Breathe

by Cari Hunter

  “Shit,” she said, hefting her response bag back onto her shoulder and starting up the stairs. “Which room, love?” she shouted.

  “Second—” the woman’s voice broke off to pant, “left.”

  Multiple candles flickered as Jem pushed the door, the light dimming and then flaring to reveal a twenty-something Pakistani woman kneeling by the side of the bed. Heavily pregnant and clearly in the latter stages of labour, she murmured a grateful string of Urdu on seeing Jem.

  “Hey, my name’s Jem.” The mattress springs creaked beneath the weight of the bags she threw onto it. “How many weeks along are you?”

  “I’m Madina.” The woman managed a small wave. “Thirty-six plus five. He’s my first. My mum says boys are always impatient.”

  Jem began to lay out the contents of her maternity pack. It didn’t take an obstetrician to see that Madina was on the verge of a home delivery; within a minute of one contraction ending, she began to pant through the next.

  “Allah!” She lowered her forehead to the mattress, her fingers clawing at the bedding. “Hospital, now. Quick!”

  Aware that nothing aside from the birth would be happening quickly, Jem pushed the Entonox mouthpiece to Madina’s lips. “Here, here, breathe on this. It’s for the pain. Big deep breaths, good, perfect.” She keyed her radio. “Hey, Ryan. Birth imminent. Backup and a midwife would be great, if you’ve got anything.”

  “I have a paramedic solo on the way to you, ETA six, but ETA on HART is upward of an hour. I’ll give Maternity at West Penn a ring now.”

  “That’s fine. Tell the solo to leave the bus next to my RRV, grab a torch, and wade down.”

  “Will do. Good luck.”

  She rolled her eyes and tossed the radio next to a pile of knitted baby clothes. Madina had sagged back against the wall, her brightly coloured salwar hobbling her at the ankles.

  “How’s about we get you untangled from these, eh?” Jem said, unhooking one foot and then the other. She felt surprisingly sanguine for someone tasked with delivering a baby in a power cut, with flash floods crippling the region. Being on the RRV, she had seen an exponential rise in her tally of home births, and she usually enjoyed the experience, provided it was complication-free.

  “I need the hospital,” Madina said. “He’s breech.”

  Jem stopped shoving an incontinence sheet beneath Madina’s bottom. “Of course he is,” she said, grabbing the maternity notes and finding the date for a planned caesarean and an entry detailing a failed attempt to turn the baby. Fuck. She squeezed Madina’s hand. “We’ll manage, I promise.”

  Anything else she might have said was lost beneath Madina’s screech of pain as a sudden gush of black-stained fluid saturated the sheet.

  “Not here,” Madina cried. “Not here.”

  “Hands and knees,” Jem said, almost dragging her into position. “That’s it, good girl. He’s going to need space to come out.”

  “Hallo? Jem?” The hail preceded a pounding of boots up the stairs, and Jem smiled as Amira stuck her head around the door. “Holy shit,” Amira whispered as, right on cue, a tiny pair of legs presented themselves.

  “My sentiments exactly,” Jem said, gauging the baby’s progress. “Grab the oxygen and the neonate bag and mask, and switch the pads on the defib. Just…just get everything ready, okay?” Using her forearm, she supported the baby’s torso, preparing to deliver his head. “You’re doing really well,” she said to Madina. “You’ve definitely got a boy.”

  Madina managed a short gasp of laughter and then yelped and pushed the baby’s arms out. Jem swapped her hold, taking the baby by his feet and lifting them in an attempt to deliver the head. It had sounded so simple in the practice guidelines. In reality, it was akin to wrestling a slimy fish with its upper third stuck in a vice, and the head was not for shifting. She threw Amira a “what the fuck now?” glance, and Amira knelt beside them, obviously none the wiser but welcome moral support.

  “Shit. Uh, give me a little push?” Jem said, and felt the head slip as Madina bore down. “Go on, go on, that’s it. I’ve almost got him.” Employing a few manoeuvres that certainly weren’t in the manual, she managed to manipulate the baby free, lowering him onto the dry towel Amira held out and then rubbing him vigorously. She rocked back on her heels, shaking her head in amazement as the baby wailed and punched the air.

