A Pretty Beach Wish

by Polly Babbington

  At least she knew that Bella was in good hands. The specialist orthopaedic foot and ankle consultant who had performed Bella’s surgery was one of the best in the country and had received numerous awards for her work. The move to Pettacombe to the foot unit and under the care of Davina Robertson had, they all believed, saved Bella’s toes.

  Juliette felt as if her whole body was consumed with worry. Every single part of her being, every fibre of her thought about Bella all of the time. It was like she was wired and buzzing constantly. She could barely hold a conversation that wasn’t about the recovery or the hospital, and she’d spent hours poring over articles on the internet on cases such as Bella’s and the reconstruction of a traumatic foot accident and subsequent deformity.

  Juliette held on tightly to the handle on the tote bag over her shoulder and realised she’d had her jaw set in a tight lock since the moment the train had pulled out of Pretty Beach. It was as if every part of her body was constricted, tense and taut. The whole of her was locked up in angst.

  Get a grip on yourself. You need to keep everyone going. She said to herself as she marched out of the station.

  Juliette opened the travel app on her phone - two buses took the route to the hospital or she could walk all the way through Pettacombe itself. She checked her watch and decided to walk. Maybe the fresh air would reset her head. Brighten her mood. She kept trying to tell herself to be grateful that Bella was alive, that the surgery had gone much better than expected, and that Bella actually seemed to be dealing with it all quite well.

  She walked along the shiny pavements of Pettacombe in the drizzle with her umbrella up and rain mac on past hurrying shoppers and mums holding hands with children in welly boots on their way to school.

  Striding along, she approached the hospital as a patient transport ambulance sailed past her and a man walked along with a child in a wheelchair and an umbrella. Yet again it hit her that her Bella, her beautiful baby was in hospital, and was very lucky not to have lost her toes.

  Juliette blinked back the tears as the reality of those thoughts hit her again and as she came to the canopy outside the main reception she folded up her umbrella and put it in her bag. Just as she went to walk into the foyer of the hospital, a crack of thunder sounded from above and lightning lit up the now darkening sky. Another clap of thunder and then all of sudden the heavens opened and rain started to lash down. Juliette sighed, at least she hadn’t been caught in the downpour.

  Juliette walked through the foyer and made her way to the orthopaedic foot and ankle unit. It felt strange to be in a hospital on the other side of it all - on the member of the public side. Usually she was in uniform, the one responsible, the one doing the caring. Now she was the one not really knowing what was going on, the one with all the questions. The one hoping everything would be okay.

  A man with a huge duffel bag and long beige mac, and a very pregnant woman in flip flops and a too-tight pair of shorts stood beside her while they waited for the lift. The woman smiled and Juliette smiled back, but looked away at the lift buttons in no mood for small talk.

  Juliette walked briskly along the corridor and up to the desk at the top of the ward. As she approached, she took a deep breath and relaxed her grip on her bag as the young nurse looked up from behind her computer, smiled at Juliette in recognition, and waved Juliette through.

  Juliette walked all the way along the corridor, past sinks and hand-washing stations and a trolley parked at the side full of linen. Just before she got to Bella she stood at a sink and washed her hands twice with soap and dried them off with paper towels. It seemed odd to be standing at a sink washing her hands not in her uniform, not with her badge on, and ready for people approaching and asking questions. It seemed to smell different too; it felt both familiar and unwelcome at the same time. Usually when people said to her that they didn't like the smell of hospitals she had always nodded in agreement, but privately she had wondered what they actually meant. Now she knew.

  Juliette pushed open the door with her foot, avoiding touching anything, and stood looking past two immaculately made-up empty beds and down to the end where Bella was propped up in a bed looking out of the window. Juliette blinked her eyes several times, took a deep breath, put a smile on her face and tried to look positive as she looked at Bella’s heavily bandaged foot and the machines surrounding her.

  Bella turned as she heard the door close and smiled at the sight of Juliette. Juliette wanted to gasp, but kept the smile on her face. Bella looked tired, gaunt, pallid. Most of all her beautiful bright Bella looked weak and small.

