Читать книгу The Poppy Factory - Liz Trenow - Страница 9

The next few weeks passed in an alcoholic haze. She averted her eyes from mirrors and hurried past shop windows to avoid seeing the dark rings shadowing the eyes in her haggard face, the hunched shoulders and gaunt frame, a woman looking old before her time. She persuaded a mate, a doctor, to prescribe tranquillisers and even, at Vorny’s insistence, got herself referred for counselling, but bottled it at the last minute.

‘I can’t sit there like an idiot, whining about losing the love of my life,’ she admitted, ‘when I know perfectly well what I need to do.’

No-one except Vorny knew what had happened with Nate. When her mother inquired, she fobbed her off, saying they were both so busy it was hard to find enough time together. She would manage without drinking for a few days and then, buoyed by her own success, would call or text to tell him the good news. But when he failed to respond, yet again, her resolve weakened.

‘What’s the point in punishing myself even further, when he clearly doesn’t want me, whatever I do?’ she’d say to herself, pouring an extra large glass.

Nothing could cheer her. The days were lengthening, the sun gaining in warmth; the bare branches of the trees on the garrison had taken on a green tinge and would soon be in bud. Swathes of acid yellow daffodils cloaked the town’s roundabouts, but the arrival of springtime made her feel even gloomier. She should have been looking forward to her new life. Instead here she was, single again, spending most evenings locked in her barrack room with a bottle, unable to face the world.

She dreaded her discharge from the Army. Without Nate, her life already felt empty and meaningless, and now she would be saying goodbye to the friends who had come to feel like family. She even, half-heartedly, considered asking to cancel the discharge, but was too proud to admit that it might have been a mistake, and the moment drew inexorably closer. Finally, the day of the dreaded leaving party arrived. Jess drank so heavily throughout the afternoon and early evening that she could remember nothing after about nine o’clock and, the following day, discovered scrapes and bruises all over her body including a blackening eye. She couldn’t bear to ask Vorny what had happened. It took a full forty-eight hours to recover from the hangover, and she felt disgusted with herself.

Then, all in one week, three good things happened.

Firstly, she noticed that the tranquillisers had finally kicked in; she felt calmer than she had in months, if a little light-headed and distanced from reality. She tried to cut down her drinking, restricting it to the evenings. The nightmares seemed to have become more sporadic, and less intense. Looking back, she realised that she hadn’t experienced the red rush of anger for nearly a fortnight. Even Vorny noticed she seemed happier: ‘You’d better watch out, I might catch you laughing,’ she’d joked.

On Tuesday, it was confirmed that Vorny and another medic, Hatts, who were both staying in the Army, would be stationed in the town for at least the next six months. This meant that the three of them could move out of the barracks and rent a place together. By seven o’clock the following evening they’d found the perfect place – a small Victorian terraced house within walking distance of the garrison medical centre – and were celebrating in the pub just around the corner, a proper old-school bar with wooden floors and sticky tables, yellowing jars of pickled eggs and some dusty packets of pork scratchings the only food on offer. The décor of the house was old fashioned and rather worn, but the beds were comfortable, the kitchen clean and modern. They moved in the next day.

On Thursday she rang the local ambulance service to see whether they had any vacancies and they invited her to sit a pre-entry exam. She spent the weekend frantically boning up on current NHS techniques, and it seemed to work because they phoned to offer her a job the following day. She would start as an Emergency Care Assistant for the first three months before sitting her paramedic exams again, because they were concerned that her knowledge was three years out of date. It was less money, but in some ways a relief not to be given the full responsibilities on day one.

Her first few shifts went by in a daze of new faces and an encyclopaedia of things to remember, but her NHS colleagues were so friendly and welcoming she wondered why she’d ever felt nervous. They were intrigued to learn about her Afghanistan experiences, especially the technical aspects of managing major trauma, bleeds and limb injuries using only equipment that could be carried in back packs. She basked in the warmth of their interest and admiration and relished sharing her experience with people who genuinely understood and were keen to learn.

