Hi everyone,
Well, we made it! 115% was our first stretch goal, and as promised you all get a new short story from the Underdogs universe. This time it's Lorraine, thanks to her winning the popular vote in Underdogs' Facebook community.
This makes six stories now- the full index of them being available here. Next on the stretch goal list, a private author interview if we get to 125%.
So, on with the story. It may have particular resonance to those who remember Lorraine's story arc in Tooth and Nail (not least her opening up to Shannon about her career history). Enjoy!
Chris Bonnello
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Lorraine Shepherd has a change of heart
Before
‘It’s okay to struggle today, Lorraine.’
‘No it’s not. We have plenty of pupils left alive.’
Mary looked taken aback by that comment. It didn’t surprise Lorraine, whose seven years in St. Luke’s Primary School had taught her that Mary Fionda often wore her heart on her sleeve. Even though headteachers traditionally weren’t supposed to.
‘Our children,’ Mary answered, leaning across her desk with an outstretched hand, its fingers brushing Lorraine’s own, ‘are best served by teaching assistants who know how they’re feeling and can healthily process those emotions... including bereavement. If you’re not in the right place to do that right now, there’s no shame in taking a few days off. Becky can cover you easily enough.’
‘I’m not likely to be much use at home… being a terrible wife and an impatient mother, barely able to function, reading Joey’s note again and again and again because there’s nothing else I’d know how to do...’
I’m so sorry Mrs Shepherd. I just couldn’t do it, said the note in her mind. It even had Joey’s wobbliest voice, to match the chaotic handwriting he had scribbled it with.
She had given the very best of herself to Joey Shetland. Been the surrogate parent figure to an eleven-year-old boy whose actual parents had respected him so little. While his mother had looked at him and seen a younger version of the husband she hated, Lorraine had tried helping the boy to become the best version of his actual self. While his father had used him as a projection point for his lifelong inferiority issues, Lorraine had tried making the boy realise how valuable he was.
Joey Shetland had left school at the end of Year Six, and moved with his parents somewhere up north back to their family roots. His future had been uncertain but, nonetheless, he had been Lorraine’s finest work – right up to the day he had killed himself. Three months into Year Seven, this wonderful and complicated young man was dead. Forever removed from the world, regardless of how much he had brought to it. Joey had been led to his grave by his unfit parents, dying without any idea of how much he was worth.
She would willingly have adopted him. And professional boundaries be damned, if she had adopted him he’d still have been alive.
‘Lorraine-’
‘His funeral was on Friday. I’m glad you gave me the day off, and I’m glad his awful mother gave me the note he’d written for me… but guess what I did the whole weekend? Exactly what I just described. Just thinking about him, and reading and rereading…’
I’m so sorry Mrs Shepherd. I just couldn’t do it.
Lorraine had felt her voice rising as her words ran on, so she let her sentence trail off. As emotional as she was, she didn’t want the children to think she was arguing with the headteacher.
‘You’ve been with us for seven years, Lorraine,’ said Mary. ‘I still remember offering you the job, without even realising you were only twenty. You seemed so far beyond your years in terms of maturity.’
Mary punctuated her words with a smile, as if a drop of sentiment would make Lorraine see something beautiful in the conservation. It failed.
‘And in all that time,’ Mary continued, ‘you and I and the rest of the staff have all seen you grow into the wonderful TA you’ve become. We all know that your greatest strength is your compassion. It’s who you are, Lorraine.’
Lorraine tried not to nod. ‘Compassion’ had even been her answer to the ‘what is your greatest strength?’ question at the interview, and it had served her well up until recently.
‘But compassion is also your biggest weakness, if you don’t mind me saying,’ Mary finished. ‘We all know how close you were to Joey.’
Something in that sentence made Lorraine furious.
‘No offence,’ she began, already knowing it was the wrong way to start a sentence, ‘but I don’t think you do.’
