Sue, an uncertain driver at the best of times, climbed over the vomit and into the driver’s seat and turned on the van. She gave Raven the iPod as, from the rearview mirror, Sue could see Flo begin to give compressions.
After a couple of false starts and horrified apologies they were on their way. Sue’s mind reeled with ways to get Becky the help she needed as fast as possible. She would sound the horn if another car came by. She put on the flashing lights. She drove in the middle of the small country lane until she pictured getting hit by an oncoming car so lurched the van to the side and drove so close to the hedge Raven instructed her to drive in the middle of the road again. Raven, in times of stress, had an incredibly solid, commanding voice. Sue drove up and down and up and down until she rammed on the brakes, the road in front of them completely flooded. It was possible to pass on a nearby footbridge if you were, say, on a bicycle … but in a van? No chance. If they’d bothered bringing their bicycles with them they could’ve … what? Propped Becky between them on the central support bar and pedalled her to Hexham?
Sue clenched her jaw, stared into the rearview mirror, trying to keep her mother’s leering, jeering voice out of her head, but all she could hear was, ‘It’ll all end in tears, Suey. It’ll all end in tears.’
Not today it wouldn’t.
Sue jammed the van’s long gear shaft into reverse. There was simply no chance she was going to let her mother be right. Not about this, anyway.
She drove, in reverse, forcing herself to tune into Raven and Flo who were timing how long they’d been doing compressions.
‘What are you doing?’ Flo asked when she noticed they were going in reverse.
‘The road is flooded. We can’t get through. I’m going to see if there are any turn offs.’
Flo started tapping at her watch, swiping and pinching and flicking her fingers along the screen. ‘There aren’t any. Not that lead to Hexham anyway.’
‘What about Gilsland? Is there a hospital there?’
‘No.’ Maybe Brampton but that’ll take at least twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour and—’
They all stared at one another as the bleak reality of their situation sunk in. Unless they found a way to make an AED out of the jumper cables … Becky might die.
‘Don’t stop!’ Sue shouted, realising Raven had fallen into the same motionless stupor she had.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ Raven returned to the syncopated pulses as Sue painstakingly drove backwards until, mercifully, the lane widened enough to do a tortuously jerky seven-point turn until, at long last, they could drive forward.
‘Oh my god, my arms!’ Raven screamed in frustration. ‘Flo, we’ve got to switch. My arms have gone numb. Sue? What the actual fuck? Why aren’t you driving?’
‘I—’ Why wasn’t she driving? She had a life to save. An actual life that was barely being kept afloat in the back of a muddy, cold, industrial van.
This wasn’t the way Becky’s life should come to end. Becky’s life shouldn’t come to an end at all.
In the back Raven and Flo began bickering about how long they should keep up compressions.
‘Thirty minutes,’ Sue said.
No one acknowledged her.
The bickering continued.
A force she had never known she possessed surged through her like lava. ‘Thirty minutes!’ She said, jamming the van into gear. ‘Now think of solutions! Actual solutions!’
Flo and Raven stared at her, jaws agape.
‘Why aren’t you doing compressions?’
Raven took over again as Flo continued to stare at Sue as if she’d never properly seen her before.
‘What would you do on the aeroplane, Flo?’ Sue demanded.
‘We have an AED kit and we’d call for a doctor on board. There’s almost always a doctor on board.’
Flo and Raven threw helpless little looks around the grey, misty landscape as if one might emerge from the elements in this, their hour of need.
‘There is something that Trevor said,’ Raven began.
‘Oh, dear god, no,’ Flo immediately began to dismiss.
‘Let. Her. Speak,’ Sue ground out.
‘It’s a real thing,’ Raven said, looking both terrified and intensely keen to prove Trevor’s nugget of information just might be their saving grace. ‘I looked it up after. A guy was having a heart attack in an ambulance in Chicago and he was dying and they couldn’t get him back, not even with the AED, and they were speeding along and hit an epic pothole and kablam!’ She raised her hands which Flo promptly grabbed and put back on Becky’s chest. ‘The pothole saved his life.’
‘So … I need to hit a pothole?’ Sue’s eyes darted between the road and Raven.
‘You need to hit an epic pothole. And as far as I can remember, there weren’t any on the road here.’
‘Do you want me to do it?’ Flo asked.
Raven and Flo both shouted ‘no’ which Flo felt a bit bad about, but Sue’s driving was erratic at the best of times and they didn’t need to turn an already bad situation into four fatalities.
‘So … what exactly do I need to do?’ Sue’s eyes connected with Raven’s.
‘You need to find some uneven ground. But not the flooded bits of the road. And then when you see a sleeping policeman or a pothole or whatever … cane it. Cane it until Becky’s heart starts again.’
‘Okay,’ said Sue. ‘Got it.’
She gripped the steering wheel so hard her hands felt as though they were melded to it, then set off at a speed no one would have recommended on these slim, wet, country lanes. Gary would’ve whooped with admiration. Gary would’ve said, ‘I knew you were made of fire, Suey! No one else ever believed
