Chapter 11 #2
‘Five years ago.’ Barbara stares into space. ‘That awful corona thing.’
Kat keeps silence for a long moment.
Then, ‘Do you have children?’
Barbara hesitates, the lines around her eyes animated, crawling outwards like ivy creeping up a house in time-lapse motion. ‘No.’
‘Sorry,’ Kat says, ‘I didn’t mean to be intrusive.’
Barbara says nothing. Just stares out of the window opposite her, beyond Jodie’s bed, her faded blue eyes reflecting the grey day.
Poor Barbara. She’s lost the only person she had in the world.
I watch each day just in case an errant son or sheepish niece turns up with illegal flowers and apologetic murmurings, but no one ever does.
She just lies in her corner bed, wasting away.
She doesn’t eat and she doesn’t sleep. She stares at the ceiling and whispers about the rat on the floor.
‘Hey,’ she calls over to me, snapping out of her staring silence, ‘The rat is on your bed! The rat is on your bed now. Get it off. Get it off! Nurse!’
‘Does she think I’m a rat?’ Jake murmurs.
I shake my head. ‘Shh. No, she has a thing about rats and mice. Leave her be.’
‘Nurse!’
Nicki walks in with a pile of sheets under one arm. ‘You calling me, flower?’
‘It’s the rat. There. On her bed.’
Nicki glances over at us and then pats Barbara’s hand with great tenderness. ‘There’s no rat, lovely. Try not to worry. Just a great big lad who shouldn’t be there because visiting is over.’
Jake takes the hint and throws his hands up, dragging himself off the chair. ‘I was going anyway.’
‘I saw it,’ Barbara says, her voice a quavering moan.
Nicki puts the pile of sheets on the bed and kneels down by her chair.
She takes both her hands and looks into her eyes.
‘It’s okay, Barbara. The rat’s gone, see?
You’re safe, flower. Now, I’ve brought these sheets to sort your bed out while you’re out of it, seeing as what we couldn’t get you up for love nor money this morning.
So let’s get your bed all nice and then me and Claire will get you washed and changed and settled back for a nice little nap. Is that okay?’
Barbara pushes out her bottom lip.
‘Now now, Barbara, you’re my good girl, aren’t you? You going to let me help you?’
‘But the rat…’
‘The rat isn’t here, flower. Just you and me.’
Nicki gets up, holding her back and flinching as if she is in pain, then winks at us as she drags the curtains round Barbara and shuts her off from the scary, rat-filled world outside.
Jodie balances on the edge of my bed, ready to launch herself off when Sister arrives. She looks at me and beckons me closer. Whispers something.
‘What?’ I say, shrinking back from her tobacco heavy fumes.
‘I said we could take Barbara to the seaside.’
‘What?’ I say again.
‘You heard me. We could take Barbara, you know, she said it was her last wish or something, right? We could make it come true.’
I stare at her incredulously. ‘I don’t think…’
I look over at Violet and Kat, Kat holding Violet’s hand, listening to her talk and weep about her family.
Jodie shakes her head and leans in closer. ‘Listen. I’ve been thinking. They like us all going for our little walks, getting some fresh air, the doctor is always telling us we should do that, isn’t he? See, Kane has this minibus thing, and the sea’s not far away, right?’
‘Um—’
‘I don’t mean like tomorrow or anything. I mean when we’re all feeling a bit better. Maybe in a few days.’
‘I—’
‘Look, I’ve thought it all through. We could take her in a wheelchair and everything. Only need to have a little sit on the beach, like a few minutes. We’d only be gone about an hour all in if you think about it, if that. They wouldn’t even miss us.’
‘But we can’t do that. Barbara’s not always all there, is she? She’s too frail. And we probably won’t all be here in a few days – people go home, they move us around, you know that.’
Jodie pouts. ‘Don’t be such a Debbie Downer. We’ve been in this long together, haven’t we? Nearly a week? They’ll not move us now until we go home, and none of us are ready for that yet, are we? You’re not going home yet, are you?’
I shake my head. ‘No, I mean, I have another week or so.’
‘Right? And my doctor says to me this morning, you’re not ready for home yet, Jodie, however much you try and convince me you are. My blood levels or something. Though I feel fine.’
‘Yes but… we just can’t. We’d get in trouble.’
‘Why would they know, though?’
‘We don’t have the strength. I don’t think I can drive, on all these meds.’
‘Kane will help us. I already asked him. He’ll do anything for me. There’s this beach, see, just a small one.’
I swallow. ‘I… why don’t we wait, maybe one or two of us come back when we’re better and out of here, take her then? Just as visitors? I could drive.’
Jodie taps her finger against her mouth and gazes at me, her blue eyes more intense than usual.
‘Haven’t you heard the nurses?’ she whispers, her eyes darting from right to left.
‘They keep saying she’s near the end, don’t they?
’ Her shoulders slump. ‘We have to help her before she goes. To do this one thing for her. It’s only a little thing, and it’s not like we’re prisoners here, is it?
What if we could give her her dying wish? Don’t you want to do that?’
I stare at her then laugh.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Well, uh…’
‘You think we couldn’t do that? Kane’s a builder, right?
He’s super strong. He can help us. And Kat, she’s up for it I reckon.
