Gemma's Journey

by Beryl Kingston

  Gemma’s head was still spinning. No, she thought. I can’t see him yet. Not in this state. I couldn’t face it. Not till I’ve got my false leg and I can walk about again. She wanted to see him very much, to know what he was like and what he thought of her and if he really had loved her all this time. But not yet. Not now.

  ‘Well?’ Billie asked, her face bright with entreaty.

  ‘There’s not much point coming here,’ Gemma said at last, parrying her mother’s pressure. ‘I’ve been discharged.’

  ‘Darling!’ Billie yelled, seizing her in her arms. ‘How lovely! You’re coming home.’

  Gemma waited until the embrace was over and then leant across the bed and stuffed the plastic bags into her locker. It was a necessary pause. ‘No,’ she said, as kindly and firmly as she could. ‘I’m not. I’m going to a flat.’

  Billie’s jaw dropped visibly. ‘What for?’

  Now there’ll be a row, Gemma thought. And she prepared herself to fight. ‘To live there.’

  ‘But you can’t,’ Billie cried. ‘I’ve got everything ready for you at home. Everything. I’ve told your father you’re coming home.’

  Is he living there? Gemma thought. Whatever else she didn’t want to play gooseberry in that little flat. And especially one-legged gooseberry. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m not.’

  Billie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘You really are the cruellest girl sometimes,’ she said. ‘Here’s your father come back specially to look after you and you go on like this. I’ve got everything ready, sheets on the bed and everything.’

  ‘It’s no good, Mother,’ Gemma said, putting her hand on her mother’s arm. ‘I’ve made my mind up. I’m not going to live with you. I’ve found a flat and that’s where I’m going.’

  ‘And when are you going to this precious flat? If I’m allowed to ask.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning.’

  Billie’s mouth was a round O, pillarbox red. ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘You can’t do this, Gemma, you really can’t. You’ll never manage on your own. You need looking after. You know you do.’

  ‘No,’ Gemma said firmly, ‘I don’t. And that reminds me. What’s all this nonsense you’ve been telling the press?’

  Billie’s expression was instantly defensive. ‘But they’d been talking to you,’ she protested. ‘They told me so. I had to let them in after that, didn’t I?’

  It’s the girl in the café, Gemma realised, heart sinking. And that made her even angrier. ‘You didn’t have to tell them fairy stories about how happy we were. Never a cross word! How could you possibly say that?’

  ‘They twist things.’

  ‘And all that stuff about how I was coming home to live with you. They didn’t twist that, did they?’

  ‘I thought you were coming home,’ Billie said. ‘You ought to be coming home. You’d be better at home. Anyone can see that. I could look after you.’

  ‘I can look after myself,’ Gemma insisted. It wearied her to be going over the same old ground again. ‘You don’t listen to me.’

  ‘Look,’ Billie said, opening her bag. ‘I’d better write down where you’re going. He can come and see you there, can’t he?’

  No, Gemma thought, stiffening her spine and her resolve, if I do see him it’s going to be when I want to. And where. I don’t want either of them turning up in Putney. ‘I’ll send you a postcard when I’ve settled in,’ she promised. The trolley was being rattled into the ward and, after the exertions of the day and the lack of tea, she was suddenly hungry. ‘They’re bringing in the supper now, so you’ll have to go. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Billie said, kissing her automatically. She couldn’t understand how this visit had suddenly gone so wrong. It ought to have been wonderful. ‘You will write, won’t you?’ The trolley was halfway down the ward and that nurse looked fierce. She began to quail, as she always did under the pressure of authority and that made her dither. ‘I suppose I had better go. Oh dear. I don’t know what to do for the best. I can’t just go off and not know where you are. I mean, where you’re going to go. I know I shouldn’t have told that reporter woman all those things but they push you so. I mean, I wouldn’t have if I’d known … I mean … You will write, won’t you? And you will see your father?’

