Chapter 10
A huge rat stares at me with slitted evil eyes, creeping up the bed towards me with its tail slashing to and fro, to and fro. I’m coming to get you, I’m coming to bite you, I’m coming to—
‘Shut up, you cantankerous old hag.’
A hissed whisper, from Barbara’s corner, behind tightly drawn curtains. A smothered giggle. ‘Never stops yakking on about mice and rats.’
‘Crazy old coot.’
I try to sit up. Try to grab the moment and make it make sense, but I am pinned to my bed and the words keep coming.
‘What a mess, shit everywhere.’
‘It’s disgusting. Look at these sheets. Some of us round here have to clean up after people like you.’
A tiny, wavery sound, like a cat in pain. Followed by more harsh laughter, then, ‘Shhh, Julie. You’re making too much noise.’
Crying, now, that’s what I can hear. Raspy sobs. Scratchy words. ‘My mouse. My mouse. Please.’
I am frozen.
‘Your mouse, your mouse, oh please, oh please,’ in a mocking whisper and a barely snuffed out cackle.
I have to call a nurse. Have to tell them what is happening. What they are saying to Barbara. But my body will not listen to my mind. My limbs are bricks. I can’t let this happen to her. Can’t let—
A scramble. A flurry of light and curtains and shock. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’
Jodie.
‘How would you feel if I called you a cantankerous old hag? Not so good, right? I’m reporting you, and you’re totally getting binned for this.’
They go quiet then, but I can still hear the watery waves of Barbara’s bewildered grief. I squeeze my eyes shut and wait for the night to swallow me up.
‘Penny.’ A soft whisper. ‘Wake up, love. I’m just here for a little bit of blood from you.’
The phlebotomist ties a tourniquet round my arm, squeezing tight until it goes numb. ‘Sharp scratch.’
I like it when the phlebotomists do my bloods.
Their sharp scratches are a whole lot less sharp than other healthcare professionals’ sharp scratches, especially doctors.
Especially junior doctors. Their sharp scratches are so sharp it’s like being bitten into by a raging tiger.
But the nice phlebotomist’s sharp scratch barely registers as anything beyond a tiny sting.
She takes several vials of blood this morning, all with different labels quickly and competently attached, neat and tidy and well-practised. ‘There we go. All done.’
‘Thank you.’
She goes to Violet next, shakes her shoulder gently. ‘Mrs Oddens? Violet?’
Violet splutters and coughs. ‘What do you want now?’
‘Just here for some bloods, love.’
‘They took some yesterday! Don’t you dare stick that thing in me!’
‘Doctor asked for some more.’
‘If you lot could do your job better this wouldn’t happen. They took about a pint of the stuff yesterday. What business do you have stabbing me again? This is disgraceful.’
The phlebotomist doesn’t even flinch. ‘Doctor needs more today.’
Violet catches me watching and narrows her eyes at me. ‘Well, try not to stab me too hard. The one yesterday, it was disgusting, she wasn’t at all careful, I can tell you that much.’
The phlebotomist presses her lips together, with one slightly raised eyebrow, wrapping her tourniquet and readying her needle.
She doesn’t mention that she was, in fact, the one who took Violet’s bloods yesterday.
I wonder about her, about how many times she goes unseen by patients, trekking round the wards with her trolley, hated for her needles.
‘Sharp scratch.’
Violet screeches like a derailed train. ‘Ouch! That ruddy hurt!’
The phlebotomist doesn’t reply, just as she didn’t yesterday when Violet went on a long rant about how much she hates needles, how she’d refused the Covid vaccine because she hates them so much but mostly because they put microchips in them to control us, and she’d had Covid anyway so what was the point?
‘You lot with your tiresome needles, all the time, disturbing my sleep. It shouldn’t be allowed. Can’t you come back at a reasonable hour?’
I close my eyes, grinning to myself. I know what Jake would be saying if he were here now.
???
Snatches of conversation float through my window from outside. It’s Jodie and Violet, out for their early morning smoke. I smile wryly at their blossoming unlikely friendship, two women diametrically opposed in background and character, bonded together by tobacco and disease.
‘She’s a bit up herself, isn’t she, that Sister Harris,’ Violet is saying.
‘What, you mean like the rod up her backside?’ Jodie says. Violet rasps out a snort, and then a laugh, and then she’s cackling away and Jodie’s joining in and they sound like the three witches from Macbeth without the third, yet more than making up for her absence.
‘And that one too,’ Violet says, her voice lower now. ‘Up herself, a bit, I mean.’
