St Matthew's Passion

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.

The ambulance car tore through the congested London streets, weaving skilfully among the traffic until the massing flicker of blue lights ahead marked their destination. Fin climbed out of the car and trotted down to the river bank, crossing the cordon. He glanced about. Paramedics aplenty, but no sign of Melissa.

Shouting to be heard above the cacophony from the circling helicopters overhead, he said to one paramedic who was loading a stretcher into the back of an ambulance: ‘Have you seen Ms Havers? Melissa?’

The man looked over each of his shoulders in turn. ‘She’s somewhere around here. I saw her a minute ago,’ he yelled back.

Later Fin would wonder whether it was instinct, sixth sense, or some more mystical force that made him turn and sweep his gaze across the river. He took in the flotsam from the smaller boat, the body of which had by now completely disappeared under the water; the larger vessel, which tilted sideways at a crazy angle, seeming to defy gravity; and the remaining bobbing heads as the divers helped the last stragglers to the bank.

And he saw her, so far away she seemed halfway to the other side, her head appearing and disappearing beneath the rolling wavelets, holding something bundled and writhing above her. If she made a sound, it was buried under the clattering roar from above.

Melissa.

Before his thoughts could catch up with what he was doing, Fin was stripping off his luminous overalls – any protection from the cold that they might afford him would be outweighed by how much they’d slow him down once they were soaked – and, in his shirtsleeves and trousers, he dived into the water.

He struck out towards where he’d seen Melissa. A strong swimmer, he ground his teeth against the almost paralysing cold and began a rhythmic crawl, putting his legs into the manoeuvre to propel himself forwards. Vaguely he registered one of the police divers ahead of him and off to one side, and he heard snatches of what the man was yelling at him – it sounded like the ship’s going to tip over, get out – but he ignored the warning, ignored the cold, ignored everything but the animal drive within him that was telling him to reach Melissa in time, and at all costs.

Fatigue was beginning to claw at him when he surged upwards to get a better view and saw Melissa’s upturned face twenty yards ahead. It disappeared again under the waves. Still her hands held the bundle aloft, and Fin could see now that it was a child of about three years, its face contorted in distress. That was good: it meant the child was alive.

Fin closed the distance. Ten yards. Five.

And he was at her, treading water, his arms enfolding her and hauling her vertically up so that her face appeared inches from his. Her eyes swam vacantly beneath thrumming lids and her mouth was agape and sucking greedily at the air.

Fin wrapped one arm around her waist, holding her tightly so that her head didn’t slip under again. With his other arm he gently hooked the child free from her grasp and draped its tiny frame across one shoulder, ignoring its pitiful, mewling cries.

Now came the difficult part.

With his free arm, the one that wasn’t clutching Melissa close so that the child was held in place between them across his shoulder, Fin began an awkward half-crawl, putting as much power as he could into his legs to make up for the handicap to his upper body. By pulling them forwards with the arm he turned them slightly in the process and had to swing his body to correct their direction each time. Despite the cold, everything about him burned: his shoulder muscles, his legs, the ragged breath in his chest.

Ignore it. Focus on what’s important, he told himself. One second at a time. Get through that. Then the next second.

Up ahead, between him and the impossibly distant bank of the river, he saw through the sheets of waves rising and falling at his eye level a police speedboat. Instead of approaching directly it veered sideways. The policemen on board were gesturing and shouting, but he couldn’t make out any distinct words.

Why aren’t they heading straight towards us to pick us up? thought Fin.

As before, when the police diver had been trying to communicate with him, he heard the odd word break through the deafening ambient noise of the surging water and the motors of the boats and helicopters.

Tipping... out the way... hurry...

As Melissa and the child weighed heavily on his shoulder and he felt the beginnings of cramp in his legs, Fin tried to focus on the men in the speedboat, tried to grasp what exactly they were getting at. They seemed to be staring at a point above and behind him.

Fin didn’t want to waste time and especially effort looking behind him, but he gave in to the inevitable and kicked his legs so that he twisted jerkily through ninety degrees in the water, his two charges clutched tightly to him. The move enabled him to see what the men had been gesturing at.

He was struck by not so much terror as awe.

The larger boat was toppling towards him in slow motion, the damage to its hull having caused it to list sideways in the first place. Now it had passed its centre of gravity and, relentlessly, it was turning on its side. And Fin was directly beneath it.

Fin’s instinct was to face the towering vessel as it bore down on him. Instead, he kicked himself round to face away from it once more and began to lash the water with his legs and claw at it with his free arm. Something had seized hold of him, a force so primal and terrifying it was like possession by a demon. It was the kind of power that enabled a woman to lift the front of a car in order to free her child trapped beneath it, a property only given to human beings in time of extreme emergency and never to be summoned by force of will alone.

Dig, kick. Dig, kick. He concentrated on the alternating actions with a manic ferocity, narrowing his consciousness so that everything else was extraneous, unimportant. Through the blur of the water in his eyes he fancied he could see the bank approaching closer with every second, in a series of jerks.

We’re going to make it, he thought in triumph.

And the shadow fell across the broken surface of the water before his eyes, cast by the brilliant sun on this clear afternoon. The shadow of the great hull, lengthening as the boat rolled through its final few degrees.

At the last minute Fin twisted round and looked up, and saw the railing lining the deck of the boat hurtling towards him a second before it struck his head. It was a glancing blow, and would have missed him entirely if he’d been just a few feet ahead; but the impact was terrific, and stunned him so profoundly that when the pain came, a crushing agony like nothing he’d ever experienced before that exploded in his head and lanced down through his neck and torso, he barely registered it.

