All She Wants

by Marchant A. J.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Other Titles

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  Epilogue

  Author Note

  Copyright © A.J. Marchant 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  If you’d like to get in touch-

  Click here to see other works by A.J.

  Email: ajmarchantwrites@gmail.com

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  Website: www.ajmwrites.com

  Time Undone

  August

  Where The Light Lasts Longer

  Mine First: A Thriller Romance

  All She Wants: A Christmas Romance

  Prose & Procrastination: A Zine

  Vol01 Call It What You Will

  1

  TILDA’S SHIFT FINISHED four hours ago. Three hours ago, she’d been told to go home. Get some sleep. Don’t come back until your next shift, when you’re supposed to be here. After she lingered for another half hour, she was forcibly pushed through the emergency room doors by an intern, and she staggered to the break room. She showered, dressed, got her boots from her locker and sat down to put them on.

  That was two hours ago, and now Tilda woke with her chin on her chest, feet still bare, a kink in her neck, and the sun rising outside the window.

  There was a post-it note stuck to her arm; Good Morning, Doc. You drool in your sleep. :-)

  Tilda checked her shirt, wiped her mouth. ‘Liar.’

  The note was written in Bernie’s scribble. The only sixty-something-year old doctor Tilda knew who signed her notes with a smiley face.

  She stood, stretched, paced a lap of the break room. It wasn’t an odd thing for her to sleep at the hospital, but she’d never conked out in a chair like that. Someone had made coffee, her cup still in the sink where she’d left it. Tilda poured a few mouthfuls in and then gulped them down. In the cupboard on the far left, right at the top, was her stash of good teabags and snacks, hidden behind containers of sultanas and dried apples that had been there since her first shift years and years ago. Tilda stood on a chair and scanned her options. She grabbed a muesli bar and went to stuff it in her top pocket. But there was no pocket; she wasn’t wearing her scrub top.

  Still standing on the chair, Tilda turned. The break room was tidy, chairs all in order and the table recently wiped clean, she could see the streaks. Lines of light fell through the window, the blinds half open and tilted down. It was a red light, a summer sun. A new day. It would be a hot day. Like the day before, and the day coming. Cool air filtered through the vent above her.

  ‘I should go home.’ Tilda tapped the muesli bar against her leg. Go home. Get some sleep in an actual bed. See the world outside the walls of the hospital for a bit. Instead, she jumped down, grabbed clean scrubs from the shelf and changed back into them. She grabbed her lab coat from the hook in her locker, checked the little notebook was still in its pocket, counted the pens hooked over the fabric. Yes, and three; same as always. She put her boots back and pulled on her runners, stuffed half the muesli bar into her mouth, tossed the rest into the locker, and started chewing as she walked out of the break room and along the corridor.

  Strings of gold tinsel twirled around the railing, drooping now and then where the tape had come unstuck. December had hardly started when the Christmas decorations appeared. Now, it looked like elves had thrown up all over the place; tinsel and baubles and paper stars and pieces of white wadding stretched out to look like piles of fake snow. Tilda was constantly getting tangled, taking more pleasure than she should when she heard fairy lights clatter down in her wake. Not long and it’ll all be gone. Day after Christmas, everything would go back to normal.

  See, Tilda hated Christmas. Loathed it. All the cheer and the singing and the decorations. Every single television channel showing a Christmas movie, none of them anything like real life. She may be back home in a rural town, but she’d spent enough time as an intern in a city hospital to know the realities of the holiday season. She’d seen it all, the chaos and casualties of Christmas. Food poisoning. Alcohol poisoning. Broken bones and black eyes and concussions from fighting over the last of some stupid toy. Attempted suicides. Successful ones, too. People electrocuted by Christmas lights, burned trying to deep-fry something that should never be deep-fried, getting stabbed by family members. If she had a matching knife for every fork she’d pulled from a patient’s hand, she’d have more cutlery than anyone would ever need.