One evening she found herself on a shift with Janine, an air force reservist who’d spent three months on the helicopters bringing in casualties to Camp Bastion. In brief moments of respite they shared stories of life in the desert, gaining a perspective they’d never seen before. Jess had thought the MERT crews brave and dedicated, but superior in attitude and she’d felt an almost visceral envy of the fact that they were going back for a cold shower each evening.

From the other point of view, Janine said she’d been in awe of the front line medics and wondered how they survived the extreme conditions in which they lived and worked. Her only real contact had been in the turmoil and urgency of an emergency evacuation, when she’d found them brusque and pushy in their desperation to ensure that their injured mates were safely onto the chopper as fast as possible.

Most shifts were busy from beginning to end, so Jess found no time for drinking except for her bedtime ‘medication’. And there was so much to learn that she fell into bed, exhausted, at the end of each day, usually managing to sleep through without nightmares.

It had been a month since she’d last tried to contact him, but now she felt strong enough to try again.

‘Hello Nate,’ she emailed. ‘How are you? I’m fine, except that I miss you loads. Civvy street seems to suit me. I’m happier than I’ve been for weeks and really enjoying the work. I’ve stopped drinking, except socially, and am sleeping well which has made a massive difference. I have lots more patience and can’t remember the last time I blew a fuse. I still love you, Nate. Can we meet? Jess x.’

They met, that first time, on neutral ground: a pub close to Liverpool Street Station.

As she waited, sipping her cola, she watched the loud braying City types and felt a certain sympathy. They were tanked up on the adrenaline of trading millions and having a couple of hours’ ‘decompression time’ before catching the commuter trains back to their quiet suburban lives. It was how she sometimes felt at the end of a busy shift.

She hardly 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 decent, law abiding lives the rest of the time seemed to abandon their collective sanity by taking party drugs, drinking themselves senseless and getting into fights in every town centre.

At first, Jess managed to summon reserves of compassion by trying to see herself in each of them. This was more or less me, just a few months ago, she’d say to herself when, for example, attending to a drunken young woman who’d been in a cat fight and had minor abrasions to her face. She’d eventually been persuaded to call it a night and get into a taxi. When a young man took a swipe at her as she tried to examine the hand he’d just punched through a window, she recalled the blinding effects of her own alcohol-fuelled anger and how she felt like lashing out at anything or anyone around her.

But mostly she failed to find any sympathy. Did they have any idea how much time and taxpayers’ money they were wasting? What if they were made to pay for the medical treatment they received – would that make any difference? The only people benefiting from these nightly binges were the alcohol companies and bar owners, she thought bitterly. Perhaps they should be made to pay up too?

It was August, and a stifling heatwave had brought crowds out of the bars onto the streets when, one Saturday night, she lost it. They’d been asked by the police to help a semi-naked young woman found unconscious in the gutter, and the others were briefly called away to help a more serious casualty, leaving Jess to look after the girl. As she knelt down to examine her, a large, burly man with a beer belly protruding beneath his shirt began to stagger unsteadily across the street towards them, shouting obscenities.

‘Leave her be, you stupid bitch,’ he shouted, lurching closer.

‘Just stand back, sir, please,’ Jess said, pleased with herself for refusing to rise to the insult.

‘Fuck you,’ the man said, taking a few steps nearer. For a moment he seemed to stop in his tracks and went quiet, so Jess turned her attention back to the casualty. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw that he was fiddling with his flies and, before she knew what was happening, both she and the young woman were drenched in foul-smelling urine.

‘What the hell?’ she shouted, powerless to resist the heat of her fury. A dense red mist descended in front of her eyes and all common sense deserted her. Instead of leaving the scene and calling for help as she had been trained to do, her only thought was to stop him pissing onto the poor woman. She leapt at him, trying to spin him round by pushing his shoulder. For all his inebriation he managed to stand his ground, the urine now running down his trousers and splashing her feet.

‘Try that again, bitch,’ he said, laughing in her face with a blast of beery breath.

‘You bastard.’ She was about to push him again when she heard Dave’s shout.

‘Back off, Jess.’

‘He’s pissing all over us.’

‘Just. Back. Off. Now. Go to the van and get yourself cleaned up. Stay there till I get back.’

