Chapter 28 #2
Nicki stares. ‘It is, you know. Barbara, where did you find this cat?’
Barbara puffs out her cheeks. ‘I just told you. The caravan. The caravan full of skunk.’
Jodie looks at me and mouths skunk with big wide merry eyes, and I start laughing, and then Kat starts laughing, and then we’re all lost in helpless fits of giggles, and the staff and visitors are standing around us, their faces written with great bemusement and a little bit of alarm.
‘What cat in the Herald?’ Sister Joy says.
Nicki says, ‘That one that was stolen. That rich toff’s cat, Lady something-or-other. Some guy asked for a ransom of 20k or something. But then he never gave her the cat back even though she paid, left the money and everything.’
The other healthcare assistant nods. ‘That cat is worth a mint, but that rich old bat, his owner, she said he was priceless to her. She was offering a reward, like 10k or something like that, if anyone finds him.’
‘No way,’ Jodie says.
‘He’s got some poet’s name or something,’ Nicki says.
‘Here, look, he has a collar,’ Sister Joy says, bending in and lifting the tag. The tag we all missed in the chaos, and the dark, and the snow. ‘Here. Byron.’
‘He’s called Snowy,’ Barbara says.
There’s a pause.
‘What have you lot been up to?’ Sister Joy says, her head tilted to the side.
Jodie shifts herself into a semi-sitting position.
‘We went to the sea. Barbara wanted… needed to see the sea one more time and didn’t have no one to take her there.
So we did. Only it went a bit wrong, my boyfriend…
I mean my ex, he kind of left us in the lurch.
And then there was this caravan dude, and this bus driver here, Cal, who is like my superhero.
And we have to tell the police about the caravan guy.
’ She stifles a yawn over the last words.
Jake raises his eyebrows at her. ‘Cool story bro.’
She sniffs at him. ‘True story.’ She closes her eyes and curls into her pillow.
Cal hovers in the doorway to the bay. ‘I should go. The bus…’
Kat drags herself off her bed and hugs him tight. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re my superhero,’ Jodie says sleepily.
Cal’s face is flushed, and I don’t know if it is because of the heat of the ward or because he is blushing. He shakes his head as Kat lets him go. ‘I’ll blame you, you know,’ he shouts over to me. ‘When the bus company have my arse.’
‘Do that,’ I say.
As he walks out of the ward I stare after him and think about how some men are, after all, good.
Sister Joy stands in the middle of the bay with her legs planted, her arms crossed and her lips flattened, looking around at each one of us.
‘So you’ve all been out on the coldest day of the year, in the snow, for over two-and-a-half hours?
There’s all levels of stupid, but this has to be at the top.
’ She turns to Kat. ‘What were you thinking?’
She sounds a whole lot like Sister Harris.
Barbara beckons her over and pulls at her arm.
‘They were thinking about me and my Maggie Mouse. And I’m glad they did.
’ Her cheeks are mottled with sheets of colour, a little bit like she has subsumed the sunset she so wanted to see.
She leans back on her pillow, cradling Snowy close, a beady suspicious eye on Nicki.
‘We really do need to talk to the police,’ Kat says. ‘We’ve quite a story to tell.’
‘What you need is to get these visitors out and have a nice cup of tea.’ Nicki walks through the ward, sweeping her arms at Jake and Nate and the others. ‘And then a bit of hot dinner’ll be here any minute. Then we can sort out the police, and hear what you’ve been up to.’
Sister Joy looks taken aback, as if shocked by a mere healthcare assistant taking charge when she is in the room. But she says nothing. Jake ignores Nicki and stays slouched on the chair next to me, arms folded and long legs splayed out, glancing around the bay with amused eyes.
Nicki turns back to Barbara. ‘We’ll need to take Byron,’ she says softly.
‘Snowy.’ Barbara folds him tighter to her chest, her arms as white as his fur, and turns her face away from Nicki’s gaze.
‘We’ll get him back to his owner, flower.’
Barbara sticks her bottom lip out and shakes her head, then nestles her face into Snowy’s, crooning words about him being safe with her, how he shouldn’t worry because he is her darling boy.
Nicki tiptoes closer and tries to pluck Snowy from Barbara’s arms, but he bucks and hisses at her and she steps back, hands in the air. ‘You get him,’ she says to Sister Joy.
Joy keeps her arms folded tightly under her ample bosom. ‘Why can’t you?’ She turns to the other healthcare assistant who hovers at the door of the bay. ‘Or you?’
