It crumpled to nothing on the road behind.
The car didn’t pause; indeed, the scream of its engine increased. The bright yellow motor with huge wheels and about a dozen exhaust pipes behind simply kept right on accelerating, screaming along the esplanade, through the next set of lights-also not lit-around the corner, up the hill and out of sight.
Leaving behind mayhem.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FOR a moment nobody moved. It was like some sort of Greek tragedy-players turned to statues where they stood.
Then someone screamed, and Max was gone from Maggie’s side in an instant.
She hardly saw him go. He was simply no longer with her, and by the time she could take in the enormity of what had happened-what was still happening-he was crouching by a body crumpled on the roadway.
Dear God, it was a child.
She dropped her ice cream and her bag and ran.
Triage. Max was with the child. What else?
No one else seemed to have been hit. Or maybe there had.
Yes, there was another. A woman was standing in the middle of the road, behind a stroller, staring numbly at the child who was now more than ten yards away from her.
Maggie’s eyes dropped from her face and saw her arm, which was streaming with blood. Far, far too much blood.
Maggie was with her in a heartbeat, seizing her hand and raising it above her head.
‘Sit,’ she said, and the woman looked wildly toward the child Max was tending.
‘No. I…’
‘Help me,’ Maggie said harshly to a kid standing by-a teenager with green-spiked hair and a T-shirt with a message that was shocking. If she was in the mood to be shocked. She wasn’t.
‘Give me your shirt,’ she said, and to the kid’s enormous credit he peeled it off almost before she’d finished saying the words.
‘Help me sit her down,’ she said, and the kid took the woman’s good hand and Maggie gently pressured the woman to sit. And then, as she sagged, to lie down.
Her arm was gushing, blood pumping out at a rate that was terrifying. Maggie had it still in the air. She grasped one of the kid’s hands and placed it on the woman’s wrist so he was holding her arm up. ‘Hold it high,’ she snapped, ‘Keep it there.’ She was twisting his T-shirt into a tie, twisting, twisting.
‘Grace…’ the woman managed.
‘I’m a doctor,’ Maggie said as she wound the T-shirt round her upper arm. ‘There’s two of us here. Dr Ashton’s looking after Grace while I look after you. I need to stop your arm bleeding before you can go to her.’
It sounded simple. Stop the bleeding. Stopping a gushing artery was an almost impossible ask.
She’d do it. She had the twirled T-shirt right round the woman’s arm now and was twisting it cruelly. The woman cried out in pain.
‘Ambulance!’
To Maggie’s astonishment-and relief-the kid-Spike?-was holding his cellphone with his spare hand, barking orders. The kid looked all of about fifteen, yet he was acting with the responsibility of a trained paramedic. ‘Esplanade, Coogee. Traffic accident. Two hurt, bad. Bleeding all over the place. Get here fast!’
‘I’m going to be sick,’ someone moaned faintly behind them. The kid turned and snapped, ‘Get away from us before you do, then. And give us your cardigan. We need a pillow.’
‘Great,’ she said, as someone else handed over a jacket-not the woman who was threatening to vomit but it didn’t matter who gave it, as long as they had it. ‘Keep that hand raised.’
‘Got it,’ the kid said-and not for the first time Maggie thought how impossible it was to predict from any group of people who could be called on to help.
Who was helping Max?
Did he need her?
She couldn’t look. Not yet.
The bleeding was slowing. Thank God. Heaven only knew how much blood the woman had lost in those first seconds-her arm had been ripped almost from elbow to wrist and spilled blood was impossible to quantify-but the bleeding was easing now to almost nothing.
‘I need another shirt,’ she yelled back into the crowd, and someone handed one over. ‘And a towel.’ She’d dropped hers and there was no time to return to the side of the road to fetch it. But someone handed one over.
In seconds she’d fashioned a pad to fit over the whole wound. She placed it on, then wrapped it tightly with the shirt, using the sleeves to tie and tie again.
She now had a tourniquet and pressure on the wound itself, and Spike was still holding the arm high.
‘Grace,’ the woman moaned again, and finally Maggie let herself glance across to Max.
He was working furiously. Alone. No one had moved to help him. There was a gathering crowd of onlookers but that was all they were. Onlookers.
She had Spike to help her, and the woman’s bleeding was controlled. Triage said she had to move on.
‘Can you tell me your name?’ she asked, and the woman’s pain-filled eyes stared up at her like she didn’t hear.
‘Your name,’ she said again, softly but urgently, and put her hand fleetingly on her cheek. ‘It’s okay. Spike and I have stopped your arm bleeding. You’re going to be okay. But I need your name.’
‘J-Judith.’
‘The little girl-she’s yours?’
‘I…Yes. Thomas is in the stroller. Grace is…Grace is…’
‘Dr Ashton’s looking after Grace,’ Maggie told her. ‘He’s good. He’ll take good care of her. I’ll go now and see how she is.’
‘Thomas…’
‘Thomas is fine.’ She looked around her at the onlookers. Met the eye of an elderly woman who was looking shocked, but was already turning away as if she was about to leave. That was what sensible people did at the scene of an accident. If they couldn’t help, they left.
She wanted sensible.
‘Can you help with the baby in the stroller?’ she called and the woman paused and pointed to herself.
‘Me?’
‘Please. What’s your name?’
‘Mary. I know these people,’ she ventured. ‘They live near me.’
‘Great.’ She motioned her to come close, so Judith could see how comfortingly grandmotherly she looked. ‘Judith, Mary’s one of your neighbours and she’ll be looking after Thomas. Spike here is holding your arm up until the ambulance arrives, so it doesn’t start bleeding again. You’re going to be fine. I need to help Dr Ashton with Grace. If you promise to stay still then there’ll be two doctors looking after Grace.’
‘Go,’ the woman whispered without hesitation. ‘Go.’
He heard her in the background and he blessed her for it. He’d never questioned her competence, but now…She was skilled and she was fast and she was sure. People jumped when she said jump, recognising her natural authority even if she was nine months pregnant, covered with sand and dressed in a bright yellow sarong.
There was so much blood…The woman Maggie was working on must have torn an artery but he couldn’t help her. He had urgent work to do himself.
Vaguely he heard the voices in the background, the woman’s voice naming her children. The blonde-ringletted child under his hands was dressed endearingly in a pink tutu over a bathing costume stained with rainbow ice cream. She was called Grace?
She was conscious. Just. Considering the force with which she’d hit the road, consciousness was a miracle. But
