Second Chances Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  “This year’s going to be my year,” they say.

  “It’s time for a fresh start,” they proclaim.

  Then they carry right on making all the same mistakes they did the previous year, whilst unrealistically expecting different results. You would think they would learn from experience but most never do. So it’s the same dead-end jobs, same bad boyfriends, same drink, drugs and bad food.

  It’s annoying enough when they go on about it to your face but it’s even worse when it’s plastered all over Facebook. Some seem to regurgitate almost word for word exactly the same rubbish they spouted the previous year – and the year before that. I don’t know why they don’t just cut and paste it and be done with it.

  Some of them boldly declare their resolutions, but what’s the point? They never keep them. And why tell all and sundry via social media. They are only setting themselves up to look foolish and weak-willed when it all goes pear-shaped.

  There’s one girl that I used to work with who has a long history of choosing inappropriate men – basically she is addicted to bad boys. When they crap all over her all we hear is “all men are bastards” and get the big victim act. A couple of weeks later it all goes quiet as she starts screwing the next one – who of course is a carbon copy of the previous one. But none of this is her fault, of course.

  Last New Year she pronounced on Facebook that she was finished with men for good. Last I heard she was pregnant by a guy she met in February who has kids by four different women and has since been done for GBH.

  Another friend and current colleague claims to be a size eighteen but is actually nearer twenty-six. She starts Weight Watchers every January and wow, do we get to hear about it – constantly. We get daily updates for a few weeks of how well she’s doing and then it all goes strangely quiet. This is around the time the lure of the cream cakes becomes too much.

  This resolution/fresh start stuff is basically just complete bollocks. Forlorn hopes, shallow promises, the whole thing is just so forced and false. 2nd January is probably my favourite day of the year due to the relief of it being all over.

  The first thing I do on that day is get the Christmas tree down and remove all evidence of the festivities from the house. My flatmates sometimes complain that it’s bad luck but I can’t understand people who keep that stuff up until Twelfth Night. Who honestly still feels Christmassy looking at tinsel and lights on 5th January?

  Once it’s all gone my home looks refreshingly bare, and normality can resume. Or at least that used to be the case because, for me, normality no longer exists. It seems that I’m stuck permanently with New Year for the rest of my life, which by my calculations is not long. As things currently stand it looks like I’ve got a life expectancy of about two months.

  I guess it’s high time I explained what the hell I’m talking about. Well, it kind of goes like this…

  Chapter Two

  2025

  When it first happened, I was confused to begin with, almost amnesiac. But now I can recall in great detail everything that occurred on that day.

  After the initial period of disorientation and shock my mind cleared and I’ve now been over the events that occurred hundreds of times. I thought if I analysed it in that much detail I might eventually pick up some clue that might help me form a plan to get me out of this predicament. So far I’ve drawn a blank.

  It was 1st January 2025, just another bog standard New Year’s Day. There was nothing remarkable about it other than it being my birthday and you already know how I feel about that. It was a particularly significant birthday for me, but before you ask, it wasn’t the big three-0 or four-0. Everyone makes a big deal about them, but they don’t bother me.

  It’s the birthdays that end in a nine that I’ve grown to dread. For the record, this particular one was my 39th.

  I think turning thirty-nine is worse than turning forty because it’s like someone’s put up a great glaring neon sign highlighting the fact that the big one is only a year away. I went through the same thing on my 29th. During that birthday, and for most of the following year, I was hugely aware of the giant sword hanging over my head, with the imaginary voice of the executioner bellowing at me over and over:

  “You’re nearly thirty!”

  “You’re not young anymore!”

  “It’s all downhill from here!”

  So depressing was the thought that at times I felt that he may as well chop my head off and be done with it. I remembered watching some old sci-fi movie when I was a kid when society did exactly that – kill everyone off at the age of thirty. On my gloomier days it seemed like a perfectly sensible idea.

  By the time thirty actually did roll around I’d had a whole year to come to terms with the situation so the day itself was not too bad after all. It was one of the few birthdays I had enjoyed since becoming an adult. Rob was exceptionally attentive by his standards – looking back, it was possibly the last year before he had started knocking off the neighbour because after that he basically didn’t bother.

  Once I had settled into my thirties I came to quite enjoy them. The whole decade stretched out in front of me, seemingly full of possibilities, which at that time included the very realistic prospect of marriage and babies. I came to realise that thirty was no age at all, not in the modern world.

  Then the years flew by, and suddenly here I was hitting thirty-nine with another sword hanging over my head. This time the terrifying prospect of being forty was looming on the horizon. That was practically middle-aged. I thought back to when I was twenty-nine and how worried I had been about that. It all seemed quite laughable now. I hadn’t been much more than a kid, really.

  Now I was about to hit forty and what had I achieved in the past decade? Diddly-squat, that’s what.

  I had gone backwards, if anything. I still had the same job, but not the same boyfriend, who I foolishly had believed might want to marry me and be the father of my babies. Now I didn’t have a boyfriend at all.

