The Poppy Factory

From the other point of view, Janine said she’d been in awe of the front line medics and wondered how they survived the extreme conditions in which they lived and worked. Her only real contact had been in the turmoil and urgency of an emergency evacuation, when she’d found them brusque and pushy in their desperation to ensure that their injured mates were safely onto the chopper as fast as possible.

Most shifts were busy from beginning to end, so Jess found no time for drinking except for her bedtime ‘medication’. And there was so much to learn that she fell into bed, exhausted, at the end of each day, usually managing to sleep through without nightmares.

It had been a month since she’d last tried to contact him, but now she felt strong enough to try again.

‘Hello Nate,’ she emailed. ‘How are you? I’m fine, except that I miss you loads. Civvy street seems to suit me. I’m happier than I’ve been for weeks and really enjoying the work. I’ve stopped drinking, except socially, and am sleeping well which has made a massive difference. I have lots more patience and can’t remember the last time I blew a fuse. I still love you, Nate. Can we meet? Jess x.’

They met, that first time, on neutral ground: a pub close to Liverpool Street Station.

As she waited, sipping her cola, she watched the loud braying City types and felt a certain sympathy. They were tanked up on the adrenaline of trading millions and having a couple of hours’ ‘decompression time’ before catching the commuter trains back to their quiet suburban lives. It was how she sometimes felt at the end of a busy shift.

She hardly recognised Nate, at first. The dreadlocks were gone, replaced with a short mat of tight black curls. Was this a statement, symbolic of his new start without her? He spotted her and smiled, with that soft beam which lit up his face and made you feel as though someone had turned the lights on.

‘Yup, all gone,’ he said, rubbing his head. ‘Got the job, too.’

‘What job?’

‘Head of Sports. Matt’s leaving.’

Her heart lifted even further. ‘Congratulations, Nate.’ She touched his hand, and he didn’t take it away.

The couple of hours they’d agreed on went by too fast. It felt curiously formal, air-kissing like strangers as they parted. But it was a start, Jess told herself, easy does it. They planned a meal together the following week, when she had a couple of days off. She began allowing herself to hope.

Although each ambulance call-out still got the adrenaline pumping and her heart racing, most of their busy shifts were filled with non-emergencies. Seven out of ten ‘shouts’ were for old people, many of them regulars. She loved the way their faces would light up when the crew arrived, the sheer relief showing in the colour of their cheeks, and admired their stoical bravery and humility. She couldn’t count the times she heard the phrase, ‘Sorry to be such a nuisance, dearie’.

She happily brewed cups of strong sugary tea, exchanged a few words of comfort or simple conversation, listened to their stories and gained satisfaction from having made a difference. Many did not need hospital treatment – it was just a matter of making sure the district nurse would call by or the carer could attend more often. They got to know some of the old folk so well that when something more serious happened and they had to be admitted to hospital, she found herself dwelling on them, wondering about their progress. If she learned that one of them hadn’t made it, she experienced genuine sorrow.

At the end of most days she felt more like a social worker than a medical responder. It’s bloody ridiculous, she said to herself, that no-one cares enough to put the system right and it’s left to an expensive emergency service to pick up the pieces. Her colleagues never seemed to gripe about it – perhaps they’d accepted that nothing was likely to change – but it made her angry: why couldn’t the state provide elderly and frail people with enough support to live with dignity in their own homes; why had society apparently washed its hands of them? They sometimes learned of a son or daughter who lived within easy driving distance yet hadn’t visited for weeks. What were they thinking? Were they unaware that their elderly relative was desperately lonely but too proud to ask for help, or did they simply not care?

The time-wasters were far more difficult to cope with. She’d heard the stories, of course, the call-outs for broken nails or wasp stings, and the people who’d learned how to circumvent the categories of urgency and would describe every situation as ‘life-threatening’, even if it wasn’t remotely so.

When faced with a fat, gobby middle-aged man demanding emergency treatment for a sprained ankle, or a woman who couldn’t remember whether she’d taken her birth control pill, she felt the old anger rising again, the nausea starting to ferment in her stomach.

‘How do you get through the day without giving them a slap?’ she asked her crew mate Dave – an older man, steady and compassionate – after they left a call-out for a minor oven burn. The woman had fussed interminably about being scarred and demanded to see a cosmetic surgeon. Dave had been admirably firm.

‘We all feel like that sometimes,’ he said. ‘Just give yourself a bit of distance. Say you need to take a couple of minutes, go outside and take a few deep breaths. I find it works a treat.’

The worst shifts were Friday and Saturday evenings, when gangs of otherwise sensible, intelligent young people who probably lived decent, law abiding lives the rest of the time seemed to abandon their collective sanity by taking party drugs, drinking themselves senseless and getting into fights in every town centre.

At first, Jess managed to summon reserves of compassion by trying to see herself in each of them. This was more or less me, just a few months ago, she’d say to herself when, for example, attending to a drunken young woman who’d been in a cat fight and had minor abrasions to her face. She’d eventually been persuaded to call it a night and get into a taxi. When a young man took a swipe at her as she tried to examine the hand he’d just punched through a window, she recalled the blinding effects of her own alcohol-fuelled anger and how she felt like lashing out at anything or anyone around her.

But mostly she failed to find any sympathy. Did they have any idea how much time and taxpayers’ money they were wasting? What if they were made to pay for the medical treatment they received – would that make any difference? The only people benefiting from these nightly binges were the alcohol companies and bar owners, she thought bitterly. Perhaps they should be made to pay up too?

