‘Sure.’
‘But, Jasmine,’ Louise said, ‘how are you going to keep on doing this? I’m going away soon and if they can change your roster at five minutes’ notice and expect you to comply, how are you going to manage?’
‘I’ve a meeting with a babysitter at the weekend,’ Jasmine told her mum. ‘She’s coming over and I’ll see how she gets on with Simon.’
‘How much is a babysitter going to cost?’ Louise asked, and Jasmine chose not to answer, but really something would have to give.
Paying the crèche was bad enough, but by the time she’d paid a babysitter to pick Simon up for her late shifts and stints on nights, well, it was more complicated than Jasmine had the time to allocate it right now.
‘How are things with Penny at work?’ Louise asked.
‘It seems okay.’ Jasmine shrugged. ‘She’s just been on nights herself so I haven’t seen much of her, and when I do she’s no more horrible to me than she is to everybody else.’
‘And no one’s worked out that you’re sisters?’
‘How could they?’ Jasmine said. ‘Penny hasn’t said anything and no one is going to hear it from me.’
‘Well, make sure that they don’t,’ Louise warned. ‘Penny doesn’t need any stress right now. She’s worked up enough as it is with this promotion coming up. Maybe once that’s over with she’ll come around to the idea a bit more.’
‘I’d better get going.’ Jasmine gave Simon a cuddle and held him just an extra bit tight.
‘Are you okay?’ Louise checked.
‘I’m fine,’ Jasmine said, but as she got to the car she remembered why she was feeling more than a little out of sorts. And, no, she hadn’t shared it with her mum and certainly she wouldn’t be ringing up Penny for a chat to sort out her feelings.
There on the driver’s seat was her newly opened post and even though she’d been waiting for it, even though she wanted it, it felt strange to find out in such a banal way that she was now officially divorced.
Yes, she’d been looking forward to the glorious day, only the reality of it gave her no reason to smile.
Her marriage had been the biggest mistake of her life.
The one good thing to come out of it was Simon.
The only good thing, Jasmine thought, stuffing the papers into her glove box, and, not for the first time she felt angry.
She’d been duped so badly.
Completely lied to from the start.
Yes, she loved Simon with all her heart, but this was never the way she’d intended to raise a child. With a catalogue of crèches and babysitters and scraping to make ends meet and a father who, despite so many promises, when the truth had been exposed, when his smooth veneer had been cracked and the real Lloyd had surfaced, rather than facing himself had resumed the lie his life was and had turned his back and simply didn’t want to know his own son.
‘Are you okay?’ Vanessa checked later as they headed out of the locker rooms.
‘I’m fine,’ Jasmine said, but hearing the tension in her own voice and realising she’d been slamming about a bit in the locker room, she conceded, ‘My divorce just came through.’
‘Yay!’ said Vanessa, and it was a new friend she turned to rather than her family. ‘You should be out celebrating instead of working.’
‘I will,’ Jasmine said. ‘Just not yet.’
‘Are you upset?’
‘Not upset,’ Jasmine said. ‘Just angry.’
‘Excuse me.’ They stepped aside as a rather grumpy Dr Devlin brushed passed.
‘Someone got out of the wrong side of bed,’ Vanessa said.
Jasmine didn’t get Jed.
She did not understand why he had changed so rapidly.
But he had.
From the nice guy she had met he was very brusque.
Very brusque.
Not just to her, but to everyone. Still, Jasmine could be brusque too when she had to be, and on a busy night in Emergency, sometimes that was exactly what you had to be.
‘You’ve done this before!’ Greg, the charge nurse, grinned as Jasmine shooed a group of inebriated teenagers down to the waiting room. They were worried about their friend who’d been stabbed but were starting to fight amongst themselves.
‘I used to be a bouncer at a night club.’ Jasmine winked at her patient, who was being examined by Jed.
Greg laughed and even the patient smiled.
Jed just carried right on ignoring her.
Which was understandable perhaps, given that they were incredibly busy.
But what wasn’t understandable to Jasmine was that he refused a piece of the massive hazelnut chocolate bar she opened at about one a.m., when everyone else fell on it.
Who doesn’t like chocolate? Jasmine thought as he drank water.
Maybe he was worried about his figure?
He stood outside the cubicle now, writing up the card. ‘Check his pedal pulses every fifteen minutes.’ He thrust her a card and she read his instructions.
‘What about analgesia?’ Jasmine checked.
‘I’ve written him up for pethidine.’
‘No.’ Jasmine glanced down at the card. ‘You haven’t.’
Jed took the card from her and rubbed his hand over his unshaven chin, and Jasmine tried to tell herself that he had his razor set that way, that he cultivated the unshaven, up-all-night, just-got-out-of-bed look, that this man’s looks were no accident.
Except he had been up all night.
Jed let out an irritated hiss as he read through the patient’s treatment card, as if she were the one who had made the simple mistake, and then wrote up the prescription in his messy scrawl.
‘Thank you!’ Jasmine smiled sweetly—just to annoy him.
She didn’t get a smile back.
Mind you, the place was too busy to worry about Jed’s bad mood and brooding good looks, which seemed to get more brooding with every hour that passed.
At six a.m., just as things were starting to calm down, just as they were starting to catch up and tidy the place for the day staff, Jasmine found out just how hard this job could be at times.
Found, just as she was starting to maybe get into the swing of things, that perhaps this wasn’t the place she really wanted to be after all.
They were alerted that a two-week-old paediatric arrest was on his way in but the ambulance had arrived before they had even put the emergency call out.
Jasmine took the hysterical parents into an interview room and tried to get any details as best she could as the overhead loudspeaker went off, urgently summoning the paediatric crash team to Emergency. It played loudly in the interview room also, each chime echoing the urgency, and there was the sound of footsteps running and doors slamming, adding to the parents’ fear.
‘The doctors are all with your baby,’ Jasmine said. ‘Let them do their work.’ Cathy, the new mum, still looked pregnant. She kept saying she had only had him two weeks and that this couldn’t be happening, that she’d taken him out of his crib and