Chapter Six #2
I called in Joel and Faisel from Resus 2 and then went down the corridor, followed by Johan, to find the police officer. He was scribbling angrily in his notebook.
“Follow me, please,” I said, directing him out of resus. This time he shifted without comment. Sweat was beading between his eyebrows and for a moment I felt sorry for him. A manual chest clearance is a brutal procedure to witness, especially when followed by a verbal ambush.
Once through the doors he stalked off, arms held slightly out from his sides to display the batons on his belt.
“Are you OK?”
I turned to see that the beautiful man hadn’t left. There was a slight smile on his face. “You were quite something in there,” he added.
“I’m fine. Thank you. And apologies. I’m not sure what I…”
He shrugged, as if it were nothing that I’d just yelled at a police officer while blood dripped from my hands. “The guy was an asshole. And you were under a lot of stress.”
“We’re trained for that, though. I don’t know what happened.”
He watched me until I looked away, bringing myself back to the present moment, to reality.
I was at work in a busy trauma center. It was January; darkness had already fallen outside.
There would be snow tonight, they’d said.
I would need to get up even earlier tomorrow and I had several hours’ study tonight.
And now the possibility of a disciplinary.
I had never been in trouble in my life. Aged twenty-six and not one black mark.
“Do you think she’ll be OK? I keep thinking about the sound she made when the bike hit her. The guy must have been doing at least fifty. It was a twenty limit.”
He had a slight accent, I realized now—something European.
Maybe Dutch? Weren’t they tall and almost universally good-looking?
His eyes were polar blue, startlingly pale and bright, but his skin was deeply tanned, as if he worked outside all year.
He looked incongruously healthy, and I didn’t see a great many healthy bodies in my line of work.
There was a gentle smear of white paint on the back of his wrist. My eyes kept returning to it, as if to find an anchor in the depths I’d nearly drowned in a few minutes ago.
What had been going on back there?
I think you’re carrying a lot of repressed rage, my sister liked to say. Don’t forget, Carrie, we had the same childhood. It’s got to come out someday.
I resolved not to mention this outburst to her. It was just a release of pressure after weeks of exam revision and on-call shifts. Nothing more sinister.
“Deniz has suffered very serious injuries,” I said. “Beyond that, I can’t really say anything, I’m afraid. The police officer said you were a random witness, is that right? You’re not related to her?”
He shook his head, which meant there really wasn’t a thing I could say to him. She’s in good hands, I could have offered, but I didn’t. He didn’t seem like someone who would appreciate platitudes.
I asked him a few questions about the collision, about how Deniz had been thrown several feet into the air before landing on the cold road. He flinched as he described it.
“There were the remains of a hamburger squashed into the tarmac a few inches from her face,” he said. He seemed angry about this. “She deserved better. She was just doing her shopping.”
Then he said something no punter had ever said to me.
“You must be so tired.” His voice had dropped. “We’ve been here for hours and I haven’t seen you stop. All this life and death must leave you like a gutted fish.”
I looked at him, surprised. That was exactly how it felt.
“I’m OK,” I said after a moment. Tiredness was something that my mother, and then my job, had trained me to override. “But I like the imagery.”
“Have you sat down today, rested?” His eyes traveled down to my ID badge. I watched him read my name and then look at my photo.
“I haven’t, no. There’s not much of that in this job. Especially when I’m on call.”
“You can’t sneak off to a cupboard for a lie-down?”
“I mean, I could. But then my bleeper would go off just as I was getting comfy among the mops and Hibiscrub refills.”
He thought about this. “I could hover nearby with your bleeper. Guard the cupboard and then knock if the bleeper went off.”
“It certainly sounds relaxing. The cleaning cupboard floor, a stranger outside the door. I’m sure I’d drift off in no time.”
He smiled. “I’ll vouch for you if that officer does complain,” he said. “You were very impressive back there. Are you still quite junior?”
I nodded.
“I only ask because of the way people spoke to you. You looked like you’d actually been doing this sort of thing for decades.” He laughed suddenly. “Until you lost it. That really was good.”
I smiled. “I’m mortified. Look, I’d better get going.”
I didn’t want to go.
“She looked so small,” he said, ignoring me. This was to become another feature of our relationship: me erecting barriers that Johan politely walked around. Occasionally it would irritate me, but most of the time I’d end up laughing at myself. Nobody had taught me to do that until Johan.
He studied a crack in the ceiling tiles that had been poorly filled with something yellow. When he spoke, his voice had changed. “She thought I was her son.”
I leaned in to hear him better, but that was a mistake. He smelled far too good.
“She saw me again and said, Hello, darling, I missed you, please don’t leave your mama again. I’m scared.”
I saw a lot of emotion in my job. More than I could handle, a lot of the time; the shouting and tears in A right from the start, he was able to read me. Deniz was being moved to ICU shortly. They probably wanted me back to do the transfer.