‘Lorraine-’
‘I loved Joey. I poured my heart and my very being into my work with him. It didn’t even feel like work. It felt like being the best person I could be, all to help him become the best person he could be. Or at least, make him see just a little of what was beautiful and good in him. To make him see that his abusive parents – and yes, I am calling them abusive, and we should have called social bloody services a long time ago – to make him see that they were wrong about him and that the world was a shinier place because a boy like Joey existed in it!’
She turned her head towards the door to see the face of a Year Three child poking his nose against the vertical glass of the door. Apparently Lorraine hadn’t controlled her voice as well as she thought.
‘He helped me as much as I helped him,’ she continued, Mary speechless before her. ‘I became my best self in order to help him. Joey was more than just a pupil I helped with his reading. I loved him like a foster son.’
But now he’s dead. A week after his twelfth birthday. Three months in a new school without me was all it took.
Maybe I failed him in a different way. I made him happy, but I didn’t teach him ways to cope on his own.
Or maybe I’m looking for things to blame myself for. And maybe I’m right to do so. I mean, he did end up dead, regardless of my best efforts.
Her eyes became watery, but somehow there were no tears. It angered Lorraine. Joey Shetland deserved tears, but after Friday’s funeral and a weekend of mourning in the void, her water supply was running low.
Somewhere in her blurred vision, she could see Mary wearing her Mrs Fionda face. Becoming the headteacher again, despite no children being present.
‘I’m sending you home,’ she said, stern but soft as if with a child. ‘This is no longer a choice I’m afraid. There are children in this school who are siblings of those who knew Joey, and in the interests of their wellbeing-’
‘Look, I’m sorry...’
I’m so sorry Mrs Shepherd. I just couldn’t do it.
It didn’t take much for those sentences to re-enter her head. Even the slightest apology did it.
‘In the interests of their wellbeing, they’re better served by those who can show them healthy ways of mourning. In time, this will be you. But for now, I need you to stay at home.’
Lorraine had made countless mistakes throughout her twenties, but nothing that had ever got her sent home from work. She decided not to say another word – not out of spite but out of self-preservation. As she grabbed the door handle and prepared for the cold reality of the outdoors, she came to realise that Mary was right. Compassion was not only her greatest strength: it really was her greatest weakness too.
She made her way into the main corridor, and came to realise that it wasn’t cold reality after all. The world around her was a sanitised, child-friendly masking of reality, where the world was covered with brightly-painted walls and smiley photos of junior sports teams and the friendly smell of whatever cleaning fluid the site manager used. A world that made itself look safe for young children. A world that could pretend that twelve-year-olds never killed themselves.
Whilst distracted by the sensory onslaught of a bright and happy St. Luke’s, Lorraine didn’t see Becky heading the other way with an armful of ring-binders.
‘Oops, sorry,’ she whispered as she squeezed past.
I’m so sorry Mrs Shepherd. I just couldn’t do it.
Lorraine picked up the pace on her trembling legs. Perhaps school really wasn’t the best place for her that morning.
#
During
She looked in the bedroom mirror yet again, not just to check the quality of her clothes but to see if she could still pull off the perfect interview face. Important people would be judging her that day.
‘You look fine,’ Charles said behind her.
‘You’re not even looking.’
‘Because I already know.’
Lorraine sighed. Her husband was genuine; that was why she had married him. She knew without doubt that her appearance really was fine in Charles’s eyes and that he wasn’t just saying it to be kind. But, respectfully, it wasn’t his opinion that mattered.
‘Do I look worthy of responsibility again?’ she asked.
‘It’s your skills, your aspirations and your willingness to learn that make you worthy of becoming a nurse,’ Charles replied, his reflection in the mirror rising from the bed to button his collared shirt. He had his own job to get himself ready for: his work as an actuary that had kept the family afloat, after Lorraine had walked out of St. Luke’s never to return. ‘But of course,’ he finished, ‘your appearance doesn’t hurt your chances either.’
He offered a gentle smile, one that was full of compassion and sincerity but without the decisive enthusiasm that would have properly comforted her.
‘Do I look like someone who can actually save lives?’ she asked.
Charles held his tie in his hands, but paused before putting it on. He took the time to walk over to Lorraine and rest his hands on her shoulders, careful not to rub them and mess up the clothes she had so painstakingly aligned across her body.
