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Flu (chapter 6)

Empty

The week from Christmas to New Year was a blur of illness and death. After the dawning of the New Year, the spread of the flu seemed to slow. Gradually, the targets were met; fewer people were admitted to hospital, fewer people died. Finally a cocktail of medications was found to be effective and the pandemic was officially downgraded.

Claire found it a privilege to return to medicine again, to hold answers in her brain and cures in her hands. The hospital felt like home again, although the thought of her own home sat in her heart like a stone. The single medics with no dependents had been asked to volunteer to remain in their hospital accommodation in case of a recurrence; she had gladly signed the form and even more gladly fell into her bunk at the end of each day with only the usual bone-tiredness.

The medical staff were lectured by shouty army-types about maintaining strict infection controls, but the mood had noticeably lightened. A demonstration of the correct method of removing scrubs was accompanied by a wolf whistle from the back of the lecture hall and an impromptu phonetic rendition of the introductory chords of ‘Hot Stuff’. The resulting hilarity drowned out the officer as he vainly tried to maintain some semblance of professionalism.

Jamie wiped tears from his eyes and emitted a sound which could only be described as a giggle. ‘I thought he was going to hurl the board duster at me,’ he whispered to Claire. ‘My maths teacher fired one at me once and hit me square on the nose.’

‘What for?’

‘Talkin,’ he grinned. ‘I was trying to flirt with the pretty girl sitting next to me.’

‘Did it work?’

He grimaced and made what she could only describe as a Scottish noise. ‘Nah. And the duster gave off a cloud of dust and I had to sit there like Caspar the Friendly Ghost until the bell rang’.

Choking back giggles of her own, Claire jumped when Geilis poked her squarely in the back and dropped a folded note down. In keeping with the theme of teenage behaviour, Geilis had drawn two heart bubbles with a J and a C, annotated with ‘kissing in a tree’. She had also added ‘empty in ward 75 tonight?’

The officer had resorted to full parade volume by this point, preventing a reply. Claire nudged Jamie and pointed to the message. He snickered before catching her confusion. ‘Tell ye later’.

An empty, Geilis explained to Claire, was when one’s parents went away on holiday and foolishly entrusted their teenage offspring with an empty house. The initial mood of the Ward 75 reunion was more sombre, as one by one the team reassembled in the dusk and performed a silent roll call.

Glasses were raised and toasts made to honour the memories of Angus’ girlfriend and Rupert’s two siblings. Colleagues were commemorated through tales of hazings, miracles and long-forgotten nights out. Friends and lovers were introduced in spirit, their souls commended into the hands of someone or something more than them, reminded that they’d meet again.

In the haze of Geilis’ home-poured measures, Jamie and Claire had long abandoned the pretence of just sitting next to each other. She was lying on his lap, his arms wrapped around her. At some point, as the sing-song was getting started, they wandered off to the Ridge hand-in-hand to sober up under the stars. 

‘I can’t go home alone, Jamie,’ she whispered eventually. 

‘Good. I can’t either.’