‘Sam? Can you hear me?’ I was crouched over him now on my knees, my jeans darkening red. His eyes closed. When they opened, they seemed to fix on something far away. I put my face down so that I was directly in his field of vision and for a second his eyes locked onto mine and I saw a flicker of something that could have been recognition.
I took hold of his hand, as he had once held mine in another ambulance, a million years ago. ‘You’re going to be okay, you hear me? You’re going to be okay.’
Nothing. He didn’t even seem to register my voice.
‘Sam? Look at me, Sam.’
Nothing.
I was there, back in that Swiss room, Will’s face turning away from mine. Losing him.
‘No. Don’t you dare.’ I placed my face against his, my words falling his ear. ‘Sam. You stay with me, you hear?’ My hand was on the gauze dressing, my body over his, juddering with the rocking of the ambulance. There was the sound of sobbing in my ears and I realized it was my own. I turned his face with my hands, forcing him to look at me. ‘Stay with me! You hear me? Sam? Sam! Sam!’ I had never known fear like it. It was in the stilling of his gaze, the wet warmth of his blood, a rising tide.
The closing of a door.
‘Sam!’
The ambulance had stopped.
Donna leaped into the back. She ripped open a clear plastic pouch, pulling out drugs, white padding, a syringe, injected something into Sam’s arm. With shaking hands she hooked him up to a drip, and placed an oxygen mask over his face. I could hear beeping outside. I was trembling violently. ‘Stay there!’ she commanded, as I made to scramble out of her way. ‘Keep that pressure. That’s it – that’s good. You’re doing great.’ Her face lowered to his. ‘Come on, mate. Come on, Sam. Nearly there.’ I could hear sirens as she worked, still talking, her hands swift and competent on the equipment, always busy, always moving. ‘You’re going to be fine, my old mucker. Just hang on in there, okay?’ The monitor was flickering green and black. The sound of beeping.
Then the doors opened again, flooding the ambulance with swinging neon light, and there were paramedics, green uniforms, white coats, hauling out the boy, still complaining and swearing, then Sam, lifting him gently away from me into the dark night. Blood swilled on the floor of the ambulance and as I made to stand up I slipped and put a hand out to right myself. It came back red.
Their voices receded. I caught a flash of Donna’s face, white with anxiety. A barked instruction: ‘Straight to theatre.’ I was left standing between the ambulance doors, watching as they ran with him, their boots clumping across the tarmac. The doors of the hospital opened and swallowed him, and as they closed again, I was alone in the silence of the car park.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Hours spent on hospital seating have a strange, elastic quality. I had hardly noticed them when I waited for Will during his check-ups; I had read magazines, pecked out messages on my phone, strolled downstairs for too-strong hospital coffee on an overpriced concourse, worried about car-parking charges. Moaned without really meaning it about how long these things always took.
Now I sat on a moulded plastic chair, my mind numb, my gaze fixed on a wall, unable to tell how long I had been there. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel. I just existed: me, the plastic chair, the squeaky linoleum under my bloodied tennis shoes.
The strip-lighting overhead was a harsh constant, illuminating the nurses who walked briskly past, barely giving me a second look. Some time after I had come in, one of them had been kind enough to show me a bathroom so that I could clean my hands, but I could still see Sam’s blood in the dips around my nails, rust-coloured cuticles that hinted at a not-so-distant atrocity. Pieces of him in pieces of me. Pieces of him where they shouldn’t be.
When I closed my eyes I heard the voices, the sharp thwack of the bullet hitting the roof of the ambulance, the echo of the shot, the siren, the siren, the siren. I saw his face, the brief moment when he had looked at me and there had been nothing – no alarm, nothing except perhaps a vague bemusement at finding himself there on the floor, unable to move.
And I kept seeing those wounds, not neat little holes like gunshot injuries in movies, but living, pulsing things, pushing out blood as if they were trying maliciously to rid him of it.
I sat motionless on that plastic chair because I didn’t know how to do anything else. Somewhere at the end of that corridor were the operating theatres. He was in there right now. He was alive or he was dead. He was being wheeled to some distant ward, surrounded by relieved, high-fiving colleagues, or someone was pulling that green cloth up over his –
My head sank into my hands and I listened to my breath, in and out. In and out. My body smelt unfamiliar: of blood and antiseptic and something sour left over from visceral fear. Periodically I would observe distantly that my hands were trembling, but I wasn’t sure if it was low blood sugar or exhaustion, and somehow the thought of trying to find food was way beyond me. Movement was beyond me.
My sister had texted me some time ago.