After You (31 page)

Everything stopped.

No, I thought. No.

The ambulance screeched to a halt. Then Donna was out, and I was running after her. Sam was motionless and there was blood, so much blood, seeping outwards in a steadily expanding pool around him. In the distance the two old people scrambled stiffly towards the safety of their door, the girl who was supposedly immobile sprinting across the grass at the speed of an athlete. And the men were still coming, running down the upper walkway towards us. I tasted metal in my mouth.

‘
Lou!
Grab him
.’ We hauled Sam towards the back of the rig. He was leaden, as if he were deliberately resisting. I pulled at his collar, his armpits, my breath coming in short bursts. His face was chalk-white, huge black shadows under his half-closed eyes, as if he had not slept for a hundred years. His blood against my skin. Why had I not known how warm blood is? Donna was already in the rig, hauling at him, and we were pushing, heaving, a sob in my throat as I pulled at his arms, his legs. ‘
Help me!’
I was shouting, as if there was anyone who could. ‘
Help me!’

And then he was in, his leg at the wrong angle, and the doors slammed behind me.

Crack!
Something hit the top of the rig. I screamed and ducked. Some part of me thought absently,
Is this it? Is this how I die, in my bad jeans, while a few miles away my parents argue about birthday cakes with my sister?
The boy on the gurney was screaming, his voice shrill with fear. And then the ambulance skidded forwards, steering right as the men approached us from the left. I saw a hand rise, and thought I heard a gunshot. I ducked again instinctively.

‘
Bloody hell!
’ Donna swore and swerved again.

I raised my head. I could make out the exit. Donna steered hard left, then right, the ambulance almost on two wheels as she hurled it around the corner. The wing mirror clipped a car. Someone dived towards us but Donna swerved once more and kept going. I heard the
thump
of an angry fist on the side. And then we were out on the road, and the young men were behind us, slowing to a furious, defeated jog as they watched us go.

‘
Jesus
.’

The blue light on, Donna radioing ahead to the hospital, words I couldn’t make out through the thumping in my ears. I was cradling Sam’s face, grey and covered with a fine sheen, his eyes glassy. He was completely silent.

‘What do I do?’ I yelled at Donna. ‘
What do I do?
’ She screeched around a roundabout and her head swivelled briefly towards me. ‘Find the injury. What can you see?’

‘It’s his stomach. There’s a hole. Two holes. There is so much blood. Oh, God, there’s so much blood.’ My hands came away red and glossy. My breath came in short bursts. I felt, briefly, as if I might faint.

‘I need you to be calm now, Louisa, okay? Is he breathing? Can you feel a pulse?’

I checked, felt something inside me sag with relief. ‘Yes.’

‘I can’t stop. We’re too close. Elevate his feet, okay? Push up his knees. Keep the blood near his chest. Now make sure his shirt is open. Rip it. Just get to it. Can you describe the wound?’

That stomach, which had lain warm and smooth and solid against mine, now a red, gaping mess. A sob escaped my throat. ‘Oh, God …’

‘Don’t you panic now, Louisa. You hear me? We’re nearly there. You have to apply pressure. Come on, you can do this. Use the gauze from the pack. The big one. Whatever, just stop him bleeding out. Okay?’

She turned back to the road, sending the ambulance the wrong way up a one-way street. The boy on the gurney swore softly, now lost in his own private world of pain. Ahead, cars swerved obediently out of the way on the sodium-lit road, waves parting on the tarmac. A siren, always a siren. ‘
Paramedic down. I repeat paramedic down. Gunshot wound to the abdomen!
’ Donna yelled into the radio. ‘
ETA three minutes. We’re going to need a crash cart
.’

I unwrapped the bandages, my hands shaking, and ripped open Sam’s shirt, bracing myself as the ambulance tore round corners. How could this be the man who had been arguing with me just fifteen minutes earlier? How could someone so solid just be ebbing away in front of me?

‘Sam? Can you hear me?’ I was crouched over him now on my knees, my jeans darkening red. His eyes closed. When they opened, they seemed to fix on something far away. I put my face down so that I was directly in his field of vision and for a second his eyes locked onto mine and I saw a flicker of something that could have been recognition.

I took hold of his hand, as he had once held mine in another ambulance, a million years ago. ‘You’re going to be okay, you hear me? You’re going to be okay.’

Nothing. He didn’t even seem to register my voice.

‘Sam? Look at me, Sam.’

Nothing.

I was there, back in that Swiss room, Will’s face turning away from mine. Losing him.

