Janey has finished slightly early today. Another client who was a hundred per cent sure their hearing aids weren’t working, so they’d stopped wearing them. She wished there were a few more hearing aid role models. Gorgeous Rose fromStrictly Come Dancinghad helped a lot with Hearing Aid Barbie, but there were fewer for older people, who really needed them. In fact, a lot of her older clients said they didn’t really mind a peaceful world, no youngsters playing their iPads too loud or people yelling into their phones. Janey has to find a polite way to tell them that wearing them will really help stave off dementia. There is, it turns out, no polite way to threaten people with losing their marbles.
‘Hearing aids take time,’ she repeats patiently, over and over. ‘You have to let the brain adapt to where the sound is coming from. The brain is an amazing thing. It will adjust and learn to tune in to the hearing aid. But you have to wear it all the time to allow the brain to do that.’
To which the traditional response is, ‘Och, no, I dinnae want to be wearing that about the place when it’s just me and the coos/out for a nice night out’ or, ‘Ach, they’re not comfortable/oh, I dinnae like the way they look/they make me feel like a right aul coot.’
And Janey has to smile politely and do her best to insist they continue, then, if they have brought a family member withthem, try to signify desperately with her eyes howincredibly importantit is that they enforce this. She always knows immediately from the way the client walks in at the next appointment whether this has been successful or not. Sometimes they bring the kit back, at least.
She is going to drive Lish home; her friend has been on an all-nighter with twins and doesn’t feel safe to drive. Lish is also wearing a new bunnet, in pretty heather colours, as they stroll the long corridors together, nodding to staff they know, smiling sweetly at the latest intake of junior doctors getting lost. They’ll figure it out.
‘Carso babies?’ says Janey, nodding her head towards the knitted bunnet. Lish yawns, nodding at the same time. Carso is mad for knitting. Extraordinarily for a town with one very small supermarket, the Scot Nor, it manages to support two yarn shops, in poisonous competition with one another, and if you’re not in the right knitting circle it’s on a par with being shut out of an American country club. Not a postbox is untopped. One of their knitters, Gertie from the airline, even had a scarf inVogue. It’s quite the thing.
‘You wouldn’t believe the delivery suite,’ says Lish. ‘It’s basically insulated the entire room.’
‘Oh, good,’ says Janey, ‘an even hotter hospital.’ She says this with feeling. A lot of staff around her age have trouble with the tropical levels of warmth, and the failure of the new building windows to open.
‘It’s for the old folks and the bairns,’ Lish parrots, as she has so many times before.
‘I wish they’d knit me a handheld fan,’ says Janey as they reach the huge revolving door, and she takes in great lungfuls of the cool March air, and it is absolutely delicious, which means Milton has been out doing his good work of kindly telling the smokers, who really absolutely cannot quit, even though they’rein hospital, and even though you absolutely aren’t meant to smoke anywhere on hospital grounds, about a secret spot around the side where the smoke won’t annoy anyone, and you’re near the furnaces so it’s still warm.
‘Oh, it’s still light,’ says Lish. ‘Or is it light again? I can’t tell.’
‘Let’s get you home.’
*
Sitting in the car, Lish is still sleepy but squints.
‘Hang on, why are you leaving early?’ she says, having finally realised what time it is.
‘I’m picking Essie up from the train station.’
Lish blinks. ‘Oh, yeah . . . You don’t seem super-happy about it.’
‘Of course I am,’ says Janey, but her friend has known her a long time.
‘Then why do you look like you’ve got spiders in your underpants?’
Janey sighs. Her eyes are on the road. It’s funny how, often, it’s easier to talk about these things when you’re driving. Side by side instead of face to face.
‘Well, you know Essie. She’s never forgiven me for . . . well, Colin, or the divorce, or anything.’
‘Yes, she’s turned out gorgeous, with a nice boyfriend and an amazing job in the capital. How terrible a parent you must have been,’ says Lish, because she is very much the best kind of friend. ‘Anyway, that’s why it’s good you can spend time together as adults.’
‘I know, but . . . it’s taken me so long to get here, you know? With the house and everything. I just thought things might be stable for a little while. A bit of calm.’
Lish laughs. ‘Oh, my God, youjinx! Midlife,’ she announces, ‘is just one continuous act of being kicked in the teeth.I wouldn’t be surprised if having actual spiders in your underpants was a real thing about menopause but nobody bothered to tell us.’
‘I just wanted a small period of peace and quiet. Before my mum and dad start “having falls”,’ says Janey.
Lish smiles ruefully and pats her on the shoulder, offering her lunchbox. ‘Gingerbread?’
Janey smooths her clinical pinafore over her hips. ‘AND I CAN’T EVEN HAVE A PIECE OF SODDING FATTENING GINGERBREAD.’
‘Would you like a knitted bunnet? I think there’s some left over.’
*
Despite how nervous she is, and although obviously Essie is doing this reluctantly – her tone made it quite clear – in the end, after she’s dropped off a sleepy Lish into Johnson’s waiting arms, Janey cannot help getting a little excited. However big and grown and, well, occasionally scornful she is – her baby girl is coming home. Will be under her roof, with her expensive designer clothes and posh candles that cost a fortune and knowing all about restaurants and, well, it is still going to be good. Even though she hasn’t got back to her about supper. Maybe she’d like to go to the chippy; she has always liked that. Even in the depths of her teenage miserableness, some hot fresh fish with masses of vinegar and a big slug of Irn-Bru was usually pretty good medicine.
