of being cooped up. She knew she wasn’t doing a very good job of being supportive but she couldn’t stay inside the hospital for a minute longer.
Lucy was coming to take over the bedside vigil from her so Ruby arranged to meet her friend Candice for dinner. The last time she’d been back to Adelaide several months earlier had been for Candice’s wedding. It was strange to think that had been when Jake had been persistently pursuing Scarlett and she’d been trying to fend off his advances but not doing so very successfully. Now, months later, it was hard to imagine them not together.
Ruby and Candice had nursed together in Melbourne but had both grown up in Adelaide. In typical Adelaide fashion there were only ever three degrees of separation. Ruby and Candice had worked together, now Candice worked as a theatre nurse for emergency surgery in this hospital, where Scarlett was an anaesthetist and Jake was about to be an intern, and Candice and Jake had grown up together as family friends. If anyone understood what Ruby and her family were going through at the moment, it was Candice.
As they selected their dishes from the Thai menu Ruby filled her friend in on Rose’s status before Candice moved the conversation on to ‘other business’, as she called it.
‘So, are you bringing a plus one to Scarlett’s wedding?’
Ruby shook her head.
‘Why not? I know you have one, you always have one. I used to wonder how you found so many.’
‘You don’t wonder any more?’
‘Not now that I’m married.’ Candice laughed. ‘It doesn’t bother me any longer that you seem to have more than your fair share of men. Now that I’ve taken myself out of the marketplace you can have as many as you want, but I do like to meet one of them every now and again. Who’s the latest?’
Ruby paused. She didn’t think there was actually that much to say but it would be nice to talk about the things they always used to discuss. It would be nice to get her mind off Rose’s medical predicament for just a while.
‘I’m not sure that there is a latest,’ she admitted.
‘You’re between boyfriends?’
‘I’m not sure exactly.’
‘How can you not be sure? What’s going on?’
‘Mitch was asleep when Scarlett rang me about Rose in the middle of the night. The phone call didn’t wake him. I left him a note.’ Mitch was a musician, a drummer, and his band had been playing at one of the local pubs that night. He’d got home late and hadn’t been asleep long when Scarlett’s phone call had woken Ruby. But Mitch had slept through all of that and Ruby hadn’t thought it necessary to wake him. It wasn’t any of his business. She hadn’t thought about Mitch since she’d walked out.
‘You left him a note?’ Candice’s tone let Ruby know exactly what she thought about that. ‘Have you spoken to him?’
Ruby shook her head. ‘He hasn’t called me either,’ she said defensively. ‘We don’t, didn’t, have that sort of relationship.’ They hadn’t been like Scarlett and Jake. Or Candice and her husband, Ewan. They had both found the person they wanted to spend the rest of their life with. They had found the person who came first. Ruby had no idea what that was like.
‘Well, if neither of you are prepared to pick up the phone, you’re probably perfectly matched,’ Candice decided, ‘but it’s kind of ironic ‘cos now you’ll never know.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ruby said with a shrug. ‘I’d never planned to bring him home to meet my family and certainly not for Scarlett’s wedding. We wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. I’d been seeing him for almost two months.’
Two months was her self-imposed time limit on relationships. Any longer than that and there was the chance that one of them could start to think the relationship was serious and that was something Ruby had always taken pains to avoid. A serious relationship meant sharing bits of your soul with another person. Letting them see deep inside you. It meant taking things a step further than sharing a bed and your body. Sharing your mind was a far scarier proposition and not one that Ruby was particularly keen on.
In her experience people started to expect more from a relationship as it started to edge towards three months. Boyfriends wanted to know more about her. They would expect to be invited to an event as her plus one. Three months meant it was serious. It meant it would hurt if she was abandoned.
‘Besides,’ she added, ‘worrying about a plus one to the wedding is irrelevant as I assume Scarlett and Jake will postpone it. I can’t imagine Scarlett will want to get married while Rose is in hospital. She’ll want to wait until Rose has recovered.’ Ruby couldn’t voice the alternative. That Rose might not get better.
‘They haven’t said what they’re planning on doing?’
Ruby shook her head. ‘No. It seems kind of an odd conversation to have in the ICU. We tend to talk about what the doctor’s latest update means and what treatment Rose should have. I think everyone is just avoiding the topic of anything to do with the future. I don’t think any of us can think more than a day ahead at this stage. So it means we sit there not really talking about much at all. It’s no wonder the days seem interminably long in Intensive Care, but it’s all we can do. Just be there for Rose.’
‘Let’s hope she’s out of there soon and then a few more of us can split the shifts and visit her.’
Access to the ICU was restricted to family members only, and that reminded Ruby of the lonely motorbike man. She wondered why she hadn’t thought to ask Candice for information. She might have even been working on the day he had been brought in. She might be the one person Ruby knew who would have the lowdown on him.
‘Speaking of visiting, there’s a guy in the bed next to Rose who hasn’t had any visitors at all. He was brought into ICU yesterday. He looked as though he would have come through Emergency first. Were you working? Do you know anything about him?’
Candice grinned. ‘I wasn’t working but I heard about him. He’s into motorsport apparently, a racing-car driver or something. By all reports, he’d done a fair bit of damage to himself but the girls were still very complimentary about him.’ Her grin widened. ‘It’s not every day they get to see quite such a glorious naked man. Even if they did have to cover him with sterile drapes, they copped quite an eyeful in between times.’
Ruby’s imagination quickly added what Candice was describing to what she’d already seen for herself and created a rather glorious picture. Almost real enough to make her blush. ‘Do you know his name?’ she asked.
‘Neil? No, that’s not right.’ Candice shook her head. ‘Noel maybe? Something starting with an N anyway. The girls weren’t interested in his name.’ She laughed. ‘But I can find out if you like.’
‘No, that’s okay. I was just curious.’ She should have checked his chart while he slept, just to find out his name, but that seemed like invading his privacy just a little too much.
‘That would make you just one in a long line, from what I hear.’
Ruby was curious but she’d hoped Candice would have been able to give her a name or something to enable her to do some research when she got home. She didn’t want to think of it as cyber-stalking but wasn’t that one of the purposes of the internet? But she still
