the one where they're irish
"Are you sure you're grand to work today?" Dana asked as Robby stowed his bag in his locker.
"Yeah, sure why wouldn't I be?"
"God, no reason at all," Dana said, and took a long slurp of her tea while levelling a look at Robby over the top of her glasses that was one of the A&E's most versatile tools. "Sure if you're grand, I'm grand."
Robby was able to give as good as he got in the looks department, but he also knew how to pick his battles. He needed his strength for other things, such as asking, "Do I want to know how many are on trolleys right now?"
"Start with the smaller crisis," Dana said. "I think Jack's up on top of the multi-storey."
"What's he doing up there?" Robby sighed. "It's lashing out."
"They only pay me enough to know so much," Dana said, making a show of turning back to her computer screen. It was easy knowing she was a Limerick woman. "All further questions can be addressed to the HSE enclosing a stamped addressed envelope."
The joys of being the department Clinical Director, Robby thought. He pulled his rain jacket on over his scrubs and headed back out into the grey early morning, dodging first the mini lakes that formed in the street outside anytime it rained for more than an hour straight, and then the little huddle of HCAs gathered under the entrance to the multi-storey. He pretended he didn't see they were smoking on hospital grounds just the same way that the senior management team pretended not to see all the structural work that needed to be done around here.
"How are ye?" Robby said with a nod as he passed them; he got an answering chorus of "Grand, Dr Robby, and yourself?"
He climbed the three flights of stairs up to the roof level, feeling every year of his age during the climb, and winced as he left the stairwell to be hit in the face by a burst of mizzle. A jacket couldn't do much for you when the rain was coming at you horizontally. Jack—standing over near a red Nissan Micra that Robby was fairly sure belonged to Mateo—didn't seem to be paying any mind to the weather.
"Well, Jack," Robby called across to him.
"What are you doing here?" Jack said without turning around.
"Some would say I'm working," Robby said. "And yourself?"
"Ah, I don't know." Robby sidled up next to him, and judging by how red-rimmed Jack's eyes were, he'd say it wasn't just that Jack's cheeks were wet because of the rain. "The mam of the O'Shea lad came in last night. Had a Mass card for me and said she hoped I'd come to the month's mind and that the whole family wanted me to know they appreciated what we'd done for him."
Robby winced. Some patients hit you harder than others. That was how it went. When it was a healthy fourteen-year-old who keeled over in the middle of a GAA match because of a previously undetected congenital heart defect, well, you tried your best no matter how hopeless you knew it was. Jack had managed to get sinus rhythm back twice, because he was one of the most skilled doctors Robby had ever met. He'd tried his very best, and the chap had still died, and that was a blow like a physical thing.
"Not something I want to be thanked for, you know?"
"You wouldn't be the better of it," Robby said lightly, because it wasn't so much that he agreed as that he didn't disagree, and he didn't want to be having a familiar, circular argument in a multi-storey car park at half seven of a morning. "Now can I interest you in not freezing our bollocks off up here?" He nodded in the direction of the white concrete bulk of the main hospital. "There's tea over there."
"Ah, sure go on, yeah," Jack said, and he was making a show of reluctance, playing at humouring Robby, but Robby could tell that he was just tired. He could see it in the dark circles under his eyes; in how his accent grew stronger, flattening out his vowels beneath the weight of watery Midlands bogs. Not to mention that this couldn't be good for Jack's leg.
As they headed for the stairwell, Jack said, "Some days I do wonder if I'm cracked to stay here and keep doing this. I could walk into a job at one of the private places, reel in all them sweet VHI euros. Or sneak in with all the junior doctors and head off to Australia."
Robby scoffed. "You'd miss the go of it here. The glamour. The chance of seeing your workplace on an episode of Prime Time." He looked sidelong at Jack as they crossed the street through the slackening rain, and said, half-sly, half-earnest, "Me."
"Ah, would you ever whisht," Jack said as they walked back through the automatic doors that led to A&E, and surely it was the blast of hot air from the heater mounted overhead that put that sudden tinge of pink into Jack's cheeks.
Or maybe it was the sight of a patient dancing around the waiting area, stark bollock naked and waving the county flag over his head. "Next year in Croker! Hon the lads!" he slurred in a way that said he'd probably come straight from a lock-in at Kavanagh's. Ossified, Robby's Bubbe would have said. You could practically see the alcohol fumes coming off him, like how a cartoon character would emanate waving lines.
"For feck's sake," Robby said, planting his hands on his hips.
"Or," Jack said contemplatively, eyeing the chaos as a small team of staff tried to corral the naked man into a side room, "the two of us could make a break for it."
It was Robby's turn to feel his face heat; there was something in Jack's tone that he could have sworn was Jack asking a question. "I thought you normally had your existential crises on the far side of a bank holiday weekend, not before it."
"Eh," Jack said, shrugging, watching Robby out of the corner of his eye, "sure there's maybe something to be said for trying out new things. That and tea."
A question, alright. Robby felt his mouth curve into a slow smile. "Tea and that," he said.
