Page 59 of The Night Shift
‘It’s not easy,’ she said. ‘But I know Maureen’s still in there somewhere. We see glimpses now and again that make it all worthwhile.
‘Same with my gran,’ said Violet. ‘She’s a real character. It’ll take more than dementia to knock that out of her.’ They shared a smile of solidarity. ‘Anyway, I’ve got to get on,’ she said. ‘If I don’t see you again, have a lovely New Year.’
The woman nodded. ‘You too, Dr Winters. And thanks for everything. Cindy told us it was your idea, me and Jim being able to stay here with Maureen. It’s made a big difference to us.’ She stood from her chair and crossed the room, surprising Violet by wrapping her into a hug. ‘Thank you,’ she said again.
* * *
Later, making her way down to help Anjali down on medical admissions Violet thought about the parallels between her patients and her own grandmother. Many of the people she’d seen this week had been confused, elderly, frail. All of them were reliant on institutional care to keep them alive and well, whether it be a hospital or a nursing home. And all of them were in some way dependent on the staff working in those institutions. Her trainers squeaked across the linoleum of the freshly polished corridor, her bleep nudging against her hip, reminding her of its continued presence, and she wondered about the many health workers employed up and down the country, those people working the night shift as she was now, quietly going about their business of caring. She realised that she was now an established member of this vast army, she was doing her bit. A small but essential cog in a machine dedicated to saving and improving the lives of the population it served. The thought gave her a quiet satisfaction and she smiled as she passed through the doors of medical admissions, greeting a tired-looking Anjali who was sat hunched over a set of notes at the admissions desk.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’m all yours. Who do you want me to see?’
Gus
Gus bleeped Violet and they arranged to meet in the mess at the end of the shift. He’d been busy through the small hours of the morning with the girl who’d been brought in with sepsis a few nights previously– some of her blood results were troubling and there had been lengthy conversation with the consultant on call about whether she needed transferring back to intensive care. Alongside this there had been a crash bleep that turned out to not be a cardiac arrest, just a patient who had fallen and a healthcare assistant who had panicked. This had at least given him an opportunity to see Violet confidently siting a new cannula in the arm of the woman who, despite her heart not having actually stopped, was looking decidedly worse for wear and in need of immediate intravenous fluids.
‘Nice work, Dr Winters,’ he’d said as Violet taped the tubing into place. ‘Looks perfect.’
‘Why, thank you, Dr Jovic,’ She had given him a meaningful stare. ‘You’re not looking too shabby yourself.’
Anjali had also been at the crash call and had raised her eyes briefly from the patient’s notes at this exchange. He wondered whether she’d later asked her foundation doctor whether anything was going on between the two of them. The thought of Violet discussing him in any capacity was both thrilling and terrifying. What would she say? ‘Oh, it’s nothing much, just a bit of casual sex to get me through the week of nights’, or ‘Well, Anjali, I can confirm that after spending less than a week in his company, Gus Jovic is the best thing that ever happened to me and I’m madly in love with him. In fact, I’m planning on shagging his brains out at the next available opportunity.’ He had to concede that the second option was improbable. Violet was never the most effusive of people and even if she did usually say the first thing that popped into her head, it was unlikely to be that.
He smiled at the idea while he waited for her in the mess, the myriad of hilarious things that came out of Violet’s mouth at any given moment, the way she was so unpredictable with her absolute candour and where and when she chose to make her opinions known. Although thinking about her discussing him with Anjali was a reminder he needed to start alerting colleagues to the fact he was no longer engaged– otherwise people might judge Violet’s behaviour as even less appropriate than usual.
As if she’d known he was thinking of her, Violet chose that moment to enter the mess, tripping over the threshold in her inimitable style and clutching at the doorframe to break her fall. She glared accusatively at the carpet and by the time she looked up he’d stopped laughing and was instead concentrating on a casual expression that he hoped saidI’m pleased to see you but don’t think for one minute that I’ve spent the whole of the past few hours thinking about you. He took one look at her face and realised that she’d seen straight through his attempt to look cool.
‘Hi,’ she said.
He tried not to read too much into the one word. How her mouth moved around the syllable, whether her tone was wary or her expression clouded with regret. He didn’t need to. This was Violet– hi meant hello, nothing more. He had to keep reminding himself just how pleasingly straightforward she was. Amelia would have easily loaded the two-letter greeting with hidden meaning. Violet wouldn’t even know how.
‘Hi,’ he said. He felt shy all of a sudden. Despite having seen Violet in an altogether compromising position, several compromising positions in fact, over the past twenty-four hours, he felt peculiarly exposed under her direct gaze. And then her face opened up into a beaming smile and his heart lifted.
‘I missed you,’ she said simply, and she walked over and took his hand in hers as if the physical distance created by the mess was too much to be borne.
They agreed that she would stop by his flat during the early evening. He’d cook again and they could both walk over to the hospital to start their final night shift. It would mean that she wouldn’t have time for a swim this morning as they both needed to get some sleep but she had obviously decided he was worth the sacrifice. Being ranked above a trip to the frozen swimming pool made him unspeakably happy and as he walked her out through the back of the hospital to where her bike was secured, he risked putting his arm around her and pulling her close to him. So what if his colleagues saw them. They had nothing to hide.
He kissed her as she pulled on her cycling helmet, laughing against her mouth as the reinforced plastic bopped him on the forehead.
