Patience Read online

  ‘I’ve told you, they wouldn’t allow them to do this to humans if it was that risky,’ Mum replies, ripping the Velcro from my waist with a little too much force. ‘And it could be amazing. It could help her walk, or talk, or you know, use her hands again.’

  ‘Those are pipe dreams, Lou. Absolute fiction. I’m surprised at you, with all your medical training, believing shit like this. They’re playing mind games with you, promising you the world. It’s snake oil. And I’m not prepared to let them play Russian roulette with our daughter’s life. I’m just not going to let it happen. I won’t sign that bloody document – and I’ll be telling them exactly that at the Best Interests meeting.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, stop it, Pete! Look, you’re upsetting Patience. She thinks you’re angry with her.’

  I hadn’t realised I was showing it. Dad looks over at me and I can see that he feels guilty.

  ‘We can talk about this tomorrow. When our guests have gone.’ Mum pauses, looking at him, pleadingly. ‘Not now?’

  Dad sighs, and his face softens a bit.

  ‘Fine. OK. Tomorrow. I’ll just take my stuff upstairs and get changed.’

  Dad doesn’t wait for a response. I hear him take a deep breath as he hoists his bag up and mounts the stairs, taking each step heavily. And when he reaches the top, he turns right, not left. He’s heading for the spare room.

  13

  Eliza

  December 24

  Christmas Eve and London was emptying out. The city’s hard-pressed workers had escaped via every available exit – train, car, plane, taxi – and it seemed like only those with nowhere to go remained. Sloane Square was damp and sparsely populated, discarded sheets from yesterday’s Salvation Army brass band carol concert pasted onto its stone flags by the rain, like address labels on recycled packaging.

  Eliza’s journey home in a bus just heading down Sloane Street was surprisingly quiet. She was the only person riding on the top deck. This was fortuitous, because she had just been sick in her coat. She had been feeling nauseous for a day or two, and it was with a sense of inevitability that she had taken off her coat and placed it in front of her just now, waiting.

  Vomiting incident over, she’d wrapped her coat up and placed it in her work bag, wincing. A major clean-up job awaited her when she got home. Could you even machine-wash wool? She doubted it.

  It had been an awful day. Feeling sick had made it worse, but really, it was shit anyway. Jenny had been an absolute cow and it was clear now that, slowly but surely, she was being forced out. Her responsibilities had shrunk to almost nothing and she was bored, bored, bored! Her last client had been summarily removed and given to someone else that morning. It was constructive dismissal, but given how off the ball she’d been since Ed had left, she didn’t think she’d have much of a case for her defence. She was an unstable, unreliable mess.

  Seeing Ed for dinner had not been ‘closure’ at all. Instead, it had just opened up a whole can of worms. All of the emotions she’d tried to suppress since he’d left her had risen to the surface in one enormous, overwhelming surge, and what happened after dinner had basically been the fairy on top of a really spindly Christmas tree that had dropped all of its needles. In that moment, when he’d drawn her to him, she had felt like she’d gone down a wormhole and emerged several years earlier, back when he had actually given a shit about her. For that moment, and about twenty minutes afterwards (it had never taken him very long), she had honestly believed that they were going to get back together.

  But when he’d rolled off her and announced brusquely that he needed a shower, rather than gathering her in a loving embrace and telling her that he loved her after all and would never leave her again, she realised she’d been entirely mistaken. Lying there, still half-clothed and with her expensive blow dry now sticking up at odd angles, she had felt like a slut. She needed to get out of there, and fast.

  She had got out of bed quickly, pulled on her knickers, skirt and shoes, and followed him into the bathroom to wash her hands and inspect the state of her face. Steam was rising out of the shower cubicle and the mirror above the sink was obliterated by condensation. She rubbed a small circle clear with her hands – she knew that he hated her doing this because it marked the glass – and found that her carefully crafted smoky ‘evening eyes’ now resembled more a pair of black eyes. She was just reaching for a piece of loo roll to try to limit the damage when his phone, which he’d placed on the bathroom windowsill while he was in the shower, beeped loudly. She looked. Obviously. She had to.

