by Judy Astley
‘No, no, no! I want them folded, I want them presented as if they’ve just come from the shop, freshly bought. You must tell them. And blouses and pyjama tops.’ Mrs Caldwell patted the top of one of the folded heaps.
‘It sounds rather time-consuming,’ Jay commented slyly. Time wasted on one job was time taken from another.
‘But it’s how I want them!’
‘Of course. We’ll have a little chat with the girls. Now is that . . . ?’ Barbara made amove toget up but Mrs Caldwell hadn’t finished. Outside the window cleaner clattered down his ladder and Jay heard water swooshing into the outside drain. For his sake, she hoped the man hadn’t carelessly slopped any over the doormat or he’d be joining them in the kitchen line-up for a telling-off.
‘Not it’s not all, not quite.’ Mrs Caldwell reached for another garment. ‘Underwear,’ she declared, holding up a pair of fine mesh pants, pink-flowered on a blue background and edged with cornflower lace. ‘They should be folded thrice like so . . .’
The window cleaner knocked on the kitchen door and pushed it open, putting his head round and grinning at Jay and Barbara. Mrs Caldwell whirled round, knickers still held aloft.
‘All done, love. That’ll be thirty quid.’ He gave Mrs Caldwell a lascivious wink. ‘Nice knickies darlin’, but I think I’ll give our usual little extras a miss today, ta, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Well that went well, I thought. Not,’ Barbara said to Jay as they sat in Starbucks celebrating their telling-off with some much-needed coffee.
Jay stirred her skinny latte (plus two sugars) and laughed. ‘It is her, isn’t it? I mean, it is Mrs Caldwell who’s overdemanding, not us who’re sloppy and hopeless?’
‘Are you serious? The woman’s obsessive. Barking. She told Monique off once for winding the flex on the iron the wrong way. I mean, for heaven’s sake, get a life, woman. Some of them . . .’ Barbara shook her head.
‘Some of them you just want to shake.’
‘And vac,’ Barbara spluttered. ‘I had a dream once that the Dachshund Man had been freeze-dried, scattered on the floor and hoovered up. Gruesome.’ She grabbed Jay’s hand suddenly. ‘Don’t tell anyone that, please, you promise?’
‘You got it. It’s just between us, that little fantasy. What shall we do now? I don’t much feel like going home and adding up how many bottles of Mr Muscle we’re going to need next month – it’ll probably start me on some mad train of thought about why it isn’t called Mrs Muscle, or Ms at the very least. How about you? Have you got cats to de-flea or de-worm or shall we comfort ourselves some more with a bit of retail therapy?’
‘I can manage an hour or two – let’s not do clothes though, let’s go and do cosmetics. We could get mad-witch eyeshadow colours to scare Mrs C. next time she hauls us over the coals.’
The two of them wandered through the town centre and into the luscious scent-soaked cosmetics department of the biggest store. ‘Mmm,’ Jay said, closing her eyes and inhaling. ‘The smell of lots of purchase possibilities. I need, and that’s need, not merely want, some new lipgloss.’
She tried several, covering the back of her hand with smears of colour till she resembled the paint chart she’d used when decorating Ellie’s bedroom the year before. It seemed, she thought as she paid for her choice, a ludicrous amount of money to hand over for such a titchy pot of bronzy-pink goo. No wonder women bought so much – at that price you just had to hurl all your faith into it.
Barbara declared herself well pleased with a new perfume and some smudgy purple-grey eyeliner. ‘Makes a change from browns for me,’ she said, ‘I keep buying all these taupe shades. I get them home and realize I’ve been influenced by the colours of my cats. Ridiculous.’
‘What’s so wonderful,’ Jay mused as they walked towards the car park, ‘is that make-up can’t make you fat, drunk, pregnant or ill. It’s a near sin with no punishment and no side effects. Perfect.’
‘If you go . . . and I’m not meaning you, this is rhetorical, you’re nowhere near a candidate,’ Barbara said, ‘If you, one, went to a sort of Overeaters Anonymous, do you think you have to rely on a Higher Power, like they do at the Alcoholics one? What do you think?’
‘I hadn’t thought,’ Jay told her. ‘Hadn’t given it a moment’s consideration. I suppose you’d have to. I just know I haven’t got the right sort. My Higher Power, the one in my head that I listen to, is a jolly live-and-let-live soul who likes a drink and a good social nosh-up. It likes chocolate and doesn’t even try to tell me not to have it. It says, go on, eat that doughnut, a bit of what you fancy can’t hurt. He or she isn’t on my side about the diet at all.’