‘I don’t want to get scratched,’ she says.
Sister Joy narrows her eyes.
‘Okay. Okay. I’ll try.’ The healthcare assistant creeps over to Barbara and tentatively places her hand on the cat. He arches his back, spits, and bats a paw at her.
Nicki purses her lips. ‘We’re going to have to get hold of the owner. Quick.’
Barbara glows with a smug little smile.
‘Right, Barbara. Just give me your arm, so we can do your sats, just quickly.’ Nicki wraps the blood pressure cuff around Barbara’s arm and slides the oximeter onto her finger. ‘Flaming heck!’ She stands back, staring at the numbers on the monitor.
‘What is it?’ Sister Joy says, her face a mask of concern and not a little bit of anger.
My stomach writhes. If we’ve made her more ill…
‘She’s got higher oxygen levels than I’ve ever seen with her!’ Nicki says, showing Sister Joy the screen. ‘And her blood pressure – it’s right perfect.’
‘And her temperature?’ Sister Joy says, casting a look of disdain over at me and Kat.
Nicki slides the thermometer into Barbara’s ear and waits for the beep. She checks the display and raises her eyebrows. ‘Thirty-seve point five.’
‘Well,’ Sister Joy says.
‘She’s in better shape than she was this morning,’ Nicki says.
Kat whispers, ‘More by luck than good management.’
‘We went to the seaside,’ Barbara says. ‘And there was sand mountains on my feet and I sat by the sea and had a nip of brandy.’
Sister Joy makes an oh with her mouth. ‘You what?’
‘Hot chocolate,’ Jodie says dreamily. ‘Hot chocolate.’
‘I don’t know what you did,’ Nicki says, ‘but she’s fitter than a fiddle right now.’
Barbara is bubbling with life and joy, and I know, all of a sudden, that we did something good today, after all.
Jake is staring at me like I am an alien, but that is not unusual. ‘Are you going to fill me in?’ He glances over at Jodie. ‘She looks knackered.’
‘It’s like Barbara says,’ I say. ‘We went to the sea. And it went wrong, but it went right as well. I… I realised a few things.’
He shifts his eyes to the side, like he always does just before he senses I’m going to do a Talk at him.
‘Yeah?’
I gaze at him and think about how much he has missed out on in his life because he has a mum like me.
All those times he missed parties. When he couldn’t do the football training he loved because I wasn’t reliable enough to take him three times a week.
All those World Book Days when all the other parents made homemade costumes worthy of the local amateur dramatics society and I sent him in his Gryffindor robes for the third year in a row (it’s helpful when parents model a good work ethic to young children, the teacher said to me with a face full of disapproval).
All those National Trust houses we didn’t visit together.
Not that I much enjoyed National Trust houses when I was a teenager, dragged round by my parents in the hopes of instilling culture into me, and Jake doesn’t much like them now, on the occasional visit we manage, trailing around with a scowl on his face and ironic grunts of ‘Oh, it’s another fireplace.
Oh, it’s another vase.’ That doesn’t make up for the fact that he should have had more National Trust houses in his life, though, that while every other family out there are #makingmemories on Instagram and Facebook I am wishing memories away under my duvet.
Facebook is for old people, Jake always says, but even if that’s true I have never been enough for it.
‘I wish I’d given you more,’ I say.
The depths of blue in his eyes look like summer.
‘But, today, I realised that I’d been beating myself up most of my life. And that I didn’t have to do that.’
Jake arrests his eye-roll and grabs my hand. ‘You’re all right, you know that, Mum. You never have to think you’re not enough, or anything like that, not for me. You had a bad lot in life, and then that loser who fathered me…’
I squeeze his hand. ‘He gave me the best thing I could ever have.’
Jake’s eye-roll resumes its sardonic rotation as he picks up his phone. ‘That’s slay,’ he mutters, and I have no idea what he is talking about.
???
Later on, the police turn up. We have had our dinner and all our observations and our medication.
I think back to my last lot of pills, at lunchtime, and think about how it feels like a hundred years and another lifetime ago.
Sister Joy struts around the bay with her mouth all flat with disapproval, yet not quite able to hide the edges of her smile as she looks at Barbara and then at Violet who, for the first time, has not complained about her dinner or the lateness of her pills.
All the staff studiously ignore Snowy, curled up in Barbara’s blankets, his purr lost beneath the whine of nebulisers.
The woman in Amina’s bed has not moved and I wonder how she would feel if she were able to be at the beach with the sand under her toes today.