by Abbie Taylor
The sky darkened further. All of a sudden it was more like night-time than the middle of the afternoon. Another giant star-shape on her sleeve. Then, as if at the dropping of a trapdoor, an incredible torrent, a solid wall of water, plunged from the sky. People scrambled and dashed for cover. Through the sheets of rain, Dawn glimpsed a blue-framed window with the words ‘Café’ and ‘Eat-in or Take Away’ printed in an arch on the glass. She found herself almost pushed through the door, propelled by the rush of bodies behind her.
‘Phew,’ a woman said, laughing and holding her arms out to let the drops fall.
Milly crawled under an empty table by the window. She was not a fan of the rain. Dawn followed her to the table and sat down. Her hair stuck to her forehead and dripped down her neck. The tables were laid with blue-checked cloths, steel milk jugs, large bottles of tomato ketchup. The laughing woman had settled herself at the next table along with a red-haired man and a toddler.
‘Yes please?’ A man with an apron over his jeans stood in front of Dawn. He had a pencil stuck behind his ear.
‘Just a coffee, thanks,’ Dawn said.
The man went away. Something touched Dawn’s knee: Milly, her wet chin leaving a dark patch on Dawn’s trousers. Her kindly, triangular eyes gazed up at Dawn. Look, I know there’s something wrong. Why don’t you tell me what it is?
Dawn touched the damp head. ‘My wise old friend.’
What would Milly think of her if she knew? The thing was, she had always assumed she was so exceptional at her job. With her gold medal and her early Matron promotion and all her grand ideas for the hospital. She had always seen herself as just that little bit better than the others, capable of taking decisions that no normal nurse in her right mind would dream of making. But the truth was, there was nothing exceptional about her. Nothing at all.
The café door opened again with a metallic ching. A splatter of water sounded from the street. A man came in, accompanied by a large, flustery red setter with its tongue hanging out. The setter promptly rushed over to sniff at Milly. She ignored him, keeping her head on Dawn’s knee. But the little boy at the next table hung over the back of his seat in delight.
‘Mine!’ he shouted, pointing at the dog.
The red setter went down on its front paws and gave a wuff of excitement. His owner, a tall, untidy-looking man with glasses, came over.
‘Boris,’ he said, ‘come here.’
‘Sorry,’ he added to Dawn, dragging the dog away.
The child wailed, stretching his arms after them. ‘MINE!’
‘Ben.’ His father tried to make him turn around. ‘Eat your sandwich.’ There was no doubt that he was the father. Dawn had rarely seen two people look so alike. Both had the same cheery, freckled faces and gangly limbs, the same bright red hair. Unusual to see that shade of red in London. The father’s intense pride in his son was obvious. It was there in the way he looked at him, touched his head, wiped a splotch of jam off his cheek. Dawn turned away from them, back to her own table.
No, she was not exceptional at all. She had failed to make Dora comfortable before she died. Failed to control Mrs Walker’s pain. What else might she have missed over the years, always smugly thinking she was so right?
It was a shock, like looking in the mirror and seeing someone different from who you had always thought you were. Should she resign? Surely a person who could do what she had was not fit to be in charge of patients? But she shrank from the thought. What else would she do with her life? She’d been at St Iberius for almost twenty years; she knew the hospital better than any other person there. The smells of her ward, the sounds; she could stand at the top of it and close her eyes and still know what was happening in every part. If she left, who else would look after it so well? Who would make the difference that she knew she did every day?
But wasn’t that the point? If she really wasn’t the wonderful nurse she had always thought herself to be? If this so-called greatness of hers had been a delusion all along?
The child at the next table was still fussing.
‘Mine,’ he wailed. ‘Mine!’ His father tried to distract him but there was the sound of a plate being flung across the table. The cries of ‘Mine’ degenerated into a scream. ‘Miiiuuugghh.’
His mouth was full but he didn’t let that stop him. The scream rose, climbing to a plateau, then tailed off, getting lower and lower, like an air-raid klaxon running down.
