Page 38 of The Night Shift
‘She just needs something else to keep that busy mouth occupied,’ he said, laughing. ‘Girls like that, they like to pretend they’re in charge but get them in the sack and it’s a different story. Oxford English Dictionary on the streets, Urban Dictionary between the sheets. I bet she likes it rough.’
‘Mate, you really can’t say that sort of thing,’ said Gus, his voice still light. ‘It’s completely inappropriate. Come on.’
‘True though, isn’t it,’ Barney mused. ‘They like to be shown who’s boss. She’s probably dying for a good fuck, likely hasn’t had one in months. Head buried in a textbook or halfway up her own arse most of the time I expect.’
‘Jesus, Barney, I mean it,’ said Gus, shaking his head. ‘Enough.’ His tone was warning now, but the surgeon either didn’t hear it or didn’t care.
‘It builds up, doesn’t it?’ Barney continued, waving his toothed forceps around airily. ‘All that frustration, trying to keep up with the men, trying to prove themselves. That’s what makes them such goers. Of course, the irony is that all the “I work just as hard as the boys”, “I’m devoted to my vocation”talk disappears as soon as they hit thirty and want babies. It’s no wonder we’ve got a recruitment crisis. That pretty little doctor up on ward ten, she’ll be trying to pretend that her number one priority is progressing her career, when chances are, she’ll be up the duff in a few years then coast along on maternity leave and part-time hours for the rest of her working life.’ He gestured to one of the scrub nurses to find a dressing for the wound site and backed away from the operating table. ‘Either that or she’s a lesbian,’ he said, rolling his eyes as if to imply that women having sex with other women was even worse than them having the temerity to want a careerandchildren.
Gus sighed as he regarded the sedated face of his patient, her endotracheal tube taped in position, the blue hair-net drawing a fine red mark across her forehead. He moved the elastic slightly further back so it sat on her hairline where it wouldn’t irritate the skin and watched the gentle rise and fall of her ribcage as he considered what to do, how to act upon what had been said. There was no response required of him as far as Barney was concerned, he obviously felt he’d said his piece, expressed his view of the world, and that was that. But Gus couldn’t let those comments go unchallenged, could he? He knew that keeping in with the surgeons was critical to future career success, and that the chances were, if he stayed in Bristol and wanted any private work in the future, he would need to keep people like Barney Snell onside, or at the very least, not offend them to the point where they refused to work with him. But on the other hand, could he live with himself if he just sat there and let this tsunami of predatory chauvinism wash over him? Didn’t he owe it to his female colleagues to say something?
‘Barney, mate,’ he said, trying to keep his voice reasonable. ‘You reallycan’tsay things like that. She’s a colleague for a start, but you can’t talk about women in that way generally. All that “oh, she’s either gagging for it or she’s a lesbian”shit– it’s a bit rapey to be honest. Have you not heard of Me Too?’
Barney looked up in surprise. ‘Fuck off, Gus– I know that,’ he said, affronted. ‘It’s not like I’ll be filing a report to the GMC expressing my views, but you know, in here it’s just us blokes, it’s not like you’re going to make a complaint is it!’ He laughed at the very suggestion.
‘Yeah, but I don’t want to hear it,’ said Gus. ‘You saying those sorts of things in here, to me– it means that you think I agree with you. And I don’t. It’s still really tough for women in medicine. There’s loads of institutional sexism and misogyny about.’As you’ve nicely demonstrated, he thought to himself.
‘Yeah, whatever.’ Barney removed his gloves and dropped them in the bin as he picked up the patient’s notes. ‘Forget I said anything– it was just a bit of banter.’
‘It’s not banter though, is it,’ said Gus, his voice taking on an edge that he hadn’t known he possessed. ‘It’s the reason things don’t change. Why is it that a woman who is focussed on her career is inevitably seen as a bitch, whereas an ambitious man gets invited for a round of golf?’ He was getting cross now. ‘It’s piss poor,’ he said. ‘I see Karen, working her arse off, day in day out. She’s brilliant. Really bright, got a PhD alongside her medical degree, passed membership first time, published a couple of papers… And she’ll get her consultant job when her number comes up, of course she will, but she’ll be back of the queue for private work, won’t she? Because that’s where you boys come in. It’s the surgeons who’ll decide whether to put the lucrative stuff her way, and they won’t because she’s not a mate of theirs– in fact a lot of them think she’s a pain in the arse, which she can be, I grant you– but she’s a bloody good doctor and it’s not fair that she has to work twice as hard as one of the blokes would just to get to the same place.’
