Free Size Matters by Judy Astley Page A

Lucky you’re not trying to give up smoking as well, you could be all patch and no skin.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 morethan 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Rory’s through there,’ she told Greg, pointing to a