‘No. Don’t you dare.’ I placed my face against his, my words falling his ear. ‘Sam. You stay with me, you hear?’ My hand was on the gauze dressing, my body over his, juddering with the rocking of the ambulance. There was the sound of sobbing in my ears and I realized it was my own. I turned his face with my hands, forcing him to look at me. ‘Stay with me! You hear me? Sam?
Sam! Sam!
’ I had never known fear like it. It was in the stilling of his gaze, the wet warmth of his blood, a rising tide.

The closing of a door.

‘
Sam!
’

The ambulance had stopped.

Donna leaped into the back. She ripped open a clear plastic pouch, pulling out drugs, white padding, a syringe, injected something into Sam’s arm. With shaking hands she hooked him up to a drip, and placed an oxygen mask over his face. I could hear beeping outside. I was trembling violently. ‘Stay there!’ she commanded, as I made to scramble out of her way. ‘Keep that pressure. That’s it – that’s good. You’re doing great.’ Her face lowered to his. ‘Come on, mate. Come on, Sam. Nearly there.’ I could hear sirens as she worked, still talking, her hands swift and competent on the equipment, always busy, always moving. ‘You’re going to be fine, my old mucker. Just hang on in there, okay?’ The monitor was flickering green and black. The sound of beeping.

Then the doors opened again, flooding the ambulance with swinging neon light, and there were paramedics, green uniforms, white coats, hauling out the boy, still complaining and
swearing, then Sam, lifting him gently away from me into the dark night. Blood swilled on the floor of the ambulance and as I made to stand up I slipped and put a hand out to right myself. It came back red.

Their voices receded. I caught a flash of Donna’s face, white with anxiety. A barked instruction: ‘
Straight to theatre.
’ I was left standing between the ambulance doors, watching as they ran with him, their boots clumping across the tarmac. The doors of the hospital opened and swallowed him, and as they closed again, I was alone in the silence of the car park.

Hours spent on hospital seating have a strange, elastic quality. I had hardly noticed them when I waited for Will during his check-ups; I had read magazines, pecked out messages on my phone, strolled downstairs for too-strong hospital coffee on an overpriced concourse, worried about car-parking charges. Moaned without really meaning it about how long these things always took.

Now I sat on a moulded plastic chair, my mind numb, my gaze fixed on a wall, unable to tell how long I had been there. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel. I just existed: me, the plastic chair, the squeaky linoleum under my bloodied tennis shoes.

The strip-lighting overhead was a harsh constant, illuminating the nurses who walked briskly past, barely giving me a second look. Some time after I had come in, one of them had been kind enough to show me a bathroom so that I could clean my hands, but I could still see Sam’s blood in the dips around my nails, rust-coloured cuticles that hinted at a not-so-distant atrocity. Pieces of him in pieces of me. Pieces of him where they shouldn’t be.

When I closed my eyes I heard the voices, the sharp
thwack
of the bullet hitting the roof of the ambulance, the echo of the shot, the siren, the siren, the siren. I saw his face, the brief moment when he had looked at me and there had been nothing – no alarm, nothing except perhaps a vague bemusement at finding himself there on the floor, unable to move.

And I kept seeing those wounds, not neat little holes like gunshot injuries in movies, but living, pulsing things, pushing
out blood as if they were trying maliciously to rid him of it.

I sat motionless on that plastic chair because I didn’t know how to do anything else. Somewhere at the end of that corridor were the operating theatres. He was in there right now. He was alive or he was dead. He was being wheeled to some distant ward, surrounded by relieved, high-fiving colleagues, or someone was pulling that green cloth up over his –

My head sank into my hands and I listened to my breath, in and out. In and out. My body smelt unfamiliar: of blood and antiseptic and something sour left over from visceral fear. Periodically I would observe distantly that my hands were trembling, but I wasn’t sure if it was low blood sugar or exhaustion, and somehow the thought of trying to find food was way beyond me. Movement was beyond me.

My sister had texted me some time ago.

Where are you? We’re going for pizza. They are talking, but I need you here as United Nations.

I hadn’t answered. I couldn’t work out what to say.

He is talking about her hairy legs again. Please come. This could get ugly. She has a fearsome aim with a doughball.

I closed my eyes and I tried to remember what it felt like, a week ago, to lie on the grass beside Sam, the way his stretched-out legs were so much longer than mine, the reassuring scent of his warm shirt, the low rumble of his voice, the sun on my face. His face, turning towards mine to steal kisses, the way he looked secretly pleased after every one. The manner in which he walked, set slightly forward yet his weight so centred, the most solid man I had ever met – as if nothing could knock him down.

