Chapter 31
I am falling off a cliff.
The land is slipping underneath me, relentlessly wrenching at my body. My bones are heavy, dragging me down into the great expanse gaping with malice and darkness.
And then Kat is there, gripping my hands and holding me steady.
Jodie had a heart condition, Kat tells me, a congenital heart disease.
She’d known for years that her heart might fail and she was on the transplant list. Her COPD came on top of all that, but it’s all she chose to tell us about.
Tell me about, at least. She was here on the respiratory ward, being treated for an exacerbation of her COPD, and doing well, but she had a feeling, Kat says, she told Kat that she just knew, and last night her heart began to fail, and later it stopped and would not start again.
I think about my dreamlike state through the night: whispers, crashes, beeps, lights. I slept through Jodie dying.
But the doctors never said, I say to Kat, wrapped in her arms after crying out all the tears I keep inside and blinking my eyes at a world that has suddenly tilted.
They never said and neither did she. But why would they, Kat says.
Why would they say anything to any of us?
Patient confidentiality. Patients’ conditions are not for sharing with the ward and the world, however friendly they are.
I think back over the last two weeks and think about how the doctors would gather round Jodie’s bed and speak in muted tones, and how she would smile and laugh and banter at them, how she would say she was ready for home so they’d no need to worry.
‘I heard you with her in the night,’ I say.
Kat wipes over her face with her sleeve and nods. ‘Yes.’
‘You were, what, praying?’
‘Jodie wanted me to. We do a special little service with the dying. She asked for that.’
‘That’s kind of nice.’
Nice? Nothing about this is nice.
Kat says nothing.
‘So she asked for you. Not Kane.’
Kat nods and smiles softly. ‘She said something to me, before she went.’
‘Oh?’
‘She said that we had set her free.’
The lump in my throat hardens. I remember some words Amina said to her on Saturday, words about how she could now be free from Kane, and so she could take up her wings and fly away.
‘She said that?’
‘She said she’d never known anyone like us five.
That we gave her back her dignity after Kane took it away.
She was struggling to speak and I said to her, I said Jodie, please don’t talk, please just rest, but she said no, she had to tell me.
She said she knew she was dying, she knew she didn’t have too long, all the operations she’d had on her heart hadn’t done enough, there were structural abnormalities that wouldn’t be fixed.
Said that she wanted to do one last thing, with Barbara, one last thing for the good of someone.
Then she was gasping and the doctor was in there saying no more talking, shush now, and then… ’
I take Kat’s hands in mine and squeeze.
‘Then I did my thing. And sat with her a while. She held onto my hand. They tried, Penny. They tried to revive her but it wouldn’t work. I had to leave, to come back here, to listen to it all. How did you not hear?’
‘Sleeping pills.’
‘Oh.’
There’s a bustle in the bay as two of the healthcare assistants start pulling all the curtains back.
Sister Harris is there, her face set in a mask of brisk emptiness, yet I can see the cracks at the sides, around her eyes.
Violet is sitting up in her bed, blinking back tears, and Barbara is lying back in hers, eyes closed.
Jodie’s cubicle is empty.
???
Later, Doctor Chowdhury stands at the end of my bed, his arms hanging awkwardly by his side. ‘Now, Penny, I’ve learned about what you’ve all been up to.’ His eyes flicker over to Jodie’s space. ‘You were very close. I am sorry.’
I can’t find any words, so I nod. The shock in me, at first broiling through me like a wave of heat, has hardened into a rock in the pit of my belly. Later, I will cry more.
‘It wasn’t your fault, you know.’
I breathe in deeply and exhale. ‘But… but if we hadn’t been out in the cold… Jodie got cold. She got tired. I could see it on her. She was a bit blue. If we had only stayed—’
Doctor Chowdhury raises his palm. ‘You must stop this. This was not the reason. Jodie died because of a long-term issue. Her doctors were surprised she had got to this age, it was thought that she would not survive childhood. You must not think this way. Instead, you must think about the joy that it brought to her at the end.’
I pick at a loose flap of skin on my thumb and then I wrench it away and hope that the sting of it will burn hotter than the shock and the grief.
