Saracen pulled the child’s wrist until its body flopped over on to his forearm then he drew back a little and felt for the head. He touched curly hair and moved his hand down to search for a carotid pulse. Still nothing. As he tried to remove his arm from the crack he brought the child tumbling forward to lie against the back of the gap. He brought up his torch and shone it through the opening. He could now see that it was a little girl. Her eyes were open but she was quite dead.
Saracen started to wriggle out backwards, for there was no room to turn round, when a woman started to scream. He looked out from under the truck and saw the yellow leggings of a fireman running towards him. A face squatted down to look under the truck. “Doctor! The trapped woman has come round. She’s in a lot of pain.”
Almost before he had had a chance to reply the screaming subsided and Saracen knew that Jill Rawlings had taken care of the situation. The strict who-does-what regime of hospital life did not always apply in the searing reality of Medic Alpha’s world.
Saracen was aware of a fireman recoiling as he got to his feet and looked down to see that the front of his jacket was covered in blood where he had been lying in the puddle. A policeman handed him some rags and he wet them at the trickling end of a hose on the ground that had been used to flush away spilt fuel before sponging away the sticky mess.
“How is she?” he asked Jill Rawlings.
“They can’t free her. Take a look.”
Jill Rawlings moved back and Saracen knelt down to peer into the crushed foot well of the car that had ploughed into the back of the Escort. He could see the problem for the woman’s foot had been snapped at the ankle and crushed between an engine support member and the bulkhead of the car. Her foot was a bloody, broken pulp sticking out at right angles from her ankle. There was no room for the firemen to use hydraulic jacks in such a confined area.
Saracen withdrew from the front of the car and said, “I’ll have to take her foot off.”
“I thought you’d say that.” said Jill. “I’ve prepared the instruments.”
“What did you give her?”
Jill told him and he nodded. “Ask the firemen if they can rig some kind of shelter to keep some of this bloody rain off will you.”
Saracen returned to examining the trapped woman’s foot with the aid of a better torch while Jill went to speak to the firemaster. Now satisfied that he knew exactly what he was going to do he began to assess his patient in more general terms. She was a woman in her early thirties, well dressed, slim, attractive and apparently in good health before the accident that was about to shatter her life. Probably the wife of a successful professional man, thought Saracen, considering the make and year of the car and the quality of her clothes. She was a woman with everything going for her who was going to waken up a widow with no left foot.
Saracen stood up and moved out of the way while two firemen rigged a makeshift shelter out of a tarpaulin. While he waited he asked one of the senior policemen about the contents of the woman’s handbag. “Anything I should know about? Any discs or medallions?”
The policeman shook his head. “She did have a kidney donor card though.”
“Did her husband carry one too?”
I put it in the ambulance with the body and alerted the hospital.”
Saracen nodded. That might be something else to tell the woman when she came round. “All right?” he asked Jill Rawlings.
“All ready.”
The firemen and policemen knew what was going on behind the screen but had only their imagination to fill in the details until the sound of Saracen using a saw painted too vivid a picture for one of them. A constable retched up the contents of his stomach on the wet road. He supported his head on his forearm as he leaned against one of the fire appliances.
“Clips!” said Saracen.
Jill Rawlings pressed them into his hand and knew that Saracen was now working on stemming the blood flow from the stump. She anticipated each request before it came. Swabs, pressure pads, tape. The seconds ticked past then Saracen sighed and said, “All right. She’ll do.” He got to his feet stiffly and rubbed at his legs to restore the circulation then he moved out of the way to allow the ambulance men to come in and lift the woman gently from the wreckage and carry her to the ambulance.
“What happened to the truck driver?” Saracen asked the senior policeman standing beside him as he cleaned his hands and watched Jill Rawlings gather together their equipment.
“Minor cuts and bruises. He went to hospital for a check-up in the first ambulance.
Saracen nodded and said, “That’s it then. I’ll leave the rest to you. He started to walk towards Medic Alpha with Jill Rawlings.
“Be seeing you,” said the policeman.
“All too soon,” replied Saracen.
As Saracen climbed into the back of Medic Alpha he paused to look over at the houses that bordered the ring road. Most of the people who had earlier been at their windows to see the excitement had returned to their television sets. Real life drama had begun to pall. Saracen had picked up some road grit in his mouth; he spat it out on the tarmac.
The rain had still not relented by the time Medic Alpha arrived back at Skelmore General and one of the ambulance men stepped in a puddle up to his ankles as he wheeled the trolley up to the doors. Saracen accompanied the trolley with the intention of handing over his patient to the surgical registrar on duty and then going home. He could hardly believe the sight that met his eyes. A amp;E resembled the Beggars’ Court of eighteenth century Paris.
“What’s going on?” he asked Tremaine, the houseman who had called him.
“Three things,” answered the flustered houseman. “It’s Saturday night, the weather is bringing in the drop- outs and City were playing United at home. There was trouble.”
Saracen looked around him and swore under his breath. The treatment room was full, the waiting room was full. Half a dozen policemen were talking to people and writing things in note-books. The sound of gagging and retching came from one of the side rooms. Saracen looked in and found Sister Lindeman cajoling a teenage girl into swallowing a gastric aspiration tube.
“OD?” Saracen asked.
“A hundred aspirin. Her boyfriend left her.”
In a corner of the main treatment room Saracen caught sight of a nurse sitting down. It was such an unusual thing that he knew something must be wrong. He went over and saw that the girl was holding the side of her face.
“What happened?”
“One of the drunks,” replied the girl.
Saracen lifted her hand away to assess the damage and saw the early signs of bruising. “Did you tell the police?” he asked.
“Jack Lane dealt with him,” replied the girl.
“Do your teeth feel all right?” asked Saracen.
The nurse smiled and said, “I’m all right, really I am. Just give me a moment.”
Saracen squeezed her shoulder and continued on a quick inspection tour. He looked in on the waiting room but the smell that met him made him wish that he had not. It was a mixture of vomit, urine and wet clothing. All the chairs were full and people were squatting on the floor. A woman was wandering up and down with tears flowing down her face and Saracen recognised her, she was regular in A amp;E when it rained. She was known to the Unit as Mary.
Mary was one of the people that the Sunday Supplements liked to call the ‘twilight people’ in their intermittent features on life’s unfortunates between advertisements for Porsche cars and Swedish furniture. She
