Chapter Three
By half six, Accident and Emergency had stopped pretending it was coping.
The waiting room was standing room only, although most had slumped to the floor in an exhausted heap.
Bodies spilled into corridors they weren’t meant to be in, voices layered on top of each other until it all blurred into one long, fraying noise.
Coughs. Complaints. Someone crying quietly into a phone.
Someone else shouting into one. The air was thick with heat and disinfectant and impatience.
I’d been on my feet since before dawn and this shift was my second, technically.
But as my first had blurred into the next one, on paper this was really just one long day.
Outside, junior doctors stood on the picket lines, placards waved above their heads, hands wrapped around hot drinks or stuffing sandwiches into their mouths.
Inside, we had been lucky if we’d had one toilet trip amongst three of us all day.
I’d claimed a chocolate bar from a machine for lunch, but now that same machine was empty, apart from a single row of Bounties, sitting there unloved.
No amount of desperation in the chaos was going to convince the punters to eat it.
And if anyone did, it was probably immediate food poisoning, as they had been forgotten about like a tin of peaches in a fallout shelter.
“Where are we on triage?” I asked an exhausted nurse as I skirted a trolley parked at a stupid angle, its wheels locked because no one had time to fix it.
“Fucked,” she answered, not looking up from the obs machine. “We’re fucked, Soph.”
Junior doctors on strike. Two nurses off sick.
One agency replacement who’d vanished an hour ago and hadn’t come back from her break, although I didn’t blame her.
Security stretched thin because there was a match on.
The early drinkers were already filling up the hospital beds, and the match hadn’t even finished yet.
The rest would join them en-masse: red-faced, loud, already drunk.
At reception, voices rose again.
“I’ve been waitin’ four fucking hours,” a bloke in a football shirt slurred, jabbing a finger at the glass. “He went in after me!”
“That’s because he’s got chest pain,” the receptionist said, tight and brittle. “Now please sit down.”
“Don’t tell me to sit down.”
The air shifted, tightening, like everyone sucked in the same breath all at once. I was already moving when the shouting sharpened.
A second man stepped forward, scarf still looped round his neck like a challenge. Words flew between them, too fast and too loud to make sense of. Someone laughed. Someone swore.
“Security,” I called, raising my voice as I pushed through the crowd. “Can we get—”
It happened in a blur.
Amy stepped in before anyone could stop her. Barely twenty-three, eyes too big for her face, hands raised as she tried to calm them down. The man swung without looking, wild and sloppy, flailing like a bough in the wind. Straight into Amy’s face.
She hit the ground hard.
“Shit!” I dropped to my knees beside her, fingers already moving, checking, assessing. “Amy, look at me. Amy.”
She nodded, dazed, blood trickling from her nose.
“Ok, Amy. Just stay nice and still for me. Someone get me a trolley,” I pushed to my feet, my eyes searching the department for a staff member in the sea of bodies.
The drunk man turned toward us, eyes glassy, his face pale beneath the flush.
“I didn’t mean to…” he started.
Then he retched.
There was no time to move. Warm vomit splashed across my chest, sour and acidic, the smell hitting the back of my throat hard enough to make me gag. I clenched my jaw and swallowed it down. There wasn’t room for disgust. Not tonight.
“Get him out,” I said flatly, not looking up. “Now.”
Security finally arrived, too late as usual, dragging him away as he protested weakly.
“Get her to a cubicle,” I instructed the porter lingering beside me, too scared to get involved in case he was the next one punched or puked on.
“There aren’t any, Soph.” His voice was quiet, tired. “We’re full everywhere.”
“Fuck,” I whispered, the sour stench of vomit rising from the heat of my chest.
“Lisa,” I beckoned one of the nurses. “Go find someone I can discharge, please, and sit them back in the waiting room. I’ll get changed then see to Amy.”
One more staff member down was all we needed.
I sighed loudly, teasing off my ruined clothes carefully, so I didn’t have to touch the putrid mush.
It had seeped underneath my shirt, glistening on my skin with a sticky residue.
My hair had survived, at least. The only places it had covered were my chest and a dribble down my legs.
Now I wore green scrubs, like I was stepping into the operating room.
The girl looking back at me from the mirror hanging over the changing room sink was tired.
Shadows hung under her eyes, a furrow was forming between her eyebrows.
Curly brown hair piled on the top of her head was slowly coming loose, strands falling around her, just like her resilience.
She had hardly eaten anything in twenty-four hours, and there’d been no sleep.
Not even ten minutes just to catch a break.
Now she wore a polyester tunic and trousers as thin as her patience was becoming.
I sighed, my breath lightly fogging the mirror.
Outside was chaotic and the world was turning too quickly.
Too quick. The pressure built in my chest again.
That feeling. A brace. Tightening and tightening.
Closing in. I closed my eyes. Concentrated on breathing.
In through my nose. Hold. Out through my mouth.
I couldn’t do this now. Not in the middle of A&E.
Not in front of people. Not at work where they’d sign me off again and push me back into therapy.
The brace tightened. Shit. Breathe. Amy needed me. The A&E needed me. Breathe.
Seconds became minutes. The fog on the mirror condensed into droplets. I watched my chest. I counted the seconds. I felt my heart start to slow. My ribs relaxing. I rolled my shoulders back. Tipped my chin up. Exhaled. The mask reset.
Four more patients came through triage. A head injury. A fever. A fall. And then another bar brawl. The man swayed on his feet, beer hot and sickly on his breath. Beside him his friend wasn’t much steadier.
“How can I help?” I started.
“Someone’s face hit my hand.”
He pushed his right hand towards me, knuckle torn and bloody, skin stretched over swollen flesh.
“You mean you punched someone?” I didn’t lift my eyes, gently pressing the space between the metacarpals.
