500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(41)

Of course not, thought Cormac, as he continued to perform CPR. Real people with real jobs didn’t really belong here. He noticed in his eyeline the man who played a doctor on television approaching.

“You must be joking,” he snarled.

“Well, you see, I have done it a lot and performed it, and I feel quite qualified.”

“You’re fine,” said Cormac shortly, relenting. “Okay, hold down his arms.”

There was no heartbeat at all now. Cormac knelt over the man’s chest and took the defibrillator.

“Right, when I say clear, let him go. One, two, three . . . clear!”

The actor sat back as the body beneath him jolted. Cormac leaned over, listening for a heartbeat.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on, wee man. You can do it. Come on.”

He shocked him again, fingers crossed. Honestly, once you got into this, he knew—as anyone else who worked in actual medicine, rather than TV medicine, knew—that it was over. He had a horrible, horrible feeling that as well as looking like a cheap, tongue-tied country bumpkin idiot, he was also going to look like a killer or a lazy and useless nurse, according to people who’d only ever watched resuscitations from the comfort of their own trendy leather sofas, in which everyone miraculously returns to life.

“Clear! Come on,” he almost screamed in frustration, jumping back down to perform mouth to mouth. “Come on!!”

Suddenly the man’s body jolted. Cormac took nothing from this; aftershocks were incredibly common in the dead. He bent, though, and lowered his head to the man’s chest. The relief he felt when he heard, slowly, first one thump then another, was one of the most gushing feelings of his entire life.

“Yes,” he hissed. “Come on, Billy Boy. Come on.”

An ambulance crew ran into the room through the now-silent crowd, which had parted to let them in.

“Asystolic?” said the ambulance paramedic, a large, sweet-faced Indian boy.

“Ventricular fibrillation,” said Cormac.

The paramedic nodded and threw him an oxygen mask, which he took gratefully with a thumbs-up, placing it over the man’s mouth. After several more minutes of working on him, and with both the ambulance crew down, one setting up a drip in situ, they sat back on their haunches as the man, very carefully, opened his eyes.

The three professionals regarded him.

“How you doing?” said Cormac finally.

“You’ve been taking something naughty, haven’t you?” said the paramedic. “Come on. Let’s go.”

The man, however, once he’d regained consciousness and looked around, realized suddenly where he was.

“Oh fuck,” he groaned, raising a shaky hand to wipe the sweat off his forehead. “Seriously? In front of these tosspots?”

Worse was to come as the man was loaded onto a wheeled stretcher and it became apparent to everyone he had peed himself in his very expensive suit, then had to be led out in front of everyone. He covered his eyes with his hands. “Christ on a bike,” he said mournfully. “No photos. If anyone tells the Mail I will have you, and don’t think I won’t.”

“Oh my God, was it a speedball?” came a very loud posh voice from the back. “Christ, how terribly nineties.”

The man on the stretcher groaned and lowered his eyes in shame.

Cormac blinked as the paramedic thanked him and took his name and address. The man on the stretcher’s nose had started to hemorrhage everywhere and a waitress was screaming.

“That’s our cue,” said the paramedic, wheeling him out. “Will take him forever to get to sleep, then he’ll wake up tomorrow and won’t remember a thing about it.”

“Aye,” said Cormac. “Well, his friends all will.”

The paramedic laughed. “Yup,” he said. “Oh well. Cheers—you performed a miracle.”

And as they left, the entire room turned around toward Cormac—who was suddenly extremely worried about the state he’d gotten Kim-Ange’s jumper into—and, to his complete surprise, gave him a round of applause, led by the man who played a doctor on TV.

AFTER THAT IT was mayhem. People vied to buy him drinks. Kalitha and Portia were suddenly all over the hero of the hour. Various men came over and announced that they had just been about to do the same thing, or would have done the same thing if he hadn’t gotten there first (this was not, to be fair, an attitude confined to London clubland and had happened at pretty much every single incident Cormac had ever encountered). Finally the manager, an incredibly smartly dressed woman with a brisk manner, took him aside and thanked him from the bottom of her heart for not letting someone die on the floor of their toilets. “I mean, it’s terrible for business,” she said. “Well, not at first, everyone comes to have a look—rubberneckers—but once that falls off. Well.”

Cormac blinked at this. “Well, hopefully he’ll let you know he’s all right.”

“He can’t,” said the woman shortly. “He’s barred. Again.”

THEY HAD MOVED from the high table, Cormac noticed, to a booth littered with vodka bottles and champagne. He realized, to his shame, that his biggest relief wasn’t just that he’d saved a man’s life: it was that he wasn’t going to have to face the bar bill.

And then he looked around at the roomful of incredibly beautiful people laughing, joking, gossiping, and yelling at each other and, well, maybe it wasn’t what he was used to, and maybe he felt poor and out of place, but, well. A bit of glamour wasn’t the worst thing in the world, was it? Everyone dressed up, trying to impress, to get on, to have fun. It might not be real, but there wasn’t a lot of fantasy in Cormac’s life, not much glitter. He might as well enjoy a bit of it, he thought, even as an incredibly beautiful brunette puckered very puffed-up lips at him and handed him a glass of champagne.