Page 71 of The Flowers of Bay C
‘And this.’ Jodie drags out a faded old blanket, the plastic shredding away on its back, pink and white candy-striped fleece covered in what looks like a hundred crusted picnic remains and drink spills. ‘Here!’ she says triumphantly, holding it aloft. ‘We can all sit on it.’
Barbara claps her hands together. ‘I want to sit on the frog chair.’
Jodie shoves the blanket at me. It smells like mildew. I shove my handbag back in the bus, my arms too full of flask and rug, weighed down with the Aldi bag full of hats and gloves still hooked over my arm, and start slowly down the beach with Kat, who is pushing Barbara, the chair responding sluggishly, the wheels catching on the grit and groaning in protest. Kat has the wolf fleece draped over her arm.
It’s not far to the water’s edge. We inch down towards it and I stare up at the open, clouded sky, breathing in the salty crisp freshness of the air and listening to the plaintive cry of gulls. I dump the flask and bag on the sand and lay out the blanket, and for the first time in weeks I feel like I can breathe again and it’s wonderful and wild and invigorating.
Jodie tugs off her Ugg boots and long stripy socks, curling and uncurling her bare toes in the damp sand. ‘Hey,’ she shouts, flinging her arms to the sky, ‘I just thought. We’ve come from C Bay to Sea Bay! How about that!’
Kat says, ‘I know which one I prefer.’
Chapter 22
The picnic rug is a square of smallness, made for a couple cosying up with a bottle of wine. The frog chair is tiny, but Barbara is tinier, and she giggles and claps her hands as Kat and Jodie help her off the wheelchair and lower her in. The poles screech and I worry it will collapse under her, but it stays put, one side listing slightly. They wrap her tightly in the blanket, gathering in her cannula and oxygen line. Her drip bag is empty, the line stretching taut and tugging at her arm, so I detach the connector lock from her port, clipping off her tube and tucking the end into the bandage around her arm. Her knees poke out from under her dressing gown, her support stockings all crinkled at her ankles, legs extending in front of her like sticks, criss-crossed with blue and purple veins vivid against the near translucency of her skin, her slippered feet resting on the sand. Kat lays the other blankets out over her legs and tucks them in all around her until she is cocooned in a blue waffle shell.
Violet stands back, leaning heavily on her walking frame next to Barbara’s chair, her face a picture of disgust as she looks down at the picnic rug. ‘You’re not getting me ontothat.’ She struggles with her walker, shoving it through the sand and placing it next to the rug, on the other side to Barbara’s frog chair.
Jodie laughs. ‘You’re no fun, Violet.’
Violet’s face tenses and then just as quickly softens, the deep-set lines around her eyes smoothing out just a little, her mouth curving into the edges of a smile. ‘Could do with a cig,’ she says. ‘Got any?’
Jodie plucks a cigarette packet out of the pocket of her jacket. ‘Of course. I’ll join you.’
Kat and Amina and I squeeze as much of ourselves as we can onto the rug. It slips and slides and buries itself in the gritty sand, leaving our legs splayed out over the naked ground. The sand is cool against my thin leggings and I shiver, pulling my parka tightly around me and my hood up. Kat hunches next to me in her onesie with the hood pulled right up, Chewie’s face smiling kookily out at us. Amina shivers. Somewhere in the far distance a dog barks.
‘Wait a sec.’ I remember the bag, discarded on the sand nearby, and tug it towards me, opening it up and rummaging through. ‘There’s a few things in here. Hats, scarves, gloves. You’re all welcome to them if you want.’
‘Good thinking,’ Kat says.
‘More by luck than design. Jake couldn’t be bothered to look for my hat, so…’ I begin to pluck out some of the contents. ‘Oh my days. Sorry about this.’ I still can’t find my lovely black bobble hat, but I do find a Bristol Rovers hat and scarf set, a West Ham hat, some red children’s fingerless gloves and a fleecy Santa hat amongst other sundry items. My favourite black wool scarf is here, though, and I wrap it around my neck, slipping on some football gloves and a tatty old beanie hat of Jake’s, pulling my parka hood up over it.
Jake never even supported Bristol Rovers.
‘We should put that hat on Barbara,’ Kat says. ‘It’s bitingout here.’
Barbara submits to Kat sliding the hat on her head and the child’s gloves onto her hands. She smiles out at the sea, diminutive and lost in a mountain of blankets and a Bristol Rovers bobble hat. Amina and Kat both find some non-matching gloves, and we sit in silence and enjoy the quiet of the beach and the rolling of the sea, watching Violet and Jodie, standing slightly away from us, puffing away.
‘It’s nice to be out in the fresh air, I must say,’ Violet says.
Kat raises her eyebrows at me, and I almost laugh out loud at the irony of it.
Marcus used to smoke, even though he was a fitness nut and knew that it messed my lungs up even further. I was just being picky, he said, he smoked outside, what more did I want? It wasn’t like he was smoking right in my face in an enclosed space or anything, he was being as considerate as he could and all I did was complain. Sorry, I would say, sorry, I know you’re thinking of me, it’s just that it makes me wheeze and it hurts. But then he’d remind me that if I made more effort to get fit my lungs would get stronger and I wouldn’t have such an issue with him having the odd cigarette at the end of a really hard day at work. He deserved it, after all, he was the one bringing the money in round here, yet here I was denying him a little bit of comfort. Sorry, sorry for putting myself first, I would say. And then he would go and smoke the cigarette and when he came in he would take me in his arms and hold me tight and I would cough and cough until my chest ached.
‘Another one?’ Violet says, when they’re done, but Jodie shakes her head.
‘Nah. We don’t really have the time. Just a sec.’ Jodie straggles up the beach and says something to Kane, then starts picking her way back towards us. Her toes are blue against the sand. He says something back to her in a shouty voice, then comes out of the van and follows her, muttering.
‘Give us it, then,’ he says.
Jodie pulls her phone out of her pocket and fiddles with it for a moment, then hands it to him. ‘Here. App’s open.’
‘Go and get down with the rest, then,’ he says to her, and Jodie smiles eagerly up at him as she comes back to Violet’s side.
Violet allows herself to be guided over to her walker and holds on to Jodie tightly as she lowers her down to the seat. ‘Ouch. My poor legs. I’m not stopping down here long.’ She sits awkwardly, legs shaking. Jodie squeezes herself down onto the rug with the rest of us, shivering.
I hold the bag out to Jodie. ‘Take some,’ I say. ‘It’s so cold.’
‘Haven’t got all day,’ Kane says, lurching down the beach towards us, scrolling through Jodie’s phone.
