Page 1 of The Flowers of Bay C
Chapter 1
Ican tell the man by my bed is judging me. Probably because I’m wearing a scraggy nightshirt emblazoned with the pink-sequinned wordsSorry Not Sorry.Then again, perhaps I just think everyone is judging me these days.
I always mean to pack a bag for these occasions – silk pyjamas, a fluffy dressing gown, like I’m actually staying in a lavish hotel. But I don’t own any silk pyjamas, my dressing gown died in the noughties, and I’m in hospital. Again.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say to the nurse, who maybe isn’t judging me at all. Maybe he’s thinking about something else entirely, like when he’s going to get off this endless shift. And I don’t even know why I’m apologising.
‘You’re not sorry,’ he says, pointing to my nightshirt and grinning.
I try to smile at him, but my lips are too cracked. ‘Sorry,’ I say again.
He shakes his head, winking at me as he walks away.
I didn’t think I’d end up in here tonight. It was a normal day, really, Jake in school and me at home, a little more tired than usual. It was only after lunch when it smashed into me suddenly, the infection, whipped me off my feet and slammed me to theground. ‘Again?’ Jake said when he got home, tossing his bag into the corner and opening the fridge. ‘Hospital?’
Hospital.
Jake grunted, checked me over and moaned at the lack of anything in the fridge. Then he called the ambulance. Then he held my hand while we waited. Then he asked if we had any biscuits.
We didn’t.
The air is too thick in this ward. Cloying waves of disinfectant and over-boiled cabbage. All around me it presses in, spattered walls and faded concertinaed curtains, with its discordant symphony of buzzers beeping, phones ringing, machines singing.
‘You. You, girl.’
I pull my brain out of its fog and cast a glance around the ward. What girl? What You?
‘Yes, you, girl, I said.’
Turns out it’s me, even though I left the girl in me behind over twenty years ago. She’s still there somewhere, though, desperate to be something more than I’ve made her.
The elderly woman in the bed next to me is pointing at me, her bony finger quivering. What does she want? What does she think I can do for her from here?
A healthcare assistant shushes her. ‘Come on, Edna lovely. Settle down. Leave the nice lady alone.’
‘Go away,’ she says to the healthcare assistant, her voice so reedy the words are almost swallowed by her breath. ‘I only want her.’ She tries to sit herself up; her face is grey round the edges, her eyes ringed with shadows. She sags back down, sinking into her pillow. ‘I only want her. Eighteen, she is. We had a nice cake.’
The healthcare assistant sighs, flicking her glance upwards. ‘She’s a patient, Edna my darling. She’s poorly. She can’t talk to you now.’
She doesn’t say,and there’s no way she’s eighteen, but I’m sure she’s thinking it. She shoots a weary grin over at me, rolling her eyes. I can’t smile back and can’t do anything much else, either. I’m hemmed in by an oxygen mask, a drip, and agony like knives needling my skin.
I couldn’t say anything even if I were eighteen.
I’m forty-five and I want to go to sleep. I want to sink into wide-open night spaces where I am allowed to live in colour.
???
Someone is touching my arm.
I open my eyes and the light batters my pupils. Was I asleep? Jake’s face is in my mind, his eyes that shimmered when he left me here earlier. Has he had a good dinner? Maybe he’ll be cooking for my parents, perhaps his famous enchiladas; I catch the scent for seconds and want to wrap myself up in it.
‘Nurse.’ Edna is weeping, and no one takes any notice.
‘Miss Fielding?’
A heavy weight presses down on my eyelids, and I try to fight against it, to focus on the person speaking to me, the soft, uncertain touch on my arm. A man in scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck hovers next to my bed, clipboard in one hand, iPad in another, clearing his throat. He looks about sixteen. ‘I just need to talk to you for a few moments, if that’s okay?’ His voice is kind but he flutters with tension, his gaze flicking around the busy ward as if there are far more important things to do. ‘I’m Doctor Wood, I’m a medical junior doctor.’
‘Oh.’ I slump a little bit inside. Junior doctors: sweet and young and serious and a little bit naïve.