  ‘Call me when you’re done’ it had said, before a gap, and then there was an ‘x’, and then that jaundiced face-kissing emoji.

  Eliza’s bowels had churned, and she had thought she might throw up. It felt like every morsel of food and drink she’d had in the past twenty-four hours wanted to head to the exit by the quickest possible route.

  This was clearly a mistake of gargantuan proportions. She had to get out of there, fast.

  She’d swigged water from the tap to try to quell the vomit – if it made Ed’s shower boiling hot, all the better – threw the tissue she’d used on the floor, ran out into the bedroom, grabbed her coat and handbag, and slammed the door behind her.

  Ed had not texted or called to check that she’d got home safely, or to ask why she’d left so soon. She didn’t know if he knew she’d seen the text or not, but he clearly didn’t care either way, and that was enough.

  It had hit her right then, like a freight train – a very delayed, very slow freight train – that they really were over. He was not coming back and she’d have no choice but to break the news to her parents soon.

  But only when the time was right, obviously. And that wasn’t now.

  It was all such a mess. Mum and Dad were still expecting them both to come for Christmas lunch, so she was going to have to cancel tonight, at the last minute; that way she didn’t have to explain why he wasn’t there. Like a child trying to avoid homework by pretending it hadn’t been set, she had pushed tomorrow’s festivities to the back of her mind, hoping that they would simply go away. It was how she dealt with most things that worried her. Anyhow, she had concluded that she’d have to call her mum tonight, pulling a sickie, and as luck would have it, that wasn’t even a lie. The news might send her mum into a bit of a spin, but not half as much as finding out on Christmas Eve that her daughter had been jilted by her fiancé.

  Ed was probably several sheets to the wind in an Oxford wine bar by now, flanked by besuited lawyers braying about some amazing divorce settlement they’d negotiated for a large fee. Or in bed with whoever had sent him that text, admiring her gorgeous blonde hair, or her impressively rounded breasts, or her bronzed, toned thighs. Or all of the above, probably. Wherever he was, he certainly wasn’t going to be coming with her, dutifully, for a family Christmas chez Willow, anyway.

  She stood up as the bus headed at some considerable speed over Battersea Bridge and pressed the bell to signal that she wanted to get off. The driver braked hard as he approached the stop and she lurched forward down the steps, clinging onto the rail to keep herself on her feet.

  When her feet hit the pavement, she paused. She felt faint and thought she might be sick again. Oh, bloody hell. Where had she got this bug from? It was Christmas Eve and everything was going to shut soon. Time to take action. She looked across the road and saw the lit green cross of her local pharmacy. Good. It was still open. She walked carefully across both lanes of traffic and pushed the door. An automated door alarm played ‘Jingle Bells’. There was no one else in there, so the pharmacist, a young Asian guy who’d served her a couple of times before, looked up immediately.

  ‘Hello, there. Can I help?’

  Eliza suddenly felt her face go cold and a wave of nausea rise.

  ‘Got any sick bags? I’m so sorry…’

  Before she had any idea what she was about to do, she was retching in the vitamin aisle.

  ‘Oh crikey, you poor love, wait a sec!’ He
grabbed a roll of tissues and leapt out from behind the counter. He got to her within a matter of seconds and the wad of tissues he thrust into her arms managed to catch most of what came next. It was all over quickly. Eliza felt mortified, but gratefully, no longer felt like being sick.

  ‘I’m so sorry. So, so sorry. Let me see if I can mop some of this up.’ She gesticulated to the splatters on the floor which hadn’t been caught by the tissues. She reached into her pocket to see if she had a clean tissue in there.

  ‘No, don’t worry, I’ll have a go with some bleach in a sec. Hang on, let me go and close up. That way no one will walk in it.’ He walked over to the door and turned over his OPEN sign to CLOSED. He was so calm and so kind that Eliza found that she was starting to cry. The man – Rohit, according to his badge – noticed and went to find a chair. Returning with it, he urged her to sit down.