I felt the buzz and pulled my phone from my pocket, read my sister’s message.
Where are you? Mum getting worried.
I checked the time: 10:48 p.m. I couldn’t believe I was the same person
who had woken that morning and dropped Lily at the station. I leaned back in the chair, thought for a moment and began to type.
I’m at the City hospital. There’s been an accident. I’m fine. I’ll be back when I know

when I know

My finger hovered over the keys. I blinked and, after a moment, pressed send.

And I closed my eyes and prayed.

I came to with a start at the sound of the swing doors. My mother was walking briskly down the corridor, her good coat on, her arms already outstretched.

‘What the hell happened?’ Treena was close behind, dragging Thom, in his pyjamas with an anorak over the top. ‘Mum didn’t want to come without Dad and I wasn’t going to be left behind.’ Thom looked at me sleepily and waved a damp hand.

‘We had no clue what had happened to you!’ Mum sat down beside me, studying my face. ‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Sam has been shot.’

‘Shot? Your paramedic man?’

‘With a gun?’ said Treena.

It was then that my mother registered my jeans. She gazed at the red stains, disbelieving, and turned mutely to my father.

‘I was with him.’

She pressed her hands to her mouth. ‘Are you okay?’ And then, when she saw the answer was yes, at least physically, ‘Is … is he okay?’

The four of them stood before me, their faces immobilized by shock and concern. I was suddenly utterly relieved to have them there. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and as my father stepped forward to take me in his arms, I finally began to cry.

We sat for several years, my family and I, on those plastic chairs. Or something close to that. Thom fell asleep on Treena’s lap, his face pale under the strip-lights, his battered cuddly cat pressed into the silky soft space between his neck and chin. Dad and Mum sat on each side of me and at any time one of them would hold my hand or stroke the side of my face and tell me it was going to be okay. I leaned against Dad and let the tears fall silently, and Mum wiped my face with her ever-present clean handkerchief. Periodically she would head off on a recce trip around the hospital for hot drinks.

‘She’d never have done that by herself a year ago,’ Dad said, the first time she disappeared. I couldn’t tell whether it was said admiringly or with regret.

We spoke little. There was nothing to say. The words repeated in my head like a mantra –
Just let him be okay. Just let him be okay. Just let him be okay.

This is what catastrophe does: it strips away the fluff and the white noise, the
should I really
and the
but what if.
I wanted Sam. I knew it with a stinging clarity. I wanted to feel his arms around me, hear him talking, and sit in the cab of his ambulance. I wanted him to make me a salad with things he had grown in his garden and I wanted to feel his warm, bare chest rise and fall steadily under my arm while he slept. Why had I not been able to tell him that? Why had I wasted so much time worrying about what was not important?

Then, as Mum came through the doors at the far end, bearing a cardboard holder with four teas in it, the doors to the theatres opened and Donna emerged, her uniform still smeared with blood, trailing her hands through her hair. I stood. She slowed in front of us, her expression grave, her eyes red-rimmed and exhausted. For a moment I thought I might pass out. Her eyes met mine. ‘Tough as old boots, that one.’

As I let out an involuntary sob, she touched my arm. ‘You
did good, Lou,’ she said, and let out a long, shaky breath. ‘You did good tonight.’

He spent the night in intensive care, and was transferred to a high-dependency unit in the morning. Donna called his parents, and said she would stop by his place after she’d had some sleep to feed his animals. We went in to see him together shortly after midnight, but he was asleep, still ashen, a mask obscuring most of his face. I wanted to move closer to him but I was afraid to touch him, hooked up as he was to all those wires and tubes and monitors.

‘He really is going to be okay?’

She nodded. A nurse moved silently around the bed, checking levels, taking his pulse.

‘We were lucky it was an older handgun. A lot of kids are getting hold of semi-automatics now. That would have been it.’ She rubbed at her eyes. ‘It’ll probably be on the news, if nothing else happens. Mind you, another crew dealt with the murder of a mother and baby on Athena Road last night, so it’s possible it won’t be news at all.’

I tore my gaze from him, and turned to her. ‘Will you carry on?’

‘Carry on?’

‘As a paramedic.’

She pulled a face, as if she didn’t really understand the question. ‘Of course. It’s my job.’ She patted me on the shoulder and turned towards the door. ‘Get some sleep, Lou. He probably won’t wake up until tomorrow anyway. He’s about eighty-seven per cent fentanyl right now.’

My parents were waiting when I stepped back into the corridor. They didn’t say anything. I gave a small nod. Dad took my arm and Mum patted my back. ‘Let’s get you home, love,’ she said. ‘And into some clean things.’

It turns out there is a particular tone of voice that emanates from an employer who, several months previously, had to listen to how you couldn’t come to work as you had fallen off the fifth floor of a building, and now would like to swap shifts because a man who may or may not be your boyfriend has been shot twice in the stomach.