“Take good care.” It was the most I felt I could say.
“You take good care, too,” he said, smiling. He stood tall, looking down at me, and those eyes seemed to be saying things they had no business saying.
I turned to head back into the ED, but he called me back.
He got a pen and a small notebook out of his bag. It was a very organized bag. Blue canvas. Even his hands looked tanned, in spite of it being January. I kept noticing that feather of white paint on his wrist.
“I hope Deniz does have a family,” he said, writing in the notebook and tearing out the sheet. “But if she doesn’t, and if she asks for me, I want to be there for her. Is that OK? Can you ask the hospital to call me?”
“Of course.” I took the paper. “She’s very unlikely to remember anything about today, but you never know.”
I folded the piece of paper—his number and his name, Johan, in neat handwriting—and involuntarily ran my thumb over the fold. He saw me do it.
I nodded toward the phone he held, its screen badly splintered. “Is that thing going to ring if we call it?”
He laughed. “No guarantees.” He tossed it from one hand to the other. Watching me. Then he turned to go, and I got another whiff of him: loamy earth, laundry, warm skin. I found myself inhaling. It was for the best that he was leaving.
As I came back to A she too was on call today.
Her left eyebrow had risen above the rim of her glasses. “Oh, right,” she said.
“What?”
“Oh, right, Carrie!”
“What are you—”
“Carrie.” She cut across me. “Don’t even. I saw the whole thing.”
I glanced around just in time to see Johan reach the exit, where he stopped and turned as well, seeking me out. He smiled at me for a moment longer than he needed to, then headed off.
“Help,” I said, turning back to my friend.
Dell whistled. “Carrie! Christ, the state of you…” She was laughing.
Then I started laughing, too; I couldn’t stop myself. We laughed so much, we had to hide in resus. Nobody likes to see doctors laughing in A&E.
—
“That sounds sexy as all hell,” Maya said when I told her.
I’d been on the way home from dinner with Dad when she’d called to say she had decided to resign from her city lawyer job and retrain as a therapist. But after ten minutes on the subject she’d become so anxious about the decision that she demanded a subject change and started firing questions at me about my love life.
“The usual,” I’d said. “Although…”
“Although what?”
“Nothing. Just an unreasonably hot man who came into work today. There is no story to tell.”
I blushed, because I’d never used the word hot to describe a man before, and because I had been thinking about him from the moment he’d left A&E this afternoon, in spite of having spent the evening with my father in a charming old restaurant near Aldwych.
Just as Dell had sensed it in my body earlier, my sister sensed it in my voice. She wouldn’t let it go, because she never does, and before long she’d got the entire thing out of me, even the rage attack at the policeman.
“Sexy as all hell,” I sighed. “You’re right. And the thing is, Maya, I don’t find men sexy. I find them disappointing, for the most part. But this…I don’t just want to see him again, I need to see him again. Which is a problem, because I can’t.”
There was a delighted silence on the other end of the phone.
“He was attracted to me, too. I know he was.”
“I imagine saving that woman’s life on your own was quite a factor,” Maya said.
I could hear the grin. “Not to mention telling the registrar he’d done a bad job and then throwing a policeman out.
And also, Carrie, you look unspeakably attractive in your scrubs and white coat.
I think probably most men fancy Doctor Carrie. ”
“They absolutely do not. Anyway, I didn’t just throw the policeman out. I went mad at him. Full-red mist.”
“Oh, Carrie. Are you OK?”
“I’m just tired. Exams were only a few days ago. It’s been intense. And just to clear this up, Maya, my colleagues do not fancy me. Most of them just see me as a high-achieving nerd.”
Maya, who really was in no position to give me advice about love or sex, didn’t argue.
From the age of sixteen her love life had been very busy indeed, but nobody had ever stuck.
Until six months ago, when she’d gone on a Lake District weekend retreat for burned-out lawyers and fallen for Eagle, the vegan chef.
Every morning Maya had gone down to the kitchen to beg for some food before the first yoga class of the day, which went on for two hours before breakfast was served.
On the third morning Eagle had fed an almond-butter-filled medjool date straight into her mouth, she had bitten his finger, and before she knew it they were having sex on the wall of an eleventh-century well as dawn broke.
They’d been having a very intense relationship ever since.
“We need to talk about this Johan. Is there really no hope of you seeing him again? I’d give a month’s salary to help you find that man’s phone number, Carrie. If I had a salary. Oh my God! What am I doing?”
“You’re investing in your mental and physical health,” I reminded her.
Even though it had been a long time coming, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about Maya stepping away from her high-powered job in favor of a life of self-care. Somehow, it didn’t quite seem like the right fit.
“I trust the universe,” she said. “You’ll see him again. And Carrie, seriously—if he comes in to visit the old lady then you bloody well get his number, OK?”
The only part I hadn’t shared with her was the fact that Johan had quite literally handed me his number. And I had already memorized it.