She’s talking about me. I can picture her now, pointing up at the window surreptitiously. I try not to laugh out loud at the irony of Violet calling someone up herself.
Jodie is quiet for a few seconds. Then, ‘Nah, she’s all right, that one. Just a bit buttoned up sometimes.’
Buttoned up? I guess that’s true, really.
‘But you know, she raised that kid alone, with that bronchithingy she’s got too, and that useless dude what just naffed off and left her.
’ I wonder how she knows all of that, and then remember Jake, their whispered conversations, their trips to the garden, all the time they’ve spent together in the past few days while I have been lying in drug-hazed agony.
Has Jake been opening up to someone, for the first time in his life?
‘He’s a good kid too, that Jake. Bit of an annoying bugger sometimes, thinks the world revolves round him.
He told me I was a millennial snowflake yesterday, like he was inventing a clever new term, said I was wittering on about the food here or something, that I should check my privilege and think about refugees.
I told him he should stop generalising about entire generations, and he got this grump on him and said he was being ironic, that Alphas never use the word snowflake ’cause that’s for Boomers and Xers who think that anyone who doesn’t have a stiff upper lip is a let down to the nation. He’s all right, and so is she.’
There’s a moment of silence, and I can almost smell the waves of Violet’s bafflement, curling up through the window with her smoke.
Then, ‘I think I’m one of them baby boomers.’
Jodie laughs. ‘Yeah, you are. You definitely are.’
I feel a little bit of something warm in my belly at the way Jodie talks about Jake and me. It’s like the soft edges of a possibility, that maybe, after all, I could be proud of myself, and those edges make me feel a little less insignificant than before.
And then I remember what happened in the night, and I look over at Barbara, and I hate myself anew.
Marcus didn’t believe in self-pride. At least, he didn’t believe I had anything to be proud of, only him who worked hard from dawn to dusk to keep a roof over our heads. And I knew he was right.
???
‘I’ve been watching you,’ Marcus says to me. ‘I can’t help but notice you’re struggling a little.’
I swipe my arm over my sweat-soaked forehead, too aware of how I must look.
I’ve been watching him, too. Watching how he works his clients until they drop, all those impossibly beautiful women hanging on his every word, women who exude confidence like rays of sunshine, strutting around the gym with their perfect toned bodies in their branded lycra and ignoring me entirely.
He crouches down next to where I am sitting on the leg-curl bench. His dark eyebrows knit together, and I follow his gaze as his eyes flick over the pitiful single ten pound weight I’m using, my legs straining at their limit. Heat blossoms in my cheeks.
‘You’re cute when you blush.’
I dab at my face with my towel, as if I can hide the increasing redness, aware of the intensity of his gaze, piercing into me.
‘Seems to me you need a targeted training programme,’ he says.
I shake my head. ‘Oh, no, I can’t afford a personal trainer or anything like that. My doctor prescribed me a six-week membership, to help me get stronger, but—’
‘Who said anything about payment?’
His eyes are oceans of empathy, and I want to drown in them.
‘Little bit of work would sort you out. You could be quite pretty, you know, if you put the effort in. Good bones. And I can help you.’ He smiles at me then and I am lost.
Quite pretty. I’m certain he doesn’t mean those words in the way Keira Knightley means them in Love Actually, all fresh-faced with youth and health and stunning beauty. He means that maybe if I work out harder my skin might sag less, I’d be less sallow, perhaps.
He reaches out and chucks me on my chin, then tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. ‘Mind me asking what’s wrong?’
Honesty. Come on, Penny, it’s the only way. ‘It’s my breathing.’
‘I know something that can help a whole load with that. Come over here.’
He leads me to a cross trainer, the machine I avoid, mocking me every time I walk into the gym with its unreachable heights. I shake my head. ‘I don’t think… I mean, I’ve been working on the bike. I’m doing okay, actually.’
I feel proud of myself, I want to say. I’m persevering and it’s paying off.
He waves his hand over at the bikes, dismissing them with a twist of the lips. ‘Nah. This’ll build you up more. Look.’ He climbs on and starts it up, and in seconds he’s a blur of movement, arms and legs whirring in a rhythmic dance, all energy and bulging muscles.
‘Now you.’
‘I can’t—’
‘That’s no attitude to take, is it? I know you can do it. I have faith in you.’ He’s not even broken a sweat. He stares at me, his brow all crunched.
I don’t understand why he has faith in me. He doesn’t know me.
‘I can only do that because I’ve worked so hard at it.’ He spreads his hands, gesturing at his body, all toned and fit and glowing with health, and grins. ‘You could, too. And I want to help.’
But why would someone like him want to help someone like me?