  ‘It’s totally fine, honestly,’ he said. ‘Now just sit down for a bit and I’ll get you some water and more tissues.’

  Eliza sat down gratefully and waited, a tear making its way slowly down the ridge of her nose.

  ‘There you go, some more,’ he said, standing next to her, with a concerned expression. Eliza began to mop up the tears, and took a grateful sip from the glass of water he’d brought her.

  ‘I take it you were coming to see me about the nausea?’

  ‘How did you guess?’ she replied, her sense of humour returning. ‘Yep. I feel dreadful. And it’s Christmas tomorrow, so… is there anything you can give me to make it stop?’

  Rohit thought for a moment.

  ‘That depends on why it’s happening. There are antiemetics I can give you, but we usually recommend you see these things out. I can give you some mineral replacement sachets, some paracetamol, maybe a vitamin tonic, that sort of thing. But before I do – is there any chance you could be pregnant? I have to ask because it affects what I can give you.’

  Eliza sat up a little straighter and looked up at him. ‘Oh shit,’ she replied.

  *

  She’d bought everything he’d recommended, including the pregnancy test which he’d pressed upon her. ‘Just in case,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t want to send you away with all that stuff without it. Not when everything’s closed tomorrow.’

  She had thought more about it after her outburst and had sought to reassure him that she was single, for a start, so it simply wasn’t possible, and that she had irregular periods anyway. And yet she had accepted the test meekly and its presence in the paper bag she was holding made her uncomfortable.

  She reached her flat, opened the door, threw her dirty coat down by the washing machine to deal with later, and walked straight into the bathroom. She paused in front of the sink, turned the tap on and swilled her mouth out, trying to remove the taste of vomit. Vomiting was becoming a habit lately, she thought. Not one that she’d planned, but it was like being dumped was a kind of gastric flu. She’d been off her food since Ed left and, when upset, she found herself being sick, more often than not. This latest episode was probably stress-related, too, she concluded. It must be.

  She grabbed the paper bag, removed the pregnancy test, ripped it out of its foil pack and sat down on the toilet. It was a routine she’d practised a few times while she’d been with Ed, when her period had been late and she’d become anxious. But her period was always late and it had never been an issue. She’d always come out of the toilet, an expression of relief on her face, and headed straight to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine.

  But not this time.

  It hadn’t even been three minutes and there were two very clear, unequivocal lines on that stick. Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

  This just couldn’t be happening, she thought; not again.

  She did two things in quick succession. First, she got out her phone and sent a quick text to her mum saying that she was throwing up and wouldn’t make it tomorrow. Secondly, she wiped, stood up, got dressed again and composed herself, and grabbed her car keys.

  14

  Patience

  December 24

  I’m in the respite care bungalow for my traditional Christmas Eve stopover. It’s a family detox, if you will, needed by all parties before the main event. The radio is on in the kitchen and it’s so loud that I can hear it clearly from my room. I imagine that Lutsi, one of the agency care workers, is dancing to it, her skinny frame bobbing back and forth between dishwasher and cupboards as she clears up after dinner and puts everything out ready for our breakfast tomorrow. They’ve bought deluxe Christmas crackers to pull at breakfast, I think. I saw them when we were having dinner. None of us have hands that can hold them hard enough to pull them, so they’ll put their hands over ours and try to simulate the action instead. I’m not really sure what the point of that is.

  The local commercial station, Star, is playing wall-to-wall festive tunes. We’ve just been treated to ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ (the M40 isn’t too clever right now, we’re told by the DJ in a blithe tone which speaks volumes about his planned route home – it’s definitely not a motorway) and now I can hear the opening bars of ‘Fairytale of New York’ by The Pogues.

  It’s my favourite of all of the Christmas classics. I love the contrast of its hopeful opening bars with the crushing defeat and anger of its lyrics. I’ve never been to New York, but would love to go. Hard squeezing me into a seat on a plane these days, though, sadly. My bum is quite big, and bendy I am not. You can do it, though, apparently. Rosie, one of the other visitors to the home, went with her parents to Disney World last year. They apparently pretty much got the red-carpet treatment, from check-in onwards. I’d love to try that, but Mum and Dad don’t have the money and I don’t need telling that dreams don’t always come true.

