeals at me through the uneasy silence. Occlusion in the line. I press her call button and drag myself up off her bed. ‘The nurse will come and sort it out,’ I say to her.
‘The sea,’ she says.
I try to smile at her but can feel my mouth distorting, my face sagging into some kind of leer. ‘It would be nice, wouldn’t it.’
‘I lost my mouse.’
I make a soothing noise.
She grips my arm. ‘I lost my mouse, and I want you to take me to the seaside.’
I squirm and back away a little. I don’t know what to say.
I wish Jodie was here. Jodie is good at this stuff, she would joke and chat with Barbara and defuse the moment.
Nicki would too, she would warm the place up with her chatter and her quips and her Lovelies and her Flowers.
But I have little to say. ‘I wish I could help you.’ I watch as her face falls.
‘Well, you can. You can get me to the seaside, can’t you? You can drive?’ Her rheumy blue gaze is insistent, weary, haunting.
‘I… yes, but… maybe you can go when you are better?’ Inside I’m thinking, she’s not getting better, and she never has visitors, doesn’t have family, she’s never going to go to the seaside again. ‘Sorry,’ I murmur.
‘Tell us about the sea, my lovely.’ Jodie is back, slinking into the ward unseen. I breathe out slowly. ‘Tell us where you’d like to go.’
Barbara beams a wide grin. ‘I want to go to Sand Bay,’ she says. ‘Where the sand stretches for miles. I want to sit on the beach. I want to eat ice-cream and watch the surf lap at the sand. I want to feel it on my feet.’
‘Sounds like heaven,’ Jodie says. ‘We should go tomorrow.’
Barbara laughs, a great wheezy rasp followed by a frenzy of hacking. She sparkles up at Jodie. ‘You’re a wicked one.’
‘Bit on the chilly side for ice-cream, though.’
‘So, what’s up here, then?’ It’s the stressy healthcare assistant, reaching over to silence Barbara’s buzzer and checking her IV line. ‘I’ll just get the nurse to sort this out for you.’
The machine screeches at us. Beep beep beep I am blocked sort me out. It accuses me for my impotence, my inability to help an old lady with what is evidently the most important thing in the world to her.
‘Back to bed, ladies. You shouldn’t be over here, you know that. Sister Harris’ll be in here and won’t be happy.’
Barbara grabs Jodie’s hand as she turns away. ‘But you do mean it, don’t you? You promise?’
Jodie stops, mouth opening then closing, flicking her eyes to me and then back to Barbara.
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘You should not make promises you cannot keep.’ Amina is standing in the middle of the ward in her long silk dressing-gown, frowning. I’m taken aback by the anger written across her face. ‘It is not fair on her.’
Jodie shrugs. ‘Who says I can’t keep it?’
Amina’s eyes darken as she grabs Jodie’s arm, beckoning her away from Barbara. ‘Don’t be such a fool. You cannot take her to the sea.’
Barbara is oblivious, drinking cold tea from a sippy cup with no handles, her hands shaking as she tries to keep purchase on it.
‘Well, what if I can?’
Amina’s eyebrows knit together more tightly. ‘You think you know best about everything.’
‘Woah!’ Jodie steps back. ‘What gives you the right to say that?’
‘You think you know all about my marriage, all about my family. You think I am not strong, that I am, what do you say, jailed in by my husband because we did not fall in love like in one of your movies.’
‘Okay—’
‘You are all, look after number one, be your true self whatever it does to others, you are the most important person in your life. But I don’t see it like that so much.
You say to me I cannot be happy in this marriage that was arranged for me, I say who are you to tell me what happiness is and that I do not have it?
I have been married to Bilal for nearly thirty years now and I love him more all the time.
He is the gentlest man I know. The best man I know. ’
‘Woah!’ Jodie says again. ‘Where did that all come from?’ She grins over at me and Kat, and I wonder at her ability to bounce things off. ‘Anyway, actually, I was thinking about others. I was thinking about making Barbara feel happy.’
‘But if her happiness is then shattered because you do not mean what you say, then it will be no happiness at all.’
Jodie says nothing, opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish.
‘You said it to make yourself feel good, not to help Barbara, not in the end.’
‘I—’
‘Do not try to justify it.’
I sit on my bed, amazed at Amina. It’s like a light has been switched on, a candle lit where there was darkness, where there was a quiet woman hiding away in her bed there is now a formidable woman of strength.
‘I just wanted to help,’ Jodie says.
‘You wanted to feel like you were helping, no?’
‘Well, yeah, I guess, but also actually I did want to make her feel better.’
‘But you understand you have to mean what you say?’
‘I kind of do – mean it, I mean.’
Vivid lines cleave through Amina’s forehead. ‘But how can you?’
‘I’ll think about it, okay?’
‘It’s better that you just be kind to her without making promises.’
Jodie doesn’t reply.
‘You see,’ Amina says, hands on hips and face flushed, ‘sometimes you must think about what and how you say things to people.’
‘Well said,’ Kat says.
Violet trundles back into the ward behind her walker, the Dressing Gown of Doom soaking wet, her hair straggly and wild, bumping into Amina as she turns back to her bed.
Violet staggers back, arms wide in alarm, as if she is afraid Amina will do something bad to her.
Amina ignores her, sagging onto her bed and closing her eyes as if all the effort she put into standing up for herself has drained out of her, like water churning down a plughole.
‘Rude,’ Violet says.
No one replies.
‘Harold’s been in the toilet again,’ she says.