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“I heard that!” Cathy shouted from inside the truck.
“Sure you did,” Ted said, walking toward his SUV, “that’s because I spoke loudly enough for you to hear me.”
He waved goodbye and drove off down the street, leaving us alone in the dark, with a pair of sneakers lazily swinging in the breeze above our heads.
Cathy jumped down from the rear of the truck and shut it up. She might have slammed the doors harder than was necessary, despite 1-8 being what we called an ‘old bus.’
“Son of a bitch,” she growled, lighting a cigarette up.
I glanced around, but if anyone was watching us, they were keeping to the shadows. You weren’t meant to be seen smoking in uniform, let alone smoking around the rear of an ambulance which carried oxygen in tanks in the cupboard and piped through the walls.
I said nothing.
“Now, he’s never gonna let me forget it,” she muttered.
“She fooled me, too,” I offered.
“You’re still in your grace period, Ky,” she told me. “But watch out, the moment they think you should know everything, you better fucking know everything, otherwise they never let you forget it.”
“Who? Ted?” I asked.
“All of ‘em,” she said, grinding the butt of her smoke out under a thick soled boot. “Come on. Let’s split. Before they give us another job out here. I want back in the fucking city.”
Cathy didn’t sing on the way back to Pitt Street. I missed it. There were no corners taken on two wheels or downshifting to make the truck leap away like a roaring lion, either. It was as if we’d brought a black cloud back with us and it was too thick to see the world we’d once known through its heavy weave.
I might have been new. I might have been learning on the job despite having a certificate saying I was qualified to do this. But even when I’d been here as long as Cathy had, it looked like I’d still get things wrong.
And be crushed by it.