  Her confusion made Gemma feel rather ashamed of herself. She leant across the bed and kissed her mother lovingly. ‘I’ll write. I promise. And I’ll see him as soon as I can.’

  ‘Yes. Well,’ Billie said, her face creased with indecision as the nurse bore down upon them. She’d have to go or they’d call that awful doctor and he’d have her frog-marched out of the ward. ‘Look after yourself.’

  She was so bewildered and upset that the full realisation of what a terrible failure this visit had been didn’t sink in until she was in the lift on her way to the ground floor. How shall I tell Tim? she thought. Poor man. He’s come halfway round the world to see her and now I’ve got to say … But what on earth was she going to say?

  He’d left three messages on her answerphone while she’d been out, so she phoned him back at once, before she’d taken her coat off and before her courage could fail her.

  ‘Well?’ his voice said eagerly.

  ‘Well it’s lovely news,’ she said. ‘She’s getting on ever so well.’

  ‘That’s good. So she’ll be coming home soon.’

  ‘Well not just yet,’ she said, flailing to find the right thing to say. ‘She’s – um – being moved.’

  ‘Oh!’ he said, trying not to let his disappointment show too much. ‘Where to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Now there was a trace of exasperation in his voice. ‘What do you mean you don’t know? You must know. They don’t just move people without telling them where they’re going, now do they.’

  Inspiration suddenly dropped light into the muddle of her mind. ‘She’s going convalescent. They haven’t told her exactly where.’

  ‘I’m surprised they still do that these days,’ he said. ‘I thought they’d closed down all the homes.’

  ‘There are some still open,’ she floundered. ‘For special cases.’

  ‘But you don’t know where this one is?’

  ‘She’s going to write and tell me,’ Billie said, thinking, I knew he’d be cross. I’ve done this so badly.

  There was a long pause and then he spoke again, his voice changed. ‘You’re upset,’ he said.

  She had to admit it. ‘Well yes, I am a bit. It was a disappointment. Her not coming home, I mean.’

  ‘Shall I come over?’

  The offer reduced her to tears. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘If you would.’

  ‘I’ll be with you in half an hour,’ he said. And was.

  It was so good to see him again and looking so handsome in that classy suit. Tears welled into her eyes for the second time. ‘Sorry to fuss,’ she said, ducking her head.

  ‘Fuss all you like, my poppet,’ he said, using his old pet name for her. ‘You’ve every right.’ And he gathered her into his arms.

  It was a bitter-sweet moment. To be here, in the flat they’d shared all those years ago, back in his arms, as if they were still lovers. It was too good to be true.

  ‘God, how I’ve missed you,’ he said, his mouth in her hair. ‘There’s never been anyone half as lovely as you. Not ever. You always were the best. What a fool I was to walk out on you. I should have had my head examined. Let me look at you, Poppet.’

  She leant back against his encircling arms and gazed into his eyes. She was too full of emotion to say a word. It was several seconds before she realised that he was talking to her about Gemma.

  ‘How long is she going to be in this home?’ he asked. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘A couple of weeks?’ she wondered. ‘Not long anyway.’

  ‘Then we’ve got a few days on our own,’ he said, looking at her amorously. If he’d got to wait another fortnight for this wayward child of his, he might as well make the most of it. ‘While the cat’s awa
y, what say the mice play a little?’

  ‘What?’ Billie asked, feeling dizzy.

  ‘Bed?’ he hoped, unbuttoning her blouse.

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Why not?’ he said and his voice was masterful. ‘We’ve waited for it long enough.’

  So they went to bed and although his love-making was as rough and quick as she privately remembered, she pretended to be thrilled, the way she’d done in the early days when it hadn’t worked. He’d come back to her. That was what mattered. She lay beside him, her nose full of the foreign scent of his skin, and knew that she was happier than she’d been in years. They could get the sex right gradually.

  He sat up, took a cigarette from a rather grand silver case and lit up. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, removing a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. ‘Why don’t I move in here for a few days? While we’re waiting.’