‘You – he has – what?’

‘He was shot twice. He’s out of intensive care but I’d like to be there this morning when he comes to. So I was wondering if I could swap shifts with you.’

There was a short silence.

‘Right … Uh. Okay.’ He hesitated. ‘He was actually shot? With an actual gun?’

‘You can come and inspect the holes, if you like.’ My voice was so calm I almost laughed.

We discussed a couple more logistical details – calls that needed to be made, a visit from Head Office, and before I rang off, Richard grew silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Louisa, is your life always like this?’

I thought of who I had been just two and a half years ago, my days measured in the short walk between my parents’ house and the café; the Tuesday-night routines of watching Patrick running or supper with my parents. I looked down at the rubbish bag in the corner, which now contained my bloodstained tennis shoes. ‘Possibly. Although I’d like to think it’s just a phase.’

After breakfast, my parents left for home. My mother didn’t want to go, but I assured her that I was fine, and that I didn’t know where I would be for the next few days so there would be little point in her staying. I also reminded her that the last time Granddad was left alone for more than twenty-four hours he had eaten his way through two pots of raspberry
jam and a tin of condensed milk in lieu of actual meals.

‘You really are all right, though.’ She held her hand to the side of my face. She said it as though it wasn’t a question, although it clearly was.

‘Mum, I’m fine.’

She shook her head and made to pick up her bag. ‘I don’t know, Louisa. You do pick them.’

She was taken aback when I laughed. It might have been leftover shock. But I like to think it was then that I realized I wasn’t afraid of anything any more.

I showered, trying not to look at the pink water that ran from my legs, and washed my hair, bought the least limp bunch of flowers I could find at Samir’s, and headed back to the hospital for ten a.m. Sam’s parents had arrived several hours previously, the nurse told me, as she led me to the door. They had headed over to the railway carriage with Jake and Jake’s father to fetch Sam’s belongings.

‘He wasn’t very with it when they came but he’s making more sense now,’ she said. ‘It’s not unusual when they’re recently out of theatre. Some people just bounce back quicker than others.’

I slowed as we reached the door. I could see him now through the glass, his eyes closed, as they had been last night, his hand, strapped up to various monitors, lying motionless alongside his body. There was stubble on his chin and while he was still ghostly pale, he looked a little more like himself.

‘You sure I’m okay to go in?’

‘You’re Louise, right? He’s been asking for you.’ She smiled and wrinkled her nose. ‘Give us a shout if you get tired of that one. He’s lovely.’

I pushed the door slowly and his eyes opened, his face turning slightly. He looked at me then, as if he were taking
me in, and something inside me weakened with relief.

‘Some people will do anything to beat me on the scar front.’ I closed the door behind me.

‘Yeah. Well.’ His voice emerged as a croak. ‘I’ve gone right off that game.’ He gave a small, tired smile.

I stood, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. I hated hospitals. I would do almost anything never to enter one again.

‘Come here.’

I put the flowers on the table and walked over to him. He moved his arm, motioning for me to sit on the bed beside him. I sat, and then, because it felt wrong to be looking down at him, I lay back, positioning myself carefully, wary of dislodging something, of hurting him. I placed my head on his shoulder and felt the welcome weight of his head come to rest against mine. His lower arm lifted, gently hooking me in. We lay there in silence for a while, listening to the soft-shoe shuffle of the nurses outside, the distant conversation.

‘I thought you were dead,’ I whispered.

‘Apparently some amazing woman who shouldn’t have been in the back of the ambulance managed to slow my blood loss.’

‘That’s some woman.’

‘I thought so.’

I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth of his skin against my cheek, the unwelcome scent of chemical disinfectant emanating from his body. I didn’t think about anything. I just let myself exist in the moment, the deep, deep pleasure of being there next to him, of feeling the weight of him beside me, the space he took up in the atmosphere. I shifted my head and kissed the soft skin on the inside of his arm, and felt his fingers trace their way gently through my hair.

‘You scared me, Ambulance Sam.’

There was a long silence. I could hear him thinking the million things he chose not to say.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said eventually.

We lay there for a bit longer, in silence. And when the nurse finally came in and raised an eyebrow at my proximity to various important tubes and wires, I climbed reluctantly off the bed and obeyed her instructions to get some breakfast while she did her medical thing. I kissed him, a little self-consciously, and when I stroked his hair his eyes lifted slightly at the corners and I saw, with gratitude, something of what I was to him. ‘I’ll be back after my shift,’ I said.

‘You might bump into my parents.’ He said it as a warning.

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure I’m not wearing my Fuck Da Police T-shirt.’