‘I’ll see– you– later,’ he said, punctuating his speech with kisses to her chin, her nose and finally her lips until she pulled away, grinning. Her cheeks were pink in the frosty air, her breath warm against his face, and the grey of her eyes appeared greener today, the aquamarine flecks sparkling in the light of a new morning. As he watched her swing her leg over the bike and push steadily off down the hill he felt a warm throb of happiness in his chest and stomach. A sensation that had been absent for so long he could have mistaken it for indigestion. He didn’t know what the next few days or weeks had in store but, for the first time in ages, he was really looking forward to finding out.
Whether it was genuine happiness or gastric irritation causing this unfamiliar feeling, he knew he had to get home and rest, just as soon as he’d visited the supermarket for ingredients for tonight’s meal. He’d keep it simple. Save the big culinary gestures for New Year’s Day maybe? Neither of them had spoken about their plans for the New Year but he felt sure that they would see each other one way or another. Tomorrow would be New Year’s Eve. Marvin would hopefully be discharged from hospital at some point during the day so Violet might be busy helping Dev look after him. Or she might have plans for a big party or be going home to see her family, now that her week of nights was over. He could ask her tonight, casually– nothing too heavy. He didn’t want to scare her away with his enthusiasm, she might find it a bit stifling. But then if she did, she’d tell him, wouldn’t she? He sighed as he paid for his groceries and the cashier looked at him with concern.
‘Don’t mind me,’ he said. ‘Overthinking. As usual.’ The cashier nodded as if she heard this all the time. She was probably very familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the great British public he thought, much as he was, much as Violet was, despite the fact that she felt herself to be on an entirely different wavelength to most people. He’d seen how she was with patients and her fears that she was tactless or had a poor bedside manner were unfounded in the main. She was a much better doctor than she thought she was. Patients valued her honesty. He was struck by a desire to tell her this at the earliest available opportunity but she was probably asleep by now. He’d tell her later, when he saw her.
Distracted by the prospect of being in Violet’s company again he didn’t notice the waft of familiar perfume in the hallway and it wasn’t until he was through the front door and confronted by the sight of two designer holdalls in the hallway, that he realised what was going on.
Amelia was back.
Violet
Sunday night
30th December
Violet left the house at five that evening, her housemate’s gentle teasing still fresh in her ears and her face still warm from laughing at him. Dev had been on good form since returning from hospital an hour earlier. Marvin was improving every day and the surgeons had suggested that he might be ready for discharge tomorrow. Which meant they’d be able to see the New Year in together. She could see from Dev’s face just how much this meant to him, the worry of the past few days which had been etched deeply into new lines around his eyes seemed to lift with each item on his ‘things to do when Marv is better’list. It didn’t really matter of course whether Marvin came home tomorrow or Tuesday, just as long as he was okay– and all signs seemed to indicate that he was– and still the same old irreverent silly Marv as always. But even Violet, who wasn’t given to ominous portents or lucky charms, could see the symbolism of him being home in time for the New Year– a fresh start, a new page on the calendar, with the injuries and the assault firmly relegated to the past.
The sun had already set and roads were slippery with dark streaks of slush, but the air was fresh on her face as she sliced through the stationary traffic, and Christmas lights still twinkled in most of the shop windows she passed. The night seemed full of possibilities– the end of her shifts meant a few days’ respite from the hospital and a chance to enjoy the bank holiday along with the rest of the country. There were a few people she would miss from this peculiarly transformative week though. Mr Zeller might remain an inpatient for many days yet but he wouldn’t beherpatient anymore– she would hand him over to the day team and their paths would be unlikely to cross again. Same with Mrs Jenson and her family, same with Mrs Chambers. She might not even see Cindy, given that she was a bank nurse and would likely move to whichever local hospital needed her the most. They’d be lucky to have her. Cindy had kept that ward running pretty much singlehandedly during her week of night shifts. Understaffed and dealing with a complicated group of patients and visitors, she’d worked efficiently and kept her sense of humour as she cared for them all. Violet would have to speak to human resources, make certain they knew what a brilliant nurse they’d hired. She wasn’t sure that she’d ever registered a formal compliment about a colleague before, to be honest, she didn’t think she’d ever complimented someone informally either, unless it was in such an offhand way as to hardly count. She now knew how important it was to receive praise at work, particularly when you needed to balance out the complaints.
At the thought of complaints she felt a sudden surge of nauseous anxiety in her chest. She had received an email from Dr Corbishley earlier that day asking her to meet with him to discuss ‘concerns raised by members of staff’. It certainly sounded ominous, and although it was unlikely she’d be fired from her post she knew it would significantly affect any reference he gave her, and therefore potentially scupper her chances of future career progression. There was also the possibility that human resources would take these complaints as evidence of bullying or harassment. While she didn’t think she’d ever behaved like a bully, it was possible that her language and direct manner had offended her colleagues as it had in the past, completely unintentionally. She didn’t know what was written in these complaints after all, there could be all sorts of real or imagined slights she had inflicted without knowing it– bullies rarely recognised themselves for what they truly were, maybe she was one? How would she know? It was all so confusing. She never really understood how others perceived her– it just wasn’t her skillset. And if she did end up with a count of workplace bullying on her record then there really was no hope of a career in healthcare. Her bosses needed to demonstrate to all staff that whistle-blowers were protected and taken seriously, and this meant dishing out harsh penalties for those who were found to have broken those codes of practice. Maybe she would end up working in a lab after all, relegated to a science bench and a Bunsen burner because she couldn’t be trusted with actual people.
