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Luke had taken her to Boujis, Emma had practically burst with excitement, half expecting to see Prince Harry every time she turned round. How Luke and his friends got on the guest list there she couldn’t imagine.
    She liked being with Luke; he was cool and fun and funny, and he threw his money around, which was rather nice; he hardly ever expected her to pay for herself, and he wore really great clothes, dark suits and pink shirts and silk ties done in a really big loose knot. He took all that very seriously. He wouldn’t be in his suit today, she reflected, because it was Friday, which was dress-down day, and they all wore chinos or even jeans. Not any old jeans, obviously, not Gap or Levi’s, but Ralph Lauren or Dolce & Gabbana, and shirts open at the neck, and brown brogues. Dressing down or indeed up on any day was not something that figured large in Emma’s life.
    She wasn’t at all sure if she was actually in love with Luke—although she had decided she would really like to be—and she was even less sure if he was in love with her; but it was very early days, and they had a lot of fun together, and she always looked forward enormously to seeing him. He was very generous, always tried to take her somewhere really nice. The other thing that was really sweet and that had surprised her was how much he respected her work.
    “It must be absolutely terrifying,” he said, “life and death in your hands. And surgery: cutting people open, how scary is that?”
    She said it wasn’t that scary—“What not even the first time?”—and she explained that you arrived at the first time so slowly and so well supervised, you were hardly aware at all it actually was the first time.
    She was certainly looking forward to seeing him; they were going to have quite a bit of time together, not just Saturday night, but the whole of Sunday and Sunday night as well; she didn’t have to be back at the hospital till ten on Monday morning.
    So she’d be able to stay in his flat for two nights, which was a really cool studio apartment; and obviously that meant they’d be having sex, quite a lot of sex. Luke was good at sex, inventive and very, very energetic, but also surprisingly considerate and eager to please, Emma thought, smiling to herself as she looked at the text he’d sent her that morning: Hi, babe. Really looking 4ward 2 tonite. I mean really. Got some news. Take care Luke xxx .
    She wondered what the news was: probably something to do with work. It usually was. Anyway, only seven more hours … There’d been a few kids with broken bones, a couple of concussions, and a boy of seventeen with severe stomach pains. It turned out he’d drunk two bottles of vodka, three of wine, and a great many beers over the past twenty-four hours, celebrating his A levels, and seemed surprised there could have been a connection. And then there were a few of the regulars. All A&E departments had them, Alex Pritchard had explained to Emma on her first day, the Worried Well, as they were known, who came in literally hundreds of times, over and over again, with the same pains in their legs or their arms, the same breathlessness, the same agonising headaches. Most of those were seen by the resident GP in A&E, who knew them and dispatched them fairly kindly; Emma felt initially that she would dispatch them rather more unkindly, seeing as they were wasting NHS time and resources, but she was told that medicine wasn’t like that.
    “Especially not these days,” Pritchard said. “They’d be suing us,given half the chance. Bloody nonsense,” he added. It had been one of his scowling days.
    Anyway she might not look like a doctor, Emma thought, but she was certainly beginning to feel like one. And even sound like one, or so Luke had told her last time he’d had a bad hangover and she’d been very brisk indeed about the folly of his own personal cure: that of the hair of the dog.
    “You’ve poisoned yourself, Luke, and swallowing more of it