Chapter 32
Sister Joy is on the night shift, and I am glad it is her. She does not complain when my cannula will not take one final IV dose, or when Alice cries in her arms, her whole body shaking. She replaces my cannula herself and I barely feel it.
During the night three more patients arrive and by morning the bay is a cold unfamiliar place, like when you move house and go back to the old one and it’s not the same anymore.
An elderly woman who is confused and distressed is in Jodie’s space, and I hold her hand in the early hours when she cries out for her son.
He’ll come and get her out of here, she says.
He will sort all of this out. Tears drip from her eyes and I sit with her, and then Sister Joy tells me to get back into bed and she sits with her, instead.
In the morning Kat and I wait for our discharge forms. We get dressed and sit on our chairs and we watch and wait together.
The doctors come for their rounds and confirm that we are both going home today, and haven’t we done well? Doctor Chowdhury says that he doesn’t want to see me in here again too soon, do I hear him?
Nicki is here with the tea trolley mid-morning and we are still waiting. ‘You two still here? Can’t get rid of you, can we?’ She makes our drinks without asking us what we want, and they are perfect.
‘I’ll miss you,’ she says. ‘Don’t get many in as fun as you lot have been. Given us all a bit of distraction, you have.’
‘Thank you for all you do,’ Kat says.
Nicki flushes. ‘Ah, I’m only a humble HCA.’
‘Nothing ‘only’ about you. You’ve been a rock for us.’
Nicki fiddles with a mug. ‘Aw. You’re my flowers, you are.’
Kat turns to me as Nicki pushes the trolley over to the new patients. ‘What’ll you be doing, then, at home, when you get back? What do things look like for you?’
I shrug. ‘Not much. Live off the state. Scrounger, and all that.’
‘Don’t say that.’
I talk to Kat about how I’ve felt like that for too long.
I’ve been steeped in my own sense of uselessness and had that feeling verified and increased by society’s judgment of those in my position.
I tell her how I felt in the worst of the pandemic, the whole narrative around it, that people like me were expendable, that we were in the way of the young and healthy getting back to normal, and how I believed it.
I believed that I wasn’t worth saving, that my life, and me, was useless.
But I don’t believe that anymore. Or most of me doesn’t. I’m working on it, I tell her.
‘Nobody is useless,’ she says. ‘If you do nothing all day, it doesn’t mean you are useless. It means you are sick. But you are valued. You are loved.’
‘I’d like to do something more,’ I find myself saying.
‘I have all this inside me. I want to paint again. To write poetry. I want to help others like me. Always wanted to. But I am scared of letting people down. I start something, and then I get ill, and I can’t do it anymore, and then people get disappointed in me, and it just goes on like that. ’
Kat levels her deep blue gaze at me. ‘You need to stop worrying so about what others think. To live free from that burden.’
If only it were that easy.
‘I need some help in the foodbank, if you’re interested.’
My heart sinks. She doesn’t get it, like everyone else. Maybe she thinks if I start doing something I will get better, that I’m ill because I don’t bother. Maybe she thinks that all I need is a job, just like they do at the DWP and the jobcentre.
‘I can’t be relied on. Flaky as heck,’ I say lightly.
‘I don’t care about that.’
‘But that’s no good is it, for a foodbank, or anything like that? I might do an hour, and then get so ill I can’t do anything for another month.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘It is?’
Kat nods.
‘But then I might manage say three weeks in a row, and you’ll get to rely on me, and then I’ll leave you in the lurch again for maybe three weeks more.’
Kat blows out her cheeks and picks up my hand. ‘Penny. It’s fine. The whole point of the foodbank is to support the vulnerable. We have many volunteers just like you, and it all runs just fine. People pick up one another’s burdens all the time.’
‘They do?’
‘It’s not a workplace where a boss is going to put you on capability for non-attendance.
If you can manage an hour sorting out shelves one week and not the next, then great.
We’d love your help. We need people like you.
People who get what it’s like for our clients.
And besides, we could do with some artwork, for some publicity we want to do around the town. ’
A spark of hope begins to flicker in my wounded soul.
I think about the book I’ve been reading, the sappy chick-lit about the bakery by the sea, and all those like it.
I think about how always in these stories the man sweeps in and saves the wretched broken-hearted girl and her bakery/bookshop/artisan goods store.
It’s a worldview that suddenly seems so off kilter to me, a world where it has to be a man that saves the girl and saves the world, where all of our problems can be solved by a mysterious, handsome stranger.
But I don’t need a man to make me better.
