Chapter 29
In the night I am all switched off. My mind is a blank haze of blissful nothingness, carrying me through hours of the best sleep I’ve had in two weeks, barely waking for my IVs and my observations.
In the morning it is quiet in the bay. Alice is propped up against her pillows, and I see her face properly for the first time, free of its CPAP constraint.
The indent of the mask still imprints her flesh, leaving angry red streaks that make her look even more vulnerable, even more frail.
Jodie is sleeping, all curled up in a quivering ball, and Violet isn’t here.
I glance out of the window to the white world outside, the snow still falling, heaped against the walls in great drifts; a good day for a snowball fight, Jake would say.
Kat is drinking a cup of tea, pinches of colour in her cheeks I’m sure weren’t there before. ‘How are you feeling?’ she says.
‘I’m actually okay,’ I say.
‘Me, too. I can’t quite believe it, to be honest.’
‘Pretty sure Sister Joy thought we’d all drop dead of pneumonia last night.’
‘What about Barbara?’
I look over to where she is sitting, feet snug in her maroon slippers, dressing gown pulled tight over her hospital gown. Her hair is stark white against the blue of the chair, her face is flushed with marbled pink. I wave at her.
She beckons me over. ‘Here. You were snoring, you were.’
‘Was I?’
She shakes with mirth. ‘Like a great big dog.’
‘Umm… thanks?’
‘Come and sit down with me.’ She pats her bed and I perch on the edge, keeping an eye out for Sister Harris, who might be on shift today. Barbara leans into me and whispers into my ear, ‘I found my mouse.’
I draw back and look at her. Is she confused, or is she lucid?
She puts her hand over her mouth and giggles. ‘You know I did.’
‘I know you did, Barbara.’
‘Hey! Off that bed, young lady.’ It’s not Sister Harris, it’s Sister Joy again, bustling in with the meds cart, wagging a finger at me.
‘You get back into bed. I’ve got my eye on you today so you don’t go off on another one of your outings.
You bad ladies, you.’ She says it all with a wide grin curving her mouth and ends it with a tinkling laugh like a mountain stream.
‘There’s a lady here wants to speak to you all, but I’ve told her to come back later, when we’ve got our morning jobs done. She’s very insistent.’
‘Who is it?’
Sister Joy shrugs. ‘She says that she cannot wait until visiting. So I say, I do not care that you cannot wait, this is a hospital. And then she says, she has something good for us, if I let her have half an hour with you.’
The ward settles into the slumber of Sunday morning, with the odd group of doctors consulting together and with their patients.
No one seems interested in me or Kat, though Barbara and Violet both get a visit, and Jodie too.
I can hear the doctor’s booming voice from Barbara’s cubicle: ‘You are much better, Barbara.’ She says it loudly and slowly, as if Barbara is both hard-of-hearing and stupid.
‘You can go back to your care home tomorrow.’
‘Oh,’ Barbara says, and I can hear the wavering in her voice.
‘We weren’t too happy with what you did,’ the doctor says, ‘but it seems there’s no harm done. You look very sprightly this morning.’
‘I went to the sea,’ Barbara says.
Sister Joy goes to speak with Jodie’s doctor and they hang round in her cubicle for longer than usual, but I can’t hear what they’re saying, their hushed tones smothered under the beepbeepbeep of Alice’s occluded IV drip. Something about morphine, and maybe tramadol, too.
‘Are you okay?’ I say to her when the doctor has left.
‘Never better.’
‘Are you going home tomorrow, too?’
‘I don’t think so.’ She seems slurred and dreamy.
A young woman with long, curly red hair and huge black framed glasses wanders into the bay, clutching an iPad and glancing around at each one of us. Her gaze alights on Jodie. ‘You’re Jodie Hancox?’
Jodie nods and smiles languidly. ‘I am she.’
‘Good. Good. I’m Sarah Lawley from the Herald.’
‘Hello, Sarah Lawley from the Herald.’
I wonder exactly how much morphine she has had.
‘I just wondered if you’d mind answering a few questions for me.’ She catches me staring. ‘You, too… Katrina?’
‘Penny.’
‘We probably shouldn’t talk to reporters,’ Kat says.
Sarah Lawley from the Herald smiles and nods. ‘I get that. I respect that. Only, we just want to tell a story with a happy ending for a change. See, we’ve heard about it on the grapevine. About the drug guy and the cat, and about your friend—’ she gazes over at Barbara, ‘—Barbara?’
Jodie nods. ‘Beautiful Babs.’
‘It’s about giving people a little lift, see. We do a lot of bad news, and when something like this comes along – we thought it might be a nice little story, some nice local flavour.’
Jodie’s eyes are far away, lost in some land of blue skies and swirling colour. ‘Happy ending.’
