stopped off at his car for a couple of joints before coming to the bar.
“Andrew, my sweet boy.” He pushed his mouth close to my ear. “You reek of sex,” he whispered. “Come all over your clothes?”
Fuckityfuckityfuck. There was no way I was going to look down and find out, but it was one detail that had escaped me at the time.
“Think I might just go home,” I said to F and he nodded sagely.
“Smart move there. Leave me here with the BMA rep, why don’t you?”
“Don’t drive.”
He nodded and pursed his lips. “Not going to. Have given my keys to, um, someone. Think she was a blonde.” He looked hopefully around the crowd at the bar, and I left him risking life and limb by frisking people at random, presumably in search of his keys.
F was right, I did reek of sex, and in the car I ran an experimental hand over my clothes. Yep, there was a good reason for the pervasive smell.
At home, I changed my work clothes for jeans and T-shirt, and changed my sheets, too. Food would require some thought, eventually, and possibly a stop for more take-away.
There weren’t crashing waves of noise rolling out of Matthew’s house, but still no one answered when I knocked repeatedly on the door. I eventually pushed it open and found myself staring at a room of scabby looking students, one of whom was pushing an entire piece of pizza into his mouth, while another one sucked on a bong.
“Is Matthew around?” I asked, and a boy shrugged. And the boy proved to be a girl when she lifted her arm and dropped it around the shoulders of the boy … person …
beside her, displaying obvious breast tissue.
“Who?” she asked.
“Matthew. Medical student, gay?” I asked. Henry was going to grow up to be just like this, I could tell.
“Yeah,” someone with wispy facial hair said. “Upstairs.”
They turned their attention away from me, so I stepped over the snaking ADSL cabling and climbed the stairs. Sure, I’d been a drug-fucked student myself, at least for as long as it took for me to work out that I’d fail unless I did some work, but I didn’t remember ever being that out of it.
F, on the other hand, had presumably spent his entire medical degree off his face.
There was no answer when I tapped on Matthew’s door so I pushed the door open carefully. Matthew was asleep on the mattress on the floor, reading lamp on the floor beside him, Medical Microbiology, by Mims and sycophants, on the pillow beside him.
There was an inarticulate shout from downstairs and I pushed the door closed again and kicked my shoes off.
Matthew didn’t stir as I stepped onto the futon and carefully lay down on the bunched-up sheet beside him. He was obviously exhausted; I could wait for him to wake up.
My pager vibrated on my hip, and I ignored it, and got to my cell phone and turned it off before the hospital called to see why I hadn’t answered my pager.
This was what had put me off fucking fellow medical types; it always felt like there was a third person (or on one memorable occasion, a fourth) in the bed with you. Someone who would page you at random, who wanted to swab you for MRSA during sex, someone that thought you actually wanted to work a weekend shift. Nobody in their right mind would sleep with a doctor, not even another doctor.
Not that sharing my life with a musician had actually been any easier. Never share a house with someone who plays an amplified instrument, and if you have to, disable the amp at bedtime each night. That little fuse is your friend. Never travel with someone who insists their instrument has to sit on their lap the whole time, especially if you have a child with them. For that matter, never travel with a child either.
Lying there, listening to Matthew breathe, listening to the rise and fall of voices from downstairs, and the sound of distressed plumbing somewhere in the building, was peaceful.
I wasn’t sleepy; I’d stopped feeling tired sometime during my first year as a fuckwit house physician. The bit of me that was supposed to warn me about exhaustion had burnt out years ago, like an asthmatic’s central respiratory chemoreceptors no longer responding to falls in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in arterial blood.
Some time later—I wasn’t sure how long, but it was long enough that I had become so bored that reading Mims and the sycophants had begun to seem appealing—Matthew stretched and stirred and rolled over to settle against me.
“You’re here,” he said sleepily. Sleepy people are allowed to state the obvious.
“Yeah. Didn’t want to wake you up.” He was warm against my skin, even through the layers of clothing between us, and the reading light flickered as the electrical wiring in the house struggled with the load of the stereo that had just been turned on downstairs. “How do you manage to sleep here?” I asked him.
“Earplugs,” he said.
Matthew moved, leaning across to kiss me, and I could feel the hard ridge of his cock through the layers of clothing. God, I remembered what it was like to be that young, then his fingers found the buttons of my jeans, and I didn’t feel quite so old any more.
Things were just starting to get interesting when there was smash of breaking glass, and a shrill scream from downstairs, audible over the music.
“Matthew!” someone shouted, and we both took off out of the room and down the stairs.
Whoever the stupid fuck was that decided forty years ago that sliding glass doors were fashionable should fucking well have to come and clean up this sort of mess.
“Turn the music off!” I shouted, and I squatted down beside the young woman, who was kneeling down amidst the shattered glass, blood welling freely from her arm.
Matthew handed me a pair of latex gloves, and I had a vague memory now of there being some beside the bed. “Call an ambulance, tell them it’s a hemorrhage,” I said. I peeled the girl’s hand off her arm, and silence descended on the house.
She was sobbing, quite reasonably in my opinion considering the mess she’d made of the tendons in her arm, and I said, “I’m a doctor. Let me have a look.”
Oh, yeah, great chunks of glass in her arm. I couldn’t apply pressure until the worst of them were out, so I grabbed the bits I could see and pulled them out. Matthew was doing the right thing, gloves on, too, soothing the woman, who was called Heidi, trying to stop her from pulling at her arm. There must have been people standing around, but if they didn’t get in the way, I wasn’t interested in them.
The big shards came out easily enough, and there was fuck all I could do about the smaller bits without some decent supplies, so I took the wadded-up shirt Matthew handed me, and pushed the ragged edges of the wound together as well as I could, then wrapped the shirt around the girl’s arm and clamped my hand over the top. There was blood welling up through the fabric, but I’d be damned if I was going to try do anything as fancy as tie off an artery when there was an ambulance a few minutes away.
“Do you have a medical kit in your car?” Matthew asked me, and I shook my head. Medical kits were for doctors who didn’t get pissed off at them being stolen all the time, not for me.
The losers in the house must have rubbed their mutual brain cells together, because they carried the mattress from the living room over, and we lifted Heidi onto it. This was an improvement. With Heidi lying down, I could get some decent elevation on the arm and have a better chance of slowing the blood loss.
“Have you got an IV catheter kit here?” I asked Matthew, and he nodded and bolted back up the stairs. I’d hoped he would have; like the NGTs it was something he could reasonably be expected to practice on himself. And if I could get a line in ready for the paramedics, it would speed things up for them, and if Heidi lost enough blood that her veins went flat, an existing line could make all the difference…
Matthew was back in a moment, handing me a bundle of equipment. “Take over,” I said. Matthew’s hands clamped over mine, and I slid mine out.
Jesus Christ, we were both awash with blood now.
I ripped the catheter kit open and put it on the bed beside Heidi, who was starting to look a little shocky. Damn, but I didn’t want to be doing this, and I supposed Heidi probably felt the same way, too.
The IV catheter went in first go. That was one of the advantages of general medicine; I’d spent all my
