‘Becky, that’s not what I meant—’
‘Well, it sounded like that to me. I’m knackered, David, I can barely keep my eyes open. And you should be too, the shifts you’ve been pulling. How you can have the energy to want… I just don’t know.’
‘I know, I’m sorry, love. Look, let’s just forget it and have an early night – not that kind!’ he added hastily, wondering how hard it would be to fit his other foot in his mouth. ‘A nice, clean, vanilla-flavoured early night. With reading and pyjamas.’
A small smile quirked the corner of her mouth, and he thought he might have got away with it. ‘Vanilla-flavoured?’
‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled miserably. ‘I just know I’m a shit, and I promise I’ll keep my hands to myself.’
* * *
He was as good as his word. Becky was asleep and snoring moments after her head hit the pillow, and he stayed up reading an Ian Rankin thriller. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock when he heard the shuffling of tiny bare feet on the carpet in the hall outside, and then Alice was in the doorway, her hair mussed and her face red and puffy with sleep.
‘Daddy?’ she murmured. ‘I don’t feel well.’
It was as if invisible hands had placed defibrillator pads either side of his naked heart and hit him with a million volts. A little over two years ago he’d taken her for a swimming lesson at the leisure centre and been helping her get changed afterwards when she’d said those exact same words: Daddy, I don’t feel well. He’d dismissed the slight temperature and the bit of a rash on her tummy as the results of the heat and humidity in the changing rooms, and given her some Calpol when they’d got home, but at teatime she’d said it again, Daddy, I don’t feel well, and this time she’d vomited – the milk that had come up had been pink, but she hadn’t been drinking strawberry milk that time. It had been blood. His baby’s blood. She’d been rushed to hospital, and within hours had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, was on a drip and surrounded by friendly but urgent-faced people in white coats, and the nightmare had begun for all three of them. He was told that even if he’d taken her straight to hospital the moment she’d said it the first time, those few hours wouldn’t have made a difference, but he didn’t believe it.
Now, those words now bypassed his rational brain completely and jerked him out of bed in a panic sweat.
‘Becky, wake up,’ he said, shoving her, and at the same time falling out of bed to kneel down in front of Alice. ‘Honey, what’s wrong? Are you in pain?’
‘David?’ Becky was sitting up in alarm. ‘What’s going on?’
He put a hand to Alice’s forehead. It was like touching the side of a furnace. Her hectic colour had nothing to do with sleep.
‘Hurts here,’ she murmured, touching the place high up on her chest where the port for administering her chemo had been installed, just under the skin.
‘Jesus, Becky, she’s burning up. I’m going to call an ambulance.’
Infection. Next to the actual cancer itself, it was the thing that they dreaded most. Alice’s immune system had been levelled by the same methotrexate that was taking out the cancer cells, so any infection could become life-threatening very quickly, and places like her port were especially vulnerable. She was on preventative antibiotics anyway, but it seemed that on this occasion they hadn’t been enough.
‘Come on, Wondergirl,’ said Becky, sounding calm and controlled. ‘Let’s get you back to bed.’ She turned haunted eyes to David and whispered, ‘Just get them here fast.’
Becky took her back to bed and he heard her running cold water as he picked up the house phone and dialled 999. He stammered through his answers to the call handler’s questions, and was told that an ambulance had been dispatched and would be with them in ten minutes.
‘Ten minutes,’ he told Becky. She had pressed a cold, damp hand towel to Alice’s forehead and was stroking her hair. ‘Do you want to, uh, get dressed and get her stuff together, or, uh, maybe should I…?’
‘I don’t really care, David,’ she said. ‘Just as long as they get here.’
But by the time he’d thrown some clothes on and taken over from her while she did the same, ten minutes had passed. Then eleven. Then twelve.
‘Why aren’t they here?’ he growled, staring out of the window at the road which remained stubbornly empty of blue flashing lights.
‘Call them again.’
‘I’m sure they’ll be here…’
‘Call them again.’
So he called them again. He was put through to a different dispatcher who said, ‘I’m very sorry about that, sir. We’ve received a high number of call-outs this evening, but I can see that an ambulance is on its way to you and should be with you in three to five minutes.’
‘Well, is it three or is it five?’ he snapped. ‘My wife, who’s looking after our daughter – you know, the one I told you about? The one with leukaemia? She’d quite like to know.’
‘All I can say, sir, is that I’m very sorry, but I can see—’
David slammed the phone down.
Three minutes became five, and five became seven.
He marched back into Alice’s bedroom. ‘I’m taking her,’ he said.
‘No you’re not,’ she said, and she was right; he knew as well as she did that it was at least a half hour drive to County Hospital in Stafford before Alice could get treatment whereas the ambulance crew could get an IV line into her the moment they got here. He’d seen the quality of emergency services deteriorate terribly in rural parts of the country like this as he’d grown up – it was part of the reason why he’d volunteered as a Special in the first place – but he couldn’t bring himself to believe things were so bad that it would take nearly
