Chapter 20
The cold afternoon hits me in the face, stealing my breath, the late November sun peeking through the low-lying layers of cloud.
It’s captivating, the wide grey sweep of the sky, drawing my gaze up away from the mass of cars and the ambulances and all the people.
I stand there for a moment, allowing the few feeble rays of sunshine to caress my face.
Jodie pulls at my arm. ‘There,’ she says, pointing over at a confusion of cars and vans and a hospital minibus all jostling for position near the entrance.
Kane is there in the centre, leaning on a beat-up old minibus with the words ‘Oak Green Primary School’ in faded green Comic Sans, and an equally faded image of an oak tree in full bloom across the battered, filthy panelling.
I wonder how he got hold of it, and then decide not to wonder too much.
He’s parked it across two of the disabled parking bays and stands there with his arms folded and a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, with Barbara next to him in her chair, her eyes sparkling in their pale reflections of the patchy blue of the sky peeping through the grey.
He spots the three of us as we make our way over, threading between two taxis. He grunts and slides the door open.
‘How are we getting her in?’ Jodie says, staring at the gap between the ground and the step. ‘Thought you had a ramp?’
Kane shakes his head. ‘I can lift her. I told you that. Just need a bit of a hand.’ He grasps the bar at the front of the chair, underneath Barbara’s maroon-slippered feet. ‘Come on. Get the back.’
‘Me?’ Jodie says.
‘Who else? Them lot don’t have the strength, right?’ He peers over at me and Kat, then shades his face with his hand, staring at us and the entrance behind us. ‘Where’s that other one? That grumpy old bint?’
‘She’s coming,’ Kat says. ‘And Amina, too. We’ll just have to wait.’
Kane shakes his head. ‘Nah. See, I’m not waiting round here anymore.
That jobsworth over there already gave me a load of lip, an’ I says to him I’ll just be five mins, an’ that was ages ago.
Said he’d fine me, and I says I’m picking up a handicapped lady, an’ he swore at me, I’m not even joking.
Those people taking up these here spaces’ll be out any sec.
’ He sweeps his arm round at the disabled bays, a look of disdain creasing his face. ‘So help me up with her, babe.’
Jodie breathes in.
‘Now.’ He says the word quietly, softly, but it’s loaded with menace, and it reminds me too much of Marcus.
Jodie grips hold of the handles on Barbara’s chair. ‘I’ll help,’ Kat says, shoving Jodie aside and taking hold herself.
‘We’ll do it together.’ Jodie grabs one handle and the bar at the side, and they lift together, Jodie’s breathing rapid and sputtering.
‘Let me,’ I say. I’m going home on Monday, after all.
I’m much better than I was. I grab the bar at the back, and we all heave Barbara and chair into the van together.
I’m not sure if it’s my imagination, but it doesn’t feel as though Kane does much of the work at all.
Sweat prickles at my brow and I breathe hard at the exertion.
Kane looks down at me from his position in the van, eyebrows slightly raised, mouth all sardonic and contorted.
‘Get in then.’ He grabs Jodie’s hand and yanks her into the minibus, so hard she’s almost flying, tripping up over the plate as she lands on the floor next to him. He laughs. ‘Stupid cow.’
‘Don’t talk to her like that,’ Kat says.
‘You want me to take you, or what?’
Kat shrugs.
‘You okay, Barbara?’ I say, climbing into the minibus and sitting down. ‘You warm enough?’
It’s chilled in here, the air sagging in a sense of worn-out hopelessness around us, as if the vehicle has given up on life, yearning for the days when squealing children bounced on its seats and threw up on its floor. A musty aroma coils through the dusty air and makes me cough.
Barbara stares around her suspiciously. ‘There’s rats in here.’
She’s probably right.
‘We should get her in one of the seats,’ Kat says. ‘Belted up.’
Kane shakes his head. ‘We gotta go. No time for that faffing around. She’s fine as she is.’
Kat stares up at him, tilting her head to the side. ‘No she’s not. We get her in the seat. Do you not care about safety? What if there was an accident? It’d be your fault if she got hurt.’
‘As if there’d be an accident,’ he says, his mouth all twisted up with a great big scoff. ‘I’m an experienced HCV driver, actually.’
‘Well, then, actually, you should know all about safety protocols,’ Kat says, head tilted even further over.
He doesn’t reply to this.
‘Come on,’ Kat says to Jodie. ‘Let’s get her in the seat.’ She leans in closer to me and whispers, ‘Go slow.’
We lift Barbara, gently and so exaggeratedly slowly Kane begins to turn purple.
He jumps out of the minibus, kicking at the wheels and then slamming the sliding door closed so hard the whole thing judders.
He flips his cigarette on the ground and then clambers in through the driver’s door. ‘Take your time, why don’t you.’
‘We will,’ Kat whispers.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing,’ Jodie says. ‘Just helping Barbara.’
‘Well, will you hurry up? You asked me to do this, so show some gratitude and get on with it.’
We settle Barbara onto her seat and cross the tattered belt over her body gently, then tuck the blankets around her.
She looks as lost in her seat as she does in her wheelchair and her hospital bed, a tiny white-haired bird, all of her pale and white against a sea of 1980s bus-seat cover, all violent geometric reds and blues and oranges fighting with one another for space.
Jodie clicks the belt into the buckle and draws back. ‘Right.’
