Truly Madly Guilty(83)

Nothing happened.

Erika breathed once more into Ruby’s mouth, while Oliver continued to rock and chant: ‘One and two and three and four and five.’

Clementine felt herself rocking in time with him, muttering over and over: pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.

So this is how it happens, a part of her thought as she rocked and begged. This is what it feels like. You don’t change. There is no special protection when you cross that invisible line from your ordinary life to that parallel world where tragedies happen. It happens just like this. You don’t become someone else. You’re still exactly the same. Everything around you still smells and looks and feels exactly the same. She could still taste Vid’s dessert. She could still smell the roast meat from the barbeque. She could hear the dog yapping endlessly and she could feel a thin line of blood trickling down her shin from where her knees had smacked hard against the pavers.

‘Oh, dear God, please, God,’ Sam moaned, and he sounded so weak and desperate, and he didn’t believe in God, he was an atheist, and his horror was her horror but she didn’t want to know about it, and Clementine thought savagely, Shut up, Sam, just shut up.

She could hear Vid saying, ‘We have a very little girl here who is not breathing. Do you understand me? She is not breathing. We need you right now. Please send an ambulance right now.’ Clementine felt an immense animosity towards him for saying that, as if he was saying something awful about Ruby, as if by saying she wasn’t breathing he was making it so. ‘We must be at the top of your list, we must be top priority, if we need to pay extra that is no problem, we will pay anything.’

Did he honestly think he could pay for a faster ambulance? That rich people could arrange for a VIP ambulance service?

‘And nine and ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen.’

Erika bent her head once more.

Sam crouched down next to Clementine and took her hand. She grabbed on to it as if he could pull her back to before, as if he could pull her back to just minutes earlier.

Hadn’t that only just happened? Just then? Just that moment before this moment? Surely she’d only looked away for a minute. It couldn’t have been more than a minute.

‘The ambulance is on its way,’ said Vid. ‘I’ll go and wait on the street so they know where to go.’

‘We’ll come too,’ said Tiffany. ‘You come and help us look out for the ambulance, Holly.’

Holly went, without resisting, without looking back, her hand trustingly held in Tiffany’s as if they were going to see another pet.

Of course a minute was enough.

Never take your eyes off them. Never look away. It happens so fast. It happens without a sound. All those stories in the news. All those parents. All those mistakes she’d read about. Backyard drownings. Unfenced pools. Children unsupervised in the bath. Children with stupid, foolish, neglectful parents. Children who died surrounded by so-called responsible adults. And each time she would pretend to be non-judgemental but really, deep down she was thinking, Not me. That could never really happen to me.

Erika lifted her head from her second breath and her eyes met Clementine’s with a look of unutterable despair. Tiny beads of water clung to her eyelashes. Her lips, the lips that had been pressed against Ruby’s, were chapped.

Oliver’s voice didn’t change. ‘One and two and three and four and five.’





chapter forty-nine



The day of the barbeque

‘… and six and seven and eight and nine and ten.’

Erika listened to Oliver count, waiting for her cue. The number fifteen.

Her shirt stuck to her. Her jeans were so cold and clammy against her thighs.

Clementine’s face looked like a skull. It was like the skin was pulled back too tight. She was an alien version of Clementine, staring at Erika as if she were begging for clemency.

Ruby wasn’t responding.

It wasn’t working even though they were doing it exactly right. Two rescue breaths after every fifteen compressions but do not stop the compressions, they’d changed the rules since the last time they’d done a first aid course, now you did non-stop compressions. She knew that was right.

She and Oliver had done a refresher first aid course back in March. It was a free course offered through Oliver’s work. The managing partner at Oliver’s new accounting firm was a passionate advocate for first aid education. He liked to interrupt meetings by pointing at someone and saying, ‘Sanjeev is having a heart attack!’ and then, while Sanjeev obligingly pretended to grab his chest, the managing partner would spin in his chair to point out someone else, often an unsuspecting intern, ‘You there! What do you do? Save Sanjeev!’ And then he’d count down the time before Sanjeev was dead and it was too late.

The course had been fun. Oliver and Erika were the star students. They’d both done first aid courses before this. Of course they had. They had their bronze medallions, their rescue diving certificates. They were the sort of people who believed in first aid courses, and anyway, no matter the subject, Oliver and Erika had always been star students. Even when the subject wasn’t a matter of life and death they took it as seriously as if it were.

Erika could see their teacher now. Paul was a ruddy-faced, heavy-breathing man who looked like a potential heart attack victim himself. ‘Got it in one,’ Paul kept saying to Erika and Oliver with an approving click of his fingers each time they got something right.