She slunk away and, as the anger dissipated, she was left feeling sick and ashamed, waiting in the ambulance and stinking of urine.

‘I’m sorry, Dave,’ she said when he returned. ‘It was so disgusting. I just lost it. How’s the girl?’

‘Come round now, and we got her into a taxi. The police have arrested him for abuse and assault.’ He laughed. ‘Can’t wait to read the police report: “detail of assault weapon: stream of stinking piss”. It’s gotta be a first.’

‘Thanks for the sympathy,’ she said, managing a smile.

Dave started up the engine and pulled off. ‘We’d better get you back to the station for a change – you don’t half smell.’ And then, after driving for a few moments, ‘In theory I ought to write this up, you know?’

She held herself still, heart in mouth.

He gave a deep sigh. ‘But it’s been a bloody awful night and you were under severe provocation, so I’ll keep it under my hat this time.’

She spent her days off cramming for the exams which were now just a couple of weeks away: anatomy, physiology, cardiology, pharmacology. Study had always come easy in the past but these days she found herself struggling to remember facts, vital information like drug dosages per weight for children; the exact position to insert the needle to reinflate a lung with needle chest compressions; the APGAR score calculation for newborns.

One morning as she went to take her tranquilliser pill, it dawned on her. Perhaps the drug was affecting her ability to retain facts? She felt fine now; surely she didn’t need them any more? She put the packet back into her bedside drawer. I’ll see how it feels for a few days, she thought to herself.

It seemed to work: she passed the exams with flying colours. Nate took her out to dinner to celebrate, and they ended up back at his flat for the first time since the party. They were tentative at first, circling each other warily as he made coffee and she wandered around, checking to see what had changed, looking for clues about the life he had spent without her, these past months.

But it was still the same old bachelor pad, with the broken blinds, the brimming waste bins, DVDs and Xbox paraphernalia scattered around the giant television. In the bathroom cabinet were shaving cream, deodorant, his familiar brand of cologne and a packet of paracetamol but, to her relief, no sign of any female occupation.

The wariness lasted only as long as it took them to finish their coffee and have their first proper kiss, and after that the weekend passed in making up for lost time. They left the bedroom only to eat and watch a bit of tv, and Nate dragged on a tracksuit once in a while to go out for takeaways and bottles of wine. He poured her drinks without a single enquiring glance, and she made sure that two glasses were her top limit – this weekend was too precious to spoil.

She knew she had to wait for him to say it, but she longed for him to reassure her, to talk about their future together once more. It wasn’t until Sunday evening was drawing on and she was preparing to leave, that he finally said, ‘I think we’re okay again, J. Don’t you?’

‘God, I love it when you get all romantic,’ she laughed, hugging him. ‘But “okay” will do me, for now.’

It started as a normal shift: 6am to 6pm, on the van with Dave and a new Emergency Care Assistant, a sweet kid called Emma. It was a blustery day with towering cumulus clouds like fantasy castles in the sky. Emma remarked how lucky they were, driving around the countryside amid the beauty of the autumn colours, and the two others agreed.

By coffee time they’d dealt with four shouts including one of their regulars, an old boy called Bert who kept a garrulous and foul-mouthed parrot. He’d fallen on the way to the toilet, so they just checked him out, cleaned him up and waited for the district nurse to arrive while the parrot hurled abuse from its cage: ‘ge’ me out of here, you ’uckers,’ it squawked, interspersed with a repetitive refrain of ‘stupid old git, stupid old git’. Emma giggled and blushed but Jess and Dave took it in their stride. They’d heard the parrot say much worse things in their time.

‘Let’s hope we get a decent break,’ Dave said, more in hope than expectation, as they pulled into the ambulance station. As usual, they’d just sat down when the next call came in: ‘Emergency RTC High Street. Two life-threatening, two walking wounded. Police on scene.’

Jess felt the welcome surge of adrenaline, more powerful than any caffeine rush, as they clambered back on board and the siren started its familiar wail. The incident was only ten minutes away but a sudden heavy downpour made the traffic even more of a nightmare than usual, with dopey drivers taking an age to move aside and let them past. When they reached the lights at the top of the High Street, it was jammed and at a standstill. Dave whooped the siren a couple of times but it made little difference – nothing was moving. In the distance, they could see the flashing blue lights of a police car.