  Eleven months of the year, the emergency room was her happy place. Now, there was a stubby plastic Christmas tree on the counter, with a creepy face that moved and a corny recording of a song that started whenever someone walked past. Scared the crap out of her every time. Even now, when she was expecting it, it still made her jump. She picked it up, flipped it over and searched out the switch. She turned it off and put it back with a thud that made the plate of biscuits beside it rattle. A head popped up behind the counter at the noise, Bernie staring back at her, biting the arm off a gingerbread person that had a grumpy face and a lab coat drawn in icing; an imitation of Tilda, a running joke.

  ‘Please tell me that’s not your breakfast.’

  The wrinkles at the corners of Bernie’s eyes doubled as she smiled, talking around another bite. ‘You’re too young to be hangin’ around here all the time.’

  The place was always quiet in the early morning. Tilda and Bernie were the only doctors there. A few interns wandered through like puppies waiting for someone to play with. Tilda leaned on the counter and looked around at the beds. Most were empty, others had the curtains drawn around them. She didn’t have to look behind them to know who the patients were and why they were there. She’d been working when all of them had come in. The usual late night patients, admitted for observation, treatment, tests. But a few of them should have been out of there by now. Tilda glanced over her shoulder at the clock on the wall. Then again, late night-early morning, things moved slower if it wasn’t an immediate or urgent situation.

  ‘Maybe I should go see if—’

  But Bernie had read her mind. ‘I can handle it. Go home.’

  Attuned to the sound, Tilda heard the subtle hydraulic hush a moment before the automatic doors opened. A figure walked in from the ambulance bay. There’d been no siren, no slamming of heavy doors. It was only after the figure shuffled in under the fluorescent light that Tilda and Bernie saw who it was. Cliff; a frequent flyer.

  ‘I got him.’ Tilda moved before Bernie could stop her, smiling back at the scowl on her face. She could see Bernie’s mind working, tossing up whether to tell her again to go home and let an intern take Cliff, or if it would be easier to let Tilda take him so the others could actually work on sick patients. Bernie gave a tiny nod, unnecessary, but it made Tilda feel a little better about ignoring orders.

  ‘Hey Cliff. How’re you doing today?’ Tilda led h
im over to his regular bed in the corner, listening as he mumbled about hearing a persistent squeal, about the creak in his knee, and how the microwave sounded strange when it beeped, ‘I can only hear it in one ear, maybe I have a tumour?’

  Tilda helped him onto the bed and Cliff talked on as she went through the motions of putting the blood pressure cuff on him, taking his temperature, examining his eyes and throat. With a subtle movement she adjusted the volume of his hearing aid on the left, palmed the hearing aid from his right ear and setting it aside to change the battery. She propped his knees up with a pillow and then sat down in a chair beside the bed. Bernie brought over a pile of paperwork for her to catch up on, and Tilda spent the morning hanging out with Cliff, loneliness the real reason he came in so often.

  After a while, Tilda put the paperwork aside, and they ate lunch together—the cafeteria made a mean roast beef. Cliff had a million stories; how many of them were true was debatable, but they were always entertaining. People filtered in and out, moving around them as they came for equipment stored in the corner, out of the way. Tilda didn’t mind. She hardly noticed the time, no thought of leaving.

  A call came over the radio that made Bernie laugh as she sent an intern out to meet the incoming ambulance. Tilda leaned back in the chair, peering around the curtain. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jerry’s got heatstroke. Again.’ Bernie stood up, her shaking head not hiding her grin. Already moving, she chucked a pen back on the desk, ducking around the corner of the station towards the supply cart.

  Year after year, every Saturday in December, Jerry the local librarian was put in a Santa suit and sat in the middle of Memorial Park. And at least once every year, just as the heat of the afternoon hit its peak, he would be rushed in with heatstroke.

  ‘I’ll be back soon, Cliff. Get some rest and we’ll see how you feel.’ Tilda squeezed his shoulder, slipping his hearing aid into her pocket and heading for the station, searching through the drawers for the spare batteries they always kept on hand.

