The Imperfect Proposal
I didn’t realise I hadn’t locked the door of the stockroom until I heard a keening noise that wasn’t coming from Nurse Harrison. The head I’d been thinking with when I closed the door hadn’t been focused on anything else apart from making the most of the twenty-minute break that was probably going to be reduced to no more than fifteen before my pager vibrated, although that vibration could have its own benefits.
Working in the emergency department of a hospital had honed my ability to be quick: quick at assessing what was wrong; quick at sewing someone back up again; quick at leaving the building when my shift ended so no one could ask me to stay just one more hour; quick at finding out what buttons got a woman to that end point before she was due back on the ward; quick to find my own pleasure when time was pressing.
Just to add, it could also take me a long time to find that ending when needed, too.
Nurse Harrison, also known as Melissa, had just split with her boyfriend, a specialist on the orthopaedic ward a couple of floors up, with a reputation for nailing nurses with the same frequency as he banged in joints. I had no illusions that I was anything more than a revenge fuck for Mel, or at this point, a revenge fingering, as I’d only gotten as far as pushing my fingers under her panties, intending to have her ride my hand.
“Oh shit!”
A voice accompanied the keen of the door hinges.
A familiar voice.
My hand stilled. Mel froze.
Sneaking a quickie during a break or between shifts was common practice that everyone ignored. You just made sure you locked the door, or at least put something heavy in front of it.
A couple of registrars were known to knock before entering any stockroom, hospital legend having had them walk in on various compromising positions. Rumour had it that Mr Stockton, neurosurgeon god, had actually sat there and watched while eating a sandwich as two of his team proceeded to get it on.
This voice did not belong to Mr Stockton. That would’ve been a blessing.
This voice belonged a decade ago.
My cock that had been looking forward to a little break-time delight was now deflating at the same rate it had when my Aunt Marie had walked into the shed the day I’d discovered masturbation.
I removed my hand from Melissa’s underwear, but I didn’t turn around. I didn’t know if the doctor who’d just walked into this stockroom had recognised my back yet.
To be fair, she hadn’t seen much of my back, and she definitely hadn’t stayed around for long enough to see it walk away.
I swallowed, stuffing the hand that was slightly wet from between Mel’s legs in my pocket.
There was nothing quite like your estranged wife seeing your fingers glistening with the arousal of another woman to start up a conversation, was there?
So, what have you been up to in the last decade apart from fingering other women?”
Well, honey, I got a little bored of not actually knowing where my wife had gone on her decade-long solo honeymoon, so I decided to check out what else there might be.
That’s lovely, husband-dear; did you manage to find anyone you wanted to get to know on a more-than-carnal basis?
That would’ve been nice, sweetheart, but when you packed for wherever it was you went first, you accidentally took my heart, so I’ve spent the last decade fucking around. Hope you didn’t mind.
My Aunt Marie would say that I’d been born with the soul of the devil to balance out the face of the angel, and it was probably that soul that made me turn around.
I hadn’t changed that much in ten years. There were a few extra kilos from lifting weights when I could, and my jaw was a little squarer. It was rare I was clean shaven, mainly because when I did have time, I didn’t have the inclination, and the dark shadows under my eyes were the standard attire for anyone who worked in a hospital in England.
I tried to focus on what my estranged wife would be thinking when she realised it was me, rather than how it would feel to see her.
I folded my arms, my fingers now dry, and tried not to look her in the eyes.
It didn’t work.
She blinked. Raised her brows. Her chin tipped up. A faint smile grew.
Nothing ever rattled her.
“Apologies, I should’ve knocked first. Can you tell me where I can find spare bedding?”
Mel was quicker to react than me. “Next room along. Give me a second and I’ll show you.” She gave me a worried glare, tightening the ponytail she was wearing her hair in, and headed to the door.
Doctor Thea Davies — I had no idea whether or not she’d ever used my surname — turned around and followed her, without even looking back.
Which was pretty much how she’d left our honeymoon suite in the hours after we’d gotten married.
A major trauma call later and I was sitting in a pub around the corner from the hospital with Wes Knight, my colleague over in the fanny-fiddling department, otherwise known as gynaecology. Wes was that rare thing — a surgeon who didn’t preach too much, unless it was about football and the quality of the IPA in the pubs listed in the Good Beer Guide. He never talked about work or bragged about what he’d managed to stitch up that day, and he never apologised for when he was on call and that dreaded pager went off, which made it easier when mine went and I had to leave mid pint of lime and soda. He was, though, a player, and he had worked his way through a whole rota of nurses and doctors, as well as Gemma and Hayley in HR, and somehow got away with it.
“Fancy catching the game tonight? Manchester Athletic is playing Spurs.” He sipped his IPA, the guest beer on tap.