Barbara stopped by the window of a new shop. There were all sorts of vitamin potions piled up in the window display along with diet remedies, powders and pills and drinks all claiming to be essential for toxic cleansing and inner purity. Photos of slender, bikini-clad women playing beach volleyball tempted body-envy. She and Jay wandered into the shop where soft persuasive music was playing and looked at a huge toy-like selection of primary-coloured tummy toners, exercise wheels, hand weights and elastic straps, every gadget promising to change your body shape, to tone, stretch and lengthen muscles till, presumably, they had to be folded double to fit inside your skin.
‘You could waste your whole life playing with this lot,’ Barbara said, picking up a broad elastic band, putting one end under her foot and hauling hard on the other end. It escaped from beneath her shoe and snapped back at her viciously, sending her flying into an artistically arranged stack of cartons that clattered to the floor.
Jay, overcome with laughter, started picking them up. ‘Hell’s teeth, look at this! Cellulite patches!’
‘You can buy it in patches?’ Barbara said, misunderstanding and grabbing one of the boxes. ‘Oh I see, you stick them on and it gets rid of it.’
‘I shall get some. I must try it.’
‘You’re mad, Jay, you know it can’t work! It couldn’t possibly!’
‘Hey, it’s just like the make-up, isn’t it? You’ve got to believe in the magic. Of course I’m going to try it. What can it hurt?’
‘About twenty-five quid, it says here. Lucky you’re not trying to give up smoking as well, you could be all patch and no skin.’
‘Lucky it’s not summer as well,’ Jay agreed, pulling her debit card out of her wallet. ‘I’d get a spotty tan and end up looking like an albino leopard.’
Jay’s phone rang just as they were leaving the shop. ‘Not more disgruntled clients, please,’ she said, not recognizing the caller’s number. It was the hospital, telling her not to worry.
‘Why do they say that?’ she wailed to Barbara as soon as she’d finished the call. ‘Why do they tell you not to worry when there’s obviously something to worry about? I’ve got to go, Rory’s ill. They said they don’t think it’s anything “too serious”, as if you’re supposed to be able to interpret that and come up with any sense. Oh God, I must dash . . . where did I leave the car?’
‘It’s round the corner on the green, just next to the Cricketers pub. I’ll see you soon,’ Barbara said, hugging her. ‘Let me know how he is and send him my love. And I’ll summon up my own higher power, put in a word for him.’
SIX
Patches
From just inside the stuffy waiting area, beside the League of Friends shop (selling an amazing array of intricately knitted pastel bedjackets) Jay could see Greg sauntering towards the Accident and Emergency department, bouncing slightly with his loose-legged old-hippy walk straight across the busy car park, without looking to see if any vehicle was backing out of a space and likely to turn him into a patient. She wished he’d do a bit of stop, look and listen; people who were driving to and from hospital premises usually had more on their minds than avoiding marauding pedestrians. Some drivers in these cars would be caught up in deep new grief, others would be here to join in with a birth, some could be jubilant with relief that an invasive and much-dreaded procedure was now over
and then there’d be those, like her, who’d been hurled into a sudden, unexpected worry about their sick child.
‘So. Appendicitis. You don’t hear much about that these days, do you? Poor old Rory!’ Greg greeted Jay quite cheerfully as the automatic doors opened and a blast of cool air whirled into the building with him. He sounded, Jay thought, as if Rory had had nothing more than an unlucky run-in with a stinging nettle. This, from a man who had taken to his bed with ‘gangrene’ the previous summer when he’d contracted a touch of athlete’s foot. The air outside smelled fresh and robust and she wished the doors could stay open, reconnecting the inmates with the world of health and wholeness beyond.
The waiting room was hot to the point of inducing torpor, and Jay could feel the skin on her cheeks shrinking as any natural moisture and all that morning’s Clinique evaporated. She had the impression that if she picked up a magazine from the pile on the low table it would flake away to shreds. If she squeezed the back of one of the cracked, blood-scarlet chairs its stuffing would tumble out beneath it in heaps of desiccated foam. The room was dotted around with minor-injuries customers; some were clutching bloodied cloths to their wounds and others were pale, silent and sickly with maybe an arm in a makeshift sling or a bare, swollen foot propped up out of damage range.
