Page 23 of The Flowers of Bay C
Her husband is there, too, nodding along at every word and exuding disgust like a haughty cat facing up to an overexcited puppy.
‘I’ve been asking for it for hours,’ Violet says. I’ve no idea what ‘it’ is, but guess that it’s something she feels should be rightfully hers right this minute.
‘It’s a disgrace,’ Mr Violet says.
Jake rolls his eyes at Jodie, but she is oblivious, her attention taken up by her magazine. ‘Lot of moaners going on about smokers in this article. I have the right to smoke if I want to.’
Violet picks up on that one. ‘All those anti-smoking types out there, wanting to take our rights away.’
‘It’s a disgrace,’ Mr Violet says.
Jodie nods fiercely. ‘Yeah, and they think we shouldn’t smoke in like pub gardens and that now. It’s all we’ve got left after they took our inside smoking away.’
Jake clears his throat. ‘Ahem millennial ahem.’
Jodie scrunches her nose at him, but a tiny smile quivers at the corners of her mouth.
‘Shall we go for one now, then?’ she says to Violet, who nods and instructs her husband in bossy tones to stop lolling around and go and get her a wheelchair. Jodie and Violet are in the habit of going for their smoke together. They huddle under my window in the Peace Garden because the smoking shelter is too far to walk and there’s a nice bench to sit on. The smoke drifts up and curls through my nose and my lungs and the pain batters my chest. Can I close the window, I ask the nurse. That one doesn’t close, she says. Can they not be told not to smoke there, I say. No one takes any notice of us, she says. So I shut up and say nothing at all to Jodie and Violet who are, after all, sick as well, and as deserving as anyone else of some pleasure in life.
‘You should say something to them,’ Kat says. ‘They’ll move somewhere else.’
But I can’t and I won’t. I am Penny who wants to please.
Chapter 7
I’m eight years old and my mummy is cross with me, I know that because at breakfast her eyebrows were angry, like when I make a mess or tell a lie. Her eyebrows never do that with Karen because she is always good.
I feel very poorly today and it’s hot in my room. The window is open but it doesn’t stop the sun burning through to me in my bed. I want to be outside with my friend Haki, playing hide and seek behind the houses where the trees are close together and it’s sometimes a bit scary. Karen says I am babyish for playing hide and seek but I like it.
My mummy and daddy are in the kitchen and I can hear every word they are saying. They don’t think I can, they think the wall is enough to stop the words coming through but it isn’t. My mummy is whispering at my daddy but it is more of a shouty whisper. She is talking about me, I know that because she just said my name. She just said that Penny is too expensive and my daddy said that it will be fine and we will get through it. I don’t know what he means, but his voice makes me feel better.
I sit up and put my ear closer to the wall. I try not to cough even though a cough is trying to come out of me. My chest ishurting and I want to cry a little bit but I stop the tears because Karen teases me when I cry and says that I am a silly little baby.
‘We’re going to have to go back to England,’ my mummy says. I have never been to England but I know it’s colder and greyer than here because Mummy says that she would never want to go back because of the weather and the gloomy sky. I was born here, like my sister, and I don’t want to go away from it. My tummy feels cold.
‘She’ll probably grow out of it,’ my daddy says.
I am growing every day, my daddy measures me sometimes and my mummy sighs and humphs and says that I grow out of all my clothes too quickly, that I am like a weed. I wish I was like a flower instead but I have to be a weed. Perhaps that is what Daddy means now, that if I grow out of something we won’t have to go to England. But I don’t know why he says that.
‘The bills are getting too high,’ Mummy says.
‘I know, but—’
‘You tell me where we’ll get the money, then, if you’re so very insistent on staying here. You tell me how we’ll get treatment for her? We haven’t got the NHS here, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
My daddy sighs really loudly.
Mummy lowers her voice, but not much. ‘If only you’d not come home so drunk that time.’
Daddy laughs out loud. ‘You didn’t seem to mind, at the time.’
‘Well, I minded nine months later, didn’t I? And now… our dream life, Martin! It’s going down the drain in front of me. And it’s all because ofher.’
Sometimes when my mummy talks about me she saysherin a way that makes me feel smaller and like I want to curl up and disappear. I wonder what she means now, what she said about Daddy being drunk. Sometimes they both have a lot of wine andthey giggle a lot and dance out on the veranda, but I don’t understand what that has to do with me.
‘We’ve no choice,’ Mummy says, and I am sad because her voice is sad.
‘Look, we should wait. I still think it could get better. That… she could get better, and we could stay here.’
