by Fay Keenan
‘Sounds great,’ Florence said. ‘Count me in for backstage support – I’ve become pretty good with a paintbrush, if scenery needs doing.’
Josie shot her a sidelong glance. ‘Actually, I was rather hoping you’d help me with the auditions. Read some parts for me when the hordes arrive, that sort of thing.’
Florence nodded. ‘Sure. Anything to help.’ She didn’t notice Josie smiling slightly into her latte. Little did she know that Josie had a lot more than just shifting scenery in mind for her new friend.
A couple of days later, Florence had one of the more unusual experiences of her teaching career when a high-priority email pinged around the staff, asking those on break duty to assemble on the school’s playing field at the start of break time. Her eyes widened when she saw the reason why. She’d seen plenty of heavy military machinery up close, but never one of these. A small surge of excitement thrilled through her as she fired off a brief reply to the email, letting the head teacher’s PA know she’d be on duty.
Half an hour later, she wasn’t feeling quite so sanguine.
‘I feel like an ambulance chaser,’ Florence grumbled as she wrapped her coat more firmly around herself to combat the chilly breeze that was blowing directly down from the Mendip Hills and onto the school’s playing fields. ‘Are you sure we’re allowed to be here, just watching?’
‘Of course,’ Josie said, as airily as the autumn wind itself. ‘After all, there’s no casualty on board at the moment, so we’re not gawping over someone who’s hurt, or worse. And how many times in your life have you seen one of those things landing or taking off, anyway?’
Florence conceded that Josie was right on that score. There was something quite exhilarating about being so close to a helicopter, after all.
The school field had a cordon of members of staff who’d been asked to ensure that no students got in the way of the craft as it was preparing to take off. Florence had been aware that it had landed on the generous playing fields of the school during her Year 8 lesson, from the deep, whickering throb of the rotor blades as they’d passed over the building. No amount of brand-new double glazing could keep out the low rumble of that noise, she’d realised. The class she’d been teaching had momentarily been distracted by the sight of the bright yellow air ambulance setting down on the fields behind her classroom, and even she’d stopped what she was doing to watch it for a few minutes. The rest of her lesson had been rather scrappy, to say the least, but eventually the children had lost interest when there wasn’t a blood-soaked casualty to gawp at. Teenagers’ taste for the macabre never ceased to amaze her.
Thankfully, it had turned out that the casualty was stable enough to go by road, so the students were denied their potential gore fest, and the injured party was spared their curious eyes. So now, as the Somerset Air Ambulance was waiting for clearance to take off, the school’s staff had been requested to keep students back from the fields, in case any of them decided to make a break for it.
The pilot, who had spent a bit of time talking to staff and students, was around the other side of the helicopter. From her distance of about fifty feet, Florence could see his broad back, and his rather unruly dark blond hair. He had his back turned to the school, and to her, so she couldn’t see his face, but she could see he was holding his audience of students, and the teachers who were keeping watch on the other side, captive with whatever he was saying.
‘Tell me you’re not having Top Gun fantasies,’ Josie said wryly, following the line of Florence’s gaze.
‘Of course not,’ Florence replied hurriedly. ‘And anyway, that was planes.’ Actually, it was rather more Fifty Shades of Grey than Top Gun that she had in mind. She might have had a giggle at the rest of the film, but Christian Grey’s piloting, however fanciful, was actually quite sexy.
‘Well, it looks like he’ll be off in a minute,’ Josie said as the small group of students who’d been chatting and their teacher made their retreat back across the field. ‘I have to say, this wasn’t quite how I envisioned spending my break time, but it’s a damn sight better than marking Year Seven’s assessments!’
‘So we’ve just got to keep everyone back until he’s taken off, now, then?’ Florence said.
‘Yup. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer. I am getting a bit chilly.’
Florence watched as the pilot turned and came back alongside the helicopter, and as he glanced towards where she was standing, she gave an involuntary gasp, and felt her stomach flip. No… it couldn’t be. Hurriedly, she turned away before he could recognise her.