‘Ben,’ the father whispered fiercely. ‘Ben, behave yourself.’
But Ben was only just getting started. He was just beginning to work himself up now. He took a deep breath, reloading himself with air. Out came a second scream, louder and longer than the first: ‘UUUUUURGGH.’ Then he took another breath, a deeper one this time. The café patrons braced themselves.
But nothing happened.
Where a penetrating shriek should have set the knives rattling on every table there was an unexpected, throbbing silence. Dawn could almost feel her eardrums uncurling, peering around themselves, starting to relax.
Then came the sharp scrape of a chair.
‘Ben?’
Another scrape.
‘Ben!’
Something in the voice. Dawn turned. The redhaired father was out of his seat. He had his back to Dawn and seemed to be struggling with the child in his chair. Across the table, the mother had risen too.
‘Ben,’ she said.
Her hands were to her mouth. Her face had sagged, like a round of dough that had collapsed, like a cake that had been taken too soon from the oven.
Her face was like the painting The Scream.
Dawn swivelled back to look at the father. He still had his back to her. She couldn’t work out what he was doing. From the jerking of his shoulders he seemed to be making some violent, repetitive movement. Was he hitting the child? Shaking him? Before she could make it out, the father straightened and swung with the child in his arms, staring around him. The child’s arms stuck straight out from his sides. His mouth was shaped like an O, his eyes round and glassy as beads. There was something odd about his face. Dawn thought at first that it was the greyish light from the window.
‘It’s stuck.’ The father’s voice was hoarse. ‘It’s stuck, and it won’t come out.’
That was when Dawn got it. That was when she knew. The loud wail, the full mouth. The deep inhalation and the sudden silence. The child was choking. Even as she thought it, he went limp. His arms flopped to his sides. His head fell back, his eyes rolled up and his face …
His face was dark blue.
Dawn stood up.
‘Call an ambulance,’ she said.
Nobody moved. Startled faces bobbed in the gloom.
Dawn said it again, louder. ‘Someone call an ambulance. Now.’
The tall man with the red setter was beside her, tapping into his phone. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ve got it.’
To the father, Dawn said, ‘I’m a nurse. Can I help?’
He answered by thrusting the child into her arms. It was so unexpected; she caught him, but the weight made her stagger backwards, catching her knees on the edge of her chair.
‘Do something,’ the father said in a voice that sounded as if there was a knot in his windpipe.
Dawn had plopped on to her chair. The child’s head sank back on her arm. His hair hung down, soft and spiky like a tiny red crown. He was wearing a green T-shirt with a picture of a train on it. Under the T-shirt his chest heaved but he made no sound. No air passed in or out through his lips. Dawn felt her own breaths come faster and shallower, as if to compensate. She was not a paediatric nurse. Children were not the same as adults. They were a different species, as different from an adult as a human was from a hamster. She had no equipment here. No oxygen, no defibrillator, no adrenaline. The ambulance would have all of these things on board. But it would never reach them in time.
She was it. She was all they had.
She worked her hand to the side of the child’s neck. To her utter relief, a ra
pid beat fluttered under the skin.
‘Is he dead?’ the mother cried.
Dawn said, ‘He’s not dead.’
But if he didn’t breathe soon, he would be. She had three minutes. Five at most. The child’s lips grew darker. No nurse could ever see that colour without a leaping of her heartbeat, an urgent, primal surging in her veins: Do something. Do something. Now. Now. Now. Every cardiac arrest tutorial she had ever taught or attended flew through her head: the legless rubber dolls with their disposable lips, the torsos with compression monitors attached. The real patients she had helped to resuscitate in A&E and the cardiac ward. All of them adults, every one.
