I’d met Olivia several times at Jackie’s house, and knew her well enough to know that she had a passion for dachshunds, merlot, and Monty Python, having spent more than one boozy dinner listening to her and Jackie’s wife tell scurrilous tales about when Jackie was a young and ill-informed house physician.
She barreled down the depressing grey corridor, dodging wonky chairs and abandoned trolleys of files, waving at me.
“Andrew!” she called out, her voice booming. “Good to see you when I’m not blind drunk,” she shouted, slapping me hard on the back.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said to her, and she clamped her hand on my elbow and steered me down the corridor, whether I wanted to go there or not.
“Not a problem,” she said, pushing me into a great vault of a room and slamming the door after herself.
There was a desk in one corner, with the ubiquitous plastic chairs around it, and I sat down and stared at the ceiling with disbelief. Whatever the room had been before, the ducting, plumbing, wiring and scaffolding had been left undisturbed and merely painted white in a vain attempt to disguise it all.
“In the fifties they had some kind of hypobaric chamber in here,” Olivia said. “Not sure why they’ve never removed all the plumbing for it, just means I have the largest office in the hospital.” She grinned at me. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard you were looking for a job here. I even phoned that Jackson bastard to find out why he’d fired you. Turns out he hadn’t, admin had.”
“Yep,” I said. “Comes from being a union agitator.”
“That’d be the problems with that fuckwit Seagate, wouldn’t it?” Olivia said, and I just loved her for it. “Couldn’t quite believe it when the morons in admin here decided they wanted him on staff; the man is a lawsuit looking for somewhere to happen.”
“Perhaps they’re insisting he pays all his own malpractice insurance. Or perhaps it’s just that he’s the best damn nephrologist I’ve ever seen,” I said.
Olivia harrumphed. “Then the word comes down from on high that not only are we getting that aggressive little bastard, but he was bringing you and some other troublemaker with him, and that someone had found a secret supply of money to fund a new registrar’s position. I’ve been campaigning for another registrar for years.”
“It’s that simple?” I asked. “I’ve got a job here?”
Olivia leaned across the desk and held out her hand.
“Welcome to London. Don’t drink the water, hitchhike, or eat any food from a roadside stall. Of course, I need to explain that you won’t actually be solely oncology; immunology, cardiology and rheumatology all want a piece of the action.”
“General slave?” I asked, and I could feel myself grinning.
“Yep,” Olivia said. “Guess they’ll give you a resident eventually. Come on, I’ll walk you around the wards you’ll mostly be working on.”
I came home with my head full, a jumble of new faces and labyrinthine Victorian wards, overlaid with the universal constants of hospitals; the smell of bad food and isopropyl alcohol.
The lights were on when I put my key in the door, and I could hear music. Matthew was accompanying the stereo in the kitchen, singing badly, and as I didn’t recognise the music, it must have been one of his CDs. He appeared as I closed the door behind myself.
“Hey,” he said, kissing my cheek. “Hope it’s all right for me to be here, even though you hadn’t invited me.”
“I gave you a key,” I said, and I touched his face for a moment, suddenly blown away by the enormity of what his being here meant. “You can come around any time you want, as often as you want.”
We kissed for a while, gentle and undemanding, and Matthew smiled at me. “I’m cooking; hope you’re going to like it.”
It had been years since I’d come home from work and found someone cooking for me; it was something Tim and I had never done. Tim thought food was a temptation to be denied, and I thought food was like sex. You could get along without it, or with really basic food, for quite a while, but it was hard to be happy unless you had plenty on hand, just in case you got hungry.
“Smells great,” I said. “What’re we eating?”
“Nothing fancy, just stir fry with a tin of satay mix in it,”
Matthew said. “I found stuff in your cupboards. Have you been doing job interviews? You’ve got your best shirt on.”
I was kind of surprised that Matthew had observed enough of my meagre wardrobe to work out which was my least stained shirt, but he obviously had. “I’ve got a job,” I said.
“At London Hospital. No idea when I start or anything like that.”
“Is it a good job?” Matthew said, grinning with delight, making me grin, too. God, I just couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“It’s a fucking brilliant job,” I said. “I’ll be a palliative care registrar, kind of floating all over the hospital, though I’m guessing that oncology will think they own me. It’s far better than grinding my days away in general medicine; this is specialising in something that I really want to do.”
I flopped down onto the couch and Matthew straddled my lap. “Great!” he said, and I speculated about what would happen if I started undressing him. Guess we wouldn’t get dinner, though. “Any disadvantages?” he asked. “Or is this a dream job?”
“Ihavetositmyphysician’sexams,” I said quickly, hoping that it wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t think about it.
“That’s not good, is it?” Matthew asked, and I shook my head.
“Think both of us are going to be studying hard, not just you,” I said.
He wrinkled his nose at me and said, “I won’t distract you, if you don’t distract me.”
I squeezed his ass, and chuckled, then slid a hand around to unzip his fly, knowing he had nothing on underneath.
“Think you should borrow some of my shorts then, because I’m kinda obsessing about your cock at the moment.”
Chapter Forty Two
There was a sustained shout from downstairs, and the sound of glass shattering, but I didn’t run down the stairs to see if anyone was hurt. I’d have to actually care for that happen.
I hated my housemates at that moment. The stereo was so loud that the floor boards were humming faintly, I hadn’t been able to use either loo for a couple of hours, the stairs were so packed with people that just getting out of my room was problematic, and people I didn’t know kept opening my door every few minutes, looking for somewhere to fuck.
It was Heidi’s welcome home party, and the cops had already been called twice.
There was another crash, clearly audible through my headphones. There was no way I could study through this, and I certainly wasn’t going to be able to sleep. There wasn’t enough credit on my phone to actually call Andrew, so I texted him, ‘please call me.’
I had intended studying, to make sure I wasn’t falling behind, really hit the books hard, then go over to Andrew’s tomorrow evening for a meal and some silent sex, but I was going to fucking kill the next person who opened my bedroom door.
The door opened and I shouted out, “Fuck off!” to the person who’d opened it without even looking up from my pathohistology text.
My phone vibrated in my hand, and I took off my headphones and put it against my ear hard.
It was Andrew, though I couldn’t hear him clearly enough to know what he was saying.
“Can you come and get me?” I shouted into the phone.
I caught his answer. “On my way,” he shouted back.
I packed my textbooks, laptop, and some clothes into my pack, then looked around the room to see if there
