500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(3)
THERE WAS A moment’s silence, then the yelling started: disbelief, fury; and suddenly Lissa found herself clicking into action, found her training propping her up, propelling her forward.
“I’m a nurse. Move away please, I can help.”
She expected to have to clear a path, but the other youths bounced upward, shouting their heads off, and dashed screaming in pursuit of the car.
“Dial 999!” Lissa shouted as she knelt down to examine Kai, pulling her phone out of her pocket. She had no idea if the lads could catch the car and was terrified they’d get hit again; there was only one way out of the development, it would have to double back at some point—but she had to prioritize.
She looked down at the figure on the pavement, his head sideways on the sunbaked stone, next to cigarette ends strewn in the gutter.
“DARLING.”
He was beautiful, fifteen years old. Lissa couldn’t get over it. Not that that mattered, of course; of course it didn’t. It had absolutely nothing to do with it. But as she bent desperately trying to save him, as she finally, finally, heard the sirens she’d been waiting for, she couldn’t get over it: the sheer heart-stopping beauty of the young soft skin, the curve of the neck, the dark hair. He was a child. She couldn’t bear to think of how the family was going to take it. She cursed herself; her best friend had deleted Ezra’s number from her phone, for her own good. She couldn’t even call him.
Even when the paramedics arrived she didn’t stop CPR. She carried on compressing, using the heels of her hands as they joined her, monitoring the oxygen, grabbing the adrenaline to shoot into his heart. She knew the paramedics and they trusted her and brought her along, Ashkan working with her, Kerry driving like a fiend as the blue lights screamed over the traffic, even if that clogged up the overwhelmingly crowded London roads, too stuffed full with lorries, vans, Ubers, motorbikes—everything jammed up so tight they could barely find room to pull over to let an ambulance through.
But on this trip, they all knew, deep down, blue lights wouldn’t matter. No matter how quickly they moved, how urgently they shouted and cleared the way. Back at the crime scene, a policewoman would be kneeling down in a pool of blood on the pavement, concerned citizens gathering around, but anyone who could have been involved was long gone into the cacophonous city. The sun had gone down and now everything felt chilled.
Kai suddenly contorted, bounced in the air as Ashkan shouted, “Clear!” and Lissa had jumped back instinctively, watching him twitch, wondering if the policewoman sitting in the blood had started the weary business of figuring out who he was, had started the weary, unbearable process of contacting his family.
Lissa let the training take over completely, wouldn’t let herself think, automatically putting the oxygen mask back on the boy’s lips, still blue; injecting another shot of adrenaline; loading another pint of blood above his arm—all of them desperately hoping he could hold on, hold on just until they got there. None of them spoke apart from the basic terms of the attempt to resuscitate and trying to get more blood into him than was leaving him.
Attempts to resuscitate are, even with the most extraordinarily advanced equipment in the world, much more unsuccessful than not. People see miracle returns from the dead on TV all the time. They didn’t see this: the blood pumping out as fast as it could be pumped in; the lack of response in the pupils every time they checked; the artificial twitching and stimulation of the young body; the barked commands and steady listening for independent breath—the hot chaos of it all as the ambulance swerved and howled through the thick London rush hour, only one of many screaming sirens, helicopters, dispatches, attending to pain and blood.
“The doctors are going to call it,” predicted Ashkan, glancing at his watch.
“You can’t,” said Lissa.
Ashkan swore. The pointlessness of it. A hit-and-run that looked deliberate. On a child. He turned away and tuned in to the police radio for a bit, then even half smiled.
“They got him,” he said grimly. “The rest of the lads jumped on the car, wouldn’t let it leave. Smashed in his windows. It must have felt like a zombie attack.”
It didn’t register with Lissa at all.
“Carry on. More blood! Now!” said Lissa fiercely, and redoubled her efforts, hissing into the boy’s ear, “Come on, Kai! Wake up! Wake up!”
THEY HAD ARRIVED at Guy’s Hospital: the ambulance doors were hurled open without ceremony and two porters and an A&E doctor jumped aboard.
“Move,” said the young doctor, who looked about nine.
“I’m not finished here,” said Lissa strongly, as she continued to work the oxygen mask, shined light in his eyes, checked for vitals.
“Yes, you are,” said the doctor. “Let me look at him.”
“I can do it!” said Lissa. His face. His beautiful face. He was a child, a child asleep, still warm—or was that their efforts?—still sleeping, dreaming, losing his homework, wishing he were a footballer or a rock star.
“Stand back!”
“I can do it!”
Lissa didn’t realize she had screamed, didn’t realize everyone stopped to look at her, as Ashkan pulled her back gently, his face a mask of concern. The junior doctor was already moving in, ignoring her.
“Step back.”
“I just . . .”