Chapter 22
The picnic rug is a square of smallness, made for a couple cosying up with a bottle of wine.
The frog chair is tiny, but Barbara is tinier, and she giggles and claps her hands as Kat and Jodie help her off the wheelchair and lower her in.
The poles screech and I worry it will collapse under her, but it stays put, one side listing slightly.
They wrap her tightly in the blanket, gathering in her cannula and oxygen line.
Her drip bag is empty, the line stretching taut and tugging at her arm, so I detach the connector lock from her port, clipping off her tube and tucking the end into the bandage around her arm.
Her knees poke out from under her dressing gown, her support stockings all crinkled at her ankles, legs extending in front of her like sticks, criss-crossed with blue and purple veins vivid against the near translucency of her skin, her slippered feet resting on the sand.
Kat lays the other blankets out over her legs and tucks them in all around her until she is cocooned in a blue waffle shell.
Violet stands back, leaning heavily on her walking frame next to Barbara’s chair, her face a picture of disgust as she looks down at the picnic rug.
‘You’re not getting me onto that.’ She struggles with her walker, shoving it through the sand and placing it next to the rug, on the other side to Barbara’s frog chair.
Jodie laughs. ‘You’re no fun, Violet.’
Violet’s face tenses and then just as quickly softens, the deep-set lines around her eyes smoothing out just a little, her mouth curving into the edges of a smile. ‘Could do with a cig,’ she says. ‘Got any?’
Jodie plucks a cigarette packet out of the pocket of her jacket. ‘Of course. I’ll join you.’
Kat and Amina and I squeeze as much of ourselves as we can onto the rug.
It slips and slides and buries itself in the gritty sand, leaving our legs splayed out over the naked ground.
The sand is cool against my thin leggings and I shiver, pulling my parka tightly around me and my hood up.
Kat hunches next to me in her onesie with the hood pulled right up, Chewie’s face smiling kookily out at us.
Amina shivers. Somewhere in the far distance a dog barks.
‘Wait a sec.’ I remember the bag, discarded on the sand nearby, and tug it towards me, opening it up and rummaging through. ‘There’s a few things in here. Hats, scarves, gloves. You’re all welcome to them if you want.’
‘Good thinking,’ Kat says.
‘More by luck than design. Jake couldn’t be bothered to look for my hat, so…
’ I begin to pluck out some of the contents.
‘Oh my days. Sorry about this.’ I still can’t find my lovely black bobble hat, but I do find a Bristol Rovers hat and scarf set, a West Ham hat, some red children’s fingerless gloves and a fleecy Santa hat amongst other sundry items. My favourite black wool scarf is here, though, and I wrap it around my neck, slipping on some football gloves and a tatty old beanie hat of Jake’s, pulling my parka hood up over it.
Jake never even supported Bristol Rovers.
‘We should put that hat on Barbara,’ Kat says. ‘It’s biting out here.’
Barbara submits to Kat sliding the hat on her head and the child’s gloves onto her hands.
She smiles out at the sea, diminutive and lost in a mountain of blankets and a Bristol Rovers bobble hat.
Amina and Kat both find some non-matching gloves, and we sit in silence and enjoy the quiet of the beach and the rolling of the sea, watching Violet and Jodie, standing slightly away from us, puffing away.
‘It’s nice to be out in the fresh air, I must say,’ Violet says.
Kat raises her eyebrows at me, and I almost laugh out loud at the irony of it.
Marcus used to smoke, even though he was a fitness nut and knew that it messed my lungs up even further.
I was just being picky, he said, he smoked outside, what more did I want?
It wasn’t like he was smoking right in my face in an enclosed space or anything, he was being as considerate as he could and all I did was complain.
Sorry, I would say, sorry, I know you’re thinking of me, it’s just that it makes me wheeze and it hurts.
But then he’d remind me that if I made more effort to get fit my lungs would get stronger and I wouldn’t have such an issue with him having the odd cigarette at the end of a really hard day at work.
He deserved it, after all, he was the one bringing the money in round here, yet here I was denying him a little bit of comfort.
Sorry, sorry for putting myself first, I would say.
And then he would go and smoke the cigarette and when he came in he would take me in his arms and hold me tight and I would cough and cough until my chest ached.
‘Another one?’ Violet says, when they’re done, but Jodie shakes her head.
‘Nah. We don’t really have the time. Just a sec.’ Jodie straggles up the beach and says something to Kane, then starts picking her way back towards us. Her toes are blue against the sand. He says something back to her in a shouty voice, then comes out of the van and follows her, muttering.
‘Give us it, then,’ he says.