Once upon a time I fell into that trap, and that man did not make me better, even though he promised every day that he would.
I look at Kat and I think about friendship.
I think about how it cannot always be measured only by minutes and hours and days and years of time.
It can be measured in the tiniest of things, in the shortest of times, through shared experiences, through profound understanding, through all the little kindnesses, through listening.
Through lending Ugg boots in the snow and taking an old lady to the seaside.
‘Think about it, will you?’ Kat says, and I promise that I will.
???
Lunchtime comes and goes. One last hospital meal. It’s macaroni cheese. I don’t eat a whole lot of it, because it is vile, and because I know Jake is cooking for me tonight. He will make me enchiladas with salsa and halloumi and they will taste like heaven.
Dad is coming to fetch me as soon as I text him that my discharge is sorted. Nate is here already, waiting with Kat and reading The Guardian.
Harold wanders into the bay, his shock of white hair standing on end, his pyjama trousers somehow even looser than before, as if they will fall to the floor at any time, leaving him all exposed, all his bones too sharply outlined against the translucence of his blue-tinged skin.
He gazes around and knits his eyebrows together.
‘I think he’s lost,’ Kat says. ‘I’ll get Nicki.’
But Harold shakes his head. ‘I’m not lost. I’m looking for her.’
‘Her?’
‘That one.’ He points to Violet’s bed space, now taken up by a thin woman who is fast asleep and looks nothing like Violet at all. ‘The one who shouts at me. I like her.’
‘She’s gone home,’ Kat says, and Harold’s shoulders slump.
‘What about her? That gobby one?’ He points at Jodie’s cubicle.
An icy surge rises through my chest and squeezes my throat. ‘She’s gone, too.’
Harold droops even more, and then turns and trudges away.
‘Jodie enchanted them all, didn’t she,’ Kat says.
She was a light force, a sweep of nature, a bolt of energy.
She swept into my life like a tsunami gathering pace, smashing through my reserve and my pain and my self-doubt.
She drew me out of myself and awakened a strength in me I never knew was there.
She was irritating, obnoxious and unpredictable.
She was a warrior, standing tall even when she had no fight left in her dying body.
She taught me about friendship and how to seize hold of the day, about the joy of being alive, about taking crazy chances and lighting up people’s lives.
Jodie was impossible, rebellious, impetuous, everything I was too afraid to be, she was our anchor point in Bay C, she was our alpha, our chief Flower.
Kat leaks tears like great big rain drops from a ponderous dark cloud. ‘I’m going to miss that little imp of a girl.’
Nicki comes over and puts her arms around her. ‘It’s okay, flower. It's okay.’
???
When the discharge forms come I am packed and ready, my bags on the floor next to my chair, my table cleared of everything but my water-jug and cup, and an old Take a Break that Jodie gave me that I never read.
The pharmacist hands me two large carrier bags full of medication and asks me if I have any allergies.
Nicki and Sister Harris are in the bay, and Sister Harris tells me to get some good rest and don’t even think about any little outings for the next week or two.
When I say goodbye to Kat I cry a little bit more, and wonder if now my tears have started they will ever stop.
She folds me tightly into her arms and nestles her face into my hair and tells me she will see me soon.
Then she digs into a bag on her bed and holds something out to me.
Something that looks like the sky and the sea all rolled into one.
It’s the blanket she was working on, all finished and glorious. ‘This is for you.’
I feel the softness of it in my hands and watch as the colours swirl through my blurry vision. ‘But, I…’
‘I wanted to give you the sea.’
‘I…’
‘The colours remind me of you.’
I can’t find any words in me, after that.
Dad comes to run me home. He is quiet in the car, brooding, shrunken from who he was yesterday in his uncharacteristic outpouring of emotion. Perhaps Mum has talked him down, told him to stop being a foolish old man, that I’m not really that special at all.
But when he drops me off, he helps me into the lift and into my flat. He carries my bags and he tells me that he loves me. And then he hugs me, and I don’t remember the last time he hugged me, and so I hug him back.
Jake is in the kitchen, stirring something in a saucepan. His eyes light up at the sight of me, even though I must be a shocker of a sight, with the bags under my eyes and unwashed hair, my body even skinnier than before, my dark eyes dulled with pain and weariness.
‘I’m cooking you your favourite,’ he says.
‘It smells good.’
‘It’s macaroni cheese,’ he says, and then he is folding me in so closely I can hardly breathe, and he is telling me that he missed me and that he loves me and that everything is going to be okay.
I stare into the pan, full of macaroni cheese, and smile, because I know that he is, after all, right.