Page 7 of The Flowers of Bay C
I don’t have the strength to leave my bed, let alone make it across the ward. I try to say something, but my voice is stuck in my throat. I think about Edna from the night before and think abouthow I seem to be regularly letting down elderly women at the moment. Sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I am just failing you, like all the other times. Like I fail my son and fail myself. I look down as a flash of pain blazes through my finger and notice I am picking at my skin again, and it is red raw.
Barbara’s voice quavers as she calls to me, ‘You have to help. Help me!’
Jodie yanks out her earbuds and clambers off her bed. She goes to Barbara and pats her hand. ‘It’s okay, Barbara my love. She’s just a patient like you. She’s really poorly. Leave her be.’
‘But my mouse,’ Barbara says.
‘Don’t worry about your mouse. We’ll find it.’
‘She’s by the sea. I have to go to the sea. Why does no one ever help me? I ask everyone and no one ever wants to help. I say to them, I say please help me. Please do this one thing. But no one cares. No one left to care.’
Jodie tenderly takes hold of Barbara’s hand and whispers something to her. Barbara stares at the ceiling, mumbling something incomprehensible. Jodie turns to me, shakes her head and makes a spinning motion with her finger. ‘Bit dippy, bless her. Thinks she’s lost a mouse.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
I dream of hundreds of mice scurrying round the ward, calling to me in sad, quivering voices, in my tiny, restless snatches of sleep.
Chapter 3
My colours have all been washed away and I want to swirl with them into a universe of nothingness. In dreams I wear purple tights and short flowery dresses that flow loose and make me skip through blue skies with rainbow clouds. In dreams I don’t hide my colours but in life I wear black leggings and grey jumpers and they help me to not take up space. Once I bought some purple tights and Marcus told me I was ridiculous and then I threw them away. Now my colours have faded, and I can’t grab hold of the edges of them anymore; there is a black hole underneath me and it looks like all the clothes I wear, and it is dragging me down, and I don’t want to resist anymore.
But then Jake’s face is there, and he is holding all the colours with him, and I have to fight for them.
???
In the middle of the night I’m wide awake. A young Filipino healthcare assistant called Ernesto has been taking my observations every hour because my sats are too low and they are worried about me, he says. He is short and wiry, the vital signs trolley towering over him as he trails it around the ward, wheels squeaking like adisgruntled seagull on every turn. He has a smile like sunshine in the rain.
A new patient is arriving, the same porter who brought me to the ward pushing her bed into the bay and winking at Ernesto, who grins back at him and grabs the front of the bed. They pull her in next to me, and I stare at her. She’s not much older than me but looks a bit scary; all nose piercings and purple hair and tattoos crawling over her arms and neck. Her eyes are dark pools of exhaustion, like everyone else’s in here, including most of the staff.
Jodie is up on her feet in seconds with her cigarettes tucked in the pocket of her dressing-gown, her oxygen cylinder trailing behind. ‘Hey,’ she says to the new woman. ‘Nice tats.’
‘Thanks,’ the woman says, her voice worn.
‘I’m Jodie,’ Jodie says, and I wonder what it is about this Jodie, that she needs to announce herself so quickly, that she wants everyone to know who she is. She’s unlike most patients I meet in here, people who just want to sleep the days away until release. She’s loud and crass and I don’t want to know her. I want her to go away and leave me alone. I want everyone to leave me alone.
‘Kat,’ the tattooed woman says, and turns her back to us, coiling herself up into a tiny ball. I can read the pain on her, see it in the stiffness of her body, in the set of her shoulders. Her hospital gown is open at the back, the tie loosened, and through the opening a large tattoo of what looks like a phoenix is visible.
Jodie whistles. ‘Woah. Must’ve hurt.’
Kat doesn’t respond.
A shock wave of agony snakes through my body, intensifying in waves with every breath. I call out to Ernesto, a thin reed of a call, but he doesn’t hear.
I pinch the skin on my arm and button my lips together. Stop bothering them, Penny. Stop making their lives more difficult, those nurses who work tirelessly, battling through twelve-hour-shifts with little break, hardly off their feet. I want to be a nurse, to have a body that will stay on its feet for twelve hours. I want to be a Tesco checkout girl or an Amazon packer, a teaching assistant or a lorry driver. I want to be anything at all.
I will squeeze my eyes tight and lie as still as I possibly can because that helps just a little bit. Maybe if I lie still enough I will disappear altogether, stop taking up this bed and let it go to someone more worthy.
???
Doctor Chowdhury is standing at the foot of my bed, clutching an iPad, with stooped shoulders and his most pitying gaze levelled at me. I know that look; it’s the one that shouts out this-is-not-good-Penny, but his tones are calm and measured as he relays the damage. ‘It’s the big three again, like last time, I’m afraid. The Unholy Trinity.’
I am empty. I am numb. He does not tell me what I do not already know.
‘Pseudomonas, some heavy growth there. Aspergillus. Mycobacterium abscessus, again. Thought we’d seen that one off last time.’ He smiles gently, as if he is making a little joke.
‘Oh.’I’m sorry,I want to say.I am sorry for being such a fertile breeding ground.
‘You know why we call these the Unholy Trinity, don't you?’
