by Sam Archer
His eyes followed her as she rose.
‘Is there nothing I can say that will dissuade you?’ he said quietly.
‘I’m afraid not.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘Then do what you must. Such a waste.’
At the door she glanced back, saw the professor hunched over his desk, his fingers steepled in front of him, his brow furrowed.
***
Melissa was in the canteen, queuing up at the hot food counter with an as yet empty tray, when a hand clamped around her arm. Startled, she looked round to see Emma, grim-faced. The other registrar marched off towards one of the unoccupied corner tables, half-hauling Melissa with her. At the table Emma sat her down on one of the chairs and dropped down opposite her.
‘Have you lost your mind?’
Melissa shrugged. Professor Penney might not be a gossip, but he certainly didn’t keep Melissa’s resignation a secret for long. ‘You’ve heard. I was going to tell you later, after work.’
‘I’ve heard, because Prof asked Jenny to write a letter to Human Resources asking them to draft an advertisement for Mr Finmore-Gage’s registrar post.’ Jenny was the professor’s secretary. ‘She grabbed me as soon as she saw me, and let me know. You know how she can’t keep a secret.’
‘Everyone’s bound to find out, sooner or later.’ Melissa was torn between the weariness of knowing that she was going to have to have this conversation with countless people in the next few days, and a desire to explain her actions to Emma, who was after all a friend. ‘You probably know why I’m doing it.’
‘Is it because of Fin? Has he hurt you in some way?’ Emma put a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my God. He hasn’t got you –’
Melissa laughed despite herself, waved her hand. ‘No, nothing like that. And he hasn’t hurt me either. Not really.’ That was a lie and she knew it. ‘I just can’t work alongside him any more. People are talking. I’m being driven slowly round the bend. It’s not good for anyone, my being here.’
‘It’s good for me,’ Emma said quietly. ‘What am I going to do, the only girl here? They’ll eat me alive.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ smiled Melissa. ‘But I will miss you. All of you.’
Emma was silent for a moment, looking down. Then she said: ‘I take it there’s no point in asking if you’ve thought this through?’
‘I’ve thought about nothing else for the last twenty-four hours.’
‘What will you do?’
They talked for a good twenty minutes, about alternative training schemes, job opportunities. To Melissa’s surprise Emma didn’t try any further to argue her out of her decision, and in a way she was relieved: it was as if Emma understood her reasons and respected them, even if she didn’t agree.
At last Emma said, ‘Have you told Fin yet?’
Melissa hadn’t, and felt guilty about it. By rights he should have been the first person she told. He was her immediate boss. Professor Penney was head of the department and it was to him she’d addressed her letter of resignation. But according to protocol, and out of simple courtesy, she ought to have approached Fin first.
She hadn’t, because he’d been at a conference that morning, away from the hospital, and she didn’t want to delay setting the process in motion in case she had a chance to reconsider and get cold feet; so she’d cornered the professor in his office before his morning rounds. Melissa knew there was another reason, however, and that was plain cowardice. She was dreading telling Fin, seeing the look on his face, and what was more she didn’t know if she’d falter at the last moment. At least now she’d made it official with Professor Penney so there was no turning back when she did speak to Fin.
Before Melissa could reply to Emma, a familiar voice behind her said: ‘Told me what?’
Emma stared over Melissa’s shoulder, her expression frozen. Melissa looked round and saw Fin, lunch tray in his hands, approaching. His look was wide-eyed, innocent, curious. He couldn’t have heard the news, then.
Fin hovered by the table, seeming aware of the silence that had fallen. ‘I was going to ask if I could sit down… but if this is a private conversation, I don’t want to disturb you.’
He hadn’t sat and eaten with Melissa, just the two of them, since before Christmas. Obviously Emma’s presence, a third party, made him feel more comfortable.
Emma started to say, ‘I’ll go –’ but Melissa motioned her to stay seated.
‘You might as well stay.’ She nodded at Fin. ‘Please, join us.’
Glancing from one woman to the other, he drew up a chair and sat.
Melissa said, ‘Fin, I’m leaving the job.’
His face, normally so expressive, went utterly still. Masklike, even.
‘Leaving.’
‘Yes. I’ve handed in my resignation this morning.’
He took in a long breath, expelled it.
‘Melissa –’
Emma stood this time. ‘I’m out of here. I have to get back to the wards.’ Before Melissa could protest, her eyes shooting daggers at her friend, Emma was heading off across the canteen.
Fin changed seats so that he was opposite Melissa. Now the mask had slipped, and although the rest of his face remained impassive, in his eyes she saw naked anguish.
‘Melissa, you don’t have to do this.’
‘But I do, Fin. You know it’s for the best.’
‘It’s because of me, isn’t it.’
‘It’s because of us. Neither of us will be happy if I stay. Not in the long run.’
His eyes never left hers, and he barely blinked. ‘Is there anything I can do to persuade you otherwise?’
‘Are you willing to reconsider? About us? Could we be together?’
She saw a slight clenching in his jaw muscles as he struggled with something that threatened to rise to the surface.
‘It’s… not possible, Melissa. As I said before.’
