Gus
Dev shot out of his seat, knocking the rest of his coffee over the table. ‘Can I see him now?’ he said.
He turned his attention to Violet. ‘You’ve got to get some sleep,’ he said. ‘It’s two hours since your shift finished. Marvin’s going to be fine and Dev will be with him anyway. You need to rest.’
‘God, yeah, I…’ She looked at him, bewildered. ‘But your shift must have finished the same time?’ she said, only now registering this fact. ‘And you’ve been holding my bleep the whole time. You should be at home sleeping too.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah. Both of us need to be back here this evening and firing on all cylinders so you’re right, I need sleep as much as you do.’ He turned to Dev. ‘Let’s head up to twenty, get you sorted. And then’—he looked at Violet—'we’ll head off.’
Once they’d seen Dev to the side room on ward twenty, Gus, as promised, stuck his head into the recovery room to see how Marvin was doing.
‘Sounds like he had a liver laceration,’ he told Violet as the doors thudded shut behind him.
She was sat on the floor of the corridor, overcome with exhaustion.
He held out a hand to pull her to her feet, steadying her with the other.
‘But he’s been lucky, the blade missed everything else, and you know, the liver’s pretty good at repairing itself. ’
‘Did they have to ligate any of the hepatic arteries?’ she asked.
Her voice sounded distant, as if she was functioning purely on autopilot.
‘Because that would increase his clotting risk and up to forty-one per cent of patient with clots go on to develop necrosis– and then there’s the chance of bile leak in nineteen per cent of liver lacerations, was the injury near the bile ducts or…
’ Her eyes were unfocussed, roving from one side of the corridor to another and yet he noticed she could still come up with facts and figures pertinent to the situation.
She used data as a comfort blanket, he knew that.
Unfortunately, in this situation the stats weren’t particularly comforting, and she was in danger of exactly the type of irrational overthinking and scenario-building that he usually succumbed to.
He turned her towards him, placed his hands firmly on her shoulders, feeling the thin fragility of her clavicles beneath the scrub fabric.
‘I don’t know, Violet,’ he said, keeping his voice steady, searching her face until she focussed on him again.
‘But the surgical team are very happy with him. They’ll be on the lookout for any post-op complications but he’s remained stable throughout, there were no lung injuries and his breathing is back to normal despite the cracked ribs.
He’s starting to wake up and chat, so that’s a really good sign. ’
He didn’t tell her that when he’d introduced himself, Marvin, still very groggy and disinhibited from the anaesthetic had been positively ecstatic, ‘Gushh?’ he’d slurred.
‘Yoush Gusssh! She looooves you. She does. Be nishe, be careful.’ He’d then said something about a shpeshial ice queen , or maybe, ice-cream , which made no sense and went on to tell every member of staff in the immediate vicinity that he loved them and Dev loved them and Violet loved them too, so Gus had wisely chosen not to read too much into his comments.
‘You need to sleep,’ he told Violet firmly now. ‘And I can’t in all conscience let you get back on your bike and cycle home. It just wouldn’t be safe. You’re coming to mine.’
She raised her eyebrows and went to speak but he interrupted her, worrying that she was going to turn him down.
‘I am literally a two-minute walk away,’ he said, ‘along a safe pavement that even you can’t fall off.
I’ve got a spare room, there’s nobody else at home and you’ll be able to sleep properly.
I expect at your house Dev will need to come back and get his stuff, the phone will be ringing once Marvin’s family know what ‘s happened, it’ll be chaos.
Mine’s quiet and it’s nearby and I’m not taking no for an answer. ’
‘I wasn’t really saying no,’ she laughed feebly. ‘You had me at “two-minute walk away”.’
He smiled into a deep exhalation, relieved that he didn’t have to push any harder. He also needed to sleep, and he knew he’d be unable to even close his eyes if he was worrying about Violet wobbling home on her bike in this state.
They retrieved their coats from the mess and made their way out into the stark white light of the wintery morning, their breath emerging in plumes of steam as they crossed the busy road and reached Gus’s apartment block.
‘Snazzy,’ Violet said as she eyed up the lift, the doors sliding back noiselessly to reveal a polished chrome and glass interior.
‘Hmmm,’ he said. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been in the lift before, but Violet was practically wilting in front of him. There was no guarantee she’d make it up four flights of stairs, however determined.
In fact, ‘snazzy’ was the last thing Violet said that morning. By the time they reached his apartment she seemed to have lost the power of speech and nodded mutely when he gestured for her to take the master bedroom.
‘I’ll be in the spare room, just through here,’ he said, indicating the side door off the corridor.
‘If you need anything just shout. I’ll set my alarm for four and I’ll call the ward as soon as I wake up, so don’t worry about updates, you won’t miss anything.
’ He turned to leave the main bedroom. ‘Oh, and there’s T-shirts and stuff in the drawers if you want to borrow anything to sleep in… ’
But she had already crawled into bed and pulled the king-sized duvet up to her ears, mumbling something that sounded grateful despite being incoherent nonsense.
Gus crossed to the window and drew the heavy blackout curtains across, shutting out the pale grey sky and the view over the rooftops.
For a brief moment he caught his own reflection staring back at him, the thin pleats of cloud in the distance superimposed on his face, the bed behind him with the once familiar shape of another person huddled under the covers.
He felt a low thud in his chest, an emotion he couldn’t identify, but he was suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to simply climb into bed alongside Violet and put his arms around her.
He shook his head and saw his reflection do the same.
He was too tired to think straight. He’d invited this woman into his home to keep her safe, to stop her cycling back to her own house exhausted, and to allow her to sleep undisturbed.
Any thoughts of what else he might like to do now that she was in his bed were completely inappropriate and a violation of her space, even if all he really wanted at the moment was to cuddle up next to her and fall asleep.
He wasn’t the predatory type and Violet was both exhausted and desperately worried about her friend.
That made her vulnerable. He smiled to himself as he closed the curtain fully and the reflection of her shape in the bed disappeared from view– she would probably hate to be thought of as anything other than hard as nails.