Worn Out Wife Seeks New Life

by Carmen Reid

  Finally, River jammed the phone between her ear and her shoulder while she kept pumping.

  ‘Hello, I understand you’re carrying out CPR on the patient,’ the voice down the line began.

  ‘Any sign of that ambulance yet?’ River asked, trying to keep the edge of panic and desperation out of her voice.

  ‘We think it will be with you in around ten minutes.’

  In her head, she replied: Ten minutes! Are you freaking shitting me?

  But Mrs Herb’s mascara was running down her face and staining her cream-coloured top. So, that kind of comment was going to help no one.

  ‘Well, the sooner the better,’ she said instead.

  ‘The gentleman I was just talking to said there is a defibrillator in the café; the patient’s best chance for survival is for you to attach the defibrillator, let it assess his heart rhythm and shock if required. I understand you’re a doctor.’

  River considered the eyes on her, Mrs Herb’s in particular, and knew that loudly declaring ‘no, I’m not a doctor’ would also not be helpful right now. But then neither would it be helpful if everyone, including the ambulance dispatch operator, assumed she knew how to work a machine that was going to deliver a huge electric shock. Jeeeeeeeeesuzzz.

  ‘Yes… of literature,’ she said in as low a voice as possible, hoping that the voice at the other end of the phone could hear. This wasn’t true either, she was a BA, but it was the only way she could think of to debunk the doctor idea without causing mass panic.

  ‘I see, madam. But you’ve had first aid training?’

  ‘I have… the works.’

  ‘Okay, don’t stop the heart massage. Ask someone to bring the defib over and open it up for you. Then give the patient two rescue breaths, several compressions and attach the pads.’

  ‘Okay, okay…’ River realised she was at risk of being overwhelmed with instructions. ‘I’m going to put the phone down now, but stay there, okay? Please stay there…’

  The defib was summoned and the café owner brought it over and opened it up. Once the ‘on’ button was pressed, a loud, commanding robot-lady voice told her to attach the sticky pads to the side of the patient’s chest.

  River worried that Mrs Herb was going to go to pieces now that things were looking so serious, but actually Mrs Herb seemed to perk up at the sight of the defib.

  ‘I’m River, what’s your name?’ River asked Mrs Herb.

  ‘Evelyn.’

  ‘Okay, Evelyn,’ River said, ‘I’m going to open Herb’s mouth and give him two big breaths of air, then I’m going to pump those round and we’re going to ask the machine if he needs a shock. Are you going to be okay with that?’

  Evelyn nodded and wiped at her eyes, making the mascara smudge worse.

  River tipped Herb’s head back, pinched his nose closed and then took a deep breath and, her lips over Herb’s, she blew hard into his mouth. It was a very strange experience, warm and not unlike a weird kiss. But she didn’t have time to think about it because he needed a second breath into his lungs and then more compressions, compressions.

  River undid the buttons on Herb’s shirt, revealing a large pinkish chest, which, mercifully, only had an outcrop of sparse hair around his big pink nipples. She’d heard about people having to shave chests before putting on the defib pads. The machine actually came with a razor.

  It was the work of a few fiddly moments to put the sticky pads in place as instructed by the calm robot-lady in the machine.

  ‘Stand clear!’ robot-lady commanded, loud and urgent, and much to River’s surprise. She’d expected to be given a reading and to be told to press the shock button… but clearly this was an automatic model.

  She did a backwards crawl away from Herb and urged Evelyn to do the same. Evelyn’s hands were up over her face and she looked as terrified as River felt. What if she’d made a mistake… hadn’t put the pads in the right place, hadn’t done the compressions quickly enough? She could not bear for Herb to die on her.

  The machine let out a truly terrifying, high-pitched zaaaaaaaaap, and Herb bounced up and down against the floor. No one moved, spoke, or even breathed in the moment that followed. All the air, all momentum left the room and everyone stared at the big American guy on the floor, willing him back to life.

  ‘Stand clear!’ robot-lady urged again and the machine whirred with the effort of charging up once more.

