Page 55 of The Flowers of Bay C
Jake nods. ‘’S’up.’
Barbara regards him with questioning eyebrows.
‘How are you?’ Jake says.
‘Oh, I’m very well, dear.’
I take in her face, ravaged like a map full of contour lines, watery, weary eyes blinking against the light of the ward. Not well, not really.
Now I’m here I don’t know what to say to her. I swallow. ‘You feeling better, then,Barbara?’
‘Pardon? Speak up, dear.’ She fiddles with her hearing aid and it shrieks in squeaky rebuke.
‘I just said, are you feeling a little better?’
‘Oh, yes, darling. Yes. But…’ She leans closer and beckons me in with a wizened, arthritic finger. ‘But that rat was here again. I saw it.’
This again.
‘The rat’s gone, Barbara.’
Jake smiles at her. ‘There’s no rats in here, no need to worry.’
‘The rat is after my mouse.’
‘It’s okay, Barbara.’ I try to channel Kat, to take her hand, but she snatches it away and hisses at me.
‘You don’t know. You can’t see it. But I can.’
It’s Jake that steps in for me. ‘I promise it’s gone,’ he says, looking into her eyes. She gazes back at him with a kind of wonder.
‘You promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘The rat was in our house. Me and Bill’s. It got in the loft and we could hear it scrabbling at night, patter patter patter on the ceiling. I thought it was the ghost.’
‘The ghost?’ Jake says.
‘Oh, pay no mind of me. Just a silly old woman. But Bill, he says to me, that’s no ghost, that’s rats that is. And he was right. But now they won’t leave me alone, see. They chase my mouse all the time.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jake says.
Barbara flaps her hand at him. ‘Ooh, no doubt you’ll be thinking I’m just some daft old bag, saying a load of stupid things. But I’m still all here. Most of me.’ She chuckles, and Jake smiles, and I do, too. ‘Bill always said I’d forget my head if it weren’t screwed on, he did. Said I was scatty as anything but that he still loved me to the stars. That’s what he always said.’ Shegazes off to the side, eyes fixed on the wall but on something more inside her memories. I think about what her life must have been like, with a man who loved her for sixty years. I think about Kat with Nate and Amina with Bilal, men who are faithful and kind and loving, men who are nothing like Marcus or my own father who failed me a thousand times over in his disappointment and disapproval. Maybe I don’t have to worry so much about Jake, if there are men like Bill and Nate and Bilal in the world; maybe Jake can be good and kind as well. I gaze at him as he sits quietly with Barbara, his hand on her arm so gentle, and I can see him for who he is, finally, through the haze of stroppy teenager and grumbling adolescence, through the haze of what I always dreaded he might become because of who his father is. He is nothing like Marcus, I see in a moment of raw clarity, joy jumping through my bones. He is Jake, he is my boy who cares about me and about a lonely old woman who is worried about rats.
‘I’m going home tomorrow, they told me,’ Barbara says suddenly.
My stomach sinks like a stone. ‘Oh, did they? That’s… I mean, that’s nice, to be going to a nice place.’ I scramble desperately through my mind for words to say that will console somebody who is going to a place to die, and through my own raging disappointment. ‘What time… did they say when you’ll be going?’
‘Oh, in the morning, I expect,’ Barbara says.
Our plans crash to the ground in a pile of dust. Barbara won’t get to see the sea after all, she won’t get to feel the sun on her face or the wind in her hair.
I take her hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper.
Chapter 17
‘It’s not going to happen.’
