Alfie

Hayley had just finished pronouncing the girl dead and as soon as she saw the woman in the pink flamingo pyjamas, her face paled.

I didn't hear the conversation, but I caught glimpses between pressing ice packs on forearms and checking drips in the back of elderly people's hands.

The woman in the pink flamingo pyjamas covered her mouth and then her face.

She sat down slowly, shoulders rising to her ears.

It's always the same.

Hayley wandered over to me, limply, and I politely excused myself from whatever tired I was attempting to stem to meet her halfway.

She told me it was the first person she'd declared dead that wasn't elderly.

We went outside to smoke, down the back of the hospital.

There were these unnaturally bright white lights which made the darkness beyond the little patch of light we were standing in feel even darker.

We were standing slightly too far apart.

I had to really stretch when I held out my box of cigarettes to... Hayley wasn't a smoker, but she took one anyway.

We stood there in silence, trailing smoke in thin wisps up towards the floodlights.

Out of nowhere, Hayley made this strange noise like a kicked dog.

I looked up at her in alarm with my saucer-wide, sleep-deprived eyes, half expecting her leg to have fallen off or gallons of blood to be pouring out of her ears, but instead she was just crying.

She pulled the sleeves of her jacket over her hands and covered her face with them.

All of a sudden, she looked very young.

I don't really know what it was.

She just looked really small.

Junior doctor is a bit of a misnomer.

Hayley had been out of medical school for two years by the time she'd come to work with me on A&E.