Page 78 of The Flowers of Bay C
Barbara gazes up at the sky and her eyes widen. The sun is fighting one last battle against the fiercely gathering clouds,battling to show off its final fuzzy glory of the day, reaching out weary fingers to touch our faces one more time.
‘It’s about to plunge into the sea,’ I say. ‘But it’s just shining on you for a while longer.’
Barbara closes her eyes and keeps her face upturned to the setting sun. Her face seems alight from within, the muted winter colours dashing over her luminescent skin and morphing into the hope of spring. On a cluster of rocks out to sea a flock of cormorants stand proudly and shriek at the fading skies.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ My knees hurt from kneeling on the rough sand, but I don’t care too much. I gaze up with her, to the arch of the heavens, the subdued colours of misted sunset. I’d forgotten how big the world is, cooped up in hospital and in my small life. I’d forgotten the heights and depths, the widths and lengths, but here they are all laid out before me, and they make me want to cast off my pain and dance on the sand. I am a tiny dot in a huge great universe, but I can see there is a vastness inside me, too, a wide expanse I’ve barely explored the edges of. And somehow, today, it’s like I’m pushing open a new door, gazing at a new scene, and it’s wild and raw and beautiful.
I turn back to Barbara. ‘It’s time to go, now. You ready?’
She nods, a tiny smile quivering at her mouth.
I nod at Kat as I drag myself up, steadying myself on the arm of the wheelchair. As we trudge up the beach, Jodie links arms with me. ‘Didn’t know you was so poetic. All that about the sunset and whatnot.’
I used to write little poems, once upon a time, to go with the pictures I painted. But Marcus said that they sounded ridiculous and that I should concentrate on building my body up so I could go out and get a normal job in an office. I gave him a poem I wrote about him, when I first met him and I was starry eyed with passion. I was proud of it, I was certain that my verbs sang and myadjectives danced, that my words bounced with colour. I thought that, at last, someone was giving me inspiration to give the best part of myself, this new man who loved me, who wanted to help me so much that he chose me out of a gym full of gorgeous, toned, fit women who had normal jobs in offices. I put oil to canvas and created a portrait of him where I brought out the mischievous sparkle in his eyes and the lustre of his hair, and then I scratched out my little poem on the canvas and wrapped it up for his birthday, my stomach tense with nervous excitement. He opened it and he laughed. What the hell is this, he said, and then, when he read the poem, he laughed even more. You really wrote this? Have you any idea how crazy you sound, Penny? Then he stowed the canvas at the back of our wardrobe and we never spoke of it again, and I never wrote another poem and I never painted another picture.
‘I’m not really,’ I say.
‘You are,’ Jodie says. ‘You put yourself down too much, you do. You can’t see who you really are.’
That’s because I don’t think I know who I really am. But I think I might know a little bit more than I did two weeks ago, and I think that little bit more is something I like, and I think I might want to keep exploring and start throwing off all the bad things I thought I was before. That might take me a long time, though.
At the entrance to the track theSea Baysign lies battered and broken, already covered over by a layer of sand. ‘Goodbye, Sea Bay,’ Jodie says.
The track itself isn’t all that long. Maybe thirty yards. But those thirty yards seem like a thousand right now and we drag our feet, taking it in turns to push the wheelchair so that we can lean on it. Violet leans heavily on the walker, almost bent double as she plods along, the small plastic wheels catching and sticking in the sandy gravel. Nobody has breath to say a word as we slog our way up tothe road, the bitter wind buffeting our faces. I keep my eyes to the ground and concentrate on my feet. One foot in front of the other, Dan would say. Keep going, Penny, you can do it, a little at a time, one, two, one, two. Amina’s stilettos clack in time with my thoughts and I zero in my focus to the sound they make. Clack clack clack clack one two one two. They are scuffed now, their patent shine dulled by sand and salt and gravelly path.
‘Why on earth did you wear those things?’ Violet says suddenly. Perhaps she’s seen me focussing on Amina’s feet. Perhaps the sound of her heels are the only thing we can all concentrate on right now, our only rally call to keep on going. ‘They seem completely unsuitable!’
Amina exhales slowly, turning to face Violet. Her brown eyes are sunken, the darkened rings around them a messy circle of pain and suffering. ‘Because they are what I like.’
‘Good for you,’ Kat says.
Violet’s lip curls. ‘Silly girl.’
Don’t spoil it, Violet, I want to say. Don’t spoil it all now, not after all of this, not after what Amina did for you back at the hospital, not when we’ve come this far.
Amina just laughs. ‘I am a silly girl. And I do not care.’
‘Right on,’ Kat says, and fist punches Amina.
Jodie is unusually quiet, and says nothing at all.
Chapter 24
The not-so-main-road stretches off into a desolated, silent, carless distance. The sea crashes behind us, rolling waves lurching higher as the wind picks up and the sun goes down. It’s an uninhabited wasteland, scrubby tired grassland waving listlessly in the wind, a few sad splashes of colour breaking up its winter captivity. As we drag up to the road we stand there and we gaze in both directions, as if by looking we will conjure something – someone – up.
But nothing. No one is in sight.
‘What do we do now?’ Violet says, wrapping her arms tightly around herself and looking at me. Why is she looking at me?
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
Kat pulls her onesie hood further over her head. ‘All we can do is wait. We wait for a car and we flag it down. Surely someone’ll stop for us, when they see Barbara and everything.’
Barbara sits there in her wheelchair, backed onto the grass verge next to a crumbling drystone wall, bundled up in blankets and face pale with cold, yet smiling like she knows a secret, her faded eyes sparkling with merriment. She is the only one who seems completely unmoved and unworried by our plight.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’m sure someone will be along in a minute or two.’
We stand there and scan the horizon. To our left the road stretches off into the mist-clogged horizon, and to our right it curves into a bend not far from where we are. But we cannot see anything and we cannot hear anything.
