CHAPTER 15
I had indeed been squeaky new when I had met Hira, just settling in at the Cardiff hub as I was. I had realised early on in my training that while I was competent at driving the big box of an ambulance, I didn’t have the spatial awareness of someone like Tom, who seemed almost to wear the vehicle like a second skin. My forte was that of an advanced nurse practitioner, with extra trauma skills, so I concentrated on those aspects. It meant a lot of mixing and matching crews for a long time, but eventually Tom and I gelled.

Those early days involved a lot of humdrum stuff, some of which could turn nasty very quickly, and a great part of said donkeywork was spent following up the district nurses. Their clientele included a heavy preponderance of elderly people, mostly women, and that was where I encountered my first deaths. Hira or one of her colleagues, perhaps with a podiatrist in tow, would rock up to some lady’s back door and walk in, as was their custom, and their former patient would be cold and motionless, usually in an armchair or their bed, but a couple of times sprawled on their kitchen floor or, in one awful case, lying full length in a frigid bath.

There was nothing medical we could do, of course, in such cases, apart from wait for the doctor to come and certify death before wrapping up and removing the terminally tired. After what seemed like far too long racking up unwanted but literal body count, spiced up by a very occasional oh-shit-we-need-as-many-crews-as-possible for a pile-up on the M4, the team leaders in Central Control finally seemed to start trusting me, and I found myself doing my first pub and football crowd jobs.

They generally preferred experienced crews for those because of the risks to our staff, as there is a moronically stupid tendency among certain idiots to see any uniform as a target, the sort of knuckledragger that stones firemen trying to save a burning house, and ambulance crews are not exempt. There are also the important factors of alcohol and, most obviously, the fact that the overwhelming majority of reasons for calling us out is fighting. Once a fight has started, it’s like a wildfire, and can keep breaking out. The coppers aren’t always there as quickly as one would hope, and more than once I have had to try and calm a drunk whose target I am treating, while praying for the flicker of more blue lights on their way to join us.

I remember a typical evening of excess refreshment, at the Man in the Moon, the police only turning up after we had started to treat the victim, the obvious culprit shirtless and abusive just beyond a couple of doormen, as we now call what used to be ‘bouncers’. One of the doormen was actually a woman, and she was the one almost face to face with the arsehole. When he realised a vanload of coppers were coming up behind him, he bolted, and her leg went out in the neatest trip I have ever seen. He was nicked with extreme enthusiasm, and then a Sergeant, someone I came to know very well, brought our door person to us to ‘recount events’.

“Being an arse, Sergeant Gould, simple as. Had a jacket on when he came out; think it’s behind that planter. Might want to have a look in it. Anyway, tried to start a couple of fights inside, so we removed him. Came out here, and must have lifted an empty on the way out. That’s it smashed over there”

She turned to me, with a smile.

“This bit’s for you, aye? Newcy Brown bottle, pint, aye? Your new patient came out for a smoke, why we keep the tables here, our mighty warrior tried to brain him with the bottle. I actually heard the impact, ‘tonk!’. So he’s obviously watched too many shit films, and the bottle doesn’t just shatter like he was obviously expecting, so he’s standing like a lemon holding it when you guys turn up. We’ve just been in face-off mode. Anyway, your patient, he goes down like a sack of bricks, and I am absolutely certain he was out cold. Quantity of blood, I was surprised to see the bottle hadn’t broken”

The sergeant had his notebook out.

“Name for the record?”

“You bloody well know my name already, Mr Policeman Sir. Eve Lynn Crowther. Yes, I’ll do a statement. One of my boys has gone to sort you the camera feeds. Two of my boys will do the biz as well. Now or later, but these two need to get the victim away, I would guess”

Angie was driving that night, and she made good time to Dai’s for a bit of queue-jumping, the poor sod on our trolley turning out to have a depressed fracture of the skull, which is deeply serious shit. Angie and I took a cuppa in the canteen after we had finished the handover.

“I think you’ve pulled there, Jen”

“Sorry? Pulled who?”