Sarah furrows her brow at her. ‘Yes. Are you okay?’
‘I’m grand.’
‘She’s stoned,’ Kat whispers to me. ‘We should get that reporter away from her.’
‘I heard that,’ Jodie says. ‘An’ I want to talk to her. Tell her the happy story. I like the happy story.’
Kat shakes her head, massaging her temple. ‘We like it too, Jodie, but you’re a bit out of it.’
Nicki is in the ward with the vitals trolley. ‘Everything all right in here?’ She raises her eyebrows at Sarah. ‘Who are you?’
Sarah shows Nicki her lanyard. ‘The other nurse, she said I could come in.’
Nicki shakes her head. ‘No reporters. These ladies need rest.’
Sarah says, ‘The Herald would like to give the respiratory ward a little something. Just in recognition of the good work that you do.’
Nicki pauses.
‘What are you raising money for right now?’
‘You can’t bribe us,’ Nicki says.
‘I want to talk to the nice lady. Let me talk to the nice lady.’ Jodie pouts at Nicki and sits herself up, arranging her pillows behind her.
I say to Kat, ‘I think we’d better help Jodie talk to the nice lady, don’t you?’
Nicki says, ‘Up to you.’
So we do. We talk to Sarah Lawley from the Herald and we tell her a story about six foolish but courageous women who went to see the sea.
We tell her about how a tatty candy-striped picnic rug and a hideous orange sleeping bag probably saved our lives (and Jodie says that a very disturbing wolf fleece saved hers).
I tell her that I’d never dreamed I would have the courage to stand up to a drug dealer or shriek at a bus that was bearing down upon me in the snow.
???
Sister Joy brings our lunchtime IVs around.
‘You’re off home tomorrow, aren’t you Penny?
’ she says, turning to me as she hooks Jodie’s clipboard back onto her bed and rubs alcohol gel into her hands.
‘You too, Kat, and Violet? Tuesday for you, is it? It’ll be all change here.
It’s a shame really, we’ve all got used to you lot and your crazy adventures. ’
‘I think so, yes. The doctor will tell me for sure in the morning. But I feel so much better, despite what we did.’ I glance over at Jodie and she gives me a slow, exaggerated wink.
Sister Joy gives Jodie a sidelong look. ‘You are a bad girl.’
Jodie bows slightly. ‘I know.’
‘But look at this woman.’ Sister Joy gestures over to Barbara, who is bolt upright in her chair, listening keenly. ‘She is like a new woman. She will be running up and down those stairs now and dashing all over the place before we can stop her.’
‘They buried my feet in the sand,’ Barbara says.
Sister Joy holds the edges of her smile in a sort of half-frown. ‘I know.’ Tones of disapproval mixed with something like admiration. ‘And look at you now! You’re like a young lady again, all ready for the dance, with your sparkly eyes and your big grin.’
‘I sat in the snow in an orange sleeping bag and had a whole lot of brandy to keep me warm.’
Jodie glances at me and I can’t help laughing, and before we know it a great rise of uproar sweeps through the ward, Violet, Kat, Jodie and I carried away over the sea on a wave of mirth.
We hack and we gasp and we cough and it’s like a great light floods the room.
Sister Joy stands in the middle of us, shaking her head and waggling her finger again.
‘Like I said, we will all miss you lot.’
I will miss them too.
Amina comes into the bay. She’s come to say goodbye, she says, she’s been set free and she’s off home. Bilal hovers at her side and regards us with a slightly suspicious air of uncertainty, as if he can’t make up his mind whether we put his wife in danger or made her dizzy with happiness.
Probably both.
She stands by Violet’s bed and twists her hands together. She is wearing her turquoise hijab, and it reminds me of the sea in summer, in its liquid flowing incandescence. She swallows, and then opens her mouth, and then closes it again.
Violet takes her hands. ‘I am going to miss you, little Amina.’
Amina gazes up at the ceiling, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘I do not know what to say. This is not usual for me, what has happened here.’
Violet says, ‘You don’t have to say anything.’
Amina gazes around at each one of us. ‘I just want to say thank you. Before, I always have felt… invisible, when I am in here. It is like they do not see me, the other patients, because of this—’ she touches her head, ‘—because of the colour of my skin, because of my religion. It is as if they think that they cannot talk with me, laugh with me. I am left alone and I feel alone. But with you… you did not do that to me. You made me feel like I belong, like I exist, maybe like I matter. I had to tell you this before I left.’
Violet picks at her nails, her mouth trembling.
‘You, too,’ Amina says to her.
Violet scuffs her feet into her slippers – new, equally hideous ones Brian has dropped in for her – and then she heaves herself off her bed and folds Amina into her arms.
Amina’s tears spill over.
‘You taught me some things,’ Violet says.