  Bella managed a fragile smile and then turned back to the window as Juliette approached the bed. Juliette reached over and kissed Bella on the cheek and took a seat on the dusky pink padded plastic chair.

  ‘How was the train?’ Bella asked, her voice low and sad.

  ‘It was fine.’

  ‘Did you remember my other Kindle?’

  ‘Of course. It’s here in my bag. How are you feeling, darling? How was the pain in the night?’

  ‘I’m okay, that pain relief made me feel really woozy again. I’m not having any more of that.’

  ‘No, it doesn't agree with everyone. I’ll have a look at it all. I’ll go and speak to the nurses. I’ll ask Luke too.’

  ‘No, Mum. Don’t please. Just let them get on with it. Let them do their job. You’re not here as a nurse. Just keep out of it.’ Bella said shortly.

  Juliette was taken aback with Bella’s response. Bella let most things wash over her, normally let everyone else take care of things. This Bella seemed different. That’s because this Bella was different. This Bella was facing at least another surgery, confronting months of appointments and a long convalescence.

  This Bella was facing the reality of her deformed foot and that she had got very close to losing a toe.

  Chapter 26

  Juliette was sitting in the same dull, grey-pink chair in Pettacombe Valley Hospital that she had first sat in when she had arrived in the morning. Bella had been sleeping on and off for most of the day, had barely touched the lunch that had been delivered, and had then fallen back to sleep.

  Juliette had exhausted the headlines on her phone, checked her emails, sent through an order for A Christmas Sparkle to Michael with directions of where to find it in her unit, and was now sitting staring out the same window Bella had been when she had first walked in much earlier on in the day.

  She looked out over the car park behind the hospital. The black-grey clouds had now moved on and the rain had stopped, but it was still dull and grim outside considering the time of year. It was almost better somehow that the weather was bad, it fitted her low mood. It fitted that the weather wasn’t happy and shiny when her Bella was lying in a hospital bed.

  Juliette shifted her position in her chair and smoothed down her green ditsy tea dress and took a humbug out of her bag, unwrapped it, and popped it in her mouth and wondered how long it would be before Bella would be allowed to go home. How long before she could go back to Oxford? How it was going to affect her walking. The trouble was that nobody knew.

  The door opened from down at the end of the ward and Juliette assumed it was one of the nurses coming in to do their observations checks. She didn’t look up or turn around and then felt someone touch her elbow and shifted to see Jeremy standing in front of her.

  ‘Hello,’ Jeremy whispered and bent down to kiss Juliette on the cheek. Juliette breathed in that same familiar expensive Italian aftershave and watched as Jeremy silently picked up another of the dull pink plastic chairs and placed it next to hers.

  ‘My god. She looks terrible. I can’t believe it. She looks like someone has drawn all the colour out of her and deflated her,’ Jeremy observed whispering whilst repeatedly shaking his head.

  ‘I thought it was just me,’ Juliette said, almost relieved that someone else also thought that Bella looked so bad.

  ‘Absolutely awful. This is hard to swallow. I can’t stand to see her like
this,’ Jeremy continued.

  Juliette put her hand on Jeremy’s leg. ‘I know. I think there’s light at the end of the tunnel, though. I’ve just had a long chat with one of the senior nurses and I’ve spoken to the consultant. She seemed relatively hopeful. She said Bella was doing much better than she had anticipated.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that. We should be grateful for that I suppose, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘I keep telling myself it could have been a lot worse...’ Juliette said trailing off and looking over at Bella. ‘But somehow that doesn’t seem to make me feel a whole lot better when I see her looking like this.’

  ‘No. I’ve felt the same. It’s made everything around me feel so delicate. You know? You don’t realise it until something like this happens. How life is just hanging there on the edge and one little foot wrong, one slip on a boat and everything can change. Actually, everything has changed.’

  ‘It has,’ Juliette replied and looked down at her feet glumly.

