Nine

 

The student who'd gone to Pathology returned with a smile for her patient and a promise to call his mother when the results came back.

As if on cue, the intern chose the same moment to release his patients, too, as the baby with the bandaged arm smiled a teary smile at his mother. Aidan stood beside me at the desk, watching them leave the ED.

When they were safely out of earshot he turned to me. "What in hell did that?" He nodded at the gaping hole in the ceiling.

"A surprised possum," I responded. I frowned. "I sent one of the students for Maintenance, but neither of them's back yet. I'll see if I can find them." I picked up the phone.

Tessa, the secretary in Engineering, answered after one ring. I asked after either the student or Tony and was told Tony was fixing a tap in a patient's room. The nursing student had ventured into Engineering and spoken to Tessa. Tessa had given her the room number, which she repeated for me as I carefully wrote it on a notepad.

Tessa promised to page Tony for me a second time, but I decided to go looking for the missing student and maintenance man.

"I'll be right back," I told the intern and remaining nursing student, who were both staring at the snoring drunk in the waiting room, their only remaining patient. Both nodded, but I wasn't sure if they'd heard.

I shrugged and strode off. I'd barely be gone five minutes, which was hardly enough time for chaos to reinvade my ED.

Clutching the paper in my hand, I kept looking at the room number. It was one of the isolation rooms, for contagious patients or those who needed to be kept apart from other patients for whatever reason.

As I approached the door, I heard a quiet whimpering on the edge of hearing, as if someone inside the room was in pain. The absence of signs or even a name on the door told me there was no patient in there, so my first thought was that the noise came from an injured staff member.

I pushed the door open, but most of the room was obscured by the curtain around the bed. The sound was louder now and definitely coming from behind the curtain. Worried, I edged around it, holding my breath as I followed the sound of the pitiful moans.

I saw the student's bored face first, her chin resting on the bed. The moaning came from her mouth, but she didn't look like she was experiencing the slightest discomfort, let alone pain. Behind her, Tony the elderly maintenance man had his eyes closed and a blissful expression on his face.

I looked more closely, not making a sound. The student's skirt was hiked up to her waist and Tony's pants garnished his ankles as he banged her from behind, oblivious to my presence.

She saw me.

Silently, I raised my eyebrows.

She held out one of the hands she'd clenched around the bed frame and I saw the fifty dollar notes she held. Ah. This was her way of supplementing her meagre student income. I touched my finger to my watch as a reminder that she had limited time for this sort of thing.

She gave a tiny nod of acknowledgement. "C'mon, Tony, baby," she murmured in a little-girl voice. "Come for me before our time's up in two more minutes and I'll give you a discount tomorrow. You can have me for my whole lunch hour for the same price as today."

He went into a frenzy of thrusting. "Fuck yeah! A whole hour for only three hundred bucks? Here I blow, baby!"

I retreated as quickly as I could before the rutting man saw me, but I heard his triumphant finale as I left the room.

I wanted to feel sorry for the girl, feeling she had to sell her body to finish her studies, but she was making a handsome profit on the sale. I wondered if I'd do the same, under similar circumstances.

I shrugged and dismissed the thought. A more important consideration was whether to report her to her supervisor. After a moment, I decided I wouldn't bother. After all, she wasn't one of my staff, nor my responsibility.

And while she was working in the ED, Emergency would be on top of the list for maintenance work.