I wanted to resist him, but I couldn’t. I was giddy, diverted, sleepless. I got cystitis and didn’t care. I hummed my way through work, flirted with the businessmen, and smiled cheerfully at Richard’s complaints. My happiness offended my manager: I could see it in his chewed cheek, the way he sought ever more feeble misdemeanours for which to tell me off.
I cared about none of it. I sang in the shower, lay awake dreaming. I wore my old dresses, my brightly coloured cardigans and satin pumps, and let myself be enclosed in a bubble of happiness, aware that bubbles only ever existed for so long before they popped anyway.
‘I told Jake,’ he said. He had half an hour’s break, and he and Donna had stopped outside my flat with lunch before I went off for a late shift. I sat beside him in the front seat of the ambulance.
‘You told him what?’ He had made mozzarella, cherry tomato and basil sandwiches. The tomatoes, grown in his garden, burst in little explosions of flavour in my mouth. He was appalled at how I ate when I was alone.
‘That you’d thought I was his dad. He laughed more than I’ve seen him laugh for months.’
‘You didn’t tell him I told you his dad cried after sex, right?’
‘I knew a man who did that once,’ said Donna. ‘But he really sobbed. It got sort of embarrassing. The first time I thought I’d broken his penis.’
I turned to her, open-mouthed.
‘It’s a thing. Really. We’ve had a couple in the rig, haven’t we?’
‘We have. You’d be amazed at the coital injuries we see.’ He nodded at my sandwich, which was still on my lap. ‘I’ll tell you when your mouth’s empty.’
‘Coital injuries. Great. Because there aren’t enough things in life to worry about.’
His gaze slid sideways as he bit into his sandwich, so that I blushed. ‘Trust me. I’d let you know.’
‘Just so we’re straight, my old mucker,’ said Donna, offering up one of her ever-present energy drinks, ‘I am so totally not going to be your first responder for that one.’
I liked being in the cab. Sam and Donna had the no-nonsense wry manner of those who had seen pretty much every human condition, and treated it, too. They were funny and dark, and I felt oddly at home wedged between them, as if my life, with all its strangeness, was actually pretty normal.
These were the things I learned in the space of several snatched lunch hours:
– Almost no men or women over the age of seventy would complain about their pain or their treatment, even if a limb were actually hanging off.
– Those same elderly men or women would almost always apologize for ‘making a fuss’.
– That the term ‘Patient PFO’ was not scientific terminology but ‘Patient Pissed and Fell Over’.
– Pregnant women rarely gave birth in the back of ambulances. (I was quite disappointed by that one.)
– That nobody used the term ‘ambulance driver’ any more. Especially not ambulance drivers.
– There would always be a handful of men who would answer, when asked to describe how much pain they were in out of ten, with ‘eleven’.
But what came through most, when Sam arrived back after a long shift, was the bleakness: solitary pensioners; obese men glued to a television screen, too large even to try to get themselves up and down their own stairs; young mothers who spoke no English, confined to their flats with a million small children, unsure how to call for help when it was needed; and the depressed, the chronically ill, the unloved.
Some days, he said, it felt like a virus: you had to scrub the melancholy from your skin along with the scent of antiseptic. And then there were the suicides, the lives ended under trains or in silent bathrooms, their bodies often unnoticed for weeks or months until somebody remarked on the smell, or wondered why so-and-so’s post was now spilling out of their pigeonhole.
‘Do you ever get frightened?’
He lay, oversized, in my little bath. The water had turned faintly pink with the blood from a patient’s gunshot wound that had leaked all over him. I was a little surprised at how swiftly I had got used to having a naked man in the vicinity. Especially one who could move by himself.
‘You can’t do this job if you’re frightened,’ he said simply.
He had been in the army before he’d joined the paramedics; it was not an unusual career arc. ‘They like us because we don’t scare easy, and we’ve seen it all. Mind you, some of those drunk kids scare me far more than the Taliban ever did.’
I sat on the loo seat beside him and stared at his body in the discoloured water. Even with his size and strength, I shivered.
‘Hey,’ he said, seeing something pass across my face, and reached out a hand to me. ‘It’s fine, really. I have a very good nose for trouble.’ He closed his fingers around mine. ‘It’s not a great job for relationships, though. My last girlfriend couldn’t cope with it. The hours. Nights. The mess.’
‘The pink bathwater.’
‘Yeah. Sorry about that. The showers weren’t working at the station. I should really have gone home first.’ He looked at me in a way that showed me there had been no chance of him going home first. He pulled the plug to let some of the water drain away, then turned on the taps for more.
‘So who was she, your last girlfriend?’ I kept my voice level. I was not going to be one of those women, even if he had turned out not to be one of those men.
‘Iona. Travel agent. Sweet girl.’
‘But you weren’t in love with her.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Nobody ever says “sweet girl” about someone they were in love with. It’s like the whole “we’ll still be friends” thing. It means you didn’t feel enough.’
He was briefly amused. ‘So what would I have said if I had been in love with her?’
‘You would have looked very serious, and said, “Karen. Complete nightmare,” or shut down and gone all “I don’t want to talk about it.” ’
‘You’re probably right.’ He thought for a bit. ‘If I’m honest I didn’t really want to feel much after my sister died. Being with Ellen for the last few months, helping look after her, kind of knocked me sideways.’ He glanced at me. ‘Cancer can be a pretty brutal way to go. Jake’s dad fell apart. Some people do. So I figured they needed me there. If I’m honest, I probably only held it together myself because we couldn’t all go to pieces.’ We sat in silence for a moment. I couldn’t tell if his eyes had gone a bit red from grief or soap.