  “Is he okay?” Madina asked. Tethered in position by the umbilical cord, she couldn’t yet turn to see him.

  “There’s nothing wrong with his lungs, that’s for sure,” Jem said. She handed Amira a pair of scissors for the cord. “Are you doing the honours?”

  Nodding, Amira picked up a couple of clamps, but then seemed to have second thoughts. “Will you show me?” she whispered. “I’ve never done it before.”

  Jem sat by her side and took one of the clamps. “Course I will. It’s dead easy.”

  Madina was watching everything over her shoulder, her gaze constantly coming to rest on her son as Amira cut the cord and swaddled him in a warm blanket. Finally able to move, she shuffled around until she was propped against the bed, and took hold of him. “He’s beautiful,” she said, busy counting fingers and toes.

  “He is.” Jem stroked a tiny thumb and then started to laugh. “That’s the first water birth I’ve ever done.”

  * * *

  The song blasting from Rosie’s car radio almost overwhelmed the ring of her phone, until the Bluetooth kicked in and sent it through to hands-free. Spotting Jem’s name on the screen, she stopped singing mid-lyric.

  “So much for taking my mind off things,” she said, and accepted the call.

  “Hallo? Rosie?” Jem said, raising her voice above a rhythmic slosh of movement and her own laboured breaths.

  Rosie pulled into a side street that wasn’t yet awash. “Hey, it’s me. Are you swimming?”

  Jem huffed a wheezy chuckle. “Paddling, more like. I got stuck in Hearts Cross on a home birth. HART have just come out with a dinghy, but I need to get the RRV back to Darnton, so I’ll be late getting to yours. Is that okay?”

  “It’s fine. I’m on my way home now.” Rosie checked the clock on her dash, calculating the time as a plan started to form. “Come whenever you can. I’ll be a while yet as well. The roads are carnage.”

  The splashing stopped as Jem paused, gasping quietly. “Yeah, tell me about it,” she said, once she had the energy to reply. “I’m knee-deep on one at the moment.”

  Rosie closed her eyes, reluctant to overstep the boundaries Jem had established, even if she didn’t understand them. “Just take your time,” she said. “And I’ll see you soon.”

  She restarted her engine and made a U-turn, pausing to see whether common sense might kick her notion into a cocked hat. A bus went by at ten miles an hour, its passage sending waves onto the submerged pavement. It was heading toward Stanny Brook. She waited for it to pass and turned in the opposite direction.

  In the hours since she had last driven down Bennett Street, most of its inhabitants seemed to have fled for higher ground. Here and there candles threw silhouettes against drawn curtains, but the majority of the houses were unlit, and the street itself was black as pitch. To her left, the old mill seemed even darker, a huge beast hunkered in her periphery, chucking out the occasional fridge or mangy armchair as the overflowing river freed the rubbish abandoned around it. She parked in the driest spot she could find and swapped her trainers for the wellies stashed in her boot. Raising her coat’s hood provided little protection, but she felt safer somehow with her face concealed, as if the monsters lurking in the mill might not be able to see her coming.

  She made it to the hoarding before she conceded defeat and announced her presence to monsters real or imaginary by switching her torch on. Its beam cut a stark line above the multiple streams winding through the wasteland. The relentless pound of the river was too close for comfort, but she chose her route with care, traversing no man’s land without snapping anything, and locating the window she ha
d previously used for access. A couple of the stacked crates had succumbed to the rising water, but she clamped her torch between her teeth and managed to hoist herself through.

  “Now what?” she said, more to dispel the creeping fear than out of hope of inspiration. Her tendency to barrel straight in and ask questions later had brought her to the mill, but she couldn’t very well scour five storeys of dubious integrity on her own in the dark.