  Evelyn began to cry once again and River was tempted to join her.

  The enormous zaaaap sound zinged through the air for a second time and Herb arced up and down. Once again, total silence in the room. And then noisy, throaty, full of phlegm… Herb drew a breath.

  ‘Continue compression!’ the machine barked and as River leaned forward to begin the task again, the café door opened and paramedics in green overalls, bearing bags full of equipment, burst in.

  ‘Over here! Over here!’ River heard herself shout and at last she was able to step back and hand over to people who really knew what they were doing.

  ‘How many shocks has he had?’ one of the men in green turned to ask her.

  ‘Two and we just heard him take a breath.’

  ‘That’s good, all good…’

  An oxygen mask went over Herb’s face. An IV drip went into his arm, and a stethoscope went over his heart.

  ‘Yes, you’ve got it beating again, well done,’ the paramedic declared and there was a cheering burst of applause. River could feel tears of relief forming in her eyes. Go Herb, she thought, I hope you get a few more trips around the block. Jeeeeeeeeez. She’d saved his life, for now anyway. She’d CPR-ed him back.

  And then… oh God… tears spilling on to her cheeks, she immediately thought of the life she had not been able to save. If only it could be so obvious when people need CPR on their metaphorical hearts.

  The paramedics were fast and slick. They had both Herb and Evelyn’s names within moments, then they were bundling Herb onto a blanket and up onto a stretcher. Soon he was out of the café door and into the back of the ambulance with his wife by his side.

  And everyone who was left in the café could breathe a huge, collective sigh of relief.

  ‘You did real good, kid.’

  River heard that familiar voice behind her shoulder. Had the ambulance guys even noticed that Franklyn Gregory was in the café? She didn’t think they had. And she guessed they’d have been too busy and too professional to care.

  ‘Yeah…’ she said, quickly wiping her face and turning to look at him. ‘I did!’

  ‘Can I get you a drink? Or get you a ride? Or buy you a cream cake?’ he asked.

  ‘On the house, ma’am,’ the owner added immediately.

  ‘No, thanks,’ River replied. She was feeling unusually calm again, but strangely hollowed out and now those tears were starting to fall again, even though she really didn’t want them to.

  ‘Sorry about your jacket,’ she told Franklyn. ‘And the 2.4 million views that’s going to get.’

  He shook his head. ‘That doesn’t seem like anything important now.’

  He passed her some napkins and put an arm around her shoulders as she tried to dry her face again.

  ‘No,’ River agreed. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she insisted, ‘just adrenaline, I guess. You need to learn how to do CPR. And after this, you’re definitely coming to my party.’

  Franklyn nodded: ‘Okay, it’s a deal.’

  30

  ‘Hello? Hi… you don’t know me, I’m Tess Simpson, I’m a friend of River Romero who lives in number 44.’

  The steel-haired gentleman who’d opened this door did not look very pleased to see her.

  ‘I know there’s been an on-going situation with the pool, so I promised River that I would talk to all the neighbours and work towards sorting it out. I work in finance, so I’m used to this kind of thing.’ Tess was smiling hard and using her breezy I’m-so-on-your-side voice.

  ‘I’d be happy to start paying the monthly maintenance again, but I’m no
t paying the fee to do the deep clean. That was all because of that situation with Mrs Papadoupolis…’

  ‘Yes.’ Tess was keen to cut that off, she’d heard this version of the story several times already. Mrs P had flirted with the pool boy, allegedly, Mr P had freaked out and ordered said pool boy off the premises and that’s when the argument with the maintenance company had all begun.

  ‘Okay.’ Tess held up a small notebook and made a tick on her list. ‘You might like to know that so far, everyone agrees with you. They’re happy to re-start monthly payments and have a pool again, but they don’t think it’s fair to foot the bill for the clean-up.’

  ‘Yeah… but Mr P won’t pay for the clean-up, so it is what it is,’ he shrugged his shoulders. ‘No pool.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to try and make progress on the cleaning,’ Tess told him. ‘So hopefully we can get to a place where we can re-start monthly payments and all enjoy a pool again.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ the man said and abruptly closed the door.

