Getting Home

by Celia Brayfield

  They were late for school. She was going to be late for her morning game. Lauren Pike could not breathe. She knew now where her Ventolin was, in the pocket of that stupid silk robe in her kitchen. Her head was swimming; her vision was clouding, she could not get air into her lungs. Her breath seared her throat like smoke. Her chest felt as if it were being crushed between iron weights.

  Lauren realised that she was gasping like a landed fish. She had suffered from asthma for nine years – it had developed shortly after she and Chester had moved into Grove House. There had been a few close calls; without her inhaler an attack could be fatal. Her last priority was not to die in front of the children. She engaged the handbrake, shoved open her car door, got out and collapsed on the grass at the roadside.

  Ben Carman watched with interest. ‘Hey,’ he called to his fellow passengers, ‘Felix, your mother is drunk.’

  ‘No she isn’t,’ was the pained reply, ‘she’s got asthma.’

  ‘She’s getting wet,’ observed Chalice with distaste.

  It occurred to Ben that this might be an occasion on which the use of the car phone would be perfectly justified. He unfastened his seat belt and called home.

  ‘Mom,’ he announced, ‘I’m on Felix’s Mummy’s car phone.’

  ‘Well, get off it right now and quit running up our bill,’ Rachel ordered him, angry because neither she nor Josh had this particular piece of equipment in their cars. ‘Those calls are expensive, you idiot.’ And she cut the line.

  Felix was his mother’s son, with an unerring instinct for right behaviour. Using all his superior weight, he wrenched the phone from Ben, retreated to the back seat with it and hit the number 9.

  ‘My mummy is having an affsma attack,’ he informed the emergency operator.

  ‘OK, dear, now where are you?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’m in our Mercedes,’ he replied proudly, kicking Ben away as he scrambled towards him between the front seats.

  ‘I mean, what road are you on. The name of the road, dear…’

  ‘We’re on our way to school,’ Felix explained, struggling to get away from Ben’s fists.

  Jon Carman unbuckled himself and. hit Felix in the face with the Gameboy. Chalice screamed. People were getting out of their cars and gathering around. Lauren Pike, who was shaking all over on the grass, her first and last involuntary movement.

  Behind the Mercedes was a van which had delivered roses to Pot Pourri, and behind that was the car carrying the raging Allie Parsons.

  Westwick had not, at that time, been designed to accommodate helicopters with ease. The neighbourhood had an inconvenient number of trees. The police officers who arrived on motorbikes were relieved to be dealing with a life-threatening emergency instead of a quarter of a million cases of road rage; they cleared the entire width of the Broadway for the helicopter ambulance from Helford Hospital to set down. Ted Parsons, grateful for his massive tyres and four-wheel drive, ran the Discovery out of the way up a grass verge, opened an umbrella and got out to watch the helicopter fly in at 9.57 a.m.

  The rain had doubled its force. It beat on the helicopter’s cockpit and streamed off the jackets of the paramedics as they leaned over Lauren trying to resuscitate her.

  Allie watched the helicopter descend with dawning hope. ‘I can’t stand this, I’m going to see what’s going. on,’ she declared, jumping out of the car. The driver did not feel moved to produce his umbrella. She stepped into the gutter and water filled her dainty sling backs. As she picked her way through the gathering crowd with all the elegance she could manage, the rain made her mascara run into inky smudges under her eyes. It flattened her prettily blow-waved hair into lank strands across her forehead and stained her sugar-pink jacket to puce. The semiology of Allie Parsons’jackets could have supported a doctoral thesis. She picked red for politics and pink for social issues, darker shades for major celebrities and paler for ordinary people, larger buttons and smaller buttons likewise. Stephanie, being social and lightweight, had merited sugar pink with one tiny pearl button at the waist, which popped off as Allie shoved her way towards the scene of the action.

  ‘I know her!’ she shouted to the paramedics. ‘She’s my friend! My dear, dear friend! Let me through! Please, please, let me through!’

  Hesitantly, the crowd drew aside and allowed her to kneel at the feet of the victim.

