Page 16 of The Flowers of Bay C
‘Yeah.’
‘I wonder where her family is.’
Jodie shrugs. ‘Dunno.’
Violet is propped up in bed, listening in to every word. She’s dressed in pink satin pyjamas and a hideous monstrosityof a dressing gown, all loud purple and red flowers clamouring for space on padded staticky polyester. It’s a shapeless beast, reaching the floor, straight up and down with a zip all the way down the front. ‘It’s like a seventies toilet tent,’ Jodie said earlier when she first donned it. ‘She should take it to Glastonbury.’ Violet didn’t hear her but I giggled and it hurt.
‘My husband will be here any minute,’ Violet says in a voice so dripping with pomposity it sounds like it wishes to audition for the role of a BBC presenter circa 1950 but doesn’t quite make the grade. ‘He’s bringing me some proper coffee.’
‘Good to hear,’ Jake says, and I nudge him. He rolls his eyes at me.
‘And a proper walker, at that.’
‘Walker?’ Jodie says.
‘These ones in the hospital are hopeless. Squeaky. And dirty.’
‘Oh—’
‘And I want to get to the toilet myself, thank you very much, not have some filthy cardboard pot in a chair brought over to me like I’m some helpless old woman. When I have my own walker, I can do that. It has a little seat, you see.’
Jodie nods, eyes wide and guileless. ‘I see.’
Jake’s mouth curls in great snarky coils.
A man walks into the bay. He can’t be Violet’s husband. Far too young and un-Violet like. He stops in the entrance, searching the beds, settling on Kat’s. Relief and something more upturns his mouth in a great big grin, white teeth gleaming in the straightest smile I’ve ever seen. I watch Violet watching him. The lines and etchings on her face veer up and down in great animation, a mix of disapproval and incomprehension. The man is holding a packet of chocolate hobnobs and a big purple Bible. He’s wearing a dog collar tucked into a neat blue clerical shirt. Violet’s eyes have almost disappeared into the folds of skin crinkled up on her faceand waves of disdain emanate from her as he bends and kisses Kat full on the mouth. It’s not only that Kat is married to a vicar, though. I can read Violet’s thinking, almost plain as day written across her face. It’s that Kat, with her purple hair, her tattoos and her piercings, is married to a tall Black vicar in ripped skinny jeans.
Jodie is agog, too. ‘He’s a bit of all right, isn’t he? I’d go to church if he was vicaring it or whatever.’
Kat just beams. It’s the first time I’ve seen her sitting up, engaged, smiling. I’m glad. I was worried for her in the night, when her soft, choked sobs carried over to my bed in waves. There’s colour in her face now, whether through feeling a little better or seeing her husband, who blatantly adores her. ‘Hobnobs and my Bible,’ she says. ‘My hero.’
That’s when Violet’s husband walks in. I know he’s Violet’s husband, just in the way that anyone knows anything. He looks a lot like her, in his facial features at least, despite an arresting bristly moustache. Maybe it’s his expression, one of slight antipathy and distaste, as if he has taken a bite of the world around him and found it wanting, ready to spit it out in disgust. He stares around the ward, taking us all in, Jodie and Jake staring right back at him. ‘Why does he have a toilet brush on his face?’ Jake whispers, and Jodie laughs out loud.
He’s much smaller than her, though, thin and wiry, sinewy where Violet is softened by age and plumpness. He ignores us and walks over to her, each step measured and careful, grimaces at the plastic chair by her bed, and perches on the very edge. ‘Hello, dear.’
‘Hello, dear.’
‘Hello, dear,’ Jake says, and Jodie laughs again. I’m going to have to watch these two. Maybe it’s like having another child, like trying to deal with siblings who wind one another up. I never got a chance to find out what that would be like, at least for myself.My own sister is much older than me and far distant, even as a child, always achieving more and better and being the one my parents liked to wax lyrical about in their Christmas Round Robins.Karen has passed her Grade 8 violin this year, as well as coaching primary age children in gymnastics, getting her gold Duke of Edinburgh award and scoring A*s in all her A Levels. Penny has only been in hospital twice this year.That kind of thing.
Watching Violet and her husband is mesmerising. They seem to mirror one another in all their words and actions, like an ultimate version of his ’n hers. I bet they have matching orange cagoules and walking boots.
Her face is all scrunched into a slicing glare. ‘Where is my coffee? And my walker?’
He opens his eyes wide; a rabbit in the headlights. ‘Oh. Oh. I… I forgot.’
Violet folds her arms and flattens out her lips.
He lays his hand on her knee. ‘I’ll bring them tomorrow. I promise.’
She raises her chin and then slowly turns her face away.
‘Forgive me,’ he says.
‘You’ll bring in some Garibaldi, then, too? From Waitrose, not Asda?’
He nods, his moustache all animated in the fervent rhythm of it.
Jake clears his throat. ‘Fly biscuits.’
