When everyone goes back to Wilcox’s flat, I plan to head home, but she drags me with her. Chateau Wilcox – he has a kitsch painted sign on the door – is a big basement flat a couple of minutes’ walk from the hospital, even though it’ll be nearly three years before we really get our hands on patients. Wilcox’s parents bought it for him, and he’s taken on a couple of flatmates who’re already on their clinical years: They’re hardly here, which suits me as I get the place to myself.

We’re only two streets up from the sea, so the patio garden has a smell of ozone and the wind tastes of salt, but at least it’s stopped raining for a bit. We’re warmed by more booze and the temporary bonhomie it’s generated. There’s a big box at the far end of the patio next to the flint wall, and Wilcox strides over to it and claps his hands to make sure he has everyone’s attention.

‘We made it, you guys. Only one term in, but we’re here, the next generation of doctors. Medics for the new millennium. Bone-sawyers, gassers, slashers. Some of us are going to make history, invent cool stuff. Some of us will have to content ourselves with getting filthy rich by removing wrinkles from ladies of a certain age.’

Everyone laughs. I have to admit, he’s pompous, but funny.

‘But I know from my dad, and my uncle, and their dad before them, that the mates we make now will stay with us for decades. The chums forged over our cadavers always last. So drink, be merry and BANG!’

He takes a box of matches from his pocket and lights the edge of the box, then races back to the rest of us on the patio. We wait. Wilcox looks pissed off.

‘That cost over three hundred quid, it’d better—’

The first firework tears out of the box, exploding in the sky like a giant white chrysanthemum, as though it’s testing the air for the others. They follow – three show-off minutes of colour and noise. I wonder if the patients in the hospital are seeing it.

And whether Kerry is seeing it, or whether she’s too focused on the flashing lights on her screen, less than a mile away, in ambulance control.

‘Gorgeous, aren’t they?’ Laura says, snuggling up to me, pretending it’s colder than it is.

I can tell she wants me to kiss her. ‘Yes. Not sure they’re worth three hundred quid, though. Excuse me, I need another drink.’ As I walk away, relief is tempered by regret.

Every sofa in the living room is occupied by snogging couples, but the kitchen is quiet. I help myself to a vodka and Coke.

‘All right, Palmer?’ Wilcox stands in the doorway. ‘Has the luscious Laura got her teeth into you yet?’