Page 112 of The Flowers of Bay C
‘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.
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?’ Shemakes 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.’
