Blood Sisters(4)

‘Ready for lunch now, Kitty?’ said the girl bending over her. She had a straight blonde fringe that swung when she spoke.

‘Of course I am, you stupid cow.’

‘Thought you might be!’

Hah! If this girl could understand what she was saying, she wouldn’t be so madly enthusiastic, clapping her hands together as if Kitty had come out with something really clever.

‘What are you pointing to on your picture board? A cow! That’s nice. Is that one of your favourite animals?’

‘She’s got a thing for cows,’ chirped one of the carers. ‘Sometimes I wonder if she’s trying to tell us something. But it all comes out like baby babble.’

Try being in her shoes! Then they’d be more understanding. Mind you, they wouldn’t like being in these ugly black lace-ups they put her in. In the back of her mind, there was the distant memory of a pair of red high heels. So high that they made her fall over.

‘What else do you like on your board, Kitty?’

Hair! That’s what she would like. Blonde hair. Not like her own dark curls.

‘Ouch, Kitty. You’re hurting me.’

‘I’ll help. She’s got a strong grip, that one. Let go of poor Barbara’s fringe.’

Kitty felt the fingers on her good hand being prised off, one by one. That was another thing about her brain. It could be happy one minute. Sad the next. Bad. Then good. Maybe she shouldn’t have grabbed that girl’s fringe like that. She was young. From the local sixth-form college. Wanted to be a social worker so she was doing ‘voluntary work here, once a week’. Or so Kitty had heard her tell Very Thin Carer.

Voluntary work. Fancy! She wouldn’t mind doing something like that if she ever got better. In your bloody dreams, Kitty told herself.

How she loved those dreams! In them, she could run. Ride a bike. Do those bloody laces up. Chase the seagulls which were always splattering on the windows. (‘It’s good luck!’ one of the more irritating carers would declare cheerily every time it happened.) Sometimes, she could actually sing, although she hadn’t had the singing dream for a while now.

‘You’re not really a cow,’ Kitty babbled, pointing to the picture and shaking her head. Except it went up and down instead of side to side. Then, in a further bid to say sorry, she gave the straight-fringed girl one of her best, biggest, sloppiest smiles. She’d learned that from Dawn. It was what she did best, apart from peeing. No matter what went wrong for Dawn – and heaven knows, there’d been quite a lot – she always wore that goofy smile.

‘I’m sure she’s trying to tell me something.’

‘I used to think that when I started,’ said the other carer. ‘It’s natural. But you can’t always fix people. Not the ones in here. Sad, I know. Just life, I suppose. Now let’s get a move on, shall we? It’s fishcakes today.’

Yummy! Mealtime again. As her roommate Margaret said, there weren’t many pleasures that came three times a day.

‘Come along now.’ Straight Fringe was steering the chair in a rather haphazard fashion down the corridor towards the canteen.

‘Be careful,’ Kitty told her. ‘And buck up or we’ll get small portions. They always do that when you’re late.’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying but it sounds like you know what you’re talking about, Kitty. And that’s something, isn’t it?’

Nearly there now! No thanks to Straight Fringe here, who’d almost collided with Dawn.

‘Morning, Kitty!’

Now what? The supervisor was standing at the door of the canteen. Bossy Supervisor, Kitty called her. Do this. Do that.

‘Bugger off!’

Sometimes it was quite funny to say things that no one else understood.

‘You look nice today, don’t you?’

This old thing? Kitty glanced down at her blue jeans with an elasticated waist and baggy red sweatshirt that the carer had dressed her in that morning. She shared some of her clothes with Dawn who was also a size 18. Bloody cutbacks again. How she hated wearing Dawn’s stuff! They always smelt of pee no matter how often they were washed. ‘Guess what, Kitty. I’ve got a surprise for you.’

‘I don’t want any bloody surprise. I want my fishcake.’

‘You have a visitor!’

No way. Friday Mum came on Fridays. Today was Tuesday. T for Tuesday. They’d done that in Word Play this morning before the ‘Knit one, purl one’ shit. ‘Wouldn’t you like to see who it is.’ Bossy Supervisor didn’t add a question mark to her sentence. It was an order.

‘Can’t she have her dinner before seeing her visitor?’ said Straight Fringe. ‘She’s nibbling her knuckles. Looks like she’s hungry.’

Kitty could have kissed her. ‘Thank you, thank you. I’m sorry I pulled your hair.’

‘We can keep her meal warm. Bring her this way. And do try to keep her chair straight, will you?’

Zig, zag. Zig, zag. Right. Left. Along the scuffed wooden floor. Into Bossy Supervisor’s office with the view over the lawn, which was ‘out of bounds to wheelchair users’. (Once, Kitty had tried to go out there – she could just about wheel herself with her one-arm-drive chair when she wanted to – but then she’d got stuck on the grass and everyone had laughed at her. That had made her feel silly.)