  She was dazzled. Wasn’t this what she’d always dreamed about, always hoped for? ‘Do you want to?’

  Given the state of his finances, the answer was obvious. ‘Oh yes, my poppet,’ he said. ‘Very much.’

  Chapter 13

  Gemma arrived on the doorstep in Amersham Road at the same time as the postman, she slow in her hospital wheelchair with an ambulance man to push her and her plastic bags mounded on her lap, he brisk and striding with a fistful of letters and a bulky parcel.

  ‘Good heavens!’ Catherine said, looking at him as she opened the door. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘Somebody’s birthday?’ he suggested. And when she shook her head, he dropped the mail on to the heap in Gemma’s lap and went whistling off to the next house.

  Gemma was aware that somebody was carrying a wooden ramp into the hall, a small skinny woman wearing a shabby T-shirt and a pair of ragged jeans. ‘This is Polly,’ Catherine said. ‘She’s my right hand. She comes in every morning and looks after the house while I’m at work.’

  Not at work this morning, Gemma registered, and wondered why not.

  ‘I swapped shifts,’ Catherine told her, answering her unspoken query. ‘I thought you’d like a welcome committee.’

  ‘That’s very kind.’

  ‘She is,’ Polly said cheerfully. ‘Hello Gemma! Hang on a tick while we get this fixed.’

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ the ambulance man offered. But even so, it took some time to wedge the ramp safely into position and it seemed longer because it had started to spit with rain and they were all getting wet. Gemma was torn between guilt at being a nuisance and annoyance at her own uselessness.

  ‘Now then,’ Catherine said, when the ramp was finally ready, ‘we’ve got something for you. Stay there and we’ll bring it out.’

  It was an electric wheelchair and obviously very heavy because it took both women to roll it down the ramp.

  ‘That’s fantastic!’ Gemma said, all smiles at the sight of it. ‘How did you get it so quickly?’

  ‘It was advertised at the clinic,’ Catherine told her as the ambulance man lifted her out of her hospital chair and lowered her into the new one. ‘They brought it round this morning. There! What d’you think?’

  It was a high-tech wonder with brakes and a joystick to turn to the right and the left and to move forwards at a nice brisk speed. And it climbed the ramp with no trouble at all.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ Gemma beamed. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

  ‘It’ll take a bit of getting used to,’ Catherine said. ‘It could be quite a job getting it through the doors, especially in your little hall. Let’s have the mail. You don’t want to take all that in with you. We’ve got some coffee on the go. Come through when you’re ready. Would you like Polly to give you a hand?’

  ‘No, no,’ Gemma said quickly. This was her chance to begin as she meant to go on. Whatever else she did in this house, she was determined not to be a burden. ‘I can manage.’ She spoke lightly, because that would show them there was no doubt in her mind. But, in fact, once she was on her own in the bedroom, managing was difficult, as she’d known it would be.

  First she had to master the art of driving her new chair, turning it sideways to open doors and then inching her way through. Then she had to learn how to turn it round in a small space – and the inner hall was a very small space. Then she had to unpack. She soon discovered that there were rather too many drawers and cupboards that were beyond her reach and that the sink in the bedroom was impossibly high. But she did what she could, accepting that clothes that she used to hang in a wardrobe would now have to be folded in a drawer. Then she struggled into the bathroom and managed to heave herself out of the chair to use the loo, without falling on the floor, and to wash her hands, without spilling too much water on her clothes. Finally, delighted to be independently mobile again, she drove out into the hall and through into Catherine’s kitchen without bumping into the furniture. It was a small triumph.

  Catherine was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and sorting through the mail. ‘Look at it!’ she said. ‘It’s all for Andrew. The parcel’s from A Question of Morals and I’ll bet that’s full of letters too. It must be the broadcast.’

  Gemma thought it very likely. ‘What a postbag!’ she said.