  Ted identified his wife struggling dementedly through the on-lookers and decided he should be on hand in case intervention was necessary.

  ‘Lauren!’ squealed Allie, confirming her status. ‘Lauren! Oh my God! She has asthma! Is she dying?’

  Lauren Pike was only technically alive. They were injecting her heart with adrenaline as Allie knelt beside her but in a few minutes it was clear that she was not going to respond. Around her nose and mouth her skin, evenly tanned toffee-colour from daily tennis, turned a deathly blue-white. The urgency of the group gathered around the body drained away. Somebody picked Lauren’s handbag, a little leather purse; off the grass where it had fallen and put it beside her. With proper respect, the paramedics lifted the body on to a stretcher, arranged the limbs tidily, laid a blanket over them and fastened the straps.

  Allie seized one of Lauren’s feet. ‘Oh my God,’ she wailed. ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe this. Lauren! Ohmy God. Where are you taking her?’

  The police kept the crowd back as the stretcher was raised and carried it towards the helicopter.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Allie demanded, stumbling alongside. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she? Where are you taking her? Are you going back to Helford Hospital?’

  ‘Alex!’ Ted stepped forward and put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. ‘Calm down. There’s nothing—’

  ‘Fuck off!’ She hit his hand away. ‘She’s our friend and she’s … don’t you feel anything?’

  ‘She’ll be at Helford Hospital. That’s the procedure,’ a paramedic confirmed, thinking he was dealing with a woman distraught with grief.

  Blessed hope flowered in Allie’s heart. Here was the way out. From the hospital she could taxi to the studio in three minutes. ‘Let me come!’ she begged the man, getting as far away from Ted as possible. ‘She’s my friend! I can’t bear to see her alone like this! I can’t leave her, I can’t! Please…’

  They were about to help her into the cockpit when a police officer carrying a child ran forward through the driving rain.

  ‘Mummy!’ screamed Chalice, now purple in the face after an extended period of hysterics. ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ And she struggled furiously in his grasp, holding out her arms in supplication.

  ‘This is your daughter?’ the officer asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Allie answered dismissively, making no effort to take Chalice from the officer. ‘Don’t worry about her, she’ll be fine. They’re on their way to school. My husband’s right there, for God’s sake, he can take them.’

  The faces around her disagreed. They said that a child’s place was with its mother, and a mother’s place was with her child, definitely not in an air ambulance carrying a dead person to her penultimate resting place. But Ted stepped forward to claim his screaming daughter and Allie inched closer to the helicopter.

  ‘Look,’ Allie pleaded, suddenly collected. ‘You have to take me. I’m Allie Parsons from Family First. Channel Ten, you know? I’m due on air right now, right now, right this minute. It’s a live show, you know. First show of the new series. A new co-host, new to TV. I’ve been caught in this appalling traffic…’

  The officer, the pilot and the paramedics never saw daytime TV, nor were they regular readers of Hey! magazine. They saw before them a skinny woman with running make-up, stupid shoes and an unpleasantly demanding manner, a child in ear-splitting distress who claimed that this was her mother and a man looking wretched and helpless. Their instinct was that this was a spoiled sensation-seeking bitch, quite possibly a nutter, and both child and husband were seriously unhappy. And the traffic was backed up for miles around.

  ‘Bes
t get away, boys,’ the police officer ordered, nodding to the pilot and beckoning a comrade to deal with Allie. ‘Stand back, please. Let them take off. You can follow on to the hospital by road. Stand back, please.’ Allie was hanging on to the side of the helicopter with both hands. Preparing to detach her, an officer put his hands over hers and used the most powerful argument he could think of. ‘What about your car, madam? You can’t leave your car, can you?’

  Allie pretended to have been persuaded, and nodded her head. The office released her hands. When she was. free she leaped for the open door of the air ambulance as the runners left the ground. The nearest paramedic decided it was safest now to pull her aboard.

  23. Good Gravelly Sub-soil

  This was what TV was all about: seizing the time, pushing your advantage, getting your story. In the air ambulance, Allie crouched beside the stretcher bearing the body of Lauren Pike to Helford Hospital and felt the adrenaline surge through her veins.

