You’d think, anyway. Regardless, I don’t want to spend my life forcing people I care about to eat food they don’t like for my sake.
One time. And it was Mal. Everything’s different with him.
I eat a biscuit, distracting myself with learning the current waiting hours in the department, knowing I have limited time to find out before someone pops up in front of me and expects me to know.
“Quiet overnight.” Marc’s in my face again, faint surprise in his eyes as he finds me eating anything he hasn’t seen me eat a thousand times before. “So you’re probably in for a shit day.”
“You’re not staying?”
“Fuck off.” He utters that part quietly. “Unless the sky falls in between now and eight o’clock, I’m going home.”
He leaves me with that, and his biscuits, and wanders off to finish his shift.
And as it happens, the sky doesn’t fall in. I spend my morning utilising my assessment skills and redirecting non-emergency cases to the urgent care service, reducing the pressure on A&E. I see every face that walks through the doors. No one takes a step until I’ve seen them, and it’s fucking exhausting, but it passes the time.
It’s lunch before I know it. I take my phone to the break room and message Sol, checking Jack is doing okay after whatever went down between him and Mal last night. Sol and I arrived too late to know for sure, and Jack didn’t want to talk.
And Mal?
I exhale as I sink onto a lumpy couch and unwrap a protein bar, picturing Mal last night instead of how he was this morning. From the aggression he brought into the bar, to the pale face and clammy skin that landed in my bed. Common sense tells me the beer he sank for whatever reason agitated a condition he’s yet to learn to live with. Fear reminds me it could’ve been a precursor to something far worse, dark clouds before a storm, and I find myself tapping into cardiology sites, refreshing the knowledge I already have.
It dulls my appetite. And stops me thinking about Mal in my bed for any reason beyond that he needed a safe place to fall.
He chose you.
Did he?
Or was my room just closest?
I know the answer. And I’ve run out of time to pretend I don’t. My break comes to an end and I make my way back to the front desk, eyeing the increased footfall in the waiting area, contemplating whether Marc’s prophecy will come true.
The next few hours are wild. Heart attacks, strokes. A resuscitation by the vending machine. Then a father tears through the doors with an unconscious baby, limp and blue, and I don’t draw breath until it’s way past the time I should’ve left.
I’m still on the streaming desk, a queue dotting through the entrance and beyond, stretching all the way to the bus stop.
I scan the faces waiting on me. Find more annoyance than distress, which lets me know how the next hour or so of my life is going to play out. But one man waiting catches my attention, mainly because he doesn’t seem to want it. He holds an arm to his chest, fidgeting and restless, gaze fixed on the police officers who stroll through the department, towing a prisoner I’ve already processed and redirected to X-Ray.
He’s alone. My age, maybe. Dressed like a prick in expensive clothes and trainers that cost more than the ridiculous sum Ispend on protein products and supplements each month. He looks familiar, and not in a good way, but I see too many arseholes on a daily basis, at home and at work, to keep track of them all. I have no clue who this idiot is, even when he reaches the front of the queue, his eyes widen, and he gives me a name absolutely not his.
“Dom Ramos?” It’s a struggle not to roll my eyes to the moon and back. “Like the Portuguese footballer?”
The man gives me a jerky nod.
I ask his address. Type it in and suppress a sigh as it comes back as a local McDonalds. “What’s brought you to A&E today?”
“Burnt my arm.”
“Where?”
“In the garden.”
“I meant where onyour arm.”
Slowly, the man unfolds the limb he’s been guarding since I spotted him, and rolls up the sleeve of his designer polo shirt. A fist-sized patch of charred skin greets me, a halo of blackened tissue around it, dirty and ragged, as if heat has chewed its way through his flesh.
It’s gory, but I can handle the sight of it. The smell, though…it’s more familiar than this mope’s face, and my stomach churns for a reason far more malignant than the biscuits I’ve managed to polish off trapped behind this desk.
Smells like guns.