  Undeterred, Tess moved on to the next address. She was glad she’d had the idea of doing this at 8 a.m.: almost everyone was in, but they didn’t want to talk for long, as they had their full days ahead. What she’d told the previous guy was true; everyone felt the same. If Mr and Mrs P could just get over their differences and pay up for the deep clean, then the usual pool service could resume.

  The problem was, Tess had broached the topic with Mr P yesterday evening and it hadn’t gone well. Mrs P had now moved out (no word if the pool boy was still involved) and Mr P was clearly still very bitter. But Tess had decided, once she’d finished her questionnaire of the building’s residents that she would go and take a much closer look at the pool.

  When she went down and stood beside it, the apartment’s pool was about eight metres long and five metres wide. There was no water in it and the bottom sloped from a depth of maybe a metre at the shallow end to two metres at the deep end. Not being much of a swimmer, Tess couldn’t tell if that was deep enough to dive in or not. The bottom of the pool was full of debris: dried leaves, white plastic bags, takeaway cups, straws, scrunched-up packaging and paper. It was a mess, yes, but because of the dry LA climate, really not that much of a mess.

  She couldn’t help feeling that everyone was being a bit of a baby about it all. Rubber gloves, bin bags, a broom, some cleaning fluid and a hose were really all that were going to be needed here. And all of those things, bar the hose, were in River’s apartment. Surely there must be some sort of hose somewhere around the pool, otherwise how would they fill the thing?

  Why on earth would she don rubber gloves and clean out the apartment pool? Because she wanted to sit poolside, maybe more than anyone else in the whole building. She wanted to lie on a sun lounger, sipping at a cocktail and cooling herself in the water every so often. It was part of the LA dream she’d been sold. It was one of the things that had brought her over here. The reason there was a patterned, silky kimono in her luggage. And surely she was just a little concerted effort away from making it happen? So off she went for the gloves, broom, liquid soap and bin bags.

  It was hot, of course, even by 10 a.m. But she had quickly started to make progress. The debris was almost entirely bagged up and now she just had to work out how to sluice the pool with water so she could scrub at the blue-painted concrete with soap and the broom.

  ‘Tess, is that you down there?’

  She looked up to see Larry leaning over his balcony and gave him a wave. ‘Yes, hi!’

  ‘What in the world…?’

  ‘If I don’t get in here and clean it, I’m never going to have a pool to sit beside for my holiday.’

  Larry checked his watch and then told her he would be right down to help.

  ‘You don’t have to…’

  ‘Yes, I think I do.’

  And within five minutes, he was also in the pool with a broom and a bucket. He found the hose, connected it up, and wet the bottom and sides of the pool thoroughly so that their soapy brushes would glide along more easily. And as they scrubbed, they fell to talking about the things that Larry had so firmly insisted he didn’t want to talk about.

  ‘I’m sorry I flipped out on you the other day,’ he said, ‘and you were completely right, I reacted about the whole money thing in exactly the same way you reacted that first dance lesson.’

  ‘Complete freak out because we were right out of our comfort zones?’ she asked, scrubbing hard at a stubborn brown stain.

  ‘I guess. And you have come back and made progress, which is really impressive. So I need to do the same… man up about my taxes.’

  Tess looked up and gave him a smile then she turned her eyes back to brushing. She knew that for some people, it was easier to talk when they were doing something and not being eyeballed.

  ‘I haven’t properly filed taxes for about three years,’ he admitted softly. ‘I have a part-time job, three days a week, so I’ve just let my employer file for me and all the dance lessons I’ve done around that… well, it’s been undeclared.’

  ‘Okay,’ Tess said.

  ‘I would love to sort all this out, you know, but I’m terrified I’ll land myself in a much bigger mess. I can’t afford to pay back taxes.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said again, ‘you need to believe me that I’ve heard much worse. It sometimes helps people to know that most tax offices are very busy chasing companies for millions of dollars in unpaid taxes and, as long as you are really straight with them, they are quite forgiving of people who owe a few thousand… or even a few hundred. You just have to explain it honestly, in the right way, and arrange a manageable payment plan.’