‘You do,’ he said, ‘but this isn’t the right day to be thinking about Joey.’
Every day’s the right day to be thinking about Joey, she thought but did not say. A year had passed since the funeral, and the wider world had grown tired of 28-year-old Lorraine Shepherd wailing about a dead boy who was becoming more consigned to history day by day.
‘You’re not doing all of this just to make up for his death, are you?’ asked Charles.
Wow, he could be direct at times.
‘Joey doesn’t care what I do to honour his memory,’ Lorraine answered, ‘and his family doesn’t deserve to have me honouring them. I just…’
There was a faint tap at the foot of the door, that could only have come from their four-year-old daughter impatient to see her parents. Lorraine strung her sentences together as Charles walked to the bedroom door.
‘I just thought that… since my words can make the difference between life and death, I’m already in the lifesaving profession. So… I might as well take it all the way and go into nursing.’
‘Is that going to be your interview answer? To why you want to get onto the course?’
‘No, of course not. They don’t need to know about Joey.’
‘Good. Because as smart as you are, you couldn’t control that boy’s decisions. Nobody could, except him. You don’t want to tell your future course leaders that you blame yourself for tragedies beyond your control. It wouldn’t be a good trait for a nurse.’
Charles opened the door at that moment, possibly to cut off Lorraine before she could protest, and picked up little June in his arms. Her face emerged from behind his chest, and she rested her chin on his shoulder.
‘And regardless of what happens everywhere else in your life,’ Charles finished, ‘you’ve always got this beautiful girl who looks up to you. And me, for what that’s worth.’
Lorraine smiled, but with reservations. She knew it was Charles’ subtle way of indicating that Joey Shetland had occupied enough of their family’s life, and that June needed to take centre stage again. Lorraine had felt so guilty about the drop in her mothering qualities over the last year, but…
June stared at her from Daddy’s arms with curious, loving eyes. Her daughter still saw her as faultless, for now.
#
‘So Lorraine, tell me about yourself.’
Oh dear.
Once upon a time, Mary Fionda had told Lorraine that a good answer to this question got you seventy percent of the way to the job. Which, conversely, meant a bad answer would send her straight back to unemployment.
‘Well, I…’
She looked at Gregory Bilton, the only vocal person on the important side of the table. The others seemed curiously subservient to him, this confident, uncompromising-looking man who spoke with a louder default volume than the average person had any right to. He looked difficult to impress.
‘Well,’ Lorraine continued, ‘I recently left my job as a teaching assistant after a succ… after being widely regarded as successful, and I felt that my nature as a person was leading me to more intimate and in-depth practices. Having worked with children to help them become the best adults… excuse me, become the best adults they can be, I decided it was time to help people with their health and wellbeing more directly.’
It was short, but close enough to what she had rehearsed. And apparently interview panels took nervous speech errors into account.
Gregory held the perfect poker face, although his silent colleagues shared faint corner-mouthed smiles. No comment was made about her answer.
‘As I’m sure you will know,’ said Gregory, ‘nursing is a rather stressful profession. What would you do in order to enable yourself to deal with that stress?’
Lorraine had already worked out she wouldn’t get a smile from him, even if she directly quoted an answer written by God himself, so she focused on the other faces on the panel.
‘I would communicate consistently, positively and healthily with my colleagues and managers, keeping discussions productive, and never falling into the trap of ranting about patients. I would also seek solace in my life outside of work, never divulging details of my job of course-’
Is that true though? Charles probably knows the colour of Joey Shetland’s eyes.
‘-but enjoying what I love in life outside of work, not least amateur poetry and my beautiful four-year-old daughter.’
She smiled at the mention of June, as did the silent interviewers.
Gregory Bilton, however, moved on to the next question.
The interview dragged on as interviews did, a verbal back-and-forth sparring match in which every answer Lorraine gave was technically correct but stated with nervous clumsiness, and every injection of humanity was declined by Gregory Bilton.