‘Waiting time, 2 hours’ flashed past over and over on a startlingly bright electronic sign. No-one commented or grumbled; two hours didn’t rate any kind of fuss. This was not the Saturday night post-sport and pub-fight slot where you squeezed into a space on the floor and settled in for the duration. The place was scented with something sharply antiseptic and lemony, masking the full range of years of bodily spills that was, Jay decided, best not thought about.
‘Rory’s through there,’ she told Greg, pointing to a row of curtained cubicles, half-hidden round a far corner. ‘Someone’s just having another look at him before he goes up to the theatre. I don’t think he’ll even get a pre-med.’
Greg chuckled. ‘That’s a good thing. Keep him away from all pleasurable drugs at his age. Don’t want him getting a taste for them.’
‘Greg! Be serious, the poor boy’s in a lot of pain. This could have been really bad – think of peritonitis.’
‘Ah Perry, met him at a party once . . . Sorry.’ Greg summoned up a scrap of sensitivity. He gently squeezed the back of Jay’s neck. ‘Just staving off the worry with a bit of misplaced flippancy. Have you seen him? Is he . . .’ Greg stopped for a moment, watching with a grimace as a nurse bustled from one of the cubicles carrying a covered kidney bowl.
‘Ugh. Hospitals, doncha just love them?’ Greg turned away and shuddered.
Jay pulled him to a row of seats close to the reception desk, a little apart from the waiting patients, where he wouldn’t feel the temptation to engage them in chat about what they were in for and some mutual faultfinding about health service policy.
‘We’ve to wait here, then someone’ll come and tell us what the plan is. And then we can see him before he goes up to have the thing out.’
‘Do you think he’ll want to keep it?’
‘Keep it?’ Jay said. ‘Are you mad? It’s not going to get any better, it’s got to be taken out.’
‘No, no I mean in a jar,’ Greg said. ‘You remember, when you were a kid, if you had your appendix out they’d give it to you to take home.’
‘I hope he doesn’t want it.’ Jay thought about the state of Rory’s room. The carpet, the surface of which was rarely visible, was like a many-layered cake with magazines and CDs sandwiching clothes, trainers and schoolbooks. A mouse, slaughtered by Daffodil, had rotted to a skeleton among his rugby kit under the bed last summer holidays. ‘It would just end up spilling all over the floor like all those abandoned coffee cups. The cat would get it . . .’
There was a loud groan from a teenage boy sitting within hearing range. He was a year or two older than Rory, covered in mud and wearing school sports kit, and with his arm supported in a sling made from two football socks tied together.
‘Sorry!’ Jay called brightly to him and the woman accompanying him – a teacher from the school, she assumed, looking as if volunteering for hospital duty wasn’t, after all, an improvement on force-feeding quadratic equations into Year 8. The woman glared back, issuing a clear non-verbal warning that if the pain-struck lad had to overhear one more gory word she knew who she’d hold responsible for the resulting mess on the lino.
‘Mr and Mrs Callendar?’ A tiny blonde doctor who, in Jay’s opinion, looked far too much like one of the pert teenage-girl finalists from Pop Idol to be taken seriously as any kind of professional, approached with a clipboard and an encouraging smile.
‘Rory is ready to go up to theatre now? You can come up and wait if you like? Or maybe you could come back later? He’ll be a bit out of it for a while? Say two or three hours till he’s properly back with us again?’
‘Um . . . we could just stay with him? Hang around till we know he’s OK?’ Jay suggested, catching the quasi-Australian question tone. She didn’t like the sound of ‘back with us’. It made the general anaesthesia sound too much like a long hike in the direction of permanent oblivion. Suppose something went wrong, suppose Rory knew as he faded, fighting, from life that his family weren’t anywhere close to him but had gone carelessly swanning off to pick up a trolley-load at Sainsbury’s, while surgeons frantically scoured the district’s blood banks for the right gallon of cross-matched plasma?
‘Come and see him for a few minutes before you leave.’ There was no question this time, this was an order; the authorities didn’t want the place cluttered with hangers-on. ‘He’s a bit woozy.’ Miss Pop Idol (the badge said ‘Melissa’) led the way to Rory, who lay on a trolley with a needle taped to his hand and a tube snaking up to a drip. He waved vaguely, smiling slightly and looking beatific.