  Aiming her torch at her wellies, she began to inspect the floor for fresh footprints, finding a track made by a heavyset pair of boots that had recently scuffed grip marks into the accumulated muck. For want of a better idea, she followed their path, skirting the perimeter to the farthest side, where something seemed to have caught the person’s interest; the prints circled a small section of a sheltered corner, the marks deepening at several points as if the person had crouched for a closer look. Whatever they might have found had since been removed, however, and Rosie kicked at the dirt, her frustration boiling over. As avoidance strategies went, this current escapade was an extreme one, even by her standards. She should be at home, putting the heating on, lighting a fire, and drinking inadvisable amounts of caffeine. She made an abrupt about-turn, resolved on going back and chewing off a couple of fingernails while she waited for Jem.

  She was midway across the rear wall, almost to the opening for the stairwell, when she saw the light. It vanished in a heartbeat, as if someone had switched on a torch but then extinguished it immediately. Without making a sound, Rosie panned her own torch in the same direction, finding nothing at first and then glancing the beam off a small scurrying figure. The figure froze in the light, bent low in an effort to remain concealed, before springing up and starting to run. The motion made the hood on his jacket fall back, but she couldn’t see his face, just short dark hair sticking out beneath a baseball cap.

  “Hey! Stop!” Rosie yelled. “Stop! Police!” She set off after him, leaving the relative safety of the walls to sprint toward him in a direct line. Her torch beam jolted as she ran, giving her flashes of wooden planks and splintered glass. She heard a scuffle and a cry of distress, and paused to get her bearings before spotting her quarry picking himself up after a fall no more than twenty yards ahead.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she called, well within earshot. “I’m a police officer. I’m looking for Tahlia Mansoor.”

  Her appeal fell on deaf ears; he was already moving, heading left, away from the access window. She chased after him, so close now that she could hear panicked gasps and the creak of the flooring beneath him. He dodged right and jumped clear, legs stretching and feet skidding, and she stopped dead, surrounded by streaks of worn yellow paint, and realising too late exactly where he had led her.

  “Fuck! Fucking shit.”

  The wood covering the trap cracked and then shattered beneath her weight, plunging her into the void. She cried out, her limbs flailing and then tensing for the impact, but she hit water rather than concrete, the air knocked from her as she was spun forward in a tumult of debris. Unable to see anything, she gasped, saturating her lungs, and reached for a surface that wasn’t there. She felt a cold draught and snatched a breath, only to have it punched out of her as the current tossed her around again.

  Colliding with a solid wall slowed her progress, and she grappled for purchase, her fingers scraping the abrasive concrete. She righted herself, feet down, head above the water, and took huge hungry mouthfuls of air, but she quickly lost her hold, the flood reclaiming her and hurtling her along the wall in a relentless drive. She stopped suddenly, without warning or apparent reason, her right leg held static as her body twisted. Three seconds of grace was all she got before the pain hit her, a blast of agony in her right thigh that made her cry out and then vomit into the water.

  “Oh God,” she whispered. Using one hand to steady herself, she pawed at the wall with the other, trying to find what was hurting her so badly. Her fingers closed around a length of rebar jutting from the concrete, and she tracked it to the point where it disappeared into the middle of her thigh. She could feel the warmth of her blood joining the current that was wrenching at her, and she bit through her lip as the motion repeatedly jarred the metal against her femur.

  For an untold amount of time, all she could do was grip the wall and breathe through the pain. She began to shiver as the water lapped at her chest, sending ripples through her damaged muscles, and she sobbed quietly, unable to move yet unable to stay still.

  “Please help me, please.” She kept her entreaty to a whisper, afraid to make anything worse by raising her voice, before an abrupt return to clarity overrode the shock. “Hey! Hey! Help!” she yelled. “Are you still up there? Can you hear me? My name’s Rosie, and I’m a police officer. I need your help, please!”

  Daring to let go with one hand, she found the inner pocket where she’d stashed her mobile to keep it dry. She tapped its newly smashed screen, yelping in relief when it lit up, but its signal was nonexistent, denying her even the “emergency calls only” option.