  ‘Look,’ she explained to the team of two paramedics, one male, one female, who were looking at her with distaste, ‘I’m sorry about all that back there. I know I shouldn’t have jumped. I was just – distraught Distraught with grief, you know? But it was wrong of me. I apologise, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Take it easy,’ suggested the woman guardedly.

  ‘Yes,’ Allie agreed, glancing at the body with lashtrembling tenderness. ‘She was such a dear, dear friend to me. So dear. A wonderful woman, you can’t imagine … or, perhaps you can. Doing such wonderful work, I mean. I mean, you do too. Wonderful work.’

  The paramedics caught each other’s eyes, looked down and said nothing.

  ‘So dedicated. You must be so dedicated to do this job,’ Allie pressed on, confident of her victory. ‘I’ve often thought we should do something on Family First about people like you. You know, the stress, the drama, the personal fulfilment of being a paramedic. It’s so important. Society just wouldn’t function without people like you.’

  Nobody spoke. The engine roared, the storm lashed the craft as it flew over Acorn Junction; on the ground below, half a million vehicle lights gleaming blearily through the sheeting rain. The helicopter banked to head for the hospital. Allie checked her watch. It was 10.12 am. Not much time left.

  ‘Look, I’m much better now,’ she pressed on. ‘I’m really quite all right. It’s been a terrible morning, with the traffic and everyrhing. This … terrible tragedy … was just the end. I’m late for the studio, you know. I should have been on air at ten, but it’s all right, they had a film report they can fill in with. Our show goes out live. What I was wondering. was … the studio has a helipad, you know. You could just put down and let me out. It wouldn’t take a minute. I mean, there’s no hurry now, is there?’

  There was a pause while the two paramedics believed their ears. ‘We can’t do that,’ said the man at last, speaking awkwardly because his mouth was stiff with amazement.

  ‘Yes, you could,’ wheedled Allie, as much as a woman can wheedle when shouting over a throbbing engine. ‘It’s the Channel Ten building, just over there.’ She gestured out into the storm. ‘You could just drop me off and fly back to the hospital. Easy.’

  ‘I’m not hearing this,’ he muttered, appealing to his colleague for help.

  ‘Take it easy,’ the woman suggested again. People did awful things when they were grieving.

  ‘But how can I?’ Allie’s eyes were wide. ‘I have to be on air right now. Right now. Four million viewers. How can I let them down?’

  ‘What about your friend here?’ the woman suggested, gently.

  ‘She wouldn’t mind,’ Allie assured them. ‘If she were here now – I mean, here and alive now – she’d say, ‘Go on, Allie. You go on. You can’t be late.’ She was so understanding. She hated anyone to be unprofessional.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the man, shifting his position uneasily. ‘Well.’

  ‘So you’ll do it?’ Allie persisted. ‘Just tell you friend the pilot? Or shall I tell him? I can go …’ She halfstood, but the woman pulled her firmly down.

  ‘Stay here,’ she ordered. ‘Sit down now. Everything’s OK. You’ve had a shock …’

  ‘But I’m over that now and I must—’

  ‘No!’ It was dawning on the woman that this was less than a case of emotional trauma and more a display of epic selfishness. ‘Sit down now, please, madam.’

  Sulkily, Allie subsided. Her next idea was to try bribery, but her money was in her briefcase and that was still on the ground in the back of the studio car. She sniffed. Her eye fell on Lauren’s purse, respectfully tucked under one of the straps holding the blanket over the body.

  Allie sniffed again, more loudly, and reached for the purse. ‘Tissues,’ she muttered. With her fingertips, she opened the purse, which fortunately did contain a small pack of tissues. Under cover of dabbing her eyes and patting her nose, Allie investigated further, looking for cash. Instead she found Jon Carman’s toy pistol.

  She crushed the tissue and let it fall, then took hold of the toy, clamped one finger over the maker’s trademark and sat as far away from the paramedics as she could in the hope they would not would notice that her weapon was made of plastic.