  Anyway, why go to Disney when you can have the five-star treatment right here in Morton Lodge, Oxfordshire’s premiere care facility? They’ve gone all out on the Christmas deccies, for a start. I heard yesterday that in the next-door bungalow, which has permanent residents, they’ve stretched to a real tree; meanwhile in here, someone has draped some partially-bald neon-pink tinsel over the rails beside my bed.

  Well, I say my bed. It’s only mine this evening. I share it with a whole host of others, each allotted a few days here every month, to give our carers a break. Accordingly, the decor in here is completely anonymous and neutral, neither feminine nor masculine. They’ve chosen purple for the walls – or perhaps you’d call it lilac? And I’m lying under a blue duvet, which was just plumped up by Magda, before she said goodnight. She’s left the light on for me, but not the wall-mounted TV, unfortunately, because I’m not actually that tired and I’d like to have watched something before bed. I’m not eight, after all. I’m a thirty-year-old woman, damn it, and I’d really like to be able to watch something dramatic, funny or even, frankly, something totally crap, before going to sleep.

  And I really wanted Jimmy to be on shift tonight. I’ve stayed here twice a month since meeting him, and we’ve hardly coincided. I hear whisperings about him, though. He’s obviously got them all pretty excited. He should be good for staff turnover, anyway; not many care homes have eye candy as tasty as him on their books.

  I wonder if he’s gay? Lots of gorgeous blokes are gay. He might be, mightn’t he? It doesn’t make much difference to me either way, of course, as I’m only looking.

  And I wonder where he’s spending Christmas? If he’s gay, then most likely with a handsome blond Adonis who works as a gym instructor, or as a pilot. If not gay, probably with some awesome nuclear scientist, with boobs like jelly moulds. I bet he never once thinks about this awesome blonde, with boobs like… What are my boobs like? Last time I had a look, I’d say they were shaped more like balloons. Huge, saggy balloons that have been inflated for weeks and are dimpled and losing their shape. And can you get hairy balloons, I wonder?

  What’s that? Crikey, it sounds like someone trying the door that opens directly into the car park from my room. It might be one of those kids who lives d
own the road. They come into our cul-de-sac sometimes and lark around, getting as close as they can to the weird-looking folk, probably for a bet. As if we are vampires or monsters, and to be feared.

  There’s that noise again, louder this time. And now there’s shouting.

  ‘Argh! Why the fuck do they lock this?’

  Bloody hell, it’s Eliza. I hear her swear several more times and then stomp around to the front door. The doorbell rings, not just once, but several times, until Lutsi goes running to the door. I hear their conversation. Eliza is currently trying to explain why she’s appeared at the home at 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

  ‘Look, I’m so sorry, I was just passing and I wanted to – to check Patience was OK. She is here, isn’t she?’

  ‘I seeeee,’ says Lutsi, her Estonian accent making her sound particularly doubtful. ‘Yas, she ees here. Weell OK – shee’s in bed, burt you might bee in lurck. Sometimes shee doesn’t go off immeediately. Are you OK, Eliza? Are you eel?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you. Just tired, you know. I’ll just go through, shall I?’

  ‘Yas.’

  Eliza almost runs into my room and shuts the door right behind her. It’s just a matter of seconds before she flings herself onto the bed next to me, throws her arms around me and starts to cry.

  ‘Oh, Patience, it’s all such a bloody mess!’ she wails into my pyjama top. ‘I am such a disaster.’ Obviously, I remain silent, because that’s all I can do. She’s used to this, and I know she’ll tell me more when she’s ready. I wait, listening to the radio, which is now playing Mariah Carey’s version of ‘O Holy Night’.

  ‘So, two major problems,’ she continues, still talking to my chest. ‘Number one, Ed and I have broken up, and I haven’t told Mum and Dad yet.’

  Oh sweet Jesus, that’s a relief! I couldn’t stand Ed. He never looked at me properly, in the eye, in all those years, not once. He’s a shifty bugger.