“Elf. That door worker”

“Oh shit”

“I… I can drop the word, if you want. Save any nastiness”

“What word?”

She looked round for eavesdroppers, then whispered, “That you’re, you know”

“I know what?”

“Trans”

“Angie, I’ll settle this now, then. I. Am. Not. Trans. I have PCOS, okay?”

Her face paled.

“Shit! I’m--- it’s just everyone’s saying it, because, you know”

“Stubble? Can’t be helped, unless I want to spend a fuckton of money on removal, and if I had that much money, I can think of nicer things to do with it”

“I’m really sorry, Jen. But yeah, I think Elf, yeah, she’s sniffing. I’ll let you know if I hear anything”

That was a pivotal moment. Angie was clearly also assuming I was gay, and there was me, newly-minted paramedic, not denying it, which must have answered her doubts. In for a pound.

“She’s a bit butch for me, Angie”

We left the rest unsaid, and over the next few months I did more ‘backwatching’ responses, to Cardiff City home matches, where they always sang that bloody misogynistic song ‘Delilah’, to various pubs near the ground on match days, and to certain selected places of alcoholic refreshment that seemed to attract those less careful of their neighbours’ welfare, or, to put it simply, violent knuckledraggers. One of those choice establishments turned out to be the ‘Moon’. Elf wasn’t always on, but when she was, I got a cheeky grin. I didn’t mind, for while I have never been a connoisseur of the fabled Stone Butch, she was still One Of Us, and deserved a nod of recognition as a courtesy.

There was also the simple fact that with her around, I could switch some of my backwatching energy to patient watching.

We finally got to have a proper conversation on one of those evenings where one ‘body’ out of the two we were called out for is rushed off in another wagon, while our own, after some cheery badinage involving multiple instructions to ‘fuck off’, is deemed fit enough to ride in a police van cage, thanksbyedon’twrite.

“Seen you here a few times before, woman”

“Aye. Getting much more of the nasties now my feet are under the table”

“You getting any shit for being, you know?”

She waved vaguely at her chin, so I sighed, and yet again said the magic words.

“PCOS, not being trans. Polycystic ovaries; buggers up my hormone balance”

“Oh, sorry! Anyway, what do I call you?”

I held out a hand.

“Not to worry. I’m Jen; tonight’s EMT is Angie”

“Where do you do your own relaxation, Jen?”

Not subtle at all; Angie was spot on, at least with half of her suspicions.

“Not really found anywhere that isn’t for blokes only”

“And neither of us is into blokes. I got that bit right, then. We, my club, we have our own place, but if we’re ever in town, we use a place called the Smugglers. Good atmosphere, all sorts of, well, non-straights; owner has class”

“Sorry?”

“Er, biker term. Sort of means worthy of respect. Sort of”

She wrote down the address for me, but it felt more like it was done as a courtesy than as a come-on. I tucked the paper away, thanked her, and Angie and I were away to our next shout, a possible whiplash injury in a single vehicle RTC. By the time we got to the Road Traffic Collision, where the Single Vehicle had RTC’d a very solid tree, Traffic were ready with their magic breath machine, and after a quick check of his spine, I shook my head, and he blew ninety-four, where the legal limit is thirty-five, oh dear. I do love Cardiff’s night life.

I did look at Elf’s bit of paper a couple of times, wondering, and then, as the weekend came on as a weekend off, I made my way out to a rather large old building. A small group of leather bears were smoking outside the door, which put me off a little, but I remembered Elf’s ‘all sorts’ comment, and opened the front door. There was a disco pounding away to my right (bugger that), and a smaller bar to my left. That would do.

A scattering of Twinks. A tall woman in a leather jacket sitting alone as she read the paper. An entire table of Diesels, in vests and denim jackets. Two older lads slumped together in a corner. A couple of women in another corner, in much the same position. Seven feet of drag queen setting up a microphone and what I guessed was a karaoke machine. A square woman with a dark brown flat-top cut behind the bar.

“Hi. First time here? I’m Lil. Ply you with alcohol?”