  ‘All right,’ she snapped. ‘This is a gun. Now tell the pilot to drop me at Channel Ten.’

  The paramedics cursed under their breath. Operating procedures were quite clear: in the event of a threat of attack with a firearm – any threat whatsoever – they should send a coded message to air-traffic control in West Helford but obey the attacker’s instructions and do everything possible not to endanger life. The man slowly got to his feet and moved forwards towards the pilot.

  ‘Quicker!’ ordered Allie, twitching the gun. ‘I must be there by half-past.’

  ‘Welcome back to a new series of Family First.’ Rod stood squarely in front of Camera One. ‘I’m your new host, Rod Fuller, and I’m standing in for Allie Parsons, who’s been unavoidably delayed on her way to the studio. I’d like to introduce you to our first guest, Stephanie Sands, an ordinary housewife whose life was shattered earlier this year by a disaster beyond her worst nightmares …’ Stephanie sat on the sofa and smiled at him trustingly. Success was a few seconds away. The glow around them was not lighting but the euphoria of victory.

  In the gallery, the vision mixer’s finger lay feath-erlight on the cue button for the taped report. The senior producer frowned intently at the screen, marvelling at the rapport the new Himbo had with the camera. In the audience, the New Green Army hugged their banners closer to their chests. The rabbit struggled, and its bearer was so rapt in the proceedings that he put the animal down, and it sat for a while by his feet, getting its bearings.

  Rod turned back to Camera One and deployed the foxy grin. Around the country, three million woman stopped whatever they were doing and sat down to watch, feeling as if spiders were waltzing around the backs of their knees. ‘But first,’ he continued winningly, ‘a report on something which increasingly affects all our lives …’

  The helicopter set down at Channel Ten at 10.22 am, a good ten minutes before the handful of available police officers from Helford Station ran into the precinct. An anti-terrorist squad was on its way in another helicopter from the centre of the city, but they also arrived long after the small pink figure tottered frantically on its high heels across the tarmac and into the building. From force of habit, Allie made her entrance through the front reception hall, where the head of the queue for the next show stood thankfully in the dry, watching the monitors above them.

  ‘Shit!’ muttered Allie, seeing multiple pictures of Rod standing in front of the excavations at Oak Hill. The sound from the monitors had been muted, so she paid no attention to what he was saying. ‘Shithead! What’s he doing in a suit, for fuck’s sake!’

  Seeing a filthy, demented, dishevelled woman swearing violently in front of the reception desk, and the three receptionists shooting anxious glances in his direction, a security officer approached her.

 
‘Can we help you, madam?’ he enquired, allowing his mass in its blue and green uniform to loom menacingly over her head.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ she said again, ‘call up to make-up and tell them to get ready. And wardrobe, they gotta find me something to wear. Anything, anything. I’ll take over after the break. Hurry!’

  ‘Are you sure you’re in the right place, madam?’

  ‘No, I’m not in the right place, you fuckwit. I should be up there!’ And she pointed at the monitors, almost jumping out of her shoes with rage.

  ‘Madam, we’re going to have to ask you to leave …’

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ For the first time, Allie focused on the man in front of her, her eyes now indigo with urgency. ‘Don’t you realise who I am? I’m Allie Parsons and that’s my show…’

  The security officer was about to escort her to the door when a grey-faced child detached itself from the queue and ran with flapping unlaced trainers over to Allie, carrying a McDonald’s bag and a pencil. These the child held mutely under her nose. Recalling the gracious behaviour that her public deserved, Allie smiled on the brat and leaned on the reception desk to autograph the bag with due ceremony, returning it with an affectionate chuck under the grimy chin. The child ran away.

  ‘It’s her,’ one of the receptionists whispered to the security officer. ‘She’s been held up in traffic today. She must have walked. But it is her.’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Parsons,’ the guard intoned, saluting as he stood courteously aside. ‘I do beg your pardon, I should have known it was you. I’ll have someone call the studio straight away. Straight away. I do beg …’ Without wasting time to abuse him any further, Allie sped into the elevator hall and took the express to the studio.

  As the doors closed on her, the first police officers ran into the building.