  My sex life was laughably non-existent, confined to my own solitary fumbling over countless unfulfilled fantasies and missed opportunities. As for my biological clock, that wasn’t so much ticking as booming out like Big Ben’s bongs as they heralded the dawn of yet another year.

  Under the circumstances there was no way I was making even a token effort to celebrate the dawn of the final year of my fourth decade. Some people were making a big deal out of it being the end of the first quarter of the century.

  Where had all that time gone? It seemed like the Millennium had only just happened. It was all so depressing that when the holiday period roster was being drawn up at work, I was the first to put my name down.

  Working four nights in a row was no sweat to me. I did it all the time. What did it matter? Without kids or a partner it wasn’t as if I was missing any quality time with anyone.

  New Year wasn’t the most pleasant time to be working in the hospital, but with the consolation of a week in Lanzarote just over a week away, I wasn’t particularly bothered. It wasn’t as if I was in A&E or anything – working in there on New Year’s Eve was, by all accounts, a nightmare.

  Up on the wards, we just picked up the fallout. Some of those admitted through A&E found their way up to me. Many of them were the worse for wear due to drink – either imbibing too much of it, or being assaulted by someone else who had. It was like this most weekends so I was used to it, but at New Year you could double it and then some.

  The first such individual didn’t even wait until New Year – a particularly unpleasant man who had nearly lost an eye in a pub brawl on the 30th. He was under the impression that swearing at the nurses was a good way to get what he wanted – as he swiftly found out, it was not.

  He was typical of the drunks we got from time to time who seemed to think it was acceptable to get lippy with us. It was something I just wouldn’t stand for. Having a go at people in the pub is bad enough, but abusing the trained healthcare professionals trying to patch them back together was way bey
ond out of order.

  It wasn’t unheard of for these dregs of humanity to even assault the staff, and following an incident the previous year, we’d had panic buttons installed on all the wards. Working for the NHS could be a thankless task at times, but as they say, somebody’s gotta do it.

  In my early years of nursing, I found these drunken, leery arseholes intimidating, but over the years I had learnt to give as good as I got. Anyone trying to backchat me soon got put in their place and there was very little they could say that would faze me. What did affect me was the other type of patient we saw more of at this time of year than any other.

  I’m talking about the suicide cases – those poor, desperate souls who for whatever reason can’t find the strength in themselves to face another year. It certainly puts my trivial New Year woes into perspective.

  Thankfully, up on the wards I usually only get to see the survivors. If they make it as far as us, the vast majority do live to tell the tale. But I’m well aware that there are plenty more out there who won’t be found in time.

  This particular New Year’s Eve had featured examples of both types of cases. It was the third of my four nights and by dawn we had four new patients on my ward – one with alcohol poisoning, another one who had been glassed in a fight in a pub, the second such case in as many nights, and another who had been beaten to a pulp in an argument over whose turn it was at a taxi rank.

  The fourth was a single mother in her late-twenties who had taken an overdose of painkillers.

  What had driven her to do that I didn’t know at this stage but I hoped I would find out when she woke up. I took a tough line with the drunks and other idiots, but I could be equally tender with those who needed it. If I got the chance to talk with this girl the next day, I would do whatever I could to help her through her pain.

  A tender hand was also needed for those who invariably came to us in the final days of their lives. We’d had one such patient on the ward for the past few days, a middle-aged man who was on the verge of succumbing, like so many before him, to the ravages of lung cancer.

  I had grown to like Thomas Scott. Despite his terminal state of health he had maintained his dignity and even a sense of humour, joking and even flirting with me a little as I cared for him. As the end neared I felt increasingly sorry for Thomas. He was only in his fifties which was far too young to die.

  His daughter Stacey, a lovely and compassionate young woman, came in to see him every day. She was clearly devoted to her father, and striking up a conversation with her I found out there had been a fair amount of tragedy in her life. Her mother had been killed by a drink-driver years before and now she was about to become an orphan in her twenties.

  She, too, needed comfort, perhaps more so than Thomas who seemed to have accepted his fate. I was more than happy to be a shoulder to cry on, reflecting that it wasn’t just the patients that needed help sometimes: it was also those closest to them.

  Some of my colleagues were of the opinion that we should keep a professional distance from our patients, including their nearest and dearest, but I didn’t agree. This wasn’t a production line in a factory – we were dealing with living, feeling human beings. Just by being in hospital they were in many cases going through some of the most traumatic moments of their lives, dying or otherwise.

  I had come into caring after witnessing death and misery on a wide scale in my youth after a natural disaster. I had realised then that what I wanted to do was care for those in need. If I was detached from people’s emotional needs, then what was the point? I might as well go and stack shelves in Tesco.

  I did a lot of caring that last, normal day. Just before I got off shift in the morning I spent some time with Kacey, the girl who had tried to take her own life during the Hogmanay celebrations. It came as no surprise to hear it was all over a man, who in this case had turned out to be a really nasty piece of work.

