Page 113 of The Flowers of Bay C
My heart sinks. She doesn’t get it, like everyone else. Maybe she thinks if I start doing something I will get better, that I’m ill because I don’t bother. Maybe she thinks that all I need is a job, just like they do at the DWP and the jobcentre.
‘I can’t be relied on. Flaky as heck,’ I say lightly.
‘I don’t care about that.’
‘But that’s no good is it, for a foodbank, or anything like that? I might do an hour, and then get so ill I can’t do anything for another month.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘It is?’
Kat nods.
‘But then I might manage say three weeks in a row, and you’ll get to rely on me, and then I’ll leave you in the lurch again for maybe three weeks more.’
Kat blows out her cheeks and picks up my hand. ‘Penny. It’s fine. The whole point of the foodbank is to support the vulnerable. We have many volunteers just like you, and it all runs just fine. People pick up one another’s burdens all the time.’
‘They do?’
‘It’s not a workplace where a boss is going to put you on capability for non-attendance. If you can manage an hour sorting out shelves one week and not the next, then great. We’d love your help. We need people like you. People who get what it’s like for our clients. And besides, we could do with some artwork, for some publicity we want to do around the town.’
A spark of hope begins to flicker in my wounded soul.
I think about the book I’ve been reading, the sappy chick-lit about the bakery by the sea, and all those like it. I think about how always in these stories the man sweeps in and saves the wretched broken-hearted girl and her bakery/bookshop/artisan goods store. It’s a worldview that suddenly seems so off kilter to me, a world where it has to be a man that saves the girl and saves the world, where all of our problems can be solved by a mysterious, handsome stranger. But I don’t need a man to make me better. Once upon a time I fell into that trap, and that man did not make me better, even though he promised every day that he would.
I look at Kat and I think about friendship. I think about how it cannot always be measured only by minutes and hours and days and years of time. It can be measured in the tiniest of things, in the shortest of times, through shared experiences, through profound understanding, through all the little kindnesses, through listening. Through lending Ugg boots in the snow and taking an old lady to the seaside.
‘Think about it, will you?’ Kat says, and I promise that I will.
???
Lunchtime comes and goes. One last hospital meal. It’s macaroni cheese. I don’t eat a whole lot of it, because it is vile, and because I know Jake is cooking for me tonight. He will make me enchiladas with salsa and halloumi and they will taste like heaven.
Dad is coming to fetch me as soon as I text him that my discharge is sorted. Nate is here already, waiting with Kat and readingThe Guardian.
Harold wanders into the bay, his shock of white hair standing on end, his pyjama trousers somehow even looser than before, as if they will fall to the floor at any time, leaving him all exposed, allhis bones too sharply outlined against the translucence of his blue-tinged skin. He gazes around and knits his eyebrows together.
‘I think he’s lost,’ Kat says. ‘I’ll get Nicki.’
But Harold shakes his head. ‘I’m not lost. I’m looking for her.’
‘Her?’
‘That one.’ He points to Violet’s bed space, now taken up by a thin woman who is fast asleep and looks nothing like Violet at all. ‘The one who shouts at me. I like her.’
‘She’s gone home,’ Kat says, and Harold’s shoulders slump.
‘What about her? That gobby one?’ He points at Jodie’s cubicle.
An icy surge rises through my chest and squeezes my throat. ‘She’s gone, too.’
Harold droops even more, and then turns and trudges away.
‘Jodie enchanted them all, didn’t she,’ Kat says.
She was a light force, a sweep of nature, a bolt of energy. She swept into my life like a tsunami gathering pace, smashing through my reserve and my pain and my self-doubt. She drew me out of myself and awakened a strength in me I never knew was there. She was irritating, obnoxious and unpredictable. She was a warrior, standing tall even when she had no fight left in her dying body. She taught me about friendship and how to seize hold of the day, about the joy of being alive, about taking crazy chances and lighting up people’s lives. Jodie was impossible, rebellious, impetuous, everything I was too afraid to be, she was our anchor point in Bay C, she was our alpha, our chief Flower.
Kat leaks tears like great big rain drops from a ponderous dark cloud. ‘I’m going to miss that little imp of a girl.’