  Larry nodded and even looked a little bit hopeful, which made Tess want to hug him. Why did people get so stressed and upset about this stuff, when it was usually very straightforward to put it right? She put the blame on trauma at an early age from maths lessons.

  ‘What about your pension plan… I think that’s a 401(k) account in the States?’

  He gave a dismissive wave and let out a sigh: ‘No idea… I’ve had jobs in the past, money must have been paid in… but it won’t be anything like enough…’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know what I can do about that.’

  ‘Let me do some research,’ she offered, ‘sometimes you can pay money into your pension and reduce your tax bill… or pay money to a charity and reduce your tax bill. Sometimes tax can be deferred and paid into your pension over a few years instead. All kinds of things can get sorted if you just bring in the right person – and that’s me – to take a look.’

  ‘I’m guessing you’re expensive, though,’ Larry said, ‘a proper big company accountant an’ all.’

  ‘Larry!’ she exclaimed. ‘We’re friends, and this will probably take me a solid afternoon to work out. You can treat me to a fish taco when it’s done. How about that?’

  ‘Tess, you can’t sort out three years of unpaid taxes and a pension for a fish taco!’

  ‘Oh, yes I can, especially for the person who is finally letting my dream of sipping cocktails beside my pool come true.’

  When all the scrubbing and brushing was done, Larry turned on the hose and they blasted the inside of the pool with water. Some patches needed to be scrubbed again, so they got down to work until it was all looking properly, beautifully blue. The deck and courtyard all around the pool were scrubbed and hosed clean too and Tess decided, expense be damned, when this work was done, she would go online and order two sun loungers, two side tables for drinks and, heck, two fresh potted plants while she was at it.

  ‘Shall I make you tea when we’re done?’ Larry asked. ‘And start to give you the details you need?’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  ‘Not that you need to do this today… or in fact anytime soon.’

  ‘Today sounds like a good day to start.’

  ‘But you might have plans,’ he protested.

  ‘Yup, I do have plans,’ she said, ‘but I can still fit you and your tea and your tax de
tails in, so don’t worry about it.’

  ‘You really are a good person,’ he said, leaning on his brush for a moment and meeting her eyes, ‘look at everything you’ve done here. We’re going to get our pool back and it wasn’t even that hard. Just needed someone to talk to folks and then roll their sleeves up.’

  ‘Ha…’ the truth of this struck her, ‘that’s almost always the way, Larry,’ she said.

  ‘What are your plans after our tea?’ he asked.

  ‘Walk the dogs, and then I’m going to take the car to the Getty Center and see some big art in a properly swanky location.’

  She didn’t add what her other definite plan for the day was: talk to Alex. Actually, properly get him on the phone and talk. She was going to bug him with calls and messages until he finally picked up, she wasn’t taking no for an answer. His breezy texts just didn’t seem quite right to her. They were sent at odd times of day for someone with an office job. Yes, he kept telling her that everything was fine, but she had to find out how things really were.

  31

  River was getting much better at English country lane driving. She was heading to a little town called Kenilworth that Dave had recommended. He’d told her to sit in a beer garden, under a tree, drinking chilled, alcohol-free cider and write and write and write. When she got bored, she could walk around the village and through its big green park spaces and then she could settle down in another pub and write and write some more. Now she was bowling down the kind of English country roads she’d dreamed of… oak trees, beech trees, luscious hedge greenery flashing past her window. And she had two things playing. Her laptop was reading out an audio version of The Merchant of Venice, while her phone blasted her latest favourite playlist at her from the car speakers.

  So her mind was hopping from Tupac and Dr Dre to Shylock and revenge. River knew it was always good to mix ideas, create mind cocktails because that was how new ideas formed. So the music blasted, the play’s words rang out and the luscious English green went by as she moved the car from 45 mph to 56, baby, 56 mph. In California, she’d be breaking the law.