  2

  A FEW MINUTES later, paramedics wheeled Jerry in. They’d cut his suit off and piles of thick red velvet with fluffy white trim surrounded him. His cheeks were just as red under the white beard he shaved off like clockwork on Christmas Day, spending the rest of the year regrowing it. It took three of them on each side to transfer him over from the gurney, the rest of the suit shedding off him, pieces of it floating down to the ground. Tilda could feel the heat radiating off him, pressing a cool cloth to his forehead, trying to calm him as he babbled on. She reached for a saline bag and was about to hang it when Bernie slapped her hand away, pointing a gloved finger at her. ‘No touching. You’re off duty.’

  An intern stepped into her place and it took everything Tilda had not to take over as she watched them trying and failing to insert the needle into a perfectly plump vein. The doors opened again. Tilda turned to see another silhouetted figure walk in, her eyes widening when she saw the blood, a towel wrapped around the woman’s arm.

  Bernie glanced over her shoulder and saw the woman as well. Another scowling moment and she gave Tilda the go-ahead to take it.

  Pulling the curtain around the team working on Jerry, Tilda crossed the room, feeling the lingering hot air that had pushed its way in. As she got closer, she saw the towel wasn’t wrapped around the woman’s arm. It was wrapped around something held to her chest, something moving, wriggling. But the woman was way too calm for it to be what Tilda hoped it wasn’t.

  They stood a metre apart from each other. The woman might have just walked into a grocery store by the way she was looking around, about to ask where the bandaids were, so calm, almost laughing. Her eyes followed the tinsel hung along the curtain railings, the fairy lights hung in half-moons across the front of the counter. Finally she looked at Tilda, a spark in her eye and a growing smile as she read the embroidered hospital name on her lab coat. ‘Wasn’t sure I was in the right place for a moment.’

  ‘That time of year, right?’ Tilda’s brain was screaming at her to move, do her job. The woman didn’t look familiar. Could be new in town, passing by. Tilda pointed at the bundled towel. ‘May I?’ She leaned in as the woman folded back a corner. And then leaned back. It definitely wasn’t what she’d expected. Brown fuzz, big ears and a snout with a twitching black nose. ‘That’s a—’

  ‘A joey, yes.’ The woman tucked the towel back in, cradling the joey closer as it tried to wrangle its way out.

  ‘The blood?’

  ‘Mine.’ She pointed with a nod down at her leg, turning it on her toe to show where the fabric had torn and blood had soaked through, still weeping a little.

  Relief shot through Tilda. She had no idea what she would have done if the woman had brought the joey in for treatment. Actually, she did; would have called for a vet and then organised a psych consult. She pointed the woman over to a bed, grabbing a clipboard on the way past the station and reeling off the usual introduction that administration had recently mandated. ‘Doctor Matilda Bronson. Welcome to Ashton County Hospital. I’ve got some forms for you to fill out, but first…’ Tilda placed the clipboard down, searching out the pedal to lower the bed to the right height. ‘What happened?’

  The woman perched on the edge, still holding the bundled-up joey. ‘I was exploring out near Ashton Dam, driving back along the highway. Saw this little guy’s mother on the side of the road. Lucky I stopped.’ She lifted the bundle a little. ‘The ground dipped away from the road into the paddock. Spotted the little guy down there, all tangled up in a blackberry bush near the fence.’ She nodded again at her leg. ‘I slipped trying to get him free, must have cut it on some wire. Clumsy. Didn’t notice at the time. But the joey’s okay. I checked him out, a little banged up but he’ll be fine…’ Tilda had never had a good poker face, and the woman smiled as she hurried to explain. ‘I’m a vet, I used to work for a wildlife rescue group.’

  ‘Right. Of course.’

  The vet juggled the bundle and held a hand out. ‘Clare. Hi.’

