Page 6 of In Sheets of Rain

“Better you than me; I like getting a bit of shuteye on nightshift.”

“I hate waking up to a callout at half past three.”

We laughed. Drank some more wine. Talked a little about the good old days. But mainly we talked about all the things we would do now we lived in the Big Smoke.

Hamilton’s not small. Maybe one-hundred-and-sixty thousand people.

But Auckland’s got one and half million.

There was no comparison, really.

* * *

“Ever been to an epileptic before?” Cathy asked me.

“Yeah, when I was a volunteer.”

“ABCs,” she said in a mock drill sergeant’s tone of voice.

I chuckled.

We screamed through an intersection at a speed that I thought was slightly reckless, but that was Cathy.

It was also the middle of the night, so the road was clear.

The ambulance barrelled onto the motorway doing over eighty in a fifty zone. Balancing on two wheels, Cathy downshifted the old truck, and made it leap into a higher gear.

“Out of my way!” she yelled at the top of her voice. “The cavalry is coming! A 1-8 to the rescue!”

There was no one to yell at, so I gripped the hand-hold above the passenger seat and laughed as if she wasn’t mental. I thought, perhaps, that a certain amount of craziness was needed to work a nightshift out of Pitt Street.

To work a nightshift on an all-female crewed vehicle heading toward a darker part of the city.

I wasn’t worried. Not really. Cathy was larger than life and would scare any other crazy person out there with her bravado and rip-shit-bust attitude.

I kinda wanted to be Cathy when I grew up.

She also wore steel-capped boots and had the biggest industrial looking torch hanging from her leather belt; she knew how to use it, too. She called it her Tommyknocker, whatever that meant.

The street lights flashed past the windows of the ambulance, strobing to the sound of Cathy’s singing. I didn’t recognise the song, but it was catchy. I was even humming along with her when we pulled up to the residential street.

Cars sat up on cinder blocks, tricycles lay on their sides in overgrown front yards, a pair of sneakers hung over the power lines in front of a house we passed with boarded up windows. Lights shone behind sheet covered openings on others; the smell of fried meat wafted on the air when I wound down my window to better read the numbers on the letterboxes.

Half the houses didn’t have letterboxes, so I guessed which one was our target by a haphazard method of deduction.

No one stood out on the side of the road to greet us.

“Nice of ‘em to show us the way,” Cathy muttered as I hit the button on the GPS to show us ‘on scene’.

We didn’t hurry out of the vehicle. Cathy clutched the keys in her hand and stared at the address in contemplation. Usually, we tucked the keys up under the visor, so any ambo could climb in and start the truck up. Usually, though, we weren’t in a neighbourhood where a stolen ambulance would make for a nice way to pass the evening.

“Come on,” Cathy said, sounding serious for the first time. “Let’s check the place out, at least.”

We grabbed our gear and trudged up the broken concrete path, eyes darting from shadow to shadow, sweat coating my palms. Nothing jumped out at us and when Cathy took the first step up onto the front porch, the door swung open and an emaciated looking young man stared out of the gloom of the house with eyes too big for his skeletal looking skull.

“Took your time,” he muttered.

“Came from the city,” Cathy said matter of factly. “Is the patient conscious?”