Protocol freaking bit the big one.
This time anyway.
It had been almost ten months since The Incident at school. Ten months of pulling herself back from her friends, social media, her future … all in an effort to wipe the memories away and start afresh. She’d thought if she could make it past the year mark, it would be like resetting the clock and then, ping! Off she’d go to uni, her ideals back in place, her spirit strong as a wild pony and her parents puffing with pride that they’d raised a child who chose to follow the beat of a different drummer or, in her case, bass guitar.
She tried some yogic breathing to see if that would drown out the chaotic thoughts pin-balling round her head.
Normally she was good at this. Raising detached to another level. It wasn’t just a goth thing, it was a Chakrabarti thing. She’d taken not one, but THREE heart attack calls last week and had sorted them out without so much as the blink of an eye. She’d calmed down dozens of panicking mums (croup was hitting the under twos in a big way this year) and convinced one very lonely old man that talking back to the telly as if it were real wasn’t necessarily a sign of Alzheimer’s as most people did it, ageing or otherwise.
She pushed herself back up and stared at her screen, psyching herself up to take another call.
The scoreboard was blinking red. The numbers of calls taken was flicking ever upwards. It was after three, which meant school was out, and most GPs had been booked up weeks in advance so mums tended to call 111 to see if their extreme level of agitation (and need to get tea on the table for the other children) was enough to get them to send a doctor over. It usually wasn’t. Normally she wrapped up the call with the usual advice: go to the chemists, call and make a proper appointment with the GP or head to the nearest A&E if the symptoms worsened.
This time, though … this time protocol left her feeling completely helpless.
She’d done the three call backs. Left the ‘if the symptoms worsen please call back’ message on Hailey’s phone, but something deep within her knew it wouldn’t matter. A person could only hear what the voices in their head were telling them and it sounded as though that girl’s head was full of demons.
Intellectually, Raven knew she wasn’t meant to take any of this personally. It was a job. Like a complaints line but with actual life and, in this case, possibly death, on the line.
Why hadn’t she said something useful? Something kind?
Was Hailey dead? Alive? Best case scenario was that she had simply been fed up with Raven’s inability to help and respond like a human. A compassionate human. It’s all anyone really wanted, wasn’t it? Someone to listen to them. To really listen and say, yes, yes I hear you.
The bloody script wouldn’t let them! The bloody script didn’t know what it was like to want to reach through the phone line and pull ‘Caller’ into a hug and say I know, I know it hurts, but it’ll be okay. Whoever or whatever is saying bad things about you, they’re not true.
Sweat was trickling down her back. The cold clammy kind. Her heart was lurching all over her ribcage. Her stomach hurt. Everything in her was cramping with a weird sort of inert exertion. More so than this morning when she’d refused Dylan’s offer to help carry her bags onto the bus. She’d thought he’d done it because she was fat and she’d stupidly wanted to prove that fat people could do things too, so like a huge, lumbering walrus, she’d refused his help, hauled the bags all the way to the end of the bus wondering if the excruciating pain she was feeling was, in fact, the beginnings of a heart attack. It was the one thing they had received really good training for with 111. Vision narrowing. Lungs unable to suck in enough air. Cheeks turning a bright, horrifying scarlet.
She didn’t feel the stabbing pain shooting down her arm, though. Or any of the other things that would’ve meant she was having an actual heart attack and, if she were to give herself the tiniest of breaks, she wasn’t that fat. The morbidly obese kind. More the could do with eating fewer crisps in her room and doing a bit of exercise kind. Big bones had a lot to answer for. Thanks Auntie Anu. For absolutely nothing.
Why hadn’t she pressed the bloody hold button? Said something positive that would’ve made Hailey realise no amount of cutting would take the real pain away. Kids were shitheads. Especially at school.
Not that she’d even got to the part where she asked Hailey her age or anything.
She’d frozen. Just like last time.
She’d just stood there all of those months ago. Stood there with the rest of the sixth formers gawping as Aisha Laghari was wheeled out of the girls’ loo into the waiting ambulance and on to the hospital where she had been easily persuaded by her mother to close down her Instagram account. Her Snapchat account. Her Twitter, her Facebook and all of the other ways kids tortured other kids – especially the different ones – to the point that they ended up trying to slice out the pain. And Raven had done absolutely nothing about it even though she’d caught Aisha in the changing rooms at the gym one day, a drop of blood trickling down her leg below her huge bath towel she’d brought in specially, presumably to cover up the scars that never quite healed.
‘Sunita?’
‘Raven,’ Raven automatically corrected as she wheeled around, startled by the touch.
‘Sunita? Alright