Barney had been ostensibly writing up the procedure and staring resolutely at the patient’s notes for the duration of Gus’s impassioned speech, but he raised his head now and opened his mouth to respond. His attention was diverted by the presence of Dr Karen Stringer who had returned from the recovery room. Neither of the men had any idea how long she’d been standing there.
‘Everything alright in here?’ she said, her voice non-committal.
‘All fine,’ said Barney smiling thinly as he gestured towards the notes. ‘I’m done.’ He glanced briefly at Gus before leaving the theatre in what could only be described as a surgical flounce. Gus grimaced. Not only had his senior colleague almost certainly heard him calling her a pain in the arse, but he had also likely scuppered any future good working relationship with the local surgical fraternity– his name would now be passed around as someone unbearably woke and earnest, someone who took himself too seriously and therefore couldn’t be trusted. Oh well. He needed to take a leaf out of Violet’s book and ask himself whether it mattered. In the grand scheme of things, probably not. He’d done the right thing. Just as she would have done.
Violet
It was five in the morning and Violet was just leaving ward seven when her bleep went off. The number was unfamiliar and she was disproportionately excited to hear Gus’s voice on the other end of the phone when she called it through. She hadn’t seen much of him this shift, their paths had only crossed once on his way to theatre and he’d texted her a couple of times to let her know he was planning on joining her for a swim if she was up for it later.
‘Violet.’ His voice was unusually serious and there was a ridiculous amount of shouty noise in the background. ‘I’m in A&E,’ he said. ‘There’s someone here you’ll want to see.’
Violet smiled remembering his previous trick with the Elizabeth Shaw chocolates. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘Is it a Mr F Rocher or a Mr Terry Orange? Or my favourite, a Miss Lily O’Brien?’
‘No,’ he said, his voice faltering. ‘I wish it was. I really wish it was.’ He sounded sad. ‘I’m with Dev, your housemate. Marvin’s been brought in, he’s been assaulted, it’s pretty bad.’
Violet felt the blood draining from her face. Her throat went tight and her ears were suddenly ringing with a high-pitched tone of alarm. ‘What?’ she said, trying desperately to process the words and put them in a recognisable order.
‘Don’t panic,’ Gus said. ‘He’s here, they’re both here and I’m with them. I’ll stay until you can get to us. Are you busy on the…’ But Violet had dropped the phone and was now sprinting faster than she’d ever run for any arrest bleep, desperately pounding along the corridor, down the porters’ stairs and narrowly avoiding being impaled on a drip stand as she rounded the corner to A&E.
Her eyes scanned the triage list on the whiteboard. There he was, Marvin Gillespie– stab wound– bay six. Shit. Violet felt as if the knife had entered her own body as she read the words. He’d been stabbed, Marvin, lovely Marvin. Why? What? She looked around, eyes dartling left and right, stunned and completely bewildered by this dramatic clashing of her two worlds. Where was bay six? Where were her boys?
‘You alright, love?’ One of the charge nurses took her gently by the elbow. ‘Here, do you want to sit down?’ He gestured to a plastic chair with dubious stains.
‘No, I– I need to find bay six. I’m one of the doctors. My friend. He was stabbed.’ She was shocked, both by the words coming out of her mouth in a coherent string, and by their content.
The nurse nodded as if staff members came looking for assaulted friends all the time. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Gus mentioned to keep an eye out for you. Come this way. Dr Winters, isn’t it?’
They paced the few metres in silence, Violet oblivious to the wailing coming from bay seven or the drunken yelling coming from bay five. The first sound she actually registered was that of Gus, his warm calming voice coming from behind the curtain.
‘Gus,’ she called out, the panic evident in her tone. ‘Dev?’ She saw her housemate’s face crumple as the charge nurse pulled back the curtain and ushered her inside. She rushed to hug him and felt his body go from rigid to molten within the space of a few seconds as he seemed to buckle beneath her.
‘Oh Violet,’ he said, and his face crumpled. ‘What a fucking nightmare.’
She glanced across to the bed where Marvin lay, his face ashen beneath the caked foundation and glitter, his heavily lashed eyelids barely flickering in response to her voice. Discoloured bruising was now starting to compete with the bronze and gold of his contoured cheeks and she wasn’t sure where the purple of his eyeshadow ended and the lattice of contusions began. A tiny frond of turquoise feather was stuck in the dried blood at the corner of his mouth and it wafted up and down with his shallow breathing.
‘Marv,’ she whispered, placing her hands on the side of his trolley, the cold metal of the bars sharpening her senses. ‘What did they do to you?’
