The Poppy Factory by Liz Trenow

recognised Nate, at first. The dreadlocks were gone, replaced with a short mat of tight black curls. Was this a statement, symbolic of his new start without her? He spotted her and smiled, with that soft beam which lit up his face and made you feel as though someone had turned the lights on.
    ‘Yup, all gone,’ he said, rubbing his head. ‘Got the job, too.’
    ‘What job?’
    ‘Head of Sports. Matt’s leaving.’
    Her heart lifted even further. ‘Congratulations, Nate.’ She touched his hand, and he didn’t take it away.
    The couple of hours they’d agreed on went by too fast. It felt curiously formal, air-kissing like strangers as they parted. But it was a start, Jess told herself, easy does it. They planned a meal together the following week, when she had a couple of days off. She began allowing herself to hope.
    Although each ambulance call-out still got the adrenaline pumping and her heart racing, most of their busy shifts were filled with non-emergencies. Seven out of ten ‘shouts’ were for old people, many of them regulars. She loved the way their faces would light up when the crew arrived, the sheer relief showing in the colour of their cheeks, and admired their stoical bravery and humility. She couldn’t count the times she heard the phrase, ‘Sorry to be such a nuisance, dearie’.
    She happily brewed cups of strong sugary tea, exchanged a few words of comfort or simple conversation, listened to their stories and gained satisfaction from having made a difference. Many did not need hospital treatment – it was just a matter of making sure the district nurse would call by or the carer could attend more often. They got to know some of the old folk so well that when something more serious happened and they had to be admitted to hospital, she found herself dwelling on them, wondering about their progress. If she learned that one of them hadn’t made it, she experienced genuine sorrow.
    At the end of most days she felt more like a social worker than a medical responder. It’s bloody ridiculous, she said to herself, that no-one cares enough to put the system right and it’s left to an expensive emergency service to pick up the pieces. Her colleagues never seemed to gripe about it – perhaps they’d accepted that nothing was likely to change – but it made her angry: why couldn’t the state provide elderly and frail people with enough support to live with dignity in their own homes; why had society apparently washed its hands of them? They sometimes learned of a son or daughter who lived within easy driving distance yet hadn’t visited for weeks. What were they thinking? Were they unaware that their elderly relative was desperately lonely but too proud to ask for help, or did they simply not care?
    The time-wasters were far more difficult to cope with. She’d heard the stories, of course, the call-outs for broken nails or wasp stings, and the people who’d learned how to circumvent the categories of urgency and would describe every situation as ‘life-threatening’, even if it wasn’t remotely so.
    When faced with a fat, gobby middle-aged man demanding emergency treatment for a sprained ankle, or a woman who couldn’t remember whether she’d taken her birth control pill, she felt the old anger rising again, the nausea starting to ferment in her stomach.
    ‘How do you get through the day without giving them a slap?’ she asked her crew mate Dave – an older man, steady and compassionate – after they left a call-out for a minor oven burn. The woman had fussed interminably about being scarred and demanded to see a cosmetic surgeon. Dave had been admirably firm.
    ‘We all feel like that sometimes,’ he said. ‘Just give yourself a bit of distance. Say you need to take a couple of minutes, go outside and take a few deep breaths. I find it works a treat.’
    The worst shifts were Friday and Saturday evenings, when gangs of otherwise sensible, intelligent young people who probably lived