  ‘Sounds really mean, but I just kept thinking I wish it hadn’t happened to Bella, like why did it happen to her and not someone else?’ Jeremy said as he fiddled with the edge of the blue cellular blanket on the bed.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ve had all kinds of thoughts and some of them have been completely and utterly irrational. I’ve even tried to blame Luke for buying the boat,’ Juliette said with a small smile.

  ‘I just keep thinking. Why her? Why not choose me? I wouldn’t care if I had to put up with having a couple of my toes chopped off if it meant her not having to go through all this. No one’s going to be looking at my toes anyway. Whereas she’s on the beginning of her life journey.’

  Juliette looked at Jeremy through eyes full of big hot tears and felt some comfort. Jeremy seemed to be on the same tumultuous ride of emotions she was and that made her feel ever-so-slightly better.

  Chapter 27

  Juliette didn’t know how to feel as Luke drove them home to Pretty Beach after they’d dropped Maggie off at school. It was a few weeks after the initial surgery, and they had just received the news from Bella’s check-up that one of Bella’s toes was not responding well and would need the second surgery sooner than they’d first envisaged. The silence in the car had been deafening as Luke carefully tackled the tight bends of the coast road.

  Juliette looked out of the passenger window and watched the sea flashing past the window. Why them? Why her little family? Why Bella? Just as everything had been going so well. She’d known something bad was going to happen. She’d felt it in the water.

  ‘It’s just so not fair,’ Juliette said, continuing to stare out of the window. She knew she must be annoying. She had said the same thing over and over again for weeks.

  ‘I know. It’s not.’ Luke replied patiently.

  ‘Why did it have to happen to her? No father in her life, she had to put up with me and having no money, and then she’s got the whole world in front of her and then this. Oxford, who gets into Oxford? My Bella did. And now she’s looking at it potentially affecting how she walks for the rest of her life.’

  ‘She didn’t have to put up with you - from what I know and can see she couldn’t have asked for a better mother. She’s the most balanced, lovely human I know. Look how she just dealt with all this for a start.’

  ‘It’s just not fair,’ Juliette said again. Those same four words that she’d already uttered about a trillion times since they’d been on the boat and Bella had slipped into the water.

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘I’m going to need to start ringing people and telling them that my daughter fell off our boat and her toes are wrecked. I’ve had so many messages. Half of Pretty Beach has been in touch. Oh, and all the flowers and deliveries, I haven’t even said thank you to anyone really. I can’t do it, Luke, it’s so unfair. I have to say the words that my daughter’s toe is looking like it’s going to be amputated. How is it going to affect her?’ Juliette knew she was being dramatic, but she just couldn’t seem to keep a lid on her emotions. It was almost as if for her whole life she’d been the one in control, the one on top of everything, but this had thrown her completely and it had seemed that she had lost any kind of rational thought.

  ‘Juliette, you need to try and calm down. She will cope - she’s as strong as you are. She handled the news of the surgery well and then asked you to bring her laptop and book in.’

  ‘Yes, she did, and that’s exactly what I mean. Who even does that? Read! Read at a time like this? You get told two of your toes are deformed, it will affect how you walk and one of them is not healing so well and there is a possibility that it is going to be lost, and you ask for a book.’

  ‘It’s her coping mechanism.’

  ‘Well, what’s mine then? I have no coping mechanism. I’m so, sooooo angry!’

  ‘It’s traumatic for everyone involved.’ Luke replied calmly.

  ‘I told you not to buy the bloody boat, Luke. I told you there are lots of accidents on boats. I told you. It’s your fault. I should never have stepped foot onto the thing.’

  Luke didn’t say anything as Juliette sat staring out the window - the air in the car taut and tight with stress.

  ‘If you hadn’t insisted on buying the boat we would never have been in this situation.’ Juliette continued angrily.

  They pulled into Mermaid Lane and Juliette looked up at the house, and as they got home the reality of the latest news regarding the toes hit her even more and she started to cry. Big, heavy tears fell out of her eyes. She and Luke sat in the car for a moment and then he tapped her on the leg. She started to sob.