“Maybe.” Today had felt surreal. Halfway through the trauma, I’d started to wonder if Thea had been a figment on my imagination. Maybe the person who’d walked in had been someone else, someone who looked like her. Maybe no one had walked in at all, and I’d just dozed off for that break. Maybe there’d been something funky about the mushrooms they were serving in the canteen. “I might need to grab an early night.”
Wes shrugged, lifting his pint. “There’s a few of us meeting in the Grapes to watch it.”
“Who’s a few of us?”
Wes hung around with some interesting characters, which meant it was always worth checking who would be about. There were just as likely to be the grandsons of East End gangsters as there were Members of Parliament. I had no idea where he knew half of his associates from, and I didn’t want to ask.
Thinking about it, I could well be still asleep in that Las Vegas suite, having just been married by Elvis, and Thea could still be lying next to me. Everything in the last ten years could be a dream, or a really freaky hallucination.
“Chuckles, Ted the Bear, Dipshit from the morgue and Mr Chambers.”
I shook my head. That list was adding to the theory that those mushrooms had been picked in a field in the middle of Glastonbury. “Chambers? As in, my boss?”
Wes nodded. “He and Dipshit had a bowls match this afternoon; they’re going straight to the Grapes afterwards. Did you know they’re partners? Bowling partners. Not life partners.”
“Bowls as in crown green bowls?”
Wes nodded again. “Dipshit won the singles final last year. I heard he’s playing at Blackpool in the autumn.” Dipshit had earned his name because he’d once dipped around in a pile of shit looking for a two pound coin. He was apparently drunk, but no one had confirmed this. He did use a piece of wood, and not his hands.
I frowned. “How do you find out all of this?”
“People tell me stuff.” He shrugged. “I think it’s because I look like I’m not listening, so they say shit they want to get off their chest but don’t think I’ll hear.”
“Is that why you ended up wrist-deep in vaginas every day?”
He shrugged again. “Maybe.”
I knew he was a damn fine gynaecologist. One who had a whispered reputation about helping women in abusive relationships. If a nurse or another doctor suspected something wasn’t right with a dynamic, that patient would end up in the care of Doctor Knight. He did volunteer shifts at the shelters, something he kept low key, along with his background.
“Chambers is coming?” I frowned. Mr Chambers was the senior consultant in my department. He was the one person I didn’t want to piss off under any circumstance, as he had the most influence on whether I made it to consultant in the next twelve months, which was the goal.
“Apparently. Do you want another pint? It’s my round.”
I nodded, although I wasn’t sure whether another pint right now was the right answer. I’d seen Chambers out socially a few times since I’d moved to London, but always when I’d been on my best behaviour.
When Wes returned, he brought Chuckles and Ted with him, both of them wearing that end-of-shift look that suggested survival had been the sole goal.
Chuckles, real name Charlie, was a senior registrar in orthopaedics. He smiled far too much and looked a bit psychopathic when he cracked a grin. Ted the Bear, partly called that because he was pretty fucking hairy, worked in paediatrics, so he often took over patients after I’d done the initial stitch-ups. His real name was Neil Paddington, but he’d long since stopped answering to Neil, because no one ever called him that.
“How long were you on for?” Ted sat next to me, a pint and a shot in his hands. “I heard it was messy in there today?”
I nodded. Messy was an understatement. “Ten hours. One break. I think.”
I still wasn’t sure if Melissa and Thea had been a hallucination.
“Big sick or major trauma?” Ted knocked back the shot.
“That, a brain injury, kid who’d ingested the contents of his mum’s medicine cabinet, a broken femur, septic kid, and a whole long list of shit. We were a doctor down, too.”
“Only one?”
It was a fair point from Ted. We’d been short staffed for months, and it wasn’t going to get any better.
“A doctor down on what we usually have. The worried well were too worried about catching this bug that’s been doing the rounds to make an appearance.” The worried well — those who had very little that a pharmacist couldn’t solve but absolutely had to present at Accident and Emergency — tended to stay away when the media was full of stories about nasty bugs and hospital beds being taken up. The current story doing the rounds was completely incorrect, but we weren’t complaining if it kept the people who didn’t actually need medical attention away.
Ted shrugged. “When are you next back on shift?”
“Two days. Unless they’re short again.” I took the pint that Wes offered and had a big drink. I wasn’t expecting a call in the next day at least, as this was the first break of longer than twelve hours I’d gone in eight days. “You?”
“A week’s leave. I fly out to the Maldives tomorrow.”
I grinned. “You meeting that model there?”
“I am indeed. A week of sand, crystal blue waters and sex.” Ted had met a model while covering a shift at a private hospital a month ago, and somehow, he’d persuaded her that he was interesting enough for her to spend time with him. Even more surprising, he’d managed to convince her to sleep with him. Medical experiments would at some point be undertaken to work out how the fuck he’d managed that.
“Make the most of it.”
His grin was dirty. “I intend to. Hello. Here’s your boss.”
