Page 114 of The Flowers of Bay C
Nicki comes over and puts her arms around her. ‘It’s okay, flower. It's okay.’
???
When the discharge forms come I am packed and ready, my bags on the floor next to my chair, my table cleared of everything but my water-jug and cup, and an oldTake a Breakthat Jodie gave me that I never read. The pharmacist hands me two large carrier bags full of medication and asks me if I have any allergies. Nicki and Sister Harris are in the bay, and Sister Harris tells me to get some good rest and don’t even think about any little outings for the next week or two.
When I say goodbye to Kat I cry a little bit more, and wonder if now my tears have started they will ever stop. She folds me tightly into her arms and nestles her face into my hair and tells me she will see me soon. Then she digs into a bag on her bed and holds something out to me. Something that looks like the sky and the sea all rolled into one. It’s the blanket she was working on, all finished and glorious. ‘This is for you.’
I feel the softness of it in my hands and watch as the colours swirl through my blurry vision. ‘But, I…’
‘I wanted to give you the sea.’
‘I…’
‘The colours remind me of you.’
I can’t find any words in me, after that.
Dad comes to run me home. He is quiet in the car, brooding, shrunken from who he was yesterday in his uncharacteristic outpouring of emotion. Perhaps Mum has talked him down, told him to stop being a foolish old man, that I’m not really that special at all.
But when he drops me off, he helps me into the lift and into my flat. He carries my bags and he tells me that he loves me. And then he hugs me, and I don’t remember the last time he hugged me, and so I hug him back.
Jake is in the kitchen, stirring something in a saucepan. His eyes light up at the sight of me, even though I must be a shockerof a sight, with the bags under my eyes and unwashed hair, my body even skinnier than before, my dark eyes dulled with pain and weariness.
‘I’m cooking you your favourite,’ he says.
‘It smells good.’
‘It’s macaroni cheese,’ he says, and then he is folding me in so closely I can hardly breathe, and he is telling me that he missed me and that he loves me and that everything is going to be okay.
I stare into the pan, full of macaroni cheese, and smile, because I know that he is, after all, right.
Epilogue
Six weeks later
Kat has set up a WhatsApp group for me, her, Amina and Violet. Violet has bought ‘one of those telephone things’ so she can keep in touch and she loves to watch the YouTube on it but can’t get her head around that Facebook thing. Kat has named the group ‘The Bay C Flowers’.
The flower that bloomed largest of all wilted too soon, and the flower who opened to the sunshine and the sea air is in a home, waiting to die.
We arrange to meet at the home, the four of us. Amina is in a purple hijab with her black stilettos and kohl-lined eyes. Kat shows us her new tattoo; a cluster of six flowers intertwined, climbing her forearm like ivy up a wall. Violet is dressed in a twinset and pearls under her silver coat.
The home is fragranced with boiled cabbage and a hint of disinfectant, and it takes me back into the hospital bay. Violet says that it smells disgusting in here.
Barbara is sitting up in her bed, face pale and sunken, her eyes holding the edges of a sparkle. She doesn’t have long, the harried carer says. Be gentle and calm, please. She’s not really allowed so many visitors, but no one else comes, only you and that cat lady a couple of times, so…
Barbara looks at me and smiles a toothless smile. ‘Little mouse,’ she murmurs. ‘Little mouse on the beach.’
I stroke her arm. ‘Yes. Yes, with the sun on our faces and the wind in our hair and the sea kissing our toes.’
‘And Dodgy Caravan Dude,’ Kat says. DCD is serving a suspended sentence now and must rue the day he stopped for a gaggle of women he thought were a bunch of crazies out for a drunken stroll in the wilds of the countryside.
‘I don’t see the rat no more,’ Barbara says. She is puffing like a steam train.
I lay my hand on hers. ‘I know you don’t. I’m glad you don’t.’
Silence falls between us.
‘She was a good girl,’ Barbara says, and then she coughs, and then sinks into a whole paroxysm of coughing.