And then I think about her face, all lit up with mayhem and mischief, all afire with glowing joy and newly minted liberation.
Pale with cold and disease, yet somehow warm with life.
She was like the autumn leaves, resplendent in their finery in their final days, blazing with colour as they hurtled to the ground and into their winter of death.
She was all the shades of gold, all the splashes of vibrancy.
And then she died.
‘Now. Let’s look at you.’ He takes up the clipboard with my notes and ruffles through the pages. ‘Hmm.’
‘I’m doing well. I’m so much better.’
‘Your vitals are good. It seems your little trip did you good. All that fresh air.’ He sweeps his hand around the bay. ‘Did you all good.’
‘So I can go home today?’
He folds his arms and ponders me, then looks back at my chart and mouths numbers as he counts up days and doses. ‘No. No, I think just to be safe I’d prefer you to stay in one more night, for your final IV late tonight. Then we’ll get you discharged and home as soon as we can in the morning.’
My gut plummets. I want to go home. I want to go and wrap myself in my blanket and my cushions and Jake’s arms.
Jake. Jake will be so sad. Jodie has become important to him, in such a short time; I could see through all their banter, their game of insults, that there was a light between them.
There was a light between us all.
???
The Friends man is back again, after lunch, when Violet, Kat and I are sitting around Barbara’s bed holding hands and saying nothing at all.
‘I had to come up here soon as I started my rounds,’ the Friends man says, almost gasping with glee. As he takes us in, his face falls and he steps back towards his trolley. ‘Are you okay?’
Kat shakes her head.
‘Jodie passed away,’ Violet says.
‘Oh. Oh. I’m ever so sorry.’ Lines of concern cut raggedly into his face and I wonder about him, about his background, about what motivates him to give freely of his time to trundle a trolley full of mostly unwanted papers and confectionery around the wards to often ungrateful patients.
‘What was it you wanted?’ I say, keeping my voice gentle, all of a sudden imbued with the knowledge that this man knows what loss is.
A smile dances quietly around his mouth. ‘It’s the papers, see.’
‘The papers?’
He tugs out a newspaper from the rack and opens it at the second page. It’s the Daily Mail.
‘What the… bring that closer!’ Violet says.
‘It’s all of them,’ he says. ‘They’ve all done your story.’
‘Oh my word!’ Kat says, her hand over her mouth. ‘Let’s see!’
In the Mail there is a photo of us all that I don’t recognise. As I look closer, I realise it’s the six of us, sprawled out on the beach, on the picnic blanket and an assortment of chairs.
‘It must be Kane,’ Kat says. ‘He took that, remember? With Jodie’s phone? He’s emailed it in. Probably demanded money for it.’
I don’t care if he did, because the picture is there in all its splendour, and it is beautiful.
Kat is there smiling up from under the hood of her Chewbacca onesie.
I am next to her, huddled in my parka and Jake’s old beanie hat with my knees drawn up, a tiny smile on my lips.
Barbara, swathed in her waffle blankets on the frog chair, her sparse white hair sticking out from a Bristol Rovers bobble hat, is leaning over towards Amina, whose hijab seems to animate in ripples, even through the stillness of the picture.
Violet is sitting stiffly on her walker, the Dressing Gown of Doom pulled over her knees and legs, the space coat zipped up tightly, her mouth twisted with pain or disdain or both.
And then there’s Jodie, in her skimpy jacket and very disturbing wolf fleece, a Santa hat perched on her head at a jaunty angle, her arms stopped short in mid-air.
I remember how she threw them high in abandon and then lowered them at Kane’s grimace, and I love that her freedom escaped into this picture.
‘Check this out,’ Kat says, pointing to the headline and laughing out loud.
ADVENTURING PATIENTS CATCH CARAVAN CRIMINAL. The prose is slightly more exciting and even more hyperbolic than that of the Herald. Sarah Lawley probably got a nice little pay-off for this story.
‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ the Friends man says. He waves another paper at us and Kat grabs it. It’s The Sun.
CAT-NAPPING CAMPING CRIME-LORD CANNED IN RUNAWAY PATIENT CAPER.
I look up at Kat and find myself grinning with her.