  ‘Rather him than me,’ Polly grinned, as she poured out Gemma’s coffee. ‘Fancy having to wade through all that lot. Makes me feel weak at the knees just to look at ’em. I never was one for readin’, me. Nor writin’, to be honest.’

  But when Andrew came home for his coffee and saw them, he was cock-a-hoop, especially as the first five letters he opened were from doctors he knew, praising him for the stand he’d taken. He opened the parcel, which was indeed full of letters, with a covering note from the producer to say he’d ‘started something.’

  ‘There you are, Kate!’ he said. ‘Didn’t I say it would be worth doing?’

  ‘Will you answer them all?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Probably. It’ll take time, though.’

  Gemma looked from the letters to the doctor’s face and in a moment of delighted revelation knew she’d found a way to justify her existence in his house. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so,’ she ventured, ‘what you need are some format letters that you can top and tail to suit the person you’re writing to. I could put them on the computer for you, if you’d like.’ And when he looked doubtful. ‘It’s all right. I’m used to word processors. I used to do the mail when I worked in an estate agent’s.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, grinning at her. ‘You’re on!’

  ‘He’ll work your fingers to the bone,’ Catherine warned.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Gemma said. ‘It’ll give me something to do. Anyway, I’d like to help.’

  ‘We’ll start after dinner tonight,’ Andrew decided. ‘You’re having dinner with us, aren’t you?’

  Put like that, how could she refuse? Providing she could help with the cooking. ‘I can’t offer to do the washing up,’ she said, ‘because I can’t reach the sink, but I can do the vegetables and things like that.’

  It was a happy meal. Gemma felt she’d made a good start in her new home, Catherine was pleased by the success of the electric wheelchair and Andrew was so full of himself that he seemed to be twice his normal size. And when they’d stacked the dishwasher and retreated into the living room for coffee and chocolates, the letters from the parcel provided non-stop and excited conversation for the rest of the evening;

  One was from a politician who berated Andrew for ‘letting down the country with your unpatriotic carping and unnecessary horror stories.’ Another was from a woman who signed herself Mrs Godfrey Gordonson and said he ought to be ashamed of himself. But the majority were from doctors and patients who agreed with everything he’d said and had their own horror stories to tell.

  A junior casualty doctor in Kent wrote that he’d spent three hours calling fifteen neurosurgery centres to try to find a bed for an accident victim and that the nearest he’d been offered had been in Yorkshire, two hundred miles away – which he thought was a
scandal. They’d flown the man there but he had died the next day. Another wrote of a little boy who’d been ferried from Manchester to Leeds, fifty-five miles across the Pennines in a blizzard, because the scanner at his district hospital only operated during office hours. A transplant surgeon wrote that he’d had to turn down twenty-nine livers in just over a year because of a shortage of intensive care beds. ‘In that time we have had eleven patients die on our waiting lists.’

  One of the worst stories was about a baby in Birmingham who, as the doctor wrote angrily, ‘died as a direct result of health cuts. His operation had been postponed five times because there wasn’t a bed for him. That’s the sort of scandalous situation we are in.’

  But the best letter of all came from an old colleague Andrew had worked with in St Thomas’s.

  ‘This is not a sudden crisis,’ he wrote. ‘We’ve been warning about it ever since Mr Clarke bulldozed the internal market into being. Hospitals are Trusts now and run like businesses with expensive management teams and decisions taken simply to save money. St Thomas’s was the flagship and they closed a hundred and thirty-seven beds in the year the Trust was set up, as you will remember. That’s what happens when you turn a service into a market. When tragedies occur, this government tends to portray them as ‘one-offs’ rather than symptoms of a fundamental malaise. You and I and the patients know better. Please go on telling it like it is, Drew. You are doing us all a great service.’

  ‘Now that’s justification,’ Andrew said, passing the letter to Catherine.

  ‘As if you needed it,’ Catherine teased. ‘You’d speak out anyway.’

  ‘All I need’s the chance,’ Andrew told her.