I drive on, smoking until the cig burns my fