Page 43 of The Flowers of Bay C
‘Nothing,’ Jodie and I both say together.
Jake shrugs and goes back to his game.
I flop back on my pillow. I did promise, kind of. I made a promise to collude with a madcap plan, to liven up our drab lives in this drab place, to make-believe a tale of a world where elderly ladies get their dying wishes and sick patients get to go on trips to the seaside. I said yes because I am Penny who says yes. Penny whosaid yes to an abusive husband. Penny who is going to say yes to a ridiculous scheme dreamed up by an unstable girl with a speciality in wishful thinking.
Sister Joy breezes into the ward, her smile all sunshine and warmth. ‘You asked for some morphine?’ she says to Jodie, holding out a small vial of oramorph.
‘’Bout time,’ Jodie says, and Joy’s face falls. ‘Only kidding. I know you’re busy.’
‘We do our best.’
‘I know. Listen, Sister, would it be okay if we take Barbara for a little bit of fresh air, say in the Peace Garden? She’s always stuck in here with no visitors, and she’s a lot stronger than she was a few days ago, isn’t she?’
Sister Joy folds her arms, regarding Jodie and then glancing over at Barbara, nestled in her armchair, all angles and tissue-paper thin skin, support stockings all crinkled around her ankles, blue veins running down her bare legs like someone has drawn on her with a biro.
‘I think it would do her the world of good,’ she says.
Jodie smiles at me and her smile is a blaze of triumph.
???
Brian doesn’t leave Violet’s side for the rest of the day. When she is wheeled back in from wherever they took her she is flopped down in her pillows, her face pasty and puffy, cheeks shrunken into themselves, fluttering eyelids purple and heavy with veins. Somehow, though, her expression is as growly as ever, stamped with the general air of disdain and disapproval that never quite leaves her. I had a teacher like that once, always viewing the world through a lens of displeasure. I was often on the edges of his antipathy, desperate to find ways to placate him but never quitesucceeding. His lips lived in a constant snarl and his nose in a perpetual crinkle at the world in general and me in particular.
???
I’ve been out of school for a month. I’m behind in my studies and my stomach is a pit of dread as I enter my tutor group. I stare at the scuffed floor, hitching my bag further up my shoulder, my hair falling over my eyes in straggly clumps. Mum said my new perm would make me look chic, but I know that in reality I look like I am walking round with a large shower puff stuck to each side of my face. I’ve barely recovered, but Mum says I mustn’t dilly dally any longer. Pull your socks up, Penny.
When I get to school I slouch my socks down and try to make my hair straight and invisible.
As I go into the classroom it falls silent. Hot fear snakes through my bones, turning them to molten lava. I feel heavy as a ton of bricks and sink down onto my chair, resting my head in my hands.
‘The wanderer returns!’ Mr Lewis stands at the front of the class, a piece of chalk in his hand, staring straight at me. No sign of anything amusing at all plays around his deadpan face, his dead-fish eyes, his sardonic line of a mouth. He claps his hands together. Once, twice, three times, slowly, slowly, an invitation a pile of thirteen-year-olds are only too happy to take him up on. The whole class joins in, slow hand-clapping me for making it back to school. My cheeks flame with heat and the room shifts around me, spinning into strange swirling shapes and colours. I feel sick. A black mist creeps in on the edges of my vision.
‘Penelope.’
Darkness. I can’t hear. It’s as though the air has turned to gloop around me, slowing everything down.
‘Penelope.’ The word comes in slow-motion, low and insistent, dragging me by the hair back through the tunnel.
‘Penelope. Stop playing up.’
It’s a shout now, a screech through my roaring ears, a wake-up call that snaps me out of my faint. Mr Lewis is in my face, eyes bulging as he shouts at me, so close I can smell something that reminds me too uncomfortably of my dad and what he likes to drink in the evening. I lower my head again, my hair a waterfall of lacquered curls scratching my desk. Maybe tonight I will cut them all off.
A bang on my head, sudden and sharp, exploding through my brain until stars race through my vision. The board rubber. He has the board rubber there in his hand and he has whacked me with it. There’s a gasp and then a shocked silence.
‘Get yourself together,’ he says. ‘It’s bad enough that you’ve missed so much school, without coming in and messing around and not speaking when you’re spoken to. Insolent girl.’
I steal a glance round at the class, at my few friends, all sitting with wide eyes and closed mouths. No one will say anything. No one ever does.
School might be the best days of their lives for those who fit in and thrive in the knowledge that they are liked, but it’s the worst days of our lives for those of us who don’t. It can be a place of great mental and physical cruelty,a place where adults allow unspeakable things to happen to children because that girl isn’t really a bully, she’s just mucking around and besides her dad is the chair of governors. It’s a place where memories are made that echo through the hollow corridors of your mind years later and conjure up the sheer heart pounding panic you felt back then when Claire Jacobs and Nicola Smith cornered you in the far reaches of the playing field and then rained their rage upon your head and shrieked that you were an ugly little wimp and please stop tryingto get into their crowd because it’s never going to happen. You want to shrink into the slimy green walls in the girls’ toilets and get subsumed within their depths because they can’t be any deeper than the hatred and bile spat out at you every day. It’s a place where you stand shivering in the playground and get picked last because everyone knows you are hopeless at P.E and most other things.
Mr Lewis and all those others are consigned to history, but he is part of my history. He is part of what makes me Penny who never quite manages to be enough. I am tired of nice Penny, of yes Penny, but I don’t seem to be able to stop her saying yes. I collude just as much as that class of kids did back in the eighties, to keep things quiet and simple, to allow the tough stuff to go unchallenged.
Because that’s who I am.
Chapter 13
Dr Chowdhury has arranged a CT scan for me. ‘I’m a little worried about the damage to your lungs from all these recent infections,’ he says. His medical students are with him today, all big, scared eyes and tensed up brows, watching his every move. ‘And with this latest pneumonia, and all your little friends down there.’ He chuckles, and his students stare at him as if they haven’t got any idea what he is talking about.