I looked over to my left where Chambers was appearing, Dipshit, Chuckles and Wes now standing with him.
“I thought we were meeting them in the Grapes?” I also thought I had a bit longer to work out whether I was still in some sort of alternative reality before seeing Chambers.
Ted shrugged. “I’m a physician, not a psychic.”
Someone, probably Wes, had the good sense to order food, and I had the good sense not to keep up with the shots Ted and Chuckles were lining up. Good sense wasn’t a rarity. I enjoyed partying, but I generally knew when to call it a night. I just didn’t always have the same sort of sense for which women I found myself with.
Including wives.
I was pretty sure that my boss was aware of the staff shortages and the possibility that my forty-eight hours of rest could well be interrupted by that call that would come to me well before someone dared pull him from his round of golf.
Consultants were one level higher than God in the hospital hierarchy. They’d already served their time doing double or triple shifts, being hazed by the consultants of their junior doctor years, and picking up the shit that was thrown on the regular to foundation year doctors. When you reached those heights, you’d effectively made it. It was a very brave person who asked a consultant to come in on their day off.
“That team really should be banned.” Chambers sat back, his gaze on the TV that was showing the football game.
We’d moved over to the Grapes for the game, finding seats with a decent view of the screens. Spurs were currently losing, but Chambers didn’t support them, so I could only assume that he was referring to his bowling match.
“The team you played tonight?”
Chambers nodded, looking disgruntled. “Bastards, the lot of them. Don’t think there was one that didn’t cheat.” He finished off his pint. “Did you meet the new doctor today?”
I pulled on my best innocent expression, the one I reserved for my Aunt Marie and my mother. “I’m not sure. It was a busy day.”
“I’ll have to introduce you when you’re next on shift.”
I wasn’t sure if his nod was directed at me or the TV, where a Manchester Athletic player had just scored.
“In fact,” he turned back to me, “you might know each other. I’m pretty sure she was at Cedars Sinai when you were.” He squinted, as if not quite recognising who I was.
My heart had already started to batter my rib cage. I could hear its thudding throughout my head, like when my sister, Catrin, had tried to learn how to play the drums.
That had been fucking irritating.
“Lots of people were on the same programme. I might not know her.” The chances of today being courtesy of some accidentally-taken hallucinogenic mushrooms were becoming slimmer.
“Thea Davies. She took an unconventional path after she graduated, though.” Chambers frowned, his attention mainly on the football. “Médecins Sans Frontières.”
If I hadn’t ingested anything hallucinogenic this morning, was there any chance of anything now?
“Really? That’s interesting. What’s her background?”
Chambers shrugged. “She mainly worked with children — tough situations, sometimes in the middle of fighting, so it was total frontline work. She’ll be an asset to our department.”
“I’m sure she will.” My nervous system was short-circuiting. “Is she staying long term, or will she be off again?”
I had no idea what I wanted the answer to be.
Chambers winced as Manchester Athletic’s keeper, Nate Morris, made a fingertip save. “Long term, I believe, but then, I’m not the person to predict what decisions the females of the species make. How did that trauma go today? I do love a good, juicy trauma.”
Only in my field would you discuss such things with a pint in your hand. I gave Chambers the details, talking him through the slight complication that the child was a haemophilic, which we hadn’t known when he arrived, thanks to the parent not being entirely with it. It was another case passed on to children’s social services and probably another case that would be added to the very long list, given how short staffed they were and the ever-growing need.
I tried to concentrate on talking to Chambers and following the game, and keeping up with the nuggets he kept dropping in about his bowls game, but the only thing that was rolling through my head was Thea.
Ten years. It had been ten years. A decade with no phone call, no message via social media, no email — I kept up the email account I’d set up when I was nineteen with the really stupid name, just in case she reached out on it.
There had been nothing. Nothing apart from the postcards.
She sent one every few months, usually from a city or town she was passing through on her way to the next hospital or surgery she was working from. There had been cards from Mali, Ethiopia, Somalia, Burundi, Syria, Iran, Columbia, Guatemala, and other places she was travelling through.
Never with a return address, and usually when she was leaving and heading on her way to her next post.
I wrote to Médecins Sans Frontières and asked them to pass on my correspondence. I had no idea if they did, only that she never acknowledged what I’d sent if she’d received it.
Ten years. We’d been married for all of that time. She hadn’t asked for a divorce, and unlike me, she’d known where to find me somehow, possibly just through medical connections. She’d always known which hospital I was working at, how to get those damn postcards to me. If she’d wanted to marry someone else, or end it anyway, she could’ve.
I never had that choice. I didn’t know if it was a choice I’d have made, anyway.
I’d married Thea Davies after knowing her three months. I’d made up my mind that the rest of my life wasn’t going to be enough time to spend with her. I didn’t expect that on the morning after we were married, I”d find my bed empty and Thea gone.