She sat the child up. Then she leaned him forward, over her arm. With the heel of her hand she slapped him sharply, twice, between the shoulder blades. Was that right? Was that what you did for a child? She slapped him again. Nothing. Now what? Feel around in his mouth? Try to remove whatever it was he was choking on? No. No. You weren’t supposed to do that if you couldn’t see it. You might push the thing in more.
The tiny body trembled in her hands. Three minutes. Three minutes. Three minutes.
Then something happened.
Everything around her seemed to slow and fade. Her own thoughts continued as normal, but the surrounding café went still. The rain stopped running down the windows, the bobbing faces froze in the gloom. The voices disappeared until all she could hear was her own heartbeat, strong and clear, tick tick tick, in her ears.
You know, Dawn. You know what to do.
She turned the child on her knee so that he faced away from her. Then she put her arms around him. Her fist was on his tummy, just higher than his belly button. Her other hand was on top of the fist. Then she pushed with both hands, inwards and upwards. A single push, quick and firm. Had there been something? A sound? A rush of air from his lips? She pushed again.
Huuuh. The child’s arms windmilled. His head flew back, almost hitting Dawn in the mouth. Something was there. There, glistening, just behind his teeth. She reached in, hooked the object with her finger, swept it out.
The child inhaled. A long, raucous, rattling whoop. Then he coughed. He doubled over Dawn’s arm and coughed and coughed and coughed. Alarmingly, his blue colour darkened even further. Under the mop of bright hair, his round face looked like a blueberry.
Then he inhaled again.
And then finally, like the shriek of a long-awaited train hurtling in to the platform, came the scream.
The noise made Dawn’s ears pop. Around her, everything sped up again to its normal pace, the sobbing mother, the whispering customers, the hammering of the rain on the window. The sounds were loud and echoing, as if she had just surfaced from underwater.
‘Aaaaaghhh.’ The child screamed again. His mother was beside them, screaming too.
‘Ben. Oh, Ben, Ben, Ben.’ She was grabbing him from Dawn’s knees. His soft hair brushed off Dawn’s arms as he was dragged away. The mother clutched him to her, rocking the two of them from side to side. Then she held him away again, up in front of her.
‘Never do that,’ she screamed at him. ‘Never do that again!’
The child bawled louder. He kicked his feet in terror, trying to get back to her. The mother pulled him to her again. Sobbing, they clung to each other. The child’s face was buried in her shoulder but the skin on his legs had changed from blue back to a bright, healthy pink.
‘Thank you.’ The father was in front of Dawn. ‘Nurse, thank you. Thank you.’
His face was green. All his blood was in his feet. He tried to shake Dawn’s hand but his own hands were shaking so hard that he had to use both of them just to grip hers.
‘I’m just glad I could help,’ Dawn said. The practical, common-sense Matron calming everything down.
‘I thought … I thought …’
‘I know. I know what you thought. But he’s fine. Look at him. He’s going to be fine.’
A siren blooped in the street. The rainy window turned green and yellow. Blue lights flashed through the blurry glass. Two men in overalls came charging in with a large red box.
‘Collapsed child?’ one of them shouted.
‘He was choking,’ Dawn said. ‘But we’ve got it out.’ She showed them the soggy lump which had flown through the air and landed on the next table. A half-chewed crust of bread.
They took him anyway, the mother leading the way with the child in her arms, the green father following with their bags and coats. The ambulance delivered a final bloop and pulled away. More people were pushing through the doors to escape the rain. Several of the customers were still looking over at Dawn, whispering and craning their necks, but the queues at the door were blocking their view. The staff were back at work, clearing tables and taking orders. The excitement was over, the moment of drama slipped already into the past.
Dawn picked up her bag from the floor.
‘Come on, Milly, let’s go.’
But when she went to stand, her legs wouldn’t work. Her knees were weak and flubbery, as if about to fold in half the wrong way. She’d have to give it a few minutes. She sat down again. Beside her table a bulky shape was hovering, blocking the light from the window.
‘I’m just going,’ Dawn told the shape. ‘You can have the table in one minute.’