‘Take the packs and run for it,’ Dave shouted. ‘I’ll get there soon as.’

It was still raining heavily as they panted down the slick pavement. I must be losing fitness, Jess thought to herself; she’d run much further with a heavy Army Bergen on her back with no problem at all in the past. They pushed their way through a crowd of gawpers with umbrellas to a scene of carnage: a car had obviously driven onto the narrow pavement at some speed and hit two people, both of them now on the ground. The driver was still in his seat, a very old man, his face ashen, and a baby buggy lay on its side near the front wheels. She looked around frantically to see where the child could be before spying it in the arms of a policewoman, apparently unhurt.

Over to her right, a policeman was doing CPR on a girl whose face already had that grey, hollowed-out look of a dying person. As she approached he shook his head grimly and gestured with a nod in the other direction, towards a shattered shop window behind the car. ‘There’s a guy over there who needs your help.’

‘I’ll get that one if you take over here,’ she told Emma.

Lying amid the shards of glass was a young man, moaning slightly, his legs in a pool of shocking red that was being washed across the pavement by the rain. Her stomach turned over as she approached, smelling that terrifying metallic stench of blood and fear. At first she thought the man’s leg was twisted beneath him but her stomach lurched again, even more violently, when she saw that the lower leg was completely missing.

Stop thinking. Get on with it, no time to waste. The checklist ran over and over in her head, like a mantra: C.A.B.C, C.A.B.C. Catastrophic haemorrhage, airway, breathing, circulation.

Barely noticing the blood and glass, she kneeled down, tore open her medipack and grabbed a tourniquet. ‘My name’s Jess and I’m a paramedic,’ she said. ‘This is going to hurt a bit. Just hang in there, we’re going to get you to hospital as soon as we can.’ She secured the band swiftly and efficiently just above the knee and observed with satisfaction as the pumping gush of brilliant red arterial blood slowed to a dribble.

Lifting her head for a moment, desperate for Dave to arrive, she caught sight of the ankle and foot a couple of metres away near a litter bin. It looked just like part of a discarded shop dummy, still wearing a sock and trainer, the canvas type in show-off scarlet, just like Nate sometimes wore. She thrust a dressing towards a middle-aged woman standing nearby. ‘This is really important,’ she said, urgently. ‘Get that limb, wrap it up and get it somewhere cold. Find a shop with a drinks cooler or ice cream freezer, soon as you can.’

The injured man’s eyes were a maelstrom of panic and fear. Even through the pallor she could see his well-made features: a handsome young man, perhaps in his twenties, with all his life before him. Like James. Like Scott. Come to think of it, he had a look of Scotty, with that mouse-blond hair and freckles all over his nose. He was breathing, fast and shallow: his airway was clear. She quickly took his pulse. It was faint, but at least it was there.

Airway okay, breathing okay-ish, circulation okay-ish. Where the hell is Dave?

It was only when she went to cover the end of the severed leg that she faltered. The shattered ends of the tibia and fibula bones glowed shocking pearly pink-white against a bloody mess of skin and flesh, like a leg of meat hacked by a crazed butcher.

It wasn’t as though she’d never seen this kind of injury before – in fact she’d seen it too many times in the heat and sand of the desert. She grabbed a pack of dressings, but when she went to lift the stump the man whimpered again and then uttered another long, loud, terrifying howl. Her head began to spin. That sound, that gut-wrenching primeval animal sound of a man in agony, the sound that Scotty was making as she worked so desperately to save him that day.

Get a grip, Jess. Don’t think. Get the leg wrapped and get up a morphine drip. Put the guy out of his agony.

But however much she tried to push it away, Scott’s face swam in front of her eyes. The young man’s groans were Scotty’s groans.