The last he was aware of was the fact that Melissa and the child were on the other side of him, and hadn’t been hit by the capsizing boat. Darkness surged over him like thunderclouds across a summer sky, and his consciousness dwindled to a pinpoint before winking out.



***



The ambulance was breaking sixty miles per hour through the crowded inner London streets.

It wasn’t nearly fast enough.

Melissa barely felt the juddering of the vehicle’s chassis. She was trembling so violently that the ambulance might as well have been standing still. Wrapped in a thick, custom-designed blanket, she still felt as cold as if she were sitting there naked.

The paramedics had pushed her gently but firmly to the bench on the other side of the ambulance, where she was now sitting. She’d tried to resist at first, insisting on examining Fin herself; but they’d been adamant.

‘You’re in no fit state to be treating anyone, doc. You’ll only make things worse.’

Melissa had to admit they were right. But as she watched the two paramedics, one woman and one man, busying themselves with Fin, she felt an almost irresistible urge to interfere again.

She remembered lapsing into a dream-like state out there in the water, pogoing in and out of its sucking depth as she focused on the only thing that mattered: keeping the child above the surface. She’d reached him after what seemed like an impossibly long time and had turned him over in the water, fearing the worst. His waxy, blue-tinged face had shown no response when she pinched him. Treading water violently, she propped the toddler across her forearm, squeezed his nose shut awkwardly with her other hand, and clamped her mouth over his, breathing out as smoothly and strongly as she could, supplying the air his own tiny body was unable to provide for him.

She’d breathed twice, three times, breaking off as her flailing legs failed to keep her above water and her head dipped under. With a concentrated effort Melissa reared up again and continued the rescue breaths.

It was no good. She was too late; the little boy had drowned. And soon she too was going to succumb. Despair tried to force her under the surface once more.

And without warning, the child had coughed violently and spewed a great gout of river water into Melissa’s face. She’d never been so delighted by something like that in her life.

He coughed a few more times, and then the yelling started, wonderful piercing screams in her ear as she hugged him close. Her delight and relief soured in seconds. She now had to get them both back to the bank. And she couldn’t do it.

So she’d focused all her energy on simply not sinking, and keeping the boy’s head above the surface. For it while it had felt as if she could keep up the activity for ever; but before long she’d been aware of the creep of a fatigue more profound than any she’d experienced before, and a greyness began to seep across her consciousness.

The shock of suddenly being grabbed and borne aloft choked the breath out of her. For an instant, in her confused, half-drowned state, she thought she was being accosted by some malevolent river demon in human form. Then familiarity had clicked into place like the twist of a kaleidoscope.

It was Fin. He’d come for her, like a guardian angel.

Try as she might to help him as he hauled her and the squalling toddler against the relentless pull of the water, she’d been unable to muster the strength in her arms and legs and instead had simply lain pressed against Fin, feeling helpless, like dead weight.

There’d been the confusion of the approaching speedboat and the shouting and then some sort of awful thundering behind them before a great wave had engulfed them, the river making one last concerted effort to drag them under. Then Melissa felt hands prising her free from Fin’s locked arm. She struggled – he’d saved her, and she didn’t want to be wrenched free from his protection – but she was too weak to resist effectively. Once again she felt herself being lifted, this time by several pairs of hands. The next thing she was aware of was the hard surface of the floor of the speedboat.

Events after that had moved so quickly that she’d registered only a small proportion of them. Fin was strapped to a stretcher on the bank and rolled into the back of a waiting ambulance. He was unconscious, and one of the paramedics had to keep a wad of gauze pressed to his head to stop the bleeding. The child, Melissa noticed, was in his hysterical mother’s arms, crying himself, already wrapped tightly in blankets. He’d have to go to hospital by ambulance as well, but for a few moments the crew indulged mother and son in their reunion.

Melissa started to clamber aboard the ambulance after Fin. The female paramedic stopped her.

‘We need to have a look at you.’

‘There’s no time, and you can’t spare the staff,’ Melissa said thickly. Nausea was beginning to kick in. ‘If I’m in the ambulance then at least you can keep an eye on me.’

The paramedic hesitated, then nodded and helped Melissa into the back.

After she’d tried to interfere, after the ambulance crew had pushed her away and she’d resigned herself to taking a back seat, she nevertheless kept her eyes fixed on Fin and on the expressions of the two paramedics attending to him. She listened to their reports: his blood pressure and pulse were fine, but his temperature was unsurprisingly low. More worryingly, the oxygen saturation in his blood was below normal, and dropping.

‘Pupils equal and reactive,’ muttered one of the paramedics. Then: ‘GCS ten.’

The paramedics moved aside, having done all they could for now. Melissa stared at Fin’s face. She’d never seen it in repose before. The wryness was gone from the mouth, along with the semi-dimple at its corner. The closed lids hid the keen intelligence, the passion, that normally radiated from the eyes.

It was a face that, for the first time since Melissa had met him, was at peace.

The peace, perhaps, of one who had come to the end of his life, and was accepting death with resignation.

Melissa swept ropes of wet matted hair out of her face and pressed her fist against her teeth, choking back a sob.

She pleaded with him silently.

Don’t, Fin.

Please don’t die.

And, although she knew it was impossible, she aimed a thought at him that perhaps he might in some odd telepathic way register.

I love you.

It was only when both paramedics glanced round sharply at her that Melissa realised she’d spoken out loud.