‘Then there really isn’t any more to say.’ Her voice was gentle, surprising her. She laid her hand on the back of his, briefly.
Then she rose and turned and walked out.
Chapter Ten
The call came in at two-thirty in the afternoon.
It was a Monday, the beginning of Melissa’s last full week at St Matthew’s. By Sunday she’d be gone, and after half a week’s break she’d start a two-week locum job down in Devon near her parents. She was waiting for responses to three applications she’d sent off for posts on training schemes in Manchester, Bristol and Newcastle respectively. All were choice, highly sought-after jobs.
None of them, though, were at St Matthew’s.
Melissa had spent the last three weeks saying quiet goodbyes. Everybody expressed sorrow at her imminent departure, and everybody seemed genuinely to mean it. Even Deborah had looked her straight in the eye and said, with real regret: ‘I’m so sorry it’s come to this.’ There was a low-key leaving do arranged for her on Friday, a simple buffet lunch at the hospital. Melissa had requested that they not go overboard, so the proposed raucous send-off had been shelved, much to the disappointment of many of the staff who’d been looking forward to a night’s carousing at the department’s expense.
Emma had adopted a jollity around Melissa that was a little forced, as if she was afraid her friend’s last few weeks at St Matthew’s would degenerate into bitterness and tears if she didn’t keep the mood upbeat. Professor Penney had treated her with a kindly sadness. Fin had once more drawn into himself, becoming as he had when she’d first started there: not quite aloof, but more distant, and less lavish with his praise of her. This time Melissa wasn’t perplexed or frustrated. They couldn’t be anything but awkward around one another, in the final throes of their brief and tumultuous association.
She used her final weeks to squeeze as much learning as she possibly could from the job, volunteering for every possible procedure, assisting both Fin and Professor Penney in theatre, taking on extra on-call duties in order to maximise her experience. One thing she hadn’t yet managed to do was take
her skills outside the hospital in the community. So when the call came through the Accident & Emergency Department that a major incident had occurred on the river, involving a collision between two boats, and a trauma specialist was needed to accompany the paramedics to the scene of the accident, Melissa felt a thrill of exultation.
She raced down to A&E, not quite sprinting – nobody who worked in a hospital really did that, outside of television dramas – and arrived to find an ambulance crew gearing up. They recognised her from numerous previous interactions and gave her a friendly nod. One of the paramedics threw a bright green bundle to Melissa and she caught it in midair. It was a set of fluorescent overalls with the word DOCTOR prominent on the back, to identify her role at the scene.
Melissa was handed the case with equipment she might need, if the injuries on site were so severe and of such a nature that the standard kit carried by the ambulance turned out not to be enough. In the ambulance bay in front of the hospital doors she swung herself up into the back of the vehicle, the engine of which was already running. The paramedic who was already in the back, a man named Charlie, slammed the doors and the ambulance took off.
On the way Charlie briefed Melissa.
‘Two cruise boats collided under the Millennium Bridge,’ he said. ‘We don’t know exactly why, but we think the captain of one of them had a stroke or a heart attack and lost control. The extent of the traumatic injuries to the passengers isn’t clear yet, but there’ll be a lot of people being fished out of the water and we’ll be tied up dealing with them.’
Melissa gazed through the window as the ambulance sped along, one of many in the convoy, its lights and sirens at full blast. The February day was clear and bright, but had started out frostily cold and hadn’t warmed up much. Looming in the near distance Melissa could see the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, which stood adjacent to the northern end of the Millennium Bridge.
She was through the doors almost before the engine had stopped, running with her case gripped in her hands. She faltered for an instant when she took in the scene before her.
Along the bank of the river emergency vehicles were massing, a riot of flashing lights competing with each other. The police and fire department were there, the former cordoning off a large section of the bank and keeping the growing public crowd back. A policeman lifted the cordoning tape to let Melissa through, noting her identifying overalls.
Beneath the suspension bridge she saw the two boats, one twice the size of the other. The larger craft had evidently rammed the smaller one side-on at an angle and the smaller boat lay on its side, half submerged. Some of the passengers were already on the bank and stood shivering, swaddled in blankets. Others bobbed in the water still, being supported and guided by police divers in wetsuits.
Melissa moved swiftly to the water’s edge, picking her way between the paramedics laying down stretchers onto which shuddering and semiconscious casualties were being manoeuvred. She stepped among the stretchers and gave a quick once-over to each in turn, issuing recommendations where the paramedics needed them, staying out of the way where they didn’t.
She had just finished listening to one groaning man’s chest and ordered his immediate transfer to hospital as a priority – he’d suffered a pneumothorax, which meant air had entered the sac around one of his lungs and was restricting his breathing – when she noticed a sodden woman stumbling away down the bank, her hand against her head.
Melissa started after her. When she drew near enough to be heard she called, Hey. Are you all right?’
The woman didn’t react. Melissa hurried closer and touched the woman lightly on the shoulder.
‘Are you hurt?’
The woman turned her head, her hair plastered across her face, and stared vaguely at Melissa as if not quite seeing her. Melissa took her by the shoulders and peered at her eyes, what was visible of her scalp. There wasn’t any obvious sign of injury, but her dazed expression suggested that she was concussed.
