your pardon?’ His eyes were almost black, as were the eyebrows that were raised so high that they nearly reached the hat covering his close-cropped hair.
In for a penny, in for a pound, she could hear her grandmother saying, and she tipped her chin up an inch before she repeated her suggestion.
‘I said, if your back aches, you might try taking off your clogs and going barefoot…you could put disposable hats over your feet if you’re worried about contamination.’
This time the silence seemed to stretch for ever, filled only by the rhythmic bleeps and hisses of the monitors and anaesthetic regulators.
When she was beginning to wonder if she was going to be thrown out of the theatre for breaking his concentration, he gave one swift nod.
‘It is worth trying,’ he said, and in an instant there was a nurse on her knees beside him, giving a nervous giggle as she pulled a bright blue plastic hat over each of his elegant long feet before she took his theatre clogs away.
Without another word, the operation continued as seamlessly as though the last couple of minutes had never happened, the second strip of misshapen bone carefully cut out of the skull so that the prematurely fused sutures were removed entirely.
Emily was utterly absorbed in the procedure, even more so now that she was assisting than when she had merely looked at a tape.
The brutal part was over and, hopefully, would never need repeating. Now it only remained to irrigate, check for leaks and close before he’d finished. She was quite looking forward to finding out if his suturing technique was as meticulous as every other one she’d observed when he suddenly stepped back from the table.
‘Taking the clogs off helped for a while,’ he announced in a slightly rough-edged voice as he stripped off first one glove and then the other, somehow managing to tuck one inside the other without getting any fluids on either hand. ‘But now I will watch while you complete the process.’
From the electric atmosphere in the theatre Emily knew that something momentous had just happened, but she couldn’t allow it to break her concentration, not if she was going to do herself and little Abir justice.
‘You might want to rest your best feature on an anaesthetist’s stool while I close,’ she said, as she positioned herself in his place at the table and held her hand out for the gently warmed saline, hoping her tone was matter-off-fact enough not to wound his ego. ‘I’ll probably take rather longer over this than you would.’
She almost chuckled when she heard Zayed murmur ‘rest your best feature’ in obvious amazement, and allowed herself just a couple of seconds to reflect on whether she’d spoken nothing less than the truth. The ubiquitous pale green scrubs he was wearing might be the most shapeless garments in existence, but when they were washed after every use, they soon became thin, and all it had needed was for the man to lean forward over his patient for every lean, tight curve of his muscular buttocks and thighs to be lovingly outlined.
Then it was time to switch her concentration up to full power as she thoroughly irrigated both operating fields to ensure that there were no bony fragments left inside the skull, then a minute inspection of the dura to check for any inadvertent tears. Of course, there weren’t any, and the way was clear for closing the initial incisions.
‘Clips or sutures?’ said the voice with a delicious hint of accent even in those few words.
‘I prefer sutures for areas that will be on constant show, even on a scalp where they will hopefully be covered by hair,’ she explained, pausing before she inserted the first one in case he had any objections to her decision.
Although she’d been conscious that those dark eyes were watching her every move, the fact had been reassuring rather than intimidating. It had been an amazing experience to be allowed to do such a sensitive part of the procedure on her very first morning on his team. Mr Breyley had allowed her to do little more than close for weeks before he’d allowed her to lead on more routine procedures, and even then he’d hovered over her, poised to take over at the first sign that things hadn’t been to his liking.
‘I am sure he will thank you if he eventually goes bald,’ her new mentor said dryly, and she concentrated on drawing the edges of the incisions together with as neat a row of sutures as she could manage.
‘Are you happy to supervise his transfer to Intensive Care?’ he asked as she positioned protective dressings over her handiwork while the anaesthetic was reversed.
‘You’re going to have a word with his parents?’ Her quick glance in his direction told her that even sitting down for the last part of the operation hadn’t relieved his pain, if the tension around his eyes was any indication. What on earth had the man done to himself?
‘The waiting is awful, so I’ll just let them know that the operation went well,’ he explained, already on his way to the door, adding over his shoulder, ‘And tell them that they’ll be able to see him in PICU in—what—twenty minutes?’
‘Maybe half an hour, to give us time to get him settled properly?’ Emily glanced up at the experienced nurse who would be accompanying Abir on the short journey from the operating theatre to the nearby unit, and received a confirming nod.
‘That will give us long enough to put some bandages on and clean his little face up a bit,’ the older woman said. ‘Although we’re not going to be able to do anything to disguise his swollen eyes. Poor little mite looks as if he’s not even going to be able to open them when he comes round.’
‘Thank goodness that’s one of the less important side- effects of the procedure…one that will sort itself out,’ Emily murmured, even as she winced at Abir’s appearance. ‘But he does look as if he’s gone several rounds with a prizefighter, and lost.’
After transferring him to Intensive Care she reassured herself that he was receiving the right levels of sedation and pain medication. Then there was the post-operative paperwork to take care of, so it was nearly an hour before she was able to think about the sudden detour her career had taken. And as for finding time to hunt down a cup of coffee and something to put in her rumbling stomach…
‘Forget it,’ she muttered as she hurried towards the outpatients clinic in response to her first bleep.
‘Mr Khalil has been called down to Accident and Emergency, and he is very particular about his clinics starting on time,’ snapped the heavily accented voice of his disapproving secretary. ‘Some of his patients have travelled a very long way to see him.’
Unspoken, but hovering in the air like a bad smell, were the words ‘and they won’t be happy to see someone as insignificant as you when they walk in the room’, but there was nothing Emily could do about that. All she could do was dive in at the deep end and hope that she didn’t drown before he arrived.
Her heart nearly stopped when she stuck her head round the doorway to the waiting area and realised that the majority of the people waiting there were probably going to have as little command of English as the Hananis.
‘Don’t panic,’ said a reassuringly Cornish voice behind her. ‘I’ve put out the call for an interpreter, just in case.’
‘Were my thoughts that obvious?’ Emily asked as she turned to find a pair of dark eyes smiling up at her from a motherly body in a uniform that could have done with being a size