‘You ready, then?’ Kane’s voice is all irritation barely smothered, like a pressure cooker about to burst its lid open.
‘Just need to get us belted in, now,’ Kat says. ‘Give us a minute.’
He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, blowing out his cheeks.
We draw our seatbelts across with meticulous languidness. Kat’s seatbelt seems to stick repeatedly. ‘Oh dear,’ she says, winking at me as she pulls the belt across her over and over again and then yanks it hard. ‘I think this one’s broken. Give me a minute while I try that one.’
I laugh under my breath as Kane slams his fist on the window.
In the end we can’t procrastinate any longer.
‘Finally,’ Kane hisses, turning over the engine.
It sounds like a tractor and I wonder if it moves like one.
He pulls out towards the entrance, and curses again as a taxi pulls in front of him.
He leans on the horn and lifts his hands as the taxi driver leans out of his window and scowls at him.
‘Will you get out my way?’ Kane shouts, but the taxi driver doesn’t get out of his way.
He sits there with engine idling, ignoring Kane’s increasingly frenzied yells.
Jodie looks at Kat, who is grinning away to herself in the corner. ‘What? You been praying or something? To slow us down?’
Kat smiles wider.
‘They’re taking ages,’ I say.
Kane slams the wheel.
‘Look!’ Jodie says, pointing to the entrance, where Amina is rushing through the doors, her bright clothing glinting in the daylight.
Behind her is Violet, stumbling along with her walking frame, dressed in a huge puffy silver jacket zipped up over the Dressing Gown of Doom.
Jodie’s face lights with glee. ‘Wonder if Brian has one of those, an’ all. ’
Kat gives me a sideways glance and I laugh out loud at the hideous incongruousness of Violet’s get-up.
Her full-length dressing gown, poking out of the silver coat like a bad onesie that forgot its legs, garish lace details at the cuffs and a zip from top to bottom.
A toilet tent, that’s what Jodie had called it.
Jodie drags the door open and screeches over at them. ‘Over here! Violet! Amina!’
Kane slams the dashboard.
They bring a violent wind in with them, with Amina’s rippling hijab and the hideous gown, and they bring more laughter too.
Violet is bright and glowing and has a face full of garish make-up, all smudged bright blue eyeshadow and a slash of scarlet lipstick, blusher that looks like a clown got a bit wasted; one hand grasping her walking frame, one arm threaded through Amina’s, the mouth that is usually turned down drawn back in a wide grin, showing wonky, yellowing teeth.
Jodie says, ‘You look like the love-child of an astronaut and a pair of seventies curtains.’
Violet doesn’t stop grinning.
Jodie helps Violet up and lifts the walker in, stowing it next to the wheelchair.
‘She came back for me.’ Violet hacks and pants, her chest rising and falling rapidly as she sinks down into one of the seats. ‘There she was, in that funny headscarf thing, running into the bay. Thought I was hallucinating, but it was her.’
Amina squeezes in next to her and I wonder if she is offended by Violet’s careless use of language. But she leans into Violet’s shoulder and grins. ‘Sorry we took a while. Madam here had to prepare herself to be the belle of the ball.’
I think that Violet has tears in her eyes. ‘She came back for me.’
‘Well, I was not going to leave you, was I?’
Violet swallows. ‘She said I had to come. So I did.’
‘You belong with us,’ Kat says.
Violet stares at her and then around at all of us, doubt clouding her eyes and creasing her face up, not into its old familiar pattern of distaste at the world, but into something more like uncertainty.
I look at her and can only imagine her thoughts.
She’s been the outsider in our ward and probably the outsider in her life, always looking on with great disapproval, a disdain that so obviously masks the pain she is in.
She’s put a shell around herself, I think, erected a boundary of haughtiness and superiority, but underneath it all she’s just got the same longings as the rest of us. She just wants to belong.
‘I think you’ve changed me,’ she says.
I am seeing a butterfly emerging out of its chrysalis, in flashes of glorious colour, beating its wings and flying free into a new world. Violet, in her polyester dressing gown and smeared blue eyeshadow, her silver coat and pink slippers, is a wave of colour and light.
I want to take hold of some of that wave and wrap it around myself.
‘This bus is a bit of a dump, though, isn’t it?’ she says, her mouth flattening back into its usual shape.
We all laugh.
I look around at all of us here in this very possibly stolen minibus, a motley crew of six sick women, one wheelchair, one oxygen cylinder, one drip stand, one walking frame, a hideous dressing gown, a Justin Bieber T-shirt and a Chewbacca onesie.
The flowers, Nicki always calls us. We’re the flowers of Bay C.
A tide of something warm steals over me; something more than fondness, like a wild longing somewhere inside me being slowly soothed, like something in the depths of me is opening as much as it is in Violet.
The taxi finally moves out of the way, its charge safely installed, and Kane guides the bus haphazardly around the entrance and out of the car park.
For the first time in two weeks I am out in the world, away from my safe place, from the routine of meds rounds and obs checks and healthcare assistants with tea trolleys.
I’m out in the world where normal people go to work and have energy, where people laugh and cry and make their way through life, where people drive a thousand cars all over the roads to a thousand different places.
I stare out of the window, shaken by the rawness of reality, by how easily I have become, once again, institutionalised in a world where I am taken care of and ruled over by hospital routine.
It’s almost too free out here on the road, where anything could happen, too scary, the skies too open and the horizon so wide it might swallow me up.