And Violet, well, she’s up herself and all, but she reckons she’d be up for it.
I asked her earlier when we was smoking, she was like, don’t be stupid, girl, but then I explained it all and she was like, well maybe, but only if she can just sit in the van ’cause she don’t like sand or seawater.
Says to me she’s feeling a whole load better.
Amina, I don’t know if she’d want to come, but no harm asking, yeah? Unless she’d sneak to Harris.’
I can’t think of what to say. She must be doing this for a bit of fun, a fairy tale we can all collude in the telling of to pass the time, a dream of better things.
‘Well, I suppose,’ I find myself saying.
Part of me wishes it was a real plan, that we could really do it, that we could really let Barbara feel the salty air on her face and the sand between her toes. I lean back into my pillows and close my eyes, conjuring up the blue sky and the gentle waves.
We could pretend, I suppose.
???
I’m not sure Violet really is feeling better, even though she told Jodie she is.
In evening visiting she looks pale, clinging on to Brian’s hand as if she’s drowning and he is her lifebelt.
Her frown is more twisted than usual, screwing up her face and pinching her eyebrows together in one straggly line as she glowers over at Amina’s family.
Amina’s husband Bilal and three of her four sons are there with her, quiet and gentle as always as they lean in towards her with tender words, faces etched with concern.
‘Shouldn’t be allowed,’ Violet mutters in Brian’s direction, while keeping her eyes narrowed at Amina’s sons. ‘Think they can get away with anything. Says three visitors on that sign, clear as day, but these people think they can do as they please.’
‘It’s disgusting,’ Brian says.
‘Gadding about, disturbing everyone’s peace.’
‘It’s a disgrace.’
‘See this is why I needed my own room. They don’t care about getting us better, really, not when they let hundreds of people come in with no thought for the ill people in here.’
Violet coughs and then explodes into a frenzy of coughing, leaving her gasping for breath and blue around the edges. She bends over, her shoulders heaving, and Brian strokes her back. ‘It’s okay, dear. Calm down. Shh.’
But Violet is riled. She points to Amina with a wavering index finger, her lips quivering with outrage. ‘That’s what happens when she has all those people over. That’s what it makes me do, Brian! It’s intolerable!’
‘Intolerable,’ Brian says.
‘And they all talk in that foreign Indian language and all. No respect.’
Amina and her family are talking quietly, as they always do, but they can’t help but hear her accusations.
I wonder what it is like to be so accused when you have done nothing wrong, and suspect Amina knows only too well.
Her glance shifts towards Violet for a second, and then over to me, and I lift my eyebrows at her and smile gently, rolling my eyes in Violet’s direction.
Urdu, Amina said to Kat when she asked about her mother tongue.
She and Bilal whisper together in Urdu, but the boys prefer to speak English, even though they are all bilingual.
One of them, their eldest, he can speak five languages, he has a flair for them, she told us with pride shining from her eyes.
‘They give me no peace,’ Violet says, her voice a pitiful rasp now, choked up with tears and the edges of her coughing fit.
‘Disgraceful,’ Brian says, and I think to myself that I have never seen anything less disgraceful than Amina’s caring, gentle family.
‘Nurse!’ Violet cries out, as Ernesto comes into the ward with the obs trolley. ‘Nurse!’
Ernesto sighs dramatically and wanders over to Violet, swaying his hips as Jodie gives a low whistle. ‘What is it, Violet?’
‘Give me some painkillers.’
Ernesto casts a sardonic glance back at Jodie. ‘I’ll ask the nurse to come and see you, Violet. Are you in pain?’
‘Of course I’m in pain, you silly little man. Why did you think I was asking for painkillers? I’m in pain because people keep giving me a headache.’
‘I’ll ask the nurse. But it could be a while, they’re just on changeover.’ Ernesto whirls round with the trolley and slaloms it over to Jodie. ‘Time for a blood pressure check, young lady.’
‘No one cares in this place,’ Violet says loudly. ‘They all think they have better things to do with their time than get some pills for a lady in pain.’
‘Well, I think they do an amazing job,’ Kat says. She’s sitting up on her bed with Nate balanced on the edge, both leaning forward, listening in raptly to the exchange.
‘Huh,’ Violet says.
Brian says, ‘They’re a disgrace.’
There’s a clamour at the door as several women come into the ward shedding wet coats and grabbing chairs. ‘Kat!’ one of them says. ‘Good to see you out of bed!’
Kat has visitors all the time, different people every day, old and young, men and women.
Her congregation, I suppose. They come armed with biscuits and grapes and chocolate and a whole lot of love, and I envy her community.
The four women grab themselves chairs and draw them up to Kat’s bed, eager with news and chatter and life.
One of them takes out a soft knitted shawl, all the shades of purple, and presents it to Kat with a kiss on the cheek.
‘We made this for you in the knitting group,’ the woman says, flushing slightly.
‘It’s for you to feel our love. And our prayers. ’
Kat has tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t know what to say. Thank you.’ She drapes the shawl around her shoulders, still managing to look edgy and eye-catching, as she always does, even in checked pyjamas. The tears spill down her cheeks and one of the women passes her a tissue.
‘We love you,’ the woman says.
I want to cry, too, but don’t know how to.