Chapter 31 #2
This one tells the story in colourful pulp.
“Five respiratory patients with hearts of gold smuggled an elderly patient with severe dementia out of their hospital ward and took her on a reckless seaside escapade. ‘They have given me my smile back,’ Barbara Evans, 87, says. Barbara was desperate to see the sea one last time. It’s where her husband Bill proposed to her in 1955, Jodie Hancox, 31, who suffers from COPD, says, and where she lost her first and only baby to a miscarriage in 1958.
Local tattooed vicar Katrina Omi, 37, who is recovering from pneumonia, says, ‘Jodie had this crazy idea and we all went along with it. We thought she was joking and then she wasn’t, and before we knew it we were in her boyfriend’s minibus heading for Sea Bay.
It was surreal but it was about the best day of my life.
’” It carries on in the same vein, meandering through our tale with its own brand of overcooked sensationalism, virtue-signalling like mad with its desire to claim its status as a paper that cares for those poor sick people.
Jodie would have loved it.
They’ve even dug Cal up from somewhere and interviewed him, dragging out his side of the story into melodramatic prose that sounds nothing like him at all.
‘I stopped as soon as I saw them. I thought they were out on the tiles, at first. They looked like a hen weekend gone wrong, like a bunch of crazy drunk woman, to be honest with you, but it quickly became obvious they needed my help, so I lifted them all into the bus, one by one, and made sure they were safe. I was just so happy I could help.’
I think about Cal’s face when he nearly ran me over, and his overwrought protests about health and safety and buses that needed to be somewhere else.
‘I offered to take them straight to the hospital, and there I sourced wheelchairs for each woman and got help to take them up to the ward. It made me late for getting my bus to the depot, but I didn’t care. I could only see six sick women who needed my help and I was only too glad to give it.’
I wonder if Cal really did say all that.
I doubt it. I think he probably told them a more mundane version, the truth, and they ennobled it in order to make him the saviour of us they wanted him to be.
I am miffed that they do not mention that I stopped the bus myself, through sheer stubborn tenacity, in a defining moment that changed my life.
‘Does The Guardian have it?’ I say, hoping that their account will plump for female solidarity more than weak little women with hearts of gold saved by A Man.
The Friends man shakes his head. ‘No, but there’s a little paragraph in The Times. Haven’t looked at the others, though. Bet The Mirror has it.’
‘What does The Times say?’
He pulls it out and flips the pages until he finds it, just a short article towards the middle.
The headline is less shouty and more bland.
‘Patients stumble across drug-dealer.’ It outlines the story without fanfare, and includes one of the quotes from the Herald from Lady Caroline.
It is without spin and without fake heroism and I like it.
???
Jake is subdued. He sits on my chair and keeps his gaze averted from Jodie’s corner, which still remains empty, frozen in waiting for its next patient. He drums his fingers on my bed remote and his dark lashes brush his cheeks and they are damp.
‘What do you want?’ Violet’s voice is shrill and harsh across the bay and I look over to her and then to the entrance where a shaven-headed man in a white Adidas hoodie stands in an uncertain, lanky pose, holding a plastic wallet and my handbag.
Kane.
He rubs his hand over his head and stares around at us. He opens his mouth and then closes it again.
Kat says, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I can’t imagine where she digs up the grace for it. I’m not sorry, not for him. I am more sorry than I can say for Jodie and her family and us as those who loved her even though we only knew the edges of her. But for Kane, I cannot find any sorry in myself.
He clears his throat. ‘I… brought this bag back.’ He holds it up hopelessly, looking around at each one of us, waiting.
‘It’s mine,’ I say, and even I can hear the clipped scorn wrapped around my words.
He shambles over and drops it on my bed.
Jake glares at him.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ Kane says.
No one replies.
‘I did love her, you know.’
Silence.
‘I’m not a bad person. I didn’t mean to leave you all there at the beach. It just happened. I… I did go back, after a while, but you were all gone. Thought you were safe. I wouldn’t have left you, you know.’’
I have lots of words I could say to this, but I have no energy to waste on saying them out loud.
His face is all crumpled up. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Maybe I’m not really sorry that he did leave us there. Maybe I’m grateful for that time spent with Jodie and the others, for the way my life got turned upside down, for the sunset and the snow and the cat and the bus. All because of him.
But I am still angry with him.
‘She never told me,’ he says, shifting his eyes to the window behind me. ‘Why did she never? If she told me I’d of treated her better. I would of.’
Kat presses her lips together.
‘She never said nothing about her heart.’
‘But you knew she was sick with her lungs,’ Kat says.
Kane stares at his feet.
A hot wave rises into my throat and pushes out my words.
‘That’s not what love is, though, is it.
It’s not that you treat someone better because they are more sick, or suffering more or whatever.
What was it you said before about love, Kat?
That it’s always patient. Always kind. Not self-serving. Love doesn’t come with conditions.’
Kane looks like he doesn’t understand what I am talking about.
‘You didn’t love Jodie,’ I say.
He looks smaller all of a sudden, diminished, shrunk back into himself. He shrugs and then he offers me the plastic wallet in his hand. ‘Thought you might like this.’
It’s the photo he sent to the Mail. The photo of us all frozen in time, with Jodie captured in a golden moment, arms in the air, glittering with life.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
Kane turns and walks out of the bay and out of our lives.
???
Violet has been all ready to go for hours.
Her discharge forms and medication have finally arrived, and Brian is packing up her things while she discards the hideous dressing gown and dons her silver jacket, with a pink and orange floral scarf that looks like it is desperately trying to escape back into the eighties.