But throughout the whole experience, Lorraine was learning more about what the job would be like: not least, how much of herself she was preparing to lose in order to match the expectations of others. Charles had once told her to be careful of pretending to be a different person in a job interview, because the danger was that she might actually get the job and spend the rest of her career pretending to be that other person. There’d be a very real danger of Lorraine Shepherd waking up one morning to find the synthetic version of her overtaking her real self – her interview mask becoming all that was left of her.
Lorraine was already picturing herself in twenty years: a version of herself who would worry about her patients without ever letting her superiors know that she was worrying. Or even worse, a version of herself with a calm bedside manner but none of the emotional attachment that had made her so effective as a teaching assistant.
A version of herself in her late forties or early fifties, who would cast her humanity aside for the sake of what other people called the greater good.
‘One last question,’ said Gregory. ‘What would you say your biggest strength is?’
Lorraine did not hesitate.
‘My biggest strength is my compassion,’ she said, aware of how much it felt like reading from a script.
#
After
‘You’re smiling,’ said Ron. ‘Are nurses paid bonuses if they smile in front of us?’
Ron was one of the more blunt patients on the stroke unit. Maybe that was why Lorraine liked him (as much as she could truly be said to like the people she knew professionally). He was wide awake in the middle of her night shift, but despite the inconvenience it presented, he was decent company.
‘Nurses getting paid bonuses?’ she answered, once she had withdrawn her fingers from his wrist and picked up her pen to finish off his vitals checklist. ‘To be fair, that would make me smile.’
‘So… what’s got you so happy tonight?’
Lorraine glanced over the checklist. Both in numbers and in terms of his growing character, Ron was very close to being worthy of discharge. He was a world apart from the frightened, clueless man who had been wheeled in mid-stroke. Sometimes, with the right care at the right time, patients had happy endings.
Well, not quite. We all die in the end. Hospitals never truly save lives, but we do prolong them. And usually, that’s enough.
‘I’m smiling because it’s been my birthday for the last two hours,’ Lorraine answered. ‘I’m thirty-one.’
‘Oh! Well that explains it. Happy birthday, and enjoy your youth. Take advantage of having a clot-free bloodstream. You’ll miss it one day.’
‘Not today though, Ron. And thank you.’
She rested the clipboard on the front of his bed, and started her wander to the next ward. In a way she would miss Ron once he was discharged, but in the kindest possible way she hoped she’d never see him again. One stroke per lifetime was more than enough.
‘Lorraine?’ came a high-pitched, borderline nervous voice from behind her.
Lorraine paused, and took an impatient breath. Steph was a nice enough girl, but she had yet to develop the self-assuredness and casual confidence expected from a real nurse.
Six months post-qualification, it hadn’t taken Lorraine long to find fault in those who were new to their own training courses. Steph was only three years behind her on the professional development timeline, but they were ruthlessly life-changing years. Adapting waking hours for night shifts would be the least of it.
‘Yes, Steph?’ Lorraine answered with a bland voice.
‘Delia needs her catheter checking. I can do it, but… I’m less than a hundred percent-’
‘You want me to do it for you. Come on, let’s-’
‘No, no, I’ll do it. I just want you to watch in case I get something wrong. It’s… a pretty tricky area to fix if something goes wrong.’
‘Yes, Delia might get a little cross if you inflict night-long pain on her genitalia. I suppose-’
‘Oh goodness…’ Steph gasped, her hands rushing up to cover her mouth. Lorraine turned in the direction of Steph’s gaze, to find Ron displaying all the telltale signs of a sudden heart attack.
It had come out of nowhere. As they often did.
Cardiac arrest.
Common in stroke victims… even ones like Ron.
Ron Parrish, 62-year-old car park attendant, father of three and grandfather of four, was going to die unless he received help. Possibly even with help. Lorraine, whilst rushing to his bedside again, reached into her mind and switched on her ability to calculate a path through a sensitive situation. More specifically, she made her emotions vanish. The greater good demanded it, and it was the better thing to do – as demonstrated by a far-too-emotional Steph who stood trembling uselessly behind her.
‘Ron?’ Lorraine asked, already knowing he wouldn’t answer but performing the necessary vitals check anyway. ‘Can you hear me?’
