Page 109 of The Flowers of Bay C
‘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 theDaily 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 theMailthere 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 theHerald.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’sThe Sun.
CAT-NAPPING CAMPING CRIME-LORD CANNED IN RUNAWAY PATIENT CAPER.
I look up at Kat and find myself grinning with her.
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 onelast 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 wantedhim 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.
‘DoesThe Guardianhave 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 inThe Times.Haven’t looked at the others, though. BetThe Mirrorhas it.’
‘What doesThe Timessay?’
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 theHeraldfrom 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 doyouwant?’ 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.