Brian is wearing the exact same silver jacket, only in a smaller version.
For a moment I can almost taste Jodie’s reaction to them, and I feel myself smiling.
A paramedic comes into the bay with a wheelchair and scans the name boards above the beds, settling on Barbara’s. ‘Hospital transport,’ he says to Nicki, who is hovering at the door with some notes. ‘Taking Mrs Evans to her care home.’
Him and Brian and Violet and Barbara are a blur of colour as they bend into cupboards and drawers, tugging towels and jumpers off their chairs, clearing their over bed tables of two weeks and more’s worth of detritus.
They pack up this part of their lives in just a few minutes.
Barbara is quavery and weepy, whether about Jodie or going back to the home I am not sure.
Maybe it is a mixture of everything. Maybe all her emotions have crowded into one great big river of tears and she can’t stop it.
I know that because I feel a little bit like that too.
Our goodbyes are too quick and without great drama, even from Violet. I remember the day she came in, when this bay and this bed space was disgusting and so was everything and everyone else, and how as she leaves now her mouth is just a little less twisted up than it was then.
Jake looks at her and Brian, framed in the entrance to the bay, and says, ‘Hashtag Briolet, modelling the latest must-have spacewalk jackets in his and hers versions.’
That’s something Jodie would have said. I can almost hear the echo of her voice whispering through the bay.
‘Keep in touch,’ Kat says.
Violet nods, then stops in the doorway, looking back at us, as if she is hovering on the edge of the possibility of saying more.
I want to get up, to go over and hug her, but Brian pulls at her arm.
As they leave I hear Brian mutter to her, ‘It’s disgusting, how long they took to get you discharged. Been waiting round all day.’
‘It’s a disgrace,’ Violet says, and then she is gone.
Barbara waves to us as she is pushed out of the door to the bay, wrapped in blankets and wearing her maroon fluffy slippers, a smile toying with her mouth. We wave back, and then she is gone too.
???
In evening visiting I am not expecting anyone. Jake left earlier, after hugging me more tightly than usual and telling me that he could not wait for me to come home tomorrow, so we could be together again in our little flat. He would cook for me, he said. Not sloppy macaroni cheese, please, I said.
I lie back on my bed and close my eyes. I am weary and wounded and I just want to sleep and then go home. My cannula stings at my arm and I shift it to try and ease the burning but it doesn’t work and I know they will have to change it one last time.
‘Penny.’
The voice is familiar. Gentle with tenderness.
Dad.
It is the first time he has come to see me in hospital in years.
I look around, searching for Mum, but she isn’t there, of course.
Just Dad. He looks old and tired, like the years have waged a battle and then won.
The lines on his face cut so deeply they look like they have been carved out, as if a sculptor has taken a knife to his flesh.
I remember him young and glorious, in Africa on safari with me, lying under great starry skies and pointing out the different constellations.
I remember him before the cares of the world got too much and before I became the burden that ruined his life.
‘Dad,’ I say.
He shifts from foot to foot, his hands jiggling by his side as if he doesn’t know what to do with them.
‘It’s… nice to see you.’ All I want is for him to come and sit with me, to throw his arms around me, so that I can cry into his chest like I did as a little girl, so the tears I’ve locked up for so long can have a safe place to fall on, so he can make everything better.
‘I saw you in the Mail,’ he says.
‘You still reading that rag?’ I bite my lip and wish I could take the insult back. My politics have never lined up with my parents’, and there have been too many arguments that have opened the wound until it is too gaping to mend.
But he smiles softly. ‘I wanted to say…’
He stops. Scratches his beard.
‘It’s just that… I’m proud of you, Penny.’
I stare up at him. His faded grey eyes are troubled.
Proud?
He never told me that he was proud of me.
Not in years, at least. Maybe when I was small, when I was doing well at school, when everything about me looked a little bit hopeful and as if I might be something useful in life.
But it was Karen they were always proud of, in the end.
I was the one who they just had to put up with.
He swallows over his bobbing Adam’s apple. ‘I… it’s just your mum, well, she’s very overpowering, isn’t she? She hasn’t made it easy for me, to be a good father.’
I rub my forehead. ‘You can’t blame her for that, Dad. You are your own man.’
He purses his lips and then nods.
‘I know she wasn’t easy, though.’
‘She… I don’t know, she always manages to make me feel like I’m in the wrong. Like she is the wise one, you know? And I was reading this article and it all just struck me, I suppose, that we – I – have been unfair.’
Unfair? That’s an understatement. But I guess I’ll take it.
‘And then Jake told me about your friend, this girl who died, this girl who brought you all together, this Jodie, and I knew then that I had to come and see you, to come and tell you, to come and say that… that…’
‘That what?’
‘That I do love you, Penny. I do. And to say that I am so deeply sorry, about Jodie, and… and about all the other things.’
All the other things. I think it would take a hundred years to pick apart all the other things.
But he is here, now, and he is my dad, and he is saying sorry.
I think back to the words Kat said on Saturday about forgiveness, and about the power that surged through them.
I think about what it might mean for me to let go of the restless bitterness that feasts itself on the wounded places inside me.
I thought all the light had spilled out of me long ago and was lost in corners piled up with shadows so deep they vibrated with inky blackness.
My colours were twisted up with the light and I was left stranded in grey.
But maybe now the corners are releasing their shadows like endless oceans releasing long-buried treasure, and the light is there, and it is catching on kindling and then blazing through my veins and singing through my bones.
I don’t think that just because my dad is here today with a sorry and a hug that all is well with the world.
But he is here and that is something and along with all the other somethings it feels a little bit like freedom.