It was August, and a stifling heatwave had brought crowds out of the bars onto the streets when, one Saturday night, she lost it. They’d been asked by the police to help a semi-naked young woman found unconscious in the gutter, and the others were briefly called away to help a more serious casualty, leaving Jess to look after the girl. As she knelt down to examine her, a large, burly man with a beer belly protruding beneath his shirt began to stagger unsteadily across the street towards them, shouting obscenities.

‘Leave her be, you stupid bitch,’ he shouted, lurching closer.

‘Just stand back, sir, please,’ Jess said, pleased with herself for refusing to rise to the insult.

‘Fuck you,’ the man said, taking a few steps nearer. For a moment he seemed to stop in his tracks and went quiet, so Jess turned her attention back to the casualty. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw that he was fiddling with his flies and, before she knew what was happening, both she and the young woman were drenched in foul-smelling urine.

‘What the hell?’ she shouted, powerless to resist the heat of her fury. A dense red mist descended in front of her eyes and all common sense deserted her. Instead of leaving the scene and calling for help as she had been trained to do, her only thought was to stop him pissing onto the poor woman. She leapt at him, trying to spin him round by pushing his shoulder. For all his inebriation he managed to stand his ground, the urine now running down his trousers and splashing her feet.

‘Try that again, bitch,’ he said, laughing in her face with a blast of beery breath.

‘You bastard.’ She was about to push him again when she heard Dave’s shout.

‘Back off, Jess.’

‘He’s pissing all over us.’

‘Just. Back. Off. Now. Go to the van and get yourself cleaned up. Stay there till I get back.’

She slunk away and, as the anger dissipated, she was left feeling sick and ashamed, waiting in the ambulance and stinking of urine.

‘I’m sorry, Dave,’ she said when he returned. ‘It was so disgusting. I just lost it. How’s the girl?’

‘Come round now, and we got her into a taxi. The police have arrested him for abuse and assault.’ He laughed. ‘Can’t wait to read the police report: “detail of assault weapon: stream of stinking piss”. It’s gotta be a first.’

‘Thanks for the sympathy,’ she said, managing a smile.

Dave started up the engine and pulled off. ‘We’d better get you back to the station for a change – you don’t half smell.’ And then, after driving for a few moments, ‘In theory I ought to write this up, you know?’

She held herself still, heart in mouth.

He gave a deep sigh. ‘But it’s been a bloody awful night and you were under severe provocation, so I’ll keep it under my hat this time.’

She spent her days off cramming for the exams which were now just a couple of weeks away: anatomy, physiology, cardiology, pharmacology. Study had always come easy in the past but these days she found herself struggling to remember facts, vital information like drug dosages per weight for children; the exact position to insert the needle to reinflate a lung with needle chest compressions; the APGAR score calculation for newborns.

One morning as she went to take her tranquilliser pill, it dawned on her. Perhaps the drug was affecting her ability to retain facts? She felt fine now; surely she didn’t need them any more? She put the packet back into her bedside drawer. I’ll see how it feels for a few days, she thought to herself.

It seemed to work: she passed the exams with flying colours. Nate took her out to dinner to celebrate, and they ended up back at his flat for the first time since the party. They were tentative at first, circling each other warily as he made coffee and she wandered around, checking to see what had changed, looking for clues about the life he had spent without her, these past months.

But it was still the same old bachelor pad, with the broken blinds, the brimming waste bins, DVDs and Xbox paraphernalia scattered around the giant television. In the bathroom cabinet were shaving cream, deodorant, his familiar brand of cologne and a packet of paracetamol but, to her relief, no sign of any female occupation.

The wariness lasted only as long as it took them to finish their coffee and have their first proper kiss, and after that the weekend passed in making up for lost time. They left the bedroom only to eat and watch a bit of tv, and Nate dragged on a tracksuit once in a while to go out for takeaways and bottles of wine. He poured her drinks without a single enquiring glance, and she made sure that two glasses were her top limit – this weekend was too precious to spoil.

She knew she had to wait for him to say it, but she longed for him to reassure her, to talk about their future together once more. It wasn’t until Sunday evening was drawing on and she was preparing to leave, that he finally said, ‘I think we’re okay again, J. Don’t you?’

‘God, I love it when you get all romantic,’ she laughed, hugging him. ‘But “okay” will do me, for now.’

It started as a normal shift: 6am to 6pm, on the van with Dave and a new Emergency Care Assistant, a sweet kid called Emma. It was a blustery day with towering cumulus clouds like fantasy castles in the sky. Emma remarked how lucky they were, driving around the countryside amid the beauty of the autumn colours, and the two others agreed.

By coffee time they’d dealt with four shouts including one of their regulars, an old boy called Bert who kept a garrulous and foul-mouthed parrot. He’d fallen on the way to the toilet, so they just checked him out, cleaned him up and waited for the district nurse to arrive while the parrot hurled abuse from its cage: ‘ge’ me out of here, you ’uckers,’ it squawked, interspersed with a repetitive refrain of ‘stupid old git, stupid old git’. Emma giggled and blushed but Jess and Dave took it in their stride. They’d heard the parrot say much worse things in their time.

‘Let’s hope we get a decent break,’ Dave said, more in hope than expectation, as they pulled into the ambulance station. As usual, they’d just sat down when the next call came in: ‘Emergency RTC High Street. Two life-threatening, two walking wounded. Police on scene.’

Jess felt the welcome surge of adrenaline, more powerful than any caffeine rush, as they clambered back on board and the siren started its familiar wail. The incident was only ten minutes away but a sudden heavy downpour made the traffic even more of a nightmare than usual, with dopey drivers taking an age to move aside and let them past. When they reached the lights at the top of the High Street, it was jammed and at a standstill. Dave whooped the siren a couple of times but it made little difference – nothing was moving. In the distance, they could see the flashing blue lights of a police car.