It was her first ever foot patrol in the desert, her heart pummelling inside her chest with terror and the effort of carrying the medical back-pack, at twenty-five kilos the weight of an average eight year old, as well as her own heavy body armour. Her head felt as though it was boiling inside her helmet as the group cautiously circled the edge of the village in the ferocious heat. No-one spoke a word as the searcher moved ahead, sweeping the dust with his long-handled detector to check for improvised explosive devices while the man behind him marked the borders of the cleared area with spray paint. Everyone else scanned the landscape for markers, piles of stones, wire or a piece of broken glass which might have been left as a secret signal to mark the position of a bomb or anything designed to divert their path towards a mined area.

They could tell the Taliban were close by, watching and waiting, because the place was deserted. The villagers were hiding in their homes and even the dogs had taken cover. The enemy would never show themselves, and knew quite well that the allied troops couldn’t fire a single shot unless they were fired at first. The tension was almost unbearable.

And then: an ear-splitting crack. Jess twisted round to see a geyser of earth erupting to the side of the patrol, just where they had passed. Someone must have stepped unwarily just a few centimetres outside the cleared zone – that was all it took. The screams of pain started instantly and, as she turned back, trying to run but encumbered by her heavy pack and body armour, the screech of yelled orders in her earpiece was almost deafening. ‘Medic! Medic! Men down, three men down.’ It was just like those training exercises, except this was for real. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion.

She heard Vorny puffing beside her and, as the clouds of soil and dust settled, the scene ahead appeared in almost surreal clarity. Captain Jones was lying beside the blast crater cursing loudly, clutching his right hand and covered in dirt. At least if he’s swearing he’s alive, she thought. Another man was seated, holding his face in his hands. Vorny paused to see if he was okay, and Jess lumbered on towards the Captain.

‘I’m fine, just get over there,’ he shouted, gesturing impatiently into the crater. ‘It’s Scott.’

The figure was almost completely obscured by the dust and rocks that had settled on it after the blast, but just then the soldier lifted his head and emitted a long and terrifying howl which seemed to echo off the mud walls of the compound behind her, reverberating through her very being.

She fell, rather than ran, down the sloping side of the crater and, when she picked herself up, the true horror of the boy’s injuries became apparent. The blood-curdling screams and streams of profanity meant he was certainly still alive, but both his lower legs were missing, vaporised by the blast. The village dogs would come scavenging later, she knew.

The earth around his lower body was already stained red with the blood gushing from the mess of mangled flesh and bone where his legs used to be. There were only moments to save his life. She ripped two tourniquets from her own upper arm, stored there for instant access and, with hands trembling so much she could scarcely grip the webbing, managed to secure one on each leg, above the knees. She glanced towards his face, pale as the sand dusting it. Even through his goggles she could see the panic in his eyes, darting from side to side, trying to focus. ‘Hang in there, Scotty,’ she said. ‘We’ll get you sorted.’

‘Jess. Thank Christ, it’s you,’ he whimpered, through gritted teeth. ‘Just save me feckin’ life, will ya? Get me home for Chrissake. Please.’

‘Don’t you worry, you’re going to make it,’ she said, trying to convince herself as much as him.

Vorny slithered down the slope to join her and they worked together, wrapping the shattered stumps with white dressings, all the while talking to the lad, trying to calm him.

‘Nearly there. MERT’s on its way. We’re going to get you out of here. Hang in there. You’re going to make it.’

Vorny set up a drip into one arm and held the bag high, squeezing it to push the life-saving liquid into Scott’s system, while Jess pulled out a morphine autojet and punched a hefty dose directly into the muscle of the upper arm on the other side. ‘That’s it, Scotty. When you wake up you’ll be in Bastion,’ she said, as the howls tailed off into moans.

By now Captain Jones was on his feet but very pale and holding his hand gingerly, with the other lad, McVeigh, who was shocked and deafened, but otherwise unharmed. They’d identified a landing site just beyond the brown poppy field at the edge of the village. The helicopter was circling, just about to land, and she was heading across the field behind the stretcher team, carrying Scotty’s pack, when the shooting started. There was no cover, and it seemed to be coming from both sides.

She dropped to the ground, cursing the fact that any delay could cost Scotty’s life after all the work they’d done to save him. But as the helicopter turned away without landing, and the firing continued without any apparent response from their own side, she realised it was not only Scott’s life in danger. Bullets could slice through the brittle brown stems of the crop at any moment. The adrenaline rush that had kept her going throughout the time they’d been working on Scotty was dissipating, and she began to panic. It was then that she saw the red poppy.