‘Yo, parents. Missing History. Result.’
‘What’ve they given you, man? You look miles away.’ Greg perched on the edge of the trolley. Rory winced.
‘Greg, don’t sit on the poor boy!’ Jay shifted sideways, looking for a place in the small cubicle to get close to Rory, and knocked into the drip support.
‘Mind your big bum, Mum,’ Rory murmured.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ Jay felt flustered and squeezed past a stack of cardboard kidney bowls to sit on the one creaky chair. She caught sight of young Dr Melissa smirking and pursing up her pretty mouth to suppress a giggle. Oh great, she thought. I’m here at the bedside of my possibly-could-have-died son and all people can do is notice my lardy arse. Did her darling son have to use the word ‘big’? Just bum on its own would have been adequate, thank you. More than.
‘We’ll be back just after you wake up, Rory,’ Jay told him, stroking his damp hair back from his eyes. ‘Is there anything you want us to bring? Pyjamas and things, obviously and . . .’
Had he actually got pyjamas, she wondered? His sleeping attire seemed to be what looked like surfers’ baggies and faded, ripped T-shirts. There must be something at the back of a cupboard that was hospital-suitable, surely, something one of Greg’s aunts had sent many Christmases ago. Every household but hers was probably equipped with a decent emergency supply. They had to be, otherwise the hospital wards would be full of women in black transparent teddies trimmed with marabou and old men in holey grey vests. That League of Friends stall would be wise to have a constant stock of sensible patient-garb in all sizes.
‘Pyjamas?’ Rory looked as if he’d never heard the word before. ‘I just want . . . like music and stuff. And Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘If, I like don’t make it . . .’ Even as he said it, he was eyeing the delectable Melissa in search of comfort-reaction.
‘Rory, removing an appendix is a routine thing, they do it every day.’ Jay had her fingers crossed all the same. Fate shouldn’t be tempted. Rory took no notice, ‘Samantha Newton, she can have my Pink CD, OK?’
‘Right, time to go up now?’ Dr Melissa threw back the curtain with the k
ind of flourish that game-show hosts usually keep for Tonight’s Star Prize and ushered in a porter. ‘Say farewell, folks?’
Jay and Greg watched as the trolley was trundled away and disappeared into a lift.
Outside in the real-life sunshine, Jay felt tears stabbing at the back of her eyes. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her thumping heart.
‘He’ll be fine, truly,’ Greg said, hugging her close to him. ‘He’ll be back at school in a couple of weeks, bragging about fancying the nurses. Or at least . . .’
‘What? Tell me!’
So Greg wasn’t so hundred per cent sure either. It was going to be like Casualty or Holby City; a slip of the scalpel, a quavery surgeon covering up early-onset Parkinson’s. They’d be ushered into the Relatives’ Room to be told a sorrowful tale of unforeseen complications and given tepid tea, all sticky with too much sugar.
‘I was just wondering . . .’ Greg looked puzzled, ‘This Pink CD . . . it’s a band is it? Not a sexual orientation?’
‘Rory will be unbearable when he gets home. He’ll expect room service,’ Imogen complained to Jay from where she was slumped over the kitchen table surrounded by open books, a disembowelled pencil case, an empty biscuit packet and several mugs, each one half full of cold tea. This was Imogen in full-steam college-work mode, spread across all surfaces, marking out maximum territory. She’d got a perfectly good desk and computer down in the basement. It too had probably disappeared under strewn-about books and college-work notes.
Tris, on the other hand, had unstacked the dishwasher and was now cleaning the sink. He’d get into all the corners too, not miss out the scuzzy bit round the overflow or ignore the undersides of the taps. Jay would have been thrilled to employ him on the Dishing the Dirt workforce: he’d be a godsend, an inspiration. But then every single client would sidle up and try to get him alone in their hallway, offering him serious cash incentives to become their personal domestic treasure. And possibly not just for cleaning – he was a good-looking young thing with the kind of tight neat bum that still distracted her from driving when she saw one like it on a boy in the street. ‘Just window shopping’, as Barbara called it. She also knew that upstairs, having fixed the tap that morning, Tris would have swept away any gritty debris and have made sure the shower door had had a spritz of cleaning stuff to sparkle it up a bit after the dust had gone down. And there in the kitchen sprawled slobby Imogen with her bare feet up on the seat cushion next to her, without a clue how lucky she was.