Page 69 of For Real

Then Toby grinned and helped me anyway. Granting mercy when I needed it most. “What’s your sign?”

“My…oh, Leo.”

“Your favourite colour?”

“Blue.”

“Your favourite ice cream?”

“Vanilla.”

He gave a whoop of laughter. “Seriously?”

“What did you expect me to say? Mint choc pain? Rum and suffering?” He was still giggling, so I went on, “Look, I’ll have you know that proper vanilla ice cream, the sort with the pods in it, is really good.” Oh dear God, I sounded pompous.5

But Toby leaned down and kissed my brow. “It’s okay, I’m into cooking. You don’t have to defend vanilla to me. It’s awesome.”

For a little while, we were quiet, his hands still moving tenderly in my hair, and I wondered if he was satisfied with the talking we had achieved. But then he asked, “Do you like your job?”

I shrugged, my shoulder nudging his knee. “I’m not sure ‘like’ comes into it.”

“That’s your answer to everything.” There was an edge of laughter to his voice.

“Just sex and work.”

“Is there anything you do like without making it really complicated?”

I smiled up at him, soothed and absurd and undone. “I like you.”

He went a little pink. “Now you’re just avoiding the question.”

“I…” I wanted to answer, but I didn’t know how to begin, so I lost myself in silence, while his impatience gathered around me.

“See, this is exactly what I mean. You’re fine to talk to me about ice cream but not what you do every day?”

“I’m not…I’m not trying to push you away. I’m just”—frightened of frightening you—“wondering how to explain.”

“What’s to explain?”

The truth was, most people didn’t understand what I did and why I did it and how it made me feel. If I was lucky, they would tell me they thought I was very brave. If I wasn’t, they would shake their head and say, I just don’t know how you can do something like that. As if I were an alien or a serial killer. I sighed. “I don’t like what I do, Toby, but I need to do it, and it’s part of who I am. I think…I think there’s a strangeness or some dislocation inside me that makes me perfectly designed for it.”

He blinked, but he kept on touching me, and I pressed into his touching. Don’t lose me. Don’t let me get lost. “I don’t think there’s anything weird about being a doctor. About helping people.”

“I don’t really help people in any sense you’d recognise. I just stop them dying.”

“That seems pretty helpful to me.”

That was how it always started: trying to make light before understanding set in. There would be a few minutes, at least, when Toby might look at me and believe me some kind of hero. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t noble. I was just a man who made decisions.

“It’s not benevolence,” I explained. “It’s detached from that, just like I am. When I arrive at an incident, that’s the first thing that happens. The adrenaline hits me, and everything slows down, and all of me is gone, shunted away to I-don’t-know-where, so there’s only the things I know how to do and the clarity to do them. It’s how I can do it. Know which bodies I can fight for, which ones I can’t, or won’t.”

His eyes held mine, not yet flinching. “That sounds kind of like a big responsibility. I freak out when I have to do the weekly egg order for the caff. Does it scare you?”

“No, it…it thrills me.” I closed my eyes for a moment, hiding from my own truths and his reaction to them. “It’s a profoundly powerful thing to stop someone dying in such a direct and individual way. Most medicine is an extended negotiation, but prehospital medicine… It’s the thinnest imaginable line between life and death. It’s where I can do something that matters.”

“Wow.” He let out a rush of breath, as if he’d been holding it. “Laurie, that’s amazing. You’re amazing.”

It was desperately tempting to let him think that. To snatch up his admiration like a greedy child. I couldn’t do it though. I couldn’t take what wasn’t rightfully mine, no matter how much I wanted it. “But you see,” I said softly, “it’s only afterwards I remember. Only afterwards I remember it’s lives. Not just bodies and statistics and probabilities and triage.”

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