Page 48 of Broken Heart Syndrome
‘Just catching up on old times, Dylan. Seems like you and me need to take a trip down memory lane as well,’ Tom said, and watched as Dylan flinched slightly, his face paling.
There it was.
An admission of guilt as far as Tom was concerned.
Yup, he needed to talk to Dylan as a priority.
And he needed to find out what Frankie was hiding.
But most of all he needed to spend time with her, try to get through to her, and then maybe, finally, finally he could be the recipient of her warm smiles and her quiet laughter. Maybe he could finally have his hands in her thick, shiny hair, and his mouth on hers.
Even with his gut still feeling tight at all he had heard from Lou, he smiled as he walked away from them down the corridor. He smiled because he remembered how Frankie had stopped breathing when he was close, and he smiled because Lou had practically ordered him to proceed.
It was time to stop pissing about and proceed.
Chapter 18
Carefully balanced ecosystem
Today had been one of the rare good days of the last few months. This was because I didn’t have to spend it doing the boring ward grunt work that had become my day-to-day life. As part of an apology from the department for the confusion with Rosie, I’d been given the odd extra study day to spend with the palliative care team, which would help make my transition in January smoother. It also allowed me to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
My cake business was going well – too well. I needed to start thinking about training someone to help. At the moment I had to turn down orders. Part of this was because I worked full time, but it was also about manpower (or more likely womanpower: I couldn’t see a man being interested in decorating cakes, although there were exceptions to this rule – Jean Paul the patisserie chef I studied with last year being one of them).
The advantage of the business getting hectic was that I didn’t have much free time. This made the avoiding-Tom plan a lot easier to put into action. At work it was tricky. I saw him in meetings and in the conference room, but I could usually slip out unnoticed as I was always positioned near the back and he was invariably stuck sitting with the other consultants at the front.
Unfortunately, I’d bonded with Ash whilst I worked with him and so couldn’t ignore him, and he was often with Tom. So Tom had opportunities to talk to me, and he took them. He wanted to know when I’d be free, asked me out to this and that; but I always demurred and got the heck out of there. Luckily my excuses weren’t that difficult to come up with because they were true: I was busy.
Still, I knew he could see through them, and I knew this by the way his eyes would flash and his jaw would clench when I gave them. I didn’t know why he was persisting, or what had sparked his interest in the first place, but I was guessing that not a lot of women said no to Thomas G. Longley and maybe he saw me as some sort of a challenge. I didn’t want to give him the chance to best that challenge and find out that I definitely wasn’t worth the effort in the first place. So I was avoiding him, and giving him excuses, and so far it was working.
Lou had made it her mission to try and convince me to go out with him. Our conversations about it went round in circles, and were pointless seeing as I was as stubborn as she was. I was learning to shut these down early and put up with her unhappy faces.
Dylan had also been bugging me since ‘The Night of Scary Drunken Frankie’. He seemed like he had something to tell me and would start trying to say it, only to stop midsentence, which was driving me up the wall. He also kept reminding me of times gone by in a weird way, as if he was trying to make me remember how good a friend he’d been over the years.
He reminisced about how he had covered for me in dissection when it was the day we opened the pelvis up and had to wash the legs out in the sink (I’d vomited into my mouth then managed to expel the rest in the toilets, and Dylan had made sure our leg was cleaned out and prepped). What he had conveniently forgotten was that I was already feeling queasy that day, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was when he had reached into the cadaver’s chest cavity, and eaten a piece of flesh. The flesh was actually some dodgy beef that he had secreted up his sleeve at lunch, and which looked surprisingly like formaldehyde-soaked muscle tissue (such was the standard of our canteen). I can still taste bile in my mouth when I remember watching him slip that meat into his mouth, thinking it was preserved dead human flesh.
So it was nice to have a break from them all and spend the morning in the hospice. You might think that hospices are depressing and that palliative care is a grim choice of specialty, but in my opinion they are the exact opposite. Hospices are, in general, friendly and have great, warm atmospheres. The staff have usually chosen to be there because they are passionate about end-of-life care, as the career choice is not one you make lightly.
A hospice is not a dark, dank place with the grim reaper hovering over every bed, and rows of people breathing their last. It’s generally bright and cheery, a lot nicer than the hospital. And the patients aren’t all on the edge of death. Most just need some help with pain control or any other troublesome symptoms. The whole aim is to make people feel better, to improve their quality of life. Often treatments in other areas of medicine aren’t geared towards making people feel better at all; sometimes they make them feel worse.
The consultant I was working with looked and acted like Doc fromBack to the Future, so much so that the staff and patients actually called him that. He was scarily enthusiastic and was the type of person who used his whole body to express himself. I thought he was the cat’s pyjamas. I especially thought this after he gave one of the patients with end-stage prostate cancer some dexamphetamine (essentially speed) to give him some extra energy to attend his daughter’s wedding. The joy on the man’s face when Doc suggested the plan gave me such a buzz that I didn’t think anything could bring me down that day.
Turned out I was wrong.
After the morning in the hospice we went over to the main hospital to review palliative patients on the ward, which meant I got to see Bill again. Doc had been impressed with my management plan and Bill had been pleased to see me, so I was on a high.
As we left the room we ran into Tom, Ash and Rosie on their ward round and on their way to see Bill. Tom smiled when he saw me. Tom always smiled when he saw me. Rosie and Ash were also looking suspiciously cheerful.
In the last week Tom had not in any way hidden his pursuit of me, and it was obvious that they both thought the situation hilarious. Rosie thought I was outright crazy. She had even gently told me that nobody would judge me if I was a lesbian in this day and age, and I should just come right out and tell everybody.
I had managed to convince her that I was not, in fact, a lesbian, but refused to talk about why I was avoiding Tom. Firstly, she didn’t know my background. She didn’t know why the likes of me was not for the likes of him. Secondly, in my experience people who cared about you tended to believe that you were more attractive and interesting than you actually were, and would try to convince you of it. Why people were driven to do this I would never know. It seemed to me that if you aimed higher than you should, it only led to heartbreak. Although Chris had been a complete tool, he had at least been an attractive one, and I should have know that no good would come from being with him. I would not make the same mistake twice.
‘Hey, Doc,’ Tom greeted, still grinning like a madman. ‘Thanks for reviewing Bill for us.’
‘Don’t thank me, son, Frankie here had done all the work,’ he boomed (he didn’t seem to have any other volume). ‘She’s a little gem isn’t she?’
He slapped me on the back with a little too much force, putting me off balance and causing me to go forward on one foot. Tom, who was close already (as was his current wont and form of torture), shot out his hand to steady me before I fell flat on my face.
‘Yeah, Doc, she’s one of the best juniors we’ve had in the department,’ he lied smoothly, and I glared up at him. Unfortunately the nuclear power of my death stare did not incinerate him on the spot. If anything his grin grew wider, while his hand kept a firm grip on my elbow. ‘You mind if I borrow her a minute, Doc? I need her to sign some paperwork; it won’t take long. Could she catch you up?’