No verbal answer, of course. No breathing from his half-gaped jaw either.
She reached to the side of Ron’s bed and pressed the emergency call button, hoping the onsite doctors that night would be as awake as the job required them to be.
‘Steph. Defib. Now.’
Steph ran away to fetch the defibrillator. It seemed like the best use of her, while she was panicked and likely to move fastest.
There would be no need for mouth to mouth. Some years it was part of the training and essential for saving lives; some years it was removed from the training and deemed to be useless. That particular year, mouth to mouth was useless, but it made no matter. Lorraine was grateful that every bed in every ward had oxygen on tap, and wondered how many vulnerable patients the taps had saved between them. When she fixed the mask around Ron’s mouth she noticed that his face was sleepy, as if he had no idea he was about to die.
Lorraine rested her hands above Ron’s heart and started her chest compressions, and watched Ron’s head nod back and forth in response. He looked a long, long way from the blunt yet friendly patient who had wished her a happy birthday a minute or two earlier.
‘It’s gone,’ Steph said as she ran back into the ward, loud enough to wake up at least one or two patients, going by the murmurs: none of whom had known beforehand that a deadly incident was happening a few beds away.
‘Gone?’ Lorraine snarled, quiet but stern.
‘Yeah, it’s not in its-’
‘I know what gone means. Get Greg. Source another.’
It wasn’t until Steph ran off a second time that Lorraine calculated how devastating Ron’s prospects had become. Before then, she had focused solely on her chest compressions and the relay of accurate instructions to her colleague.
None of her patients had died before. Except those in palliative care, of course. Nobody who stood a chance of seeing their home again had died on Lorraine’s watch. She had always understood there would be a first: it made no sense to think she could save every single person through the entirety of her career.
Joey Shetland entered Lorraine’s mind, but left immediately. She did not understand why.
Two minutes of chest compressions. Steph was still nowhere to be seen.
Three minutes.
How the hell can you lose a defibrillator in a hospital? Lorraine asked herself, her anger giving her a much-needed energy boost. Did it not get replaced after Yanek?
Four minutes. Steph returned without a defibrillator, but mouthing ‘Greg…’ as she caught her breath.
‘You do compressions,’ Lorraine commanded, since Steph had more energy in her hands. Steph took over without hesitation – and to be fair to her, her CPR was pitch-perfect – and in the moments of having nothing immediate to lay her hands on, Lorraine reached behind her and drew the privacy curtain across. A tired patient in the background said something, but it wasn’t a priority.
Whilst Steph continued the chest compressions and there was nothing practical that Lorraine could do, she realised why Joey had left her mind so quickly.
The risk of death must have reminded her of the boy she once knew, but her own mental force-field had kept him out. Joey was the one area of Lorraine’s life that she refused to touch while on duty: he wasn’t a part of her backstory, or a series of lessons she learned, or even an interesting anecdote. Joey remained her one weakness, and it was healthier to keep him as a non-event. At work, at least.
There would always be a place for Joey Shetland in a hidden section of Lorraine’s heart, but that warm and hidden place was no longer the focal point of her personality. It still existed, but the other parts of her had grown bigger. And if Ron and Yanek and all of her other patients had known how she had changed, they would have been glad of it.
Lorraine’s compassion wasn’t keeping Ron alive. Her medical expertise was.
Gregory Bilton hauled the curtain open so he could charge through, rolling a defibrillator trolley he had sourced from somewhere. The moment Lorraine saw him looking blankly around the front panel with wide-spread twitching fingers, she worked out he hadn’t used one since training. She reached out her hands, knowing that Gregory would roll the defibrillator trolley over to her as if it were his plan all along.
Ron was unresponsive, but the odds had shifted in his favour. Plus the situation had been simplified: if the defibrillator couldn’t save him, he was beyond saving anyway.
Gregory and Steph stood and watched as, over the following minutes, Lorraine Shepherd saved a life.