‘I’m not waiting for the table,’ the shape said.
She looked up. It was the tall man with the flustery red setter. The one who had called the ambulance.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
Chapter Six
For a moment, she couldn’t answer. The man loomed over the table, peering at her in a concerned way through thick-framed rectangular glasses. He was a large man about her own age, not fat but bulky, with broad shoulders that strained at his navy jacket. He had thin, straight, light-brown hair. Despite her agitation, something about him struck Dawn as familiar. She had seen him somewhere before. Either that or he had one of those very ordinary faces that you saw on the street all the time.
‘Are you all right?’ the man asked again.
‘Yes. Thank you.’ Dawn’s voice came out at a higher pitch than normal. The effect of the adrenaline on her vocal cords.
‘I can’t believe it.’ The man’s eyes were round and staring behind the glasses. ‘What you did … I mean …’ He waved his hands, seeming to search for a dramatic enough way to describe what had happened. Then he gave up, gesturing instead towards the soggy lump of bread on the next table.
‘He could have died,’ he said.
It sounded more intense than Dawn could cope with right now.
‘He wouldn’t have died,’ she said. ‘What I did was just basic first aid.’
‘Are you a doctor? Nurse?’
‘Nurse.’
‘Incredible.’ The man shook his head. ‘Incredible.’
He kept repeating it. He wasn’t as confident as Dawn had first thought. She’d had the vague impression when he’d called the ambulance of a powerful, capable man but this man, large as he was, had the hunched shoulders and stooping posture of a person who habitually tried to avoid drawing attention to himself. His glasses had a dated appearance, as though he had found them in some charity shop from the 1970s. They seemed too big for his face. He kept having to poke them back up his nose with his finger. He had an anxious expression. Not, Dawn guessed, the sort of person who normally struck up random conversations with strangers. It occurred to her that he was actually quite shocked.
She said in a kinder tone, ‘Well, it was you who called the ambulance.’
‘But it wouldn’t have got here in time.’
The man was interrupted by the red setter tipping his head back and emitting a long, high-pitched yowl. He was fed up of staring at Milly and being ignored. Milly lay across Dawn’s feet, pressing into her legs, gazing up at her from time to time in a worried way to check that all was well.
‘Boris. Take it easy.’ The man crouched beside the dog and put a hand on his head. Boris sat back and panted.
&nbs
p; ‘What a beautiful dog,’ Dawn said, as much to put his owner at ease as anything else. The setter was a beauty; all quivering energy and movement, balanced on the very tips of his paws as if ready to leap off somewhere at any moment. His distinctive, bright blue collar contrasted vividly with his orange coat. London seemed full of redheads today.
‘He belongs to a friend,’ the man said. ‘He can’t walk him at the moment so I’m doing it for him.’
Milly thumped her tail on the wooden floor. The man looked down at her. ‘Your dog’s nice too,’ he said. ‘Friendly.’
‘She loves being with people,’ Dawn said. ‘She spends a lot of the day on her own.’
The tall man’s agitation seemed to be settling. The small talk about the dogs had brought the colour back to his face. It was a cliché, but it always was the largest men who were the most squeamish. They came in to the clinics, all stiff upper lips and grim waving away of any offers of comfort: ‘Nah, mate, I’m fine,’ then slid to the floor at the first glint of a needle. The man knelt on one knee, pulling at Boris’s ears until the dog’s eyes half closed and his paws began to slip on the floor. Dawn thought he seemed to glance at her a couple of times, but when she caught his eye he looked quickly away again as if afraid of being thought rude.
‘This might sound strange,’ he said, ‘but I think I recognize you.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, I think you were at the same school as me.’
‘Oh, really?’ Dawn was intrigued. ‘A King’s graduate!’ No wonder he had looked familiar. Which of her classes had he been in? The Croydon King’s Academy had been enormous. In Dawn’s year alone there had been 500 pupils. At least a quarter of them, she had never known their names.