‘Okay, I get that,’ Roxy said. She’d taken a step back from her foil mountain and was talking to Ailish via the mirror again. ‘But don’t you ever wonder, just for a minute, what it would have been like to be with the other guy? The sexy waiter?’
Ailish dropped their eye contact as she felt a red heat begin to tingle in her neck again.
‘Well, maybe once or twice…’
18
EMMY
Emmy tossed her phone on the desk of the nursing station, then stretched back in her chair and groaned.
‘I swear on all that is fricking holy, I. Am. Having. The. Worst. Day. Ever.’
‘Not as bad as Mrs Leckie in bed number six,’ Yvie deadpanned. ‘She’s just discovered that her dog bit her neighbour’s arse when he went in to feed it because she’s stuck in here. The poor man is down in casualty waiting for a tetanus.’
‘And Mr Catterson in bed 14 has just got the results of his tests back,’ Keli said, not even glancing up from the chart she was writing on. ‘Syphilis. Apparently, there’s been a four-way romance situation going on over at the care home and he had no idea. Poor man is distraught.’
In the middle, Emmy looked from one of them to the other. ‘You know, you two are really taking the jam right out of the middle of my doughnut today. Couldn’t you just have let me have my moment? I’m trying to be seriously pathetic here, and you keep snapping me out of it. You’re terrible friends.’
That pulled Keli from her chart, and she looked up, smiling. ‘We are. Forgive us. Carry on, please. Tell us all the reasons your problems are worse than syphilis.’
Sometimes it was hard to keep a straight face around these two, but Emmy appreciated that they at least tried to make her laugh in times of high-level irritation. It was just as well that the nursing station was out of earshot of the rooms on the ward and all the patients, because there was very little that didn’t get discussed there.
‘Fine. Maybe not exactly worse than syphilis, but everyone who’s still in here is beginning to feel a bit sad because they’re not going to be with their loved ones tonight, we almost misplaced a patient, my dad’s lost the plot and may be contemplating stalking my mother, my mum has finally got off the couch and appears to have decided it’s time to party, I’m deeply suspicious that my boyfriend is having an affair as he’s now hiding his location from me and I nearly rear-ended my car this morning because I thought I saw him somewhere he shouldn’t be, and now I’ve been trying to call my granny, the one sane person left in my universe, and she’s not picking up her phone. The world hates me.’
‘But at least…’ Keli began, and Emmy immediately put her hand up to stop her.
‘I know. I don’t have syphilis.’
Keli grinned. ‘Exactly!’
Yvie stretched over her to reach the stapler. ‘Are you worried about your gran? Does she usually answer?’
Emmy shook her head. ‘No more than usual. She’s terrible for not picking up the phone if she’s busy, and if she goes upstairs for an afternoon nap, she can’t hear it. She refuses to have a phone upstairs because she says it’ll just interfere with her relaxation if it rings and disturbs her.’
Keli was back on chart-writing again but still engaged in the conversation. ‘I love your gran. We should all be more like Minnie. Bugger the world – if we don’t want to be disturbed, then we won’t be.’
‘Exactly. Although she does also think that the Rolling Stones should make another comeback, that you should wear a natty knitted scarf at all times and that all ailments can be cured by a sausage roll.’
‘That’s me won over too,’ Yvie concurred. ‘I’m for making Minnie Prime Minister.’
‘I’ll try her again in a few minutes. If she’s sleeping, then I really don’t want to wake her. In the meantime, I’ll select one of my other issues at random and ruminate over that for the next half an hour.’
The buzzer to Emmy’s left suddenly went off, making her jump, and all three of them swung their heads to the security screen.
Keli got there first. ‘Em, I think one of your issues may be standing at the door.’
By this time, Emmy had spotted it too, but she wondered if she was hallucinating. Cormac. There. Waiting to be let in. She reached for the button to open the door, mind whirring. What was happening? What was wrong? She could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d popped into to the ward. There was the first time they’d met, when he’d visit one of her patients, and once when he’d been brought into A&E downstairs, to be checked out after a smoke-inhalation situation. He’d come up after he’d been cleared just to let her know about it and tell her he was fine. The only other occasions were when she’d forgotten to bring something in and asked him if he could drop it off. None of which applied here, so it was with some trepidation that she buzzed him in.
It only took him a few seconds to cover the distance from the door to the nursing station, by which time, Emmy was on her feet and got in first with, ‘Hi. Is everything okay?’
Cormac gave her the smile that had won her over the very first time that she’d met him. ‘Yeah. I was literally just passing and thought I’d say hello since I won’t see you until tomorrow morning. How you doing, Keli? Yvie, all good?’
He was always so lovely to her friends, who returned the greeting, then moved discreetly to a desk a few feet away and carried on with their work.
Emmy’s brain took that very moment to start working overtime. This was odd. Out of character. Why was he doing this? And why was she completely terrified to just take him somewhere private and ask him straight out what was going on?
Instead, she was channelling some kind of rom com fake sweetness. ‘Aw, that’s really nice,’ she said, with the smile that he said had won him over the very first time he’d met her. She then tried a minor ambush with, ‘How come you’re out of uniform?’ He was still wearing the clothes he’d left in this morning. Usually, he changed as soon as he got to the station, and even if he was nipping out to Civvy Street, he’d normally keep on his uniform trousers and T-shirt, and just throw a jacket over them.