  “Shit. Shit.” Thrown into a blind panic, she tried to free her leg, managing to move it a fraction. When the pain came, it seemed to come from a distance. She dimly heard herself scream and saw the water twist and roil in the light from her phone. Then her forehead bounced off the concrete, and everything faded out.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The whoop and wail of sirens had become the city’s soundtrack, a raucous orchestra of emergency services, their resources stretched to breaking point and getting nowhere fast. Well off the clock and still only halfway to Darnton, Jem hadn’t gone anywhere for fifteen minutes, and brake lights stretched ahead as far as she could see. The traffic jam was giving her far too much time to agonise over what she might say to Rosie, should they actually get to meet up that night, although that was looking ever more unlikely. When her phone rang, she answered it without thinking, sending the call through to hands-free and smiling at the name on the display.

  “I thought it might be you,” she said. “Are you stuck too? I haven’t moved for ages.”

  “Is that Jem?” The girl sounded young and uncertain, and she immediately started to cry. “I tried to call nine-nine-nine, but there was a queue, and your name is top of her list.”

  “What the—?” Jem rechecked the screen, but she hadn’t been mistaken. “What are you doing with Rosie’s phone? Where is she? Is she okay?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus,” Jem whispered. “What happened?”

  “She fell through the floor. I made her fall.” The girl sniffled and then blew her nose on something. “I came back to help her, but she wasn’t really awake.”

  “Fucking hell.” Jem checked the distance between the RRV and the surrounding cars. “Where are you?”

  “The old mill off Bennett Street. Can you help her?”

  “Yes, I’m a paramedic.” Jem whacked her blues on and hit the sirens, shifting into the central gap that formed as the cars parted for her. “How badly is she hurt?”

  “I don’t know. She’s in the water.”

  On some level, Jem was processing the information, even as she accelerated and hit her priority button, yelled at Ryan for backup, and then yelled at the fuckwit in front of her who pulled into the middle instead of pulling right.

  “Okay,” she said, fighting to breathe through the stress compressing her chest. “Okay. Are you with her?”

  “No. There’s no signal down there.”

  “Can you take me to her?”

  “Yes, yes I can,” the girl said. “I’ll meet you by the gap in the fence on Bennett.”

  “Ten minutes.” Jem swerved around a van. “It’ll be all right. She’ll be all right. What’s your name?”

  “Tahlia,” the girl said, and disconnected the call.

  * * *

  The RRV fishtailed as Jem threw it around the corner of Bennett Street. She tried not to look at its data screen, tried not to think what might have happened to Rosie in the last seven mi
nutes and twenty-three seconds. She didn’t need to search for the fence; she stopped behind Rosie’s car, her legs shaking so violently that she stalled the engine and sent the RRV lurching into Rosie’s bumper.

  “Shit.”

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and ended up doing a messy combination of both as she ran to the boot and began to stack her kit on the pavement. Unable to carry everything, she ransacked her bags, amalgamating them into one and throwing vials of drugs into her pockets. A girl approached Jem as she was settling the response bag and defib on her shoulders.

  “Tahlia?”

  The girl nodded, squinting against the blues Jem had left on to guide others in. She was filthy and gaunt, and her clothes were wet through. Her hair, almost hidden by her cap, looked as if it had been hacked off with a penknife. “Rosie’s been talking to me,” she said. “But the water’s getting deeper.”

  “Bloody hell.” Jem tapped her pocket, checking for her inhaler. “Come on, let’s go.”

  They weaved across the wasteland at a near jog, taking a route Tahlia was obviously familiar with, despite the fresh hazards of near-darkness and unpredictable flotsam. Using a stack of rickety crates like a staircase, she scrambled through a broken ground-floor window.

  “Hurry.” She beckoned to Jem, heedless of Jem’s burden or the rattle of her breathing.

  Jem ignored them as well, launching herself over the sill and keeping up with Tahlia. From a distance, she saw the gaping hole in the floor, the splintered wood splattered with streaks of paint that hadn’t been enough to alert Rosie.

  “Is she down there?” Jem knelt at the edge, straining to catch sight of anything but whirls of brown water in her torchlight.

  “She’s this way,” Tahlia said, hauling on Jem’s sleeve. “She got pulled farther along.” Choosing her path with care, she guided Jem to a smaller opening seemingly designed for people rather than goods or waste, with a concrete lining and a metal access ladder. “Do I have to go down?” she asked, crouching at the top.