The night shift doctors finally arrived on scene as the third shock across Ron’s body stopped and restarted his heart, and after several long moments of nothingness, his shallow breathing began to flow once more. Lorraine relaxed her shoulders, content in the knowledge that the bad news she’d have to break to his family wouldn’t be the worst type of news after all.
‘Nice one Lorraine,’ said Steph, her voice little more than a whisper. But perhaps under the circumstances, the girl really had done a good job. Following specific instructions at top speed was particularly difficult when your brain wasn’t in the right place. Steph would make an excellent nurse post-qualification, once she learned to leave her emotions at the back of her mind.
Lorraine looked back at what she could see of Ron, most of him obscured by the doctors scurrying around and administering drugs. There were footsteps at the entrance too, which came as a relief. The sooner Ron had a whole team around him, the sooner she could bugger off to a back office and get working. Paperwork never excited her, but it helped the next shift to avoid making grievous errors. And besides, once it was complete she’d be able to call Ron’s family and pass on what they needed to know.
‘Need a break, Lorraine?’ asked Gregory. Lorraine nodded, able to smell a hint a mile off. In a workplace full of vulnerable people with functioning ears, where security concerns were described as ‘Mr Green is looking for his coat’ and deceased patients had ‘gone to Lavender Cottage’, the ability to read between lines was essential. Gregory was satisfied that the team around Ron was strong enough, and it was time for his nurse to start processing the incident.
He followed her into the corridor, checking for passers-by as he did. Lorraine understood this to mean that he wanted to talk, so she stopped a safe distance from the door. She stretched her cramped fingers, wondering whether this would count as part of her actual break, before realising that it almost certainly would.
‘Yes?’ she asked.
‘Just wanted to say well done, really,’ began Gregory, smiling. It was curious: Lorraine had known him for three years, from interview to training to qualification and he had even become her line manager, but this was the first time she had ever seen him smile. He must have meant it. ‘I knew long ago that you’d become exactly the kind of person our patients needed, and your ability to keep your mind focused in sensitive situations is absolutely stellar. You saved Ron’s life just now. I’m proud of you, Lorraine – well done. Oh, and happy birthday too.’
Lorraine’s face did not change.
‘Just so you know,’ she replied, ‘I’ll be making a referral to the Head of Nursing, asking them to investigate how a defibrillator managed to go missing from a stroke ward.’
Without another word, she walked away. Gregory knew better than to continue the conversation.
Her words came from care rather than malice, of course. Lorraine knew better than to protect the reputation of her colleagues when their next thoughtless error could kill a patient and slice their surviving family apart.
I may have changed since the Joey days, Lorraine thought to herself as she walked to the office, but I still care about people. The caring just feels different now. It’s caring on an intellectual level, not an emotional level. A more useful way of caring, when your words and actions impact whether someone has a future.
The paperwork took less than an hour. Incident report, updating case notes, and re-evaluating Ron’s plan since he was clearly not ready for discharge. The phone call to his family was fairly standard, and they took it as well as they could have done under the circumstances.
Making the most of her final break minutes for the night, Lorraine opened the door to the break room for a sit down and a glass of water, and found Steph in tears in the chair furthest from the door.
‘You’ll get there, Steph.’
‘Get where?’ she gasped, looking approximately back in Lorraine’s direction, unfocused.
‘To the point where you can push it aside and do everything without wavering. Trust me, it takes a while. But you get there.’
‘How long does it take?’
‘How long is a piece of string? Depends on the person, but I’d say years, not months.’
‘It didn’t take you long though, did it? It seems like you were just born that way.’
Lorraine didn’t open her mouth. She knew no words would come out.
Just like I feared at the interview, she thought to herself in emerging horror. My interview persona really did take over my old self… so much, that people who didn’t know me three years ago assume my old self never existed.
Worst of all, I’m happy with it.
She gave no verbal response to Steph, turning herself and sitting down on the nearest break room chair, and realised for the first time what she had lost along her path towards correctness. She reached over to the water cooler, her hand shaking at work for the first time in a year or two.
I can save lives nowadays, but that’s all I am now. An instrument for the greater good.
My greatest strength is my ability to get the job done.
##
Copyright © Chris Bonnello 2021