  ‘Come on. I’ll make us some tea.’

  Juliette followed in behind Luke, and as he started to make the tea, she kicked off her shoes and took off her denim jacket. She opened the cupboard next to the fridge, rummaged around in the back, and found the family-size jar of chocolate spread. She opened the drawer, took out a spoon, pulled off the foil top on the chocolate and started spooning the spread straight into her mouth.

  As she stood against the worktop looking at her blue fridge, Juliette kept repeating to herself that she needed to remain calm. She was not handling herself well and she knew it. And so did Luke. Breathe and calm. Breathe and calm.

  Wasn’t it to be expected though? What was she supposed to do? Just carry on and be dependable, sensible Juliette? Smile and say oh no worries? The one everyone could rely on - Bella, Maggie, Daisy - she was always the reliable one for all of them. Juliette was always there and now she wanted to climb up onto the roof of her house and scream at the top of her lungs noooooooo. She didn’t want to have to be the dependable one.

  She wanted to shout no to her daughter having the accident. But she couldn’t do that. Just as she had always had to, she had to carry on, to get up, get dressed, soldier on and continue. Suck it up and get on with it.

  Juliette flicked through her phone checking her messages and emails.

  ‘There’s a message from the surgery. Sarah is covering all my visits, the clinic and appointments for the rest of the week.’

  ‘That’s good. You can put all that to the back of your mind for a bit, then.’

  ‘Oh my god, Luke! The Lellery thing, what the heck am I going to do about that? I haven’t even thought about it.’

  ‘Good question. You’ll have to think about it next week. You don’t need to let them know yet, do you?’

  ‘Not really. But I’ll never get the opportunity again if I turn it down.’

  ‘Let’s think about it when we know a bit more about how she’s going to go. What the consultant said yesterday wasn’t definite.’

  Juliette finished her tea and went into the bathroom when the doorbell went downstairs. Luke jogged down the stairs and opened the door to a huge bouquet of flowers from White Cottage Flowers.

  He said thank you to one of Felicity’s girls who had delivered it on her bike and closed the door. He took the flowers up to their bedroom and handed them to Juliette as she opened the door
from the bathroom.

  Juliette took out the card and handed it to Luke.

  ‘From Jeremy. I do have to admit, he is good in a crisis. I’ll need to call him and sort out everything with Maggie. Oh, Luke, what about Maggie’s feelings about this next instalment? You know how much she loves Bella. She’s going to be distraught too. I need to make sure she’s okay.’

  Chapter 28

  Luke, Juliette, and Maggie had just got home from the hospital and Juliette was making a cup of tea. Juliette cut Maggie a slice of cake, popped it onto a plate and passed the plate to her.

  ‘There you go, darling. A nice slice of cake for you,’ Juliette said, with a bright voice. Maggie had been unusually quiet at the hospital and so Luke and Juliette had attempted to keep the conversation light on the way home in the car.

  ‘I know Maggie, why don’t you go and get Delilah and you can watch the children’s channel with your cake? I’ll just finish off making the dinner and then we’ll watch something together too.’

  Maggie seemed very pleased to be allowed to eat cake and watch television, and after Juliette had taken the cake into the sitting room, she’d walked back into the kitchen to sit with Luke.

  After more tests at the hospital Bella’s middle toe, which had been the one causing the most concern with the question as to whether or not the bones were going to heal properly, was now doing better. It had been a huge respite for everyone.

  When Davina Robertson, the consultant, had changed her mind about another surgery as the healing progressed, Juliette had been overcome with relief. Bella had beamed as the consultant had started to talk about what would happen next, the further surgery in the future and the impending physio.

  As Juliette started preparing vegetables for dinner Luke looked up from his phone. ‘So obviously what the surgeon said was correct. She should know. It will affect her muscles, coordination, and balance. Everything I’ve found and researched certainly suggests the post-op physio, but also taking up something for motor skills. There are a couple of research articles that mention the benefits of things like ballet, etc.’