‘Christ, Jess, what the fuck are you playing at?’

Dave’s shout, close to her ear, brought her instantly back to the High Street in the pouring rain, a scene painted in grey and red, the smell of blood, the young man’s groans, his shattered limb in her arms. She had absolutely no idea how long she’d been kneeling there.

‘Let me take over,’ Dave barked, taking hold of the leg and shoving her aside brusquely. ‘Just give the poor sod some morphine. Get a drip going and pump in some fluids, for Christ’s sake.’

Dragging herself back to the present, she stood and picked up her pack. Through the shattered glass of the shop window she could see an array of meat, liver, sausages, lamb chops, trussed chickens, all glistening with broken glass. The centrepiece was a large whole leg of lamb, the severed end pointing towards her, a neatly trimmed version of this young man’s leg. Like Scotty’s legs after that blast.

She forced her eyes away, searching the pack for a morphine syringe.

‘I’m just going to give you something for the pain,’ she said, squatting down by his head. But when she looked into his face she could see that he had gone, his eyes rolled back, his skin a deadly grey.

She shook his shoulder. ‘Stay with us,’ she shouted, shaking him harder. She pressed her finger to his neck.

‘No pulse, Dave. Christ, he’s got no pulse.’ She ripped open his jacket and shirt, and pressed the pads onto his chest. ‘Flatline.’

‘I’ll secure his airway,’ Dave shouted. ‘Start CPR, now.’

No, no, no, no, she muttered to herself, in rhythm with the pumps on his chest, like a mantra. Not again, not again. It can’t be, can’t be. Now, the rest of the world disappeared and the only thing that mattered was counting out loud the chest compression pumps: one – two – three – four – five – six – seven – eight – nine. Eighty to a hundred pumps a minute for two minutes, a quick check of the pulse and then start again. Dave was squeezing air into his lungs from the bag now, twelve breaths a minute. If we keep doing this he will come back, she said to herself, I’ve seen it happen, just so long as we can keep it up.

Just as the muscles in her arms felt as though they would crumple with exhaustion Emma returned and took over for a while, and they alternated for what seemed like hours, all through loading him onto the ambulance and the crazy race back to the hospital; even as they were wheeling him into A&E.

The doctors declared both casualties dead on arrival. They were the young parents of the baby. The old man who’d lost control of his car and driven onto the pavement at forty miles an hour was completely unharmed.

When they got back to the ambulance station Dave said, ‘Want a coffee?’

She nodded numbly and followed him into the kitchen, barely aware of her surroundings, finding it strange that she could even breathe or put one foot in front of another when she felt so completely shell-shocked. He placed a mug of hot sweet tea onto the table in front of her but when she went to pick it up her hands shook so badly that she slopped it all over her uniform.

He put a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘It happens to all of us, you know,’ he said, kindly.

She shook her head vehemently. ‘No, it doesn’t happen to all of us, not like that. You saw me, Dave. I lost it again. Some kind of flashback thing. God knows how long it was before you arrived and took over.’

‘Only a few moments, I’m sure. Besides, you’d already controlled his bleeding.’

‘But the delay could have meant the difference …’ The thought was simply too enormous and too terrible to contemplate. She felt overwhelmed and exhausted; barely able to think straight.

After a long pause Dave said: ‘I think you need to take a few days off. Why don’t you ask Frank?’

‘Oh God, I couldn’t face Frank, right now.’

‘Do you want me to ask him for you?’

She nodded.

‘Okay. I think you need to talk to someone, but perhaps not today. The best thing for you now is to go straight home, have something to eat and a couple of glasses of wine. Try to think about something else. I’ll text to let you know what Frank says.’

It was this simple act of kindness and understanding which finally broke the dam, opening the door to all the horror, the guilt and the shame. She began to weep, with long, agonising gasps that seemed to wrench all the air out of her lungs. Dave moved his arm around her and she rested her head on his warm, broad shoulder till the sobs abated.