Chapter 29 #2
Jodie, too, drags to her feet, steadying herself on my bed as she makes her way over to Amina and slings her arms around both her and Violet. ‘Me too.’
‘I would like to stay in touch,’ Amina says.
Kat says, ‘Here, write down your number, I’ll share it with the others when I get my phone back. I think we’d all like that.’
‘Yes please,’ I say.
???
At visiting time, the little Friends man trundles into the bay pushing his newspaper trolley. He stops in the centre and looks around at each of us in turn, an enigmatic little grin spreading over his face. ‘I have a surprise for you.’
‘What?’ Kat says. Nate is with her, leaning in closely and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
The Friends man plucks a paper from the rack and brandishes it at us, holding it up high. It’s a Herald. ‘You are celebrities,’ he says.
‘Oh my word,’ Violet says.
Jodie smiles lethargically. ‘Go on, then, what’s it say?’
Kat says, ‘A couple of sentences somewhere towards the back?’
‘You’re on the front page,’ the Friends man says.
What?
‘No way,’ Jake says.
Friends man spreads the newspaper out on Violet’s bed, and Kat and Nate and Jake and I crowd over to see it. Jodie hoists herself up and limps over. ‘What’s it say, then?’
The first thing I see is a photo of Barbara smiling so widely all the lines on her face are vivid with life and motion. Sarah Lawley from the Herald must have snapped it on her phone.
‘They’ve caught him!’ Kat says. ‘Look!’
I lean over to read the article.
‘Read it out to me,’ Barbara shouts over.
‘“Six hospital patients catch wanted criminal in seaside escapade.” That’s the headline,’ I say.
‘Read it all!’
‘Okay, okay.’ I read the copy out loud and we laugh at the exaggeration and embellishments in the story.
Perhaps it was Sarah Lawley’s poetic license, or more likely Jodie’s morphine-addled imagination.
Apparently I defended us against Dodgy Caravan Dude (who, it turns out, is named Gary Cockford), by seizing his knife and holding it against his throat, and Amina high-kicked him with her stiletto heel, “‘like this awesome ninja chick,’ Jodie Hancox, 31, says.” (‘She got my age wrong,’ Jodie mumbles.) Most of it is true enough to the tale, though, and as I read it I think about how much it sounds like a made-up story, something beyond the bounds of reality.
Hospital patients wouldn’t go and do something stupid like that, would they?
But there is no judgment in the article.
Instead the journalist has written us as heroic, as selfless and self-sacrificial, as kind and courageous women who just wanted to give an elderly lady her dying wish.
And there is something true in that, of course, but I know that my motivations, at least, are a little less black-and-white, that there is nuance to this tale that doesn’t quite come out in this report.
I know that I wanted to be somewhere different, that I wanted to please other people and to say yes, but also know that because I did, I discovered some new things that will help me say yes a whole lot less in the future.
‘I did want to help Barbara,’ Kat says, her brow all crinkled up as she reads the report again.
‘But I’m not this great humble hero they’re making out.
I kind of like being needed, I guess. I wanted to be part of this thing, to be the person everyone looks to for help.
I… I don’t always feel like I am enough, I suppose. ’
I stare at Kat, beautiful, confident, self-assured Kat, and think about how people might be swimming along so smoothly on the surface when underneath there is a whole maelstrom of emotions and sadness and anger and helplessness threatening to pull them under at any time.
I think about how we are so quick to judge people from first impressions, how we have no clue about what is really going on in their lives, how people so often wear a mask, how they say they are fine when they are not.
I think about Violet and her behaviour when she first arrived in Bay C, how her words were so soaked in bile, and how they must have sprung from the fear squirming deep inside her and the pain that so gripped every part of her body, from years of rejection that squeezed her into a desert of bitterness and pulled her husband into it with her.
How her motivation for this outing was not only born out of the super-human selflessness Sarah Lawley so hoped to invest us all with; how she wanted to explore this new sense of belonging, something she’d caught glimpses of in the past two weeks in a world she was usually so hostile to and so was hostile back.
And Amina wanted to come because she wanted to prove she was a human who existed, to dance into the freedom of being seen, and because she wanted to help Violet, the very person who had so disdained and spurned her.
Perhaps Amina’s motivation was the best of us all.
I look at Jodie and think about her happy-go-lucky temperament and how it covered over the grim truth of her life with Kane.
And then there’s me, with my eager-to-please manner and how I so kick myself inside when I do not stand up against injustice or oppression or abuse.
I wonder what the world would look like if we were all more honest with one another, if we all admitted our tangled motivations and messed-up emotions, if we helped one another a little more by allowing our own vulnerabilities to stand out and proud.
‘I get it,’ I say to Kat.
I look down at the article again, reading to the end.
There is a quote from Lady Caroline about how immeasurably grateful she is to us for returning her dear cat, Byron, and how delighted she is to donate to the hospital on our behalf.
The whole piece reads like a sappy girl-power chick-lit novel, all friendship-in-adversity and women who beat the odds, tenacious, feisty women who are even stronger together.
There’s a photo of the hospital as well, and one of our bay from the outside I didn’t know she had taken.
We are all lying in our beds, looking fast asleep and not very strong at all.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Jodie says, and she is grinning from ear to ear.
Jake says, ‘I can’t even.’