“How, I’m tellin’ you, mate, I didn’t start it,” he slurred, boozy breath filling the space between us as he pushed to his feet. “He threw the first punch. Ask anyone.”
“I don’t care who started it. Sit down before you fall over.”
“Don’t fucking talk to me like I’m a kid. We’ve been waitin’ three fucking hours. Three. You lot useless or what?”
He lurched sideways and then rocked backwards, hitting his legs on the side of the bed, then wobbling to the left and knocking into the steel trolley of equipment beside me.
“If you keep swearing, I will have security remove you.” I held my palm out and waited. “Now let me see your hand.”
The drunk football fan shook his head. “You hear that, Kev? Big threat. Gonna call the bizzies on us.”
The man struggled to his feet again, swaying hard, stepping into the space between us until there was none left.
His face was mere centimetres away from mine, breath hot on my face, staring at me, eyes glossy and unfocused, pupils wide and useless.
Then he swayed hard again, falling sharply to his right and nearly taking me out with him.
“Jesus Christ…” The words slipped out before I had a chance to clip them.
The curtain snapped back.
“Enough.”
The word cut clean through the noise.
I stepped back without thinking, watching as Dr Hargreaves took the man’s hand and closed his grip around the swollen knuckles, pressing just enough to make his point. Not rough. Not kind.
The man hissed, swore under his breath.
“You broke it punching a wall,” Dr Hargreaves said, already turning the hand, already in control. “Either you let us deal with it, or you leave.”
“Like hell I am,” the bloke spat. “You touch me and I’ll…”
The rest of his words vanished as Dr Hargreaves pressed into the man’s hand again, fingers firm over the knuckle.
“See here? Base of the second metacarpal. Likely non-displaced. He’ll need an X-ray to confirm, then splinting for support. Keep the hand elevated, ice on swelling. No funny business.”
The man’s jaw clenched. Dr Hargreaves didn’t flinch.
Not a flicker, pressure maintained over the broken hand.
His voice was flat, clinical, but it carried.
Clear. Controlled. The nurse beside me relaxed, stepping closer, already moving to prep the X-ray request, and the tension in the room seemed to settle, just a fraction.
“Sophie.” The dark-haired man pulled the rubber gloves from his hands, his voice softer. “I’ve got this. Go see to someone else.”
I slipped out through the curtains, concentrating on the air filling my lungs, not the deep pressure building in my chest, pushing up from my diaphragm.
“Soph?”
I tipped my head up, tracking the light voice of the nurse.
“I need stitches in cubicle twelve. Can you do them?”
Nodding, I slid into the next space, pulling in one long steadying breath before I pushed through the polyester fabric that gave little privacy from the bay next door.
The man inside sat with his top off. Tattoos covered nearly every inch of flesh apart from an angry, swollen gash on his left-hand side. The same ink crawled up his neck, a thick, dark auburn beard cutting off any further ascent. Dropping my eyes, I scanned the clipboard.
“You are Reap?” I asked, glancing back at his face, and a sudden hit of familiarity, disappearing as quickly as it came.
He watched me quietly, like he couldn’t quite trust me, but had no other choice.
“Alright, Reap. Let’s have a look at you.”
Gently, I nudged my fingers around the wound.
It gaped. The edges puckered where it was swollen, not fitting back together when I carefully pushed them closed.
Reap didn’t move. Slow, long, controlled breaths.
His chest moving in and out like he barely felt the pain.
I glanced up, my eyes catching the little metal barbells through his nipples, the only part of his torso free of tattoos.
“Let me know if this hurts,” I mumbled, averting my eyes, hoping he hadn’t noticed that they lingered a little too long.
He was fit. His chest broad and hard. His stomach covered, not quite a washboard of ripples but smooth, toned, like he moved all the time.
He sat still under my hands as I worked.
Never wincing as I injected around the wound with the anaesthetic.
Never flinching as the needle pinched or as I pushed the sides of his flesh back together. Just quiet. Controlled.
Through the blur of shouting, the stench, the heat, there was a stillness in him that didn’t belong to a man like him.
His skin was a riot of tattoos and brutalised by piercings.
Metal hung from the side of his lip, a row of rings climbing up his right ear, and a metal ring stretching the lobe of his left.
Yet his presence was quiet. Heavy. Calm in a room full of chaos.
And he watched. Not like he was scrutinising me, but with the kind of attention that made you wonder whether he was taking note of everything at once.
That familiarity was back. Heavy and gnawing. Like I should know something, but I didn’t. It wasn’t quite recognition. And it wasn’t warmth. Just a weight that tugged at something old, half-forgotten, and I dismissed it as fatigue.
“You on any medication, Reap?” I asked, securing the last stitch and covering my work with a sterile dressing. “Allergies?”
He grumbled something that sounded negative and I didn’t ask again, my attention fixed on the tray as I dropped the used dressing packet on top.
When I turned round again, he’d pulled his clothes back on, the myriad of tattoos nearly all hidden apart from the stains on his hands, the shapes inked into his knuckles and the creep of ink up his neck.
I followed the pattern, losing it in the thickness of his beard.
And then his eyes. A mix of brown and amber.
Too familiar. A threat of déjà vu. For a split second, I recognised something in him.
A memory. Old. Fleeting. Like a dream. But I couldn’t grasp it.
I’d seen him somewhere before. In the hospital, maybe?
Or in the street? He wasn’t someone you would forget. He stood out.
The man called Reap pushed his arms into the thick leather waistcoat, pulling it over the black leather jacket he wore underneath. Then he pushed off the bed, nodded at me, his eyes sweeping across my face one last time. A tiny hint of a flicker in the amber.
As he turned, the embroidery on the back of the leather caught my eye. Three crowned skulls. They laughed like they knew something I didn’t. And they watched me as he walked away.