  Over the course of about half an hour she related the whole grisly tale to me. It seemed that she had been muddling along as a single mum until a couple of years ago until this lad, Aaron, had come into her life and swept her off her feet. But he hadn’t been all he had appeared to be.

  He had been a drug dealer and a criminal, who had gradually taken over her life, seducing her with money and glamour before hooking her on drugs so he could control her. He also used her flat to store his merchandise and when she eventually got raided following a tip-off, it was her, rather than him, that the police arrested.

  With threats of violence if she implicated him, Kacey ended up in court and fined, but it didn’t end there. In a financial mess and drug-dependent, she had come to the attention of social services. Ultimately, her three-year-old daughter was taken away.

  That had been the final nail in the coffin that had driven her to the overdose. Aaron, of course, was long gone by this time, having moved on to his next victim.

  I tried to empathise with her situation as best as I could but my suffering at the hands of my unfaithful man was trivial compared to what she had been through. Remembering the heartbreak I had been through at New Year, four years ago, I could scarcely begin to imagine the extent of her pain.

  I wanted to tell her it would get easier, but would it? She had pretty much lost everything. All I could do was counsel her and offer her advice on how to get clean and get her daughter back which had to be the number one priority.

  After a few hours’ sleep, I came back into work on the evening of 1st January for the last of my four nights. It turned out it was to be my last night in a way which I was completely unaware of yet. During this final shift my world was going to be turned upside down.

  On my return I discovered that Thomas Scott was in a bad way. He was unconscious and near death. The strange events that were to change my life were destined to occur in his private room which was just off the main ward. It was paid for by the private healthcare he received as part of his pension package.

  Apparently he had had quite a stellar career in the retail trade and had retired early, clearly not short of a few quid. This was all information I had gleaned from one of my many chats with Stacey over the previous few days. Talking about her dad seemed to help her deal with what she was going through.

  The last time I had spoken to Thomas himself had been on the morning of the 30th, just before I went off shift. He had been struggling that day, seemingly forgetful of who he was or why he was in hospital. Subsequently, he had gone quickly downhill. By the time I came into work on the evening of 1st January it was clear he was not going to last the night.

  The end came in the early hours of the following morning. I had been caring for him during the previous few hours, but had gone for a break when the inevitable happened. It was left to my colleague Carmen to give me sad news when she returned to the break room.

  “I’m afraid Mr Scott’s just passed away,” she said.

  Some people think that we nurses become anaesthetised to such news, dealing with it every day. But I never did, and felt very sorry for Thomas and his family. He had been a decent guy.

  “Did he regain consciousness at all?” I asked.

  “He woke up briefly,” replied Carmen. “He wasn’t alone – his daughter was with him.”

  The task of preparing the body to be taken down to the mortuary fell to me. This was the one part of the job of nursing that I never felt fully prepared for, no matter how many times I did it.

  On the way to Thomas’s room I passed Stacey and her fiancé, David. She looked up at me, her tear-stained face full of grief. She let go of David and hugged me.

  “It’s OK,” I said as I held her, even though of course it wasn’t.

  Nothing could take away the pain of what she had just been through, but if I could offer even the slightest crumb of comfort just from the warmth of human contact then I had helped, albeit in a small way.

  I approached Thomas’s room, steeling myself for the sad task that lay ahead. The first thing I would do when I got into the room would be to ope
n the window, even though it was freezing outside.

  This was a nursing tradition that had been taught to me in my early days by an older nurse who I had worked with in Africa with the Red Cross. She was a committed Christian and had claimed that it would help to set the deceased’s spirit free.

  Although I wasn’t much of a believer in the afterlife myself, it had stuck with me and it always felt like the right thing to do.

  Next I would begin the process of laying out the body. I would wash the patient from head to toe, and then dress him or her in fresh linen prior to the body being taken down to the morgue. As I went about this, I always treated the dead patient with the utmost respect, speaking gently to them as if they were still alive.

  At odds with my generally atheist nature, at these moments there was always a small part of me that imagined some small spark of consciousness might still exist somewhere. If that were true, then hopefully my words of comfort might help them along on their journey to wherever they believed they might be going.

  Or maybe I was just doing it to help me cope better with the task in hand. Either way, it worked for me.

  I was not destined to even get started on these tasks this time. As I opened the door to the private room I was taken aback to see a very oddly dressed stranger inside, peering intently at the chart of the bottom of Thomas’s bed.

  He was dressed in outdoor clothing, but with an old-fashioned medical white coat draped over the top. If this was some attempt to disguise himself as a doctor it was a pretty lame one, particularly as he was also wearing a large hiker’s rucksack over the top of the coat.

  My first thought on seeing the rucksack was of terrorism. It was a reaction I always had now when I saw anyone acting even slightly out of the ordinary wearing a rucksack. It was an irrational fear brought on by decades of terrorist attacks in London and elsewhere.

  This man didn’t look like your average terrorist, whatever that was. I suppose my fears had conditioned me to imagine some young man of Middle Eastern origin. This was prejudiced, I know, but too many images in the media had imprinted this cliché indelibly in my mind.