‘Where –?’ the woman muttered.
‘Where are you? You’re safe. The boat you were in was involved in an accident. I’m a doctor, and you’re going –’
‘No.’ The woman shook her head, spraying Melissa with droplets of river water. Her eyes took on a more focused look and stared deep into Melissa’s. ‘Where is he?’ Her voice rose in panic. ‘Where’s my son?’
Melissa raised her head from her scrutiny of the woman’s face and looked over at the throng of people, both accident victims and emergency personnel, on the bank behind her. She spotted a few children, but they all seemed to be with parents. Whirling, she scanned the dark, roiling surface of the water.
There. Some distance away from the smaller, capsized boat, a tiny figure bobbed.
Melissa stared around wildly. ‘Hey! There’s a child in the water!’
One or two of the paramedics glanced over for a moment but were engrossed in helping their own patients. Melissa turned to the river and waved frantically to the police divers dotted about, yelling: ‘A child!’ and jabbing with her finger in the boy’s direction. She went unheard in the general tumult, which wasn’t helped by the roar of helicopter blades as two choppers swung overhead.
Melissa looked quickly at the woman, who still hadn’t caught on that her son was in the water but clung to Melissa’s arm, mumbling desperately and incoherently. Melissa stared from helicopters to divers to the tiny floating figure.
The boy would be spotted before long. But by then it would be too late.
Melissa pulled her arm out of the mother’s grip. She closed her eyes and drew a long breath, filling her lungs almost to bursting.
She leaped forward, launching herself as far as she could out into the water.
In the fraction of a second she spent in the air, the images came flooding back, as clear as if the intervening years hadn’t happened.
Melissa was six years old, playing too close to the pond at the bottom of a friend’s garden. Her friend’s parents were only a few feet away but had turned their backs for a moment, and little Melissa, stretching out with a stick to snare an elusive lily, slipped on the wet grass at the edge of the pond and tumbled into the water. Within seconds her friend’s father was there with her, his arms around her and lifting her free. But those seconds of heart-stopping terror, in which she’d been surrounded by the dark, cloying silence of the water, were burned into Melissa’s memory. They’d made her uneasy around lakes and rivers, and had prevented her from enjoying holidays on the beach ever since.
And, of course, she’d never learned to swim.
The impact when she hit the surface of the river shocked the breath out of her. It wasn’t just the unimaginable cold, but the horrible familiarity of the great expanse of water as well, as though the pond from her childhood had taken on a new and far bigger form and had been waiting for her return all these years later. For a moment she felt herself plunging deeper, no oxygen in her lungs any longer, and panic wrenched at her stomach. Then her head broke the surface and she sucked in a fresh chestful of air.
Disorientated for a moment, she flailed about, trying to get her bearings, trying to ignore the numbing cold encasing her. There was the bridge… and there, the looming bulk of the larger boat, listing now as if it too was going to capsize. The smaller boat was almost completely submerged.
Beyond the vessels, at eye level across the choppy black surface of the water, she spotted the boy’s bobbing shape.
Please don’t let me be too late.
She repeated the thought over and over in her head, as much as anything to distract her from the knowledge that she really had no idea what swimming involved, what you were supposed to do with your arms and legs. She floundered about, creating a churning storm around her, and saw that she’d inched closer to where the boy was.
Or rather, where he had been. Because Melissa could no longer see him. He’d gone under.
Fear ravening at her insides, and the vastness of the water beneath her trying to suck her down like
a living thing, Melissa struck out as best she could in the direction of the child.
***
Fin took the stairs three at a time, too impatient to use the lift. He’d been finishing off the last of the morning’s cases in a theatre list which had run well over schedule when word had filtered through about the serious incident on the Thames. Annoyed, he’d asked his junior doctor to apply the final layer of sutures, and had gone to the ward where he found Deborah.
‘Why wasn’t I told about this earlier, when the call came through?’ he demanded.
‘You were in theatre, with a full list,’ the sister pointed out. ‘And in any case, Ms Havers has gone out.’
He headed for the Accident & Emergency entrance, hoping there was still a vehicle that he could hitch a lift with. Fin had no objection to Melissa’s having responded to the call and gone to the scene of the accident. It would be good experience for her, and he was confident enough about her abilities as a doctor that she’d handle herself with aplomb. But an incident like this meant all hands were required on deck, and he should have at least been told, by Melissa if not by Deborah or one of the other staff.
The entire fleet of ambulances was in use, most of them having been deployed to the site of the accident and the rest out on calls across the rest of the district. Nonetheless, Fin managed to find an ambulance car sitting idle, and a paramedic who would take him to the river.
On the way he listened to the reports being despatched over the two-way radio. Numerous cases of hypothermia. Two suspected myocardial infarctions – heart attacks – one of them affecting the captain of one of the vessels that had collided. Multiple cases of orthopaedic trauma, involving fractured limb bones. At least four blunt traumas to the chest, two of which had resulted in pneumothoraces. More staff were needed, as the numbers of casualties were outstripping the capacity of the emergency services to triage and treat them effectively.
Fin was glad he’d decided to go out.