Page 68 of The Flowers of Bay C
‘You belong with us,’ Kat says.
Violet stares at her and then around at all of us, doubt clouding her eyes and creasing her face up, not into its old familiar pattern of distaste at the world, but into something more like uncertainty.
I look at her and can only imagine her thoughts. She’s been the outsider in our ward and probably the outsider in her life, always looking on with great disapproval, a disdain that so obviously masks the pain she is in. She’s put a shell around herself, I think, erected a boundary of haughtiness and superiority, but underneath it all she’s just got the same longings as the rest of us. She just wants to belong.
‘I think you’ve changed me,’ she says.
I am seeing a butterfly emerging out of its chrysalis, in flashes of glorious colour, beating its wings and flying free into a new world. Violet, in her polyester dressing gown and smeared blueeyeshadow, her silver coat and pink slippers, is a wave of colour and light.
I want to take hold of some of that wave and wrap it around myself.
‘This bus is a bit of a dump, though, isn’t it?’ she says, her mouth flattening back into its usual shape.
We all laugh.
I look around at all of us here in this very possibly stolen minibus, a motley crew of six sick women, one wheelchair, one oxygen cylinder, one drip stand, one walking frame, a hideous dressing gown, a Justin Bieber T-shirt and a Chewbacca onesie. The flowers, Nicki always calls us. We’re the flowers of Bay C. A tide of something warm steals over me; something more than fondness, like a wild longing somewhere inside me being slowly soothed, like something in the depths of me is opening as much as it is in Violet.
The taxi finally moves out of the way, its charge safely installed, and Kane guides the bus haphazardly around the entrance and out of the car park. For the first time in two weeks I am out in the world, away from my safe place, from the routine of meds rounds and obs checks and healthcare assistants with tea trolleys. I’m out in the world where normal people go to work and have energy, where people laugh and cry and make their way through life, where people drive a thousand cars all over the roads to a thousand different places. I stare out of the window, shaken by the rawness of reality, by how easily I have become, once again, institutionalised in a world where I am taken care of and ruled over by hospital routine. It’s almost too free out here on the road, where anything could happen, too scary, the skies too open and the horizon so wide it might swallow me up.
Chapter 21
Kane drives too quickly. The old minibus weaves and undulates worryingly as he slews round corners as though he thinks he is Lewis Hamilton, the chassis screeching and the suspension groaning as we bounce up and down over speed bumps that Kane doesn’t appear to notice. It does indeed move like a tractor, but like a souped-up tractor on speed.
‘Easy, babe,’ Jodie says. She’s sitting up at the front next to him, her hand on his knee.
He shoves her hand away. ‘You wanna get there quick, don’t you?’
‘Well, yeah, but—’
‘Well then.’ He changes down a gear as he moves out to overtake a pootling red Micra, the gearbox crunching and the bus hopping forward as he releases the clutch too quickly. ‘Stupid pile of garbage,’ he mutters, sticking his middle finger up at the window as he passes the Micra, then growling when the Micra driver gives him the same back.
‘I’ve got a quicker route,’ he says, turning around to face us and grinning. ‘Better than that piece of crap.’ He motions to an ancient SatNav, stuck to the windscreen with its mount peeling away at the edges, worn wire trailing down to the cigarette lighter. ‘I’ll get you gals there in no time.’
‘Thanks, babe,’ Jodie says.
‘Thanks, babe,’ Kat mouths at me, rolling her eyes.
He stamps on the brake as we swing sharply into a bend and see an actual tractor dead ahead of us, trundling along at a snail’s pace. We jerk forwards into our seatbelts.
‘Wheee!’ Barbara says, patting her hands up and down on her lap. ‘Faster!’
‘She’s like a kid on a fairground ride,’ Kat says.
She’s all wide-eyed with wonder and smiling with glee. ‘We’re going to the seaside.’
‘We are,’ Kat says.
‘We’re going to see the sea!’
‘We are.’
Barbara starts hummingOh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seasidein a quavering croon, and one by one we join in. Amina’s voice, it turns out, is both rich and powerful, like liquid gold, like an ocean I want to plunge into.
‘You should go onX Factor,’ Jodie says.
‘You sound nice,’ Violet says.
Amina glances shyly up at her, eyes sparkling, then looks quickly away out of the window, twisting her hands together in her lap. I gape at Kat, raising my eyebrows in Violet’s direction. Did she actually just compliment Amina?
