Tommy laughed aloud. ‘Down, girl!’ he teased as Zach responded to the sudden burst of sound, his dark eyes seeming to find hers unerringly. ‘It wouldn’t be a fair contest…I’m in no condition to fight you for him.’
The reminder that the young man was her patient and had potentially serious injuries snapped her back to what she should be doing with a guilty start, but she still had to force herself to drag her eyes away from the man outside the curtain.
‘So, let’s see what we can do to get you back in fighting form,’ she suggested, and began to palpate the darkly bruised ribs.
‘I dunno about fighting form,’ he said around a groan of pain. ‘I’d be grateful just to have a good summer. I’d rather not be around when winter comes.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, concerned. There had been such resignation in his tone…far too much for someone who hadn’t even reached his twenties yet.
‘I won’t make it through another winter on the street,’ he said bluntly. ‘And to tell the truth, I don’t really want to.’
‘Oh, Tommy…If you had a place in a hostel…’ Amy began, but he was shaking his head before she could complete the sentence.
‘They’ll only take you in if you’re clean—off drugs,’ he clarified, in case she didn’t understand.
‘But I’m sure we could find you a place on a programme to—’
‘Not a lot of point, is there, Doc, with me in this state? Anyway, I’m not too keen on going back into the system, seeing as how it was the system that did this to me.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said quietly while she systematically cleaned up his wounds one by one, taping steristrips over the cuts that would heal without stitches and leaving the worst until last for suturing. This was the most she’d ever heard Tommy say about his life but she’d known that there were dark shadows in his background—she could tell by the expression in his eyes. They held the same fathomless, wary depths that she’d first seen in…Zach?
‘I was put into care when I was about four, when my mum dumped me at the social services office, and the system was so glad they’d found somewhere to put me that they forgot about me.’
He fixed her with eyes that were uncannily like Zach’s for the amount they kept hidden, but suddenly she realised that there was also a banked inferno of emotions raging underneath his apparent apathy.
‘By the time someone thought to check up on why I kept trying to run away, the bastard who was supposed to be looking after me like a father had been abusing me for years and I was HIV positive.’
‘Oh, Tommy…’ Amy breathed, her heart breaking for all the misery he’d suffered in his life…was still suffering, she realised, confronted with the evidence of his latest assault.
‘Hey, I’m cool,’ he said with an awkward shrug, even though the slight flush of colour in his pale cheeks told her he’d been touched by her sympathy. ‘If I’m lucky, it’ll be a good summer. I’ve got no job to go to so I’ll be outside in the sunshine with plenty of time to listen to the birds and smell the flowers while I stick my hand out for money for my next fix. By the time winter comes…who knows?’ he finished with another shrug and a corresponding grunt of pain when the manoeuvre jarred his ribs.
‘Have you been taking any anti-retroviral medications?’ Even as she asked, Amy realised that Tommy’s drug abuse would probably preclude his adherence to any regular preventative treatment.
‘Nah,’ he said dismissively, obeying her silent gesture to turn his head for the next set of stitches to close the wound in his scalp. ‘They made me feel worse than coming off dope, and it was already too late to have any real effect. Anyway, if I was given a supply of drugs…any drugs…I’d more than likely be mugged for them.’
Amy couldn’t argue with that. Tommy was the expert when it came to conditions on the streets.
‘Well, you probably already know that one of the dangers now is developing an infection that your body can’t fight.’
‘So they tell me, but I’ve been lucky so far—apart from having the crap kicked out of me. Haven’t had anything more than a cold.’
The conversation died for a few minutes while Amy concentrated on making a neat job of his scalp, grateful that he’d chosen such a brutally short hairstyle as it made the task so much easier.
Finally, as she handed over to the nurse to tape a protective dressing in place, she positioned herself so that she met his gaze head on, her pen poised over the clipboard that held his notes.
‘So, Tommy, if I give you a course of antibiotics, will you promise me that you’ll take the whole course?’
‘How long is a course?’ he parried warily.
‘Just until you come back to have your stitches taken out?’ she bargained, her heart aching that there was so little she could do for him. ‘A week? Would you be able to keep them out of sight for a week?’
‘Make it five days and I’ll do my best,’ he countered, then grinned cheekily. ‘And that’s only because you asked nicely.’
‘They break your heart sometimes, the way they’ve had to survive,’ said a quiet voice just behind her, and when Amy looked over her shoulder and up into Zach’s dark eyes she realised that he understood far more about the hell Tommy had gone through than she would ever know.
‘So, who is Mr Willmott?’ said that same voice right behind her in the cafeteria queue, and Amy gasped, dragged out of her pessimistic thoughts about young Tommy’s chances of surviving into his twenties by the man who could have ended up just like Tommy, if his teachers had been right.
‘Dr Willmott,’ she corrected automatically, only remembering as she said it that, of course, it had reverted to Mr when Edward had climbed up the next rung of the promotion ladder. Not that it was relevant any more.
‘Really,’ Zach said as he took a tray from the pile and kept pace with her slow shuffle in the queue towards the hot meals. ‘I presume he works here. Is he in A and E, too, or one of the other departments?’
‘No, he doesn’t work here.’ Suddenly she felt strangely guilty to be talking about her husband with Zach, but couldn’t find a way to end the conversation without sounding rude. ‘He’s…He was killed. A year ago. On the motorway.’
The words emerged in jerky lumps. Uncomfortable. Unpractised.
After the initial ‘getting to know you’ enquiries, the other A and E staff had tactfully refrained from asking for any more painful details and she certainly hadn’t volunteered. The only people who talked about Edward any more were her parents, bewailing the loss of her handsome, successful husband every time she set foot in their house, and his parents, endlessly, when she made her duty visits.
And yet…for the first time, she actually wanted to talk about what had happened. Did this mean that she was actually coming to terms with her loss, or was it because it was Zach she was telling?
Almost as soon as they were sitting down she found the stark details pouring out of her as if she needed to purge herself of the words. Somehow, in spite of the fact that she hadn’t seen him for so many years—and hadn’t really known him well even then—she knew that she could trust him with her confidences.
‘There was a pile-up in bad weather…dozens of cars involved…a woman had been thrown out of a vehicle. Apparently, Edward saw it happen. He pulled over and got out to help and was hit by another car. He was killed instantly.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Zach said, visibly shocked and clearly at a loss for what to say.
‘He