  Tilda took her hand, shook it. Pushing the strangeness of the whole thing aside, she focused on the task at hand. The cut on Clare’s leg would need stitches, but there was blood on her shirt as well as a small cut on her chin. ‘Let’s take a closer look.’ But before she could do anything, she needed another pair of hands. ‘Bernie? Can I have an intern please?’

  Bernie’s voice drifted through the curtain. ‘Any preference?’

  ‘No.’

  A head poked in. Great. It was the intern who couldn’t insert an IV. Good thing he didn’t have to do much. Tilda read his name tag; James.

  ‘Could you… Do you mind?’ Tilda had never before asked someone to hand off a joey so she could examine them. James’s smile dropped when he realised what he’d be doing, and Clare hesitated. ‘Don’t worry…’ A silent order not to fuck up passed between Tilda and James. ‘He’ll be in good hands.’

  The whole thing was awkward at first, James holding it like a wriggling bomb about to explode, but soon the joey settled, James bouncing it gently in his arms.

  Bernie’s face appeared betweens the curtains, taking in the scene in one sweeping glance. Her eyes landed on James and the joey’s little snout poking out. ‘Might be your new specialty, James… Doc, you’re outta here once you’re done, right?’

  Busy examining and cleaning the scratches on Clare’s arm, Tilda mumbled in response, and then Bernie was gone. Clare flinched and Tilda apologised. ‘None of these are too deep. They’ll heal nicely. Same with the one on your chin. I’ll get a gown for you to change into and we’ll look at your leg.’

  With Clare gowned and a tray prepped, Tilda set to cleaning and numbing the cut while the vet and the intern bantered about what to name the joey. Somehow they landed on reindeer names and were going through to find the right one. Which was Comet, apparently.

  Again, Clare noticed the look on Tilda’s face, asking with a laugh, ‘What?’

  Tilda gave Clare her most professional smile. ‘Not
hing. It’s just… you’re one of those people.’

  ‘One of what people?’

  James jumped in. ‘Doc here is the town Grinch.’

  Clare gasped around a grin. ‘How can you hate the most wonderful time of the year?’

  Tilda couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or was seriously asking, but it wasn’t an argument she wanted to have, yet again. She prodded the edges of the cut to make sure the area was properly numbed. ‘This might be easier to do if you’re laying on your stomach.’

  Clare paused midway through turning over. She pointed at the pieces of red velvet on the floor. ‘Is that…?’

  ‘Yeah. Santa had a rough day.’ James was still rocking the joey like a baby, stopping when Tilda looked up at him.

  Tilda put a pillow under Clare’s ankle and angled her leg. It was always better to keep a patient distracted, so she asked if Clare was passing through, travelling to see family during the holidays.

  Chin propped in her palm, Clare looked back over her shoulder, watching as Tilda opened a suture kit. ‘Been here for a while actually. Staying in the apartments behind the pub, but I’m looking for somewhere a little more permanent.’

  ‘Really? Haven’t seen you around. I would’ve noticed you…’ She paused, fighting the heat rising in her cheeks. ‘A new face, I mean.’

  Someone snorted on the other side of the curtain.

  ‘Maybe if you left the hospital, Doc.’ Jerry laughed, a big belly laugh that made more pieces of red and white fluff float down to the floor.

  ‘Look who’s feeling better.’ Tilda sighed.

  ‘Hey, Doc? Whadda you want for Christmas?’ Jerry had put on his best Santa voice.

  ‘A life.’ James muttered under his breath, though louder than he meant to, and Bernie laughed.

  Tilda ignored them all. ‘For December to be over.’ She adjusted the overhead lamp, shifted closer on the stool. And decided to prove them all wrong by leaving as soon as she’d stitched up the vet. Though, of course, not until she’d checked on Cliff and returned his hearing aid. And she should run up those lab results. Finish signing off her charts. Teach the incompetent intern how to insert an IV. But she would walk out that door. Eventually.