Epilogue
Six weeks later
Kat has set up a WhatsApp group for me, her, Amina and Violet. Violet has bought ‘one of those telephone things’ so she can keep in touch and she loves to watch the YouTube on it but can’t get her head around that Facebook thing. Kat has named the group ‘The Bay C Flowers’.
The flower that bloomed largest of all wilted too soon, and the flower who opened to the sunshine and the sea air is in a home, waiting to die.
We arrange to meet at the home, the four of us. Amina is in a purple hijab with her black stilettos and kohl-lined eyes. Kat shows us her new tattoo; a cluster of six flowers intertwined, climbing her forearm like ivy up a wall. Violet is dressed in a twinset and pearls under her silver coat.
The home is fragranced with boiled cabbage and a hint of disinfectant, and it takes me back into the hospital bay. Violet says that it smells disgusting in here.
Barbara is sitting up in her bed, face pale and sunken, her eyes holding the edges of a sparkle. She doesn’t have long, the harried carer says. Be gentle and calm, please. She’s not really allowed so many visitors, but no one else comes, only you and that cat lady a couple of times, so…
Barbara looks at me and smiles a toothless smile. ‘Little mouse,’ she murmurs. ‘Little mouse on the beach.’
I stroke her arm. ‘Yes. Yes, with the sun on our faces and the wind in our hair and the sea kissing our toes.’
‘And Dodgy Caravan Dude,’ Kat says. DCD is serving a suspended sentence now and must rue the day he stopped for a gaggle of women he thought were a bunch of crazies out for a drunken stroll in the wilds of the countryside.
‘I don’t see the rat no more,’ Barbara says. She is puffing like a steam train.
I lay my hand on hers. ‘I know you don’t. I’m glad you don’t.’
Silence falls between us.
‘She was a good girl,’ Barbara says, and then she coughs, and then sinks into a whole paroxysm of coughing.
We say nothing and we sit with her and watch the sun go down outside her window.
It’s a clear day in mid-January, a cloudless sky, its pale blue of day chased away by new slashes of coral and indigo that whirl through the heavens like endless ribbons.
Barbara gazes out of the window and her eyes are alight with the beauty of it, the colours dancing over the rheumy weariness and transforming her for moments into a young girl by the sea with her new husband burying her in the sand and then bringing her ice-cream.
The sun hangs low and then plunges into the horizon, but the streaks of colour remain there, suspended, written across the sky, as if they will be there for ever more.
By Barbara’s bed is a mounted photo of six stupid women in daft outfits on a beach. It catches her eye now and she twinkles playfully up at us, and then she says, ‘You saved me.’
Then she is lost to us, her eyes rolling to the side, in another world, muttering about her mouse and Bill and deckchairs. We sit for a while longer, and then the carer comes back and tells us it’s time to go.
As we get up to leave, Barbara stops her murmurs and grabs at Kat’s arm. ‘Come back later. With your oil and things.’
And we all know what she means.
Three months later
I am back in hospital. It’s not as bad, this time, and it’s not as good, either, but the sun shines outside the window behind my bed and I allow Dan to take me out into the Peace Garden to build up my strength.
Spring is blooming out here in all its glory, clouds of daffodils dancing in the borders and the last snowdrops playing on the grass.
I take a deep breath in and allow the peace of it to permeate through my battered body.
They’re missing me at the foodbank, Kat said to me on Facetime, but there’s no hurry. No hurry. Just be.
I am sitting on a brand-new bench. It is crafted from the lightest beechwood, shining with new varnish, and it has a silver plaque on the back in the centre. I trace my fingers over it once again and murmur the words aloud, allowing them to spill out into the sun-dappled silence:
In memory of Jodie, who took us out of our sickness and into the sea.
The End