‘Just because someone doesn’t spill out their heart, Ruby, it doesn’t mean they don’t still have feelings.’ Jess would not be swayed. ‘We all hurt, Ruby.’ Jess huffed off to bed, no doubt to stick pins in a little doll she’d name Caroline. ‘We just all have different ways of showing it.’
RUBY leapt on the phone when it rang the next evening. Dressed for her shift, her heart leapt in hope that it might be Cort, that he might want to clear the air before she commenced her shifts, but the voice on the other end brought no relief. ‘ I just wanted to check that you’re coming to church on Sunday.’ Ruby closed her eyes at the sound of her mother’s voice on the phone.
‘I’m on nights,’ Ruby said, because even if it killed her, she’d at least have died trying.
‘You just said you were working Thursday, Friday, Saturday.’
‘Which means I’ll be home in bed on Sunday,’ Ruby explained as patiently as she could.
‘Your dad does whole weekends without sleep, and he’s doing a reading this Sunday. It would be nice if his family was there,’ her mum said. ‘It’s the nine a.m. service. If you take Adam’s car to work, you’ll get there in time. I’ll do a nice lamb roast.’
And that was it.
There was just no point arguing.
‘How’s your mum?’ Tilly asked when she hung up the phone.
‘Still keeping the peace,’ Ruby said. She was in her navy shorts and white shirt and her hair was tied tight. If you didn’t know how much she was shaking inside, she could almost have passed for a nurse. ‘Still keeping the chief happy!’
‘Come on,’ Tilly said. ‘I’ll walk with you.’
They walked up the hill under the lovely moon that had once held so much promise and Ruby was so glad to have her friend beside her.
‘Cort was widowed recently,’ Ruby said. Was it breaking a confidence to confide in her best friend when her heart was breaking? Probably, but she knew it would never be repeated by Tilly, not even to the others, and she was very grateful when Tilly said nothing for a little while and just walked on.
‘How recently?’ Tilly asked.
‘A month,’ Ruby said. ‘Well, it was a month when we …’ It still made her stomach churn to think of it. ‘She was in a car accident a few years ago—she had a head injury.’
‘It sounds like he lost her a long time ago,’ Tilly said gently.
‘Still …’
‘We had a couple the other week,’ Tilly said, ‘they were just so happy, so excited to be having this baby, and I found out halfway through labour that the baby wasn’t actually his—she’d lost her partner right at the start of the pregnancy.’ And they walked up the hill and Ruby listened. ‘It’s none of my business,’
Tilly said, ‘but I couldn’t get it at first, how she could move on so quickly. And then I saw the love, and I saw how happy they were and how he was with the baby …’ Tilly was the kindest person Ruby knew. ‘Don’t judge him, Ruby.’
‘He should have told me.’
‘When?’ Tilly asked. ‘You wanted him out the next morning …’
‘He hasn’t told anyone about her,’ Ruby said. ‘Even his colleagues don’t know or most of his friends.’ Tilly turned then and looked at her.
‘Hurts, doesn’t it? When someone you care about can’t confide in you?’ But Tilly didn’t hold grudges and she gave her friend a hug as the lights of Emergency came into view. ‘Maybe he had his reasons.’
‘I think I was supposed to be his get back out there fling.’
‘And what was he supposed to be?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ruby admitted. ‘If I’d even thought about it for a moment it would never have happened. I’ve just made things a whole lot more complicated—not only do I have to face Emergency, I have to work alongside him, after all the terrible things that I said.’
‘Then say sorry.’
‘What if he won’t accept it?’
‘Then at least you’ll have said it.’ Which wasn’t the answer Ruby wanted, but it was, she knew, the right one.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Tilly said. ‘No running away.’
‘I won’t.’
At night the side door wasn’t open so she had to walk through the waiting room and already it was steaming, two people asking her on her way through how much longer they would have to wait. Already her temples were pounding, but she went to the staffroom, took out a little white teapot she had painted her name on in red nail varnish, made a big pot of herbal tea and told herself she could do this.
‘Evening, Ruby!’ Sheila gave a tight smile as she walked into the staffroom and Cort deliberately didn’t turn his head from the television. ‘Ready for some action?’
‘Bring it on!’ Ruby smiled.
Cort had been unable to comprehend that she, that anyone, could throw so much away for the sake of three nights, but as the weekend progressed, he started to see it.
See what he never really had before.
It was like finding out about sex when he had been younger. Suddenly it was there glaring at him at every turn—how on earth had he not noticed? Now, though, it was the dark side of A and E that was illuminated. All the stuff he usually just ignored or shrugged off or put up with was blazingly obvious, and there was this part of him that wanted to shield her from it. There were fights breaking out in the waiting room, angry relatives, abusive patients and the drama of sudden illness. He watched her face become pinched, even though she smiled; he saw her eyes shutter regularly as if another knife had been stabbed in her back; and he started to see that for some, the emergency room was damaging.
Not that he could do anything about it.
Once she tried to talk to him, but Cort was still too churned up, and he blanked her, then regretted it all through the next day when he couldn’t sleep, wondering if she’d be back.
She was.
To a place that was twice as busy and twice as angry as before, and he noticed it—all of it—even the little things he would never have seen before.
‘I’ll eat my supper here.’ Siobhan peeled off the lid of her container. Ruby had made it through Thursday and was back for round two—a busy Friday night and the patients were particularly feral.
Siobhan was in the grumpiest of moods because she’d been brought back from the staffroom as the numbers were too low for her to take a proper break. They had a young overdose in cubicle six and they couldn’t identify the tablets she’d taken, despite poring through books and the internet, and Sheila had asked Siobhan to make a phone call. Now Siobhan sat, stuck on hold to Poisons Information, as Cort tried to work out a drug dose. He watched Ruby’s shoulders tense as Siobhan’s bored eyes fell on the student