Jodie pulls her phone out of her pocket and fiddles with it for a moment, then hands it to him. ‘Here. App’s open.’
‘Go and get down with the rest, then,’ he says to her, and Jodie smiles eagerly up at him as she comes back to Violet’s side.
Violet allows herself to be guided over to her walker and holds on to Jodie tightly as she lowers her down to the seat. ‘Ouch. My poor legs. I’m not stopping down here long.’ She sits awkwardly, legs shaking. Jodie squeezes herself down onto the rug with the rest of us, shivering.
I hold the bag out to Jodie. ‘Take some,’ I say. ‘It’s so cold.’
‘Haven’t got all day,’ Kane says, lurching down the beach towards us, scrolling through Jodie’s phone.
Kat passes the wolf fleece to Jodie. ‘You almost forgot this.’ Jodie gazes at it, then glances at Kane, chewing on the inside of her cheek.
Then she quickly shrugs her jacket off and pulls the fleece over her head.
The jacket is even more ill-fitting over the fleece, barely meeting in the middle, the howling wolf displayed in all its tacky glory.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Can I have the Santa hat?’
I pass the West Ham hat up to Violet. Its wool is unravelling, more well-used than the Bristol Rovers one. She screws up her face but slips it over her head, saying nothing. She pulls out a pair of gloves from the pockets of her silver puffer jacket. They are black leather and look expensive.
Kane hovers near Violet, pulling a face at the wolf jumper. ‘You quite ready?’
‘Kane’s just gonna take a photo of us all,’ Jodie says. ‘Smile, everyone!’
Kane comes around to the front of us and stands with the phone held out in front of him and a sulk screwing up his face. We smile up at the camera and Jodie kneels next to me and throws her hands up in the air, then lowers them at the look of disdain written over Kane’s face.
‘Done,’ he grunts, turning on his heel and setting off back up to his minibus.
‘We made it,’ Jodie says, relaxing onto a patch of sand next to the blanket, which is too full of the four of us, and dusting the clingy sand from her feet. ‘We’re here. We’re at the seaside, Barbara!’
Barbara is alive with light. She looks around at us all, giggles, then looks around again, flinging her hand over her mouth. ‘You brought me.’
‘We did.’
‘I never thought you really would, you know.’
We edge closer to her and Kat lays her head lightly on her knee.
‘I want to feel the sand.’
Kat looks doubtful.
‘Let me feel it,’ Barbara says.
Jodie and Kat gently remove Barbara’s maroon slippers and her off-white support stockings, revealing wrinkled feet with purple blotches and discoloured, yellowing toenails curling around under themselves.
Jodie places the shoes and socks up on Barbara’s wheelchair, behind us, just in case the tide comes in and catches us off guard.
Kat digs into a small bag she has on her lap. ‘Can I do this?’ she says to Barbara, holding up a tiny pair of nail scissors and some bright red nail polish.
Barbara stares at her, and then nods. ‘Yes. Yes, poppet.’
‘It’s quick dry stuff. Sixty seconds.’ Kat takes Barbara’s left foot and starts trimming the nails, slowly and carefully, and we watch in silence as she paints each toenail until they are all glittering with vibrant scarlet.
‘They match my gloves,’ Barbara says.
‘Leave them a minute.’ Kat clips her bag closed and sits with her legs drawn up to her, gazing out at the sea.
After a few moments Barbara stretches out her feet, splaying out her toes and pressing them to the sand, burrowing them in. ‘Now bury my feet,’ she says to Jodie.
‘Sand’s a bit chilly,’ Jodie says.
‘I don’t care.’
Jodie plucks handfuls of sand and gently pats them over Barbara’s feet, digging further in until two mounds of sand take shape, cutting off Barbara at the ankles.
Barbara stares at them, her face serious, something dark crossing her eyes.
‘Bill used to do that. Only he’d bury me up to my neck, he would, and I’d be lying there pinned under this great mountain of sand, and he’d be there laughing at me.
Then he’d say, you still look beautiful even under that lot.
That’s what he’d say. Then he’d leave me right there, all up to my head in his sand cave, then he’d be back with ice-cream cones, saying oh no, looks like I’ll have to eat both of these seeing as you’re all tied up.
And I’d leap up out of the sand and it’d fly everywhere, and we’d sit and eat ice-creams with bits of sand in them, and they were the best things ever. ’
We sit there and feel the wind ruffling at our hair. It blows the fake fur on my hood into my eyes and I blink it away and wonder if the prick of tears is only my imagination.
‘He sounded lovely,’ Kat says softly.
Barbara stares out to the horizon.