Josie, hearing Florence’s sudden intake of breath, gave a laugh. ‘Now what did I tell you about fantasising? Although he is pretty fit, I’ll give you that.’
‘Er… right.’ Florence was far too embarrassed to confess that it wasn’t exactly fantasy that had caused her to gasp. Rather more that the pilot who was just about to get that impressive machine up into the air was, in fact, the next-door neighbour she’d had to confront about the three a.m. music sessions before her first day at school. And, of course! Now she realised where she’d seen him before. He was the person she’d nearly run over on the zebra crossing at the start of term, too. She ducked her head, hoping the high collar of her coat would disguise her from any attention he might have paid her.
‘What’s up?’ Josie, who had a nose for a good scandal, peered curiously at Florence, who knew she’d gone a most unbecoming shade of puce, despite the autumn breeze.
‘Nothing,’ Florence responded, sounding like the teenagers she’d been teaching.
‘Yeah right!’ Josie grinned. ‘Have you got the hots for our sexy helicopter pilot? Love at first sight, is it?’
‘Not exactly first sight,’ as the words came out of her mouth without thinking, Florence cursed herself. There was no way Josie was going to let that go.
‘You’d better be free at lunchtime,’ Josie said. ‘And then you can tell me where you’ve seen that gorgeous hunk of flying manliness before.’
‘Let’s just keep an eye on the kids, shall we?’ Florence said archly, scanning the crowd for any incidents of poor behaviour that could divert Josie’s attention from a potential interrogation. Sadly, the children were all too excited to see the helicopter up close to consider messing about, for once.
As the pilot shut the door of the helicopter, Florence could see that he was checking a number of switches and, within a minute or so, the rotor at the back and the large one on the roof of the helicopter had started to spin, slowly at first and then with increasing velocity until the blades became a blur, and then, oddly, seemed to stand still, they were moving so fast. The breeze that started as a whisper whipped up until Florence was brushing her hair back from her eyes. Then the roar started.
‘I told you it was worth waiting for,’ Josie raised her voice above the engines. ‘I might be a country bumpkin, but how often do you get to see a helicopter taking off up close?’
Florence was reluctant to take her eyes off the air ambulance but managed to glance around to make sure that the staff cordon was still in place, and that no overexcited students were trying to do a James Bond and storm the helicopter before take-off.
The noise was growing louder, and Florence could feel the earth under her feet vibrating as the air ambulance reached full power. Then, graceful as a dancer leaping onstage, the helicopter started to lift, until it hovered a couple of feet above the ground. It floated there for a moment, and Florence could see the pilot doing a few final checks before the helicopter rose further. Then, in an almost stage-like nod to its audience of students and teachers, the pilot turned the helicopter around to face the gathered spectators at the edge of the school field. He hovered the craft ten feet above the ground for a few seconds, allowing students to take photos and videos, before turning the craft back around and rising further into the air, its vibrant yellow stingingly bright against the grey September sky. In another few seconds, it had risen at great speed and, as Florence watched, it sped across the sky
, vanishing from sight in a matter of moments.
A murmur of disappointment rumbled around the spectators as, perfectly on cue, the bell rang for the next lesson change-over, breaking the spell and restoring all of them back down to the now still earth.
‘Come on, you lot,’ Josie called to the nearest group of students. ‘Time to get back to lessons.’
Amidst mild rumbles of dissent, the students shuffled off to where they should be for the last period before lunch.
Josie looked at her watch. ‘Right. Just time to swing by the office and grab a coffee to take with me to class Seven Oh-bloody-hell-not-them,’ she said, giving Florence a martyred grin. ‘And at lunchtime you can tell me all about your first encounter with that stunning pilot.’
Florence sighed. Josie could make a drama out of anything, and, really, there wasn’t much to tell. Not that the truth would deter Josie from making a good story out of it, she was sure.
8
‘Oh God, not this one again. Really?’ Air ambulance paramedic Haleh ‘pronounce it like the comet’ Constantine groaned as Sam tapped the screen on his phone and the cabin was filled with a recognisable beat.
‘Pilot picks the music,’ Sam said wryly as 2Pac’s ‘California Love’ rolled its way, once again, through the cockpit. At the end of a callout, if they weren’t going on to another job but were returning to base, Sam liked to take down the operational tension a notch or two by playing music on board and, when they happened to be flying back over a particular landmark, dropping their height by a little so that the landscape swept past them in sharper focus. This afternoon they were heading back from Weston-super-Mare after the patient had been transferred by road to the Bristol Royal Infirmary. It was their second callout of the shift, having been summoned to the playing fields at Willowbury Academy after a pensioner had fallen down the stairs of their terraced house that backed onto the school’s playing fields. The SAA had the capacity to hop from job to job, so after stabilising the pensioner, they’d been called to a sports centre in Weston after a rugby training session had resulted in a neck injury to one of the players. Once again, the expert medical team had stabilised the casualty enough to send them by road ambulance to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, so they were flying back to their base at Norton Magna to replenish their supplies.
Now that the cloud had cleared and the sky was blue, this was a trip that would take no longer than about twenty minutes and as Sam had already logged height, direction and air speed with Air Traffic Control, the team was looking forward to a cuppa and a cake back at base. It had been Haleh’s birthday at the weekend, and she’d brought in enough pastries and cakes to feed an infantry division.
Given the short distance between the job and base, there wasn’t much opportunity for an extensive in-flight playlist, but Sam had been riffing a lot on the rap music of his youth lately. It amused him, as an adult, that as a somewhat diffident, white, middle-class, teenage boy, he’d been so enamoured of 2Pac and the other mid-nineties rap giants, but he still had a lot of affection for them and their genius.
‘Not exactly a fair rule,’ Neil Sims, the duty doctor who was currently sitting in the front seat next to Sam commented. ‘It’s not like any of us can jump into your chair and take over.’
Sam grinned at Neil, who, in addition to being the chief medic on board, also doubled as technical crew. Neil was responsible for running through the pre-flight checks alongside Sam and knew almost as much about the operation of the helicopter as he did.
‘I reckon technical crew should get a choice of playlists as well, sometimes,’ Neil added.
‘No way,’ Sam laughed. ‘The last time I let you have control over the back-to-base playlists, there was so much Radiohead, I nearly threw myself out of the door!’
‘Nothing wrong with Radiohead; keeps our patients sedated longer than this crap,’ Neil, who was drier than the Serengeti in August, deadpanned.
‘Precisely my point,’ Sam said, still grinning. ‘You don’t want your pilot asleep on the job, do you?’
A guffaw from behind him, where Haleh and the second of the paramedics, Darren, were sitting, made Sam glance back.
‘Behave or I’ll throw a bit of Marilyn Manson onto the next playlist.’
‘I wouldn’t mind that, actually,’ said Haleh. ‘Back in the day I went through a bit of a goth phase.’
‘I can’t imagine you smothered in black lipstick and looking miserable,’ Sam teased the seemingly perennially cheerful Haleh. She was the voice of calm and positivity in the team, and Sam really enjoyed working with her, as she could always put any job into perspective, no matter how terrible it seemed at the time. She’d got the team through some dark trips back from the more traumatic jobs, and somehow always had a way of being able to see the light in the darkness. He was glad she was part of the team.
Sam looked down as the varying green patchwork of fields flowed beneath them, bisected by roads where the traffic seemed to move at a snail’s pace from the view of the helicopter. The sky was a vibrant, cloudless blue, in contrast to the countryside beneath, which, in addition to the fields, was broken up occasionally by clumps of forest, scattered with evergreen and beech trees, turning a vibrant copper in the late-autumn season.
They approached the magnificent contours of Cheddar Gorge at a leisurely pace, flying low enough so that a couple of dog walkers on the top flat looked up and raised their arms in greeting, and even the mad-looking collies they were with looked up, intrigued by the noise. Then it was across the M5, a long, straight expanse of motorway that led to the Devon border and the home of the Helimed Control Centre in Exeter, who co-ordinated all of the incoming jobs.
‘You reckon we’ll make it back without another callout?’ Haleh’s voice came over the radio system.
‘Well, since we’ve done two jobs already, I’m not sure we could get back out without going home first,’ Neil replied. He was helping Darren to compile a checklist of current onboard supplies, ready to replenish before another job. ‘If Helimed Control calls one in before we get back, we’d better decline.’
‘Great,’ Sam said. ‘I could do with a coffee before we head out again, if we need to.’ He glanced back at the instruments and adjusted slightly to accommodate for the increased wind speed this side of Cheddar Gorge. The West Country weather could be capricious, and it was essential to stay on top of conditions at all times. ‘Let’s hope the tourists don’t cause an accident on the motorway before the end of the shift.’ The M5 was notorious for accidents caused by visitors to the counties of Somerset and Devon; not a week went by when at least one stretch of it wasn’t closed to clear up.
‘Amen to that,’ Darren replied.
The crew fell into a companionable silence as they approached the base and Sam began his landing checks. On a day like this, when a casualty was likely to have a good outcome, it was easy to feel optimistic, to appreciate the positives of the job they all did. Sometimes it wasn’t quite so easy, when it was too late to treat someone, and the darkness would creep in post-operation. But, on this beautiful Somerset day, all was optimism.
9
When Florence got home from school, the ever-present box of books to mark under one arm and her laptop case slung over the other shoulder, she hurried more quickly than usual through her door, just in case she encountered Sam on the doorstep. Since she’d realised he’d been the man she’d nearly mown down on the zebra crossing, she’d been more than a little embarrassed at the prospect of seeing him again. She’d also promised to cast an eye over Josie’s pared down Much Ado script that evening and, at some point, she had to eat. She certainly had enough to take her mind off the images that kept persistently running through her mind of Sam in his pilot’s uniform on the school field, and then taking off into the skies above. That, combined with the persistent memory of his appearance in his sleepwear at the front door was enough to make her want to see him again. Although she was never going to admit to having nearly run him over; not in a million years.
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Sitting down to a big bowl of her favourite macaroni cheese three quarters of an hour later, she swiped open her Kindle and began to read through Josie’s script. A seasonal adaptation of the famous tale of enemies-to-lovers Beatrice and Benedick, and love’s-young-but-thwarted-dream Hero and Claudio, Florence immediately noticed that Beatrice and Benedick’s roles had been beefed up, and Claudio and Hero’s pared down to avoid Shakespeare’s somewhat anachronistic, and rather brutal, treatment of the latter. In fact, apart from one or two little scenes of conflict and then resolution, the focus was much more on Beatrice and Benedick.
She found herself laughing out loud at the early scenes, which took all the comedy moments from Beatrice and Benedick’s relationship and set them against the backdrop of a wintry Willowbury, then smiled as Josie skilfully interwove the Shakespearean with her own adaptation, having them bickering with each other, falling under the spell of their friends’ chatter, stumbling foul of the ‘Willowbury Whisperers’, who did their best to split up Hero and Claudio, and then, happily, all ending well and in a passionate kiss under the mistletoe. The ringleader of the ‘Willowbury Whisperers’ was the Don John figure, the mischief-maker of the play, but, pleasingly, he got his comeuppance and was dunked in a pan of mulled cider at the end.
It was part pantomime, part Shakespeare Retold, but was guaranteed to be very entertaining. It also seemed to fit the slightly odd world of Willowbury to a T, bringing in elements of Winterfest, the celebration of all things frosty, which took place in the town every year. It would, she was sure, go down a treat with the locals.
After making a couple of notes on a scene or two, Florence emailed Josie with her thoughts and then put her plate in the sink, wishing she’d got her act together and arranged to have the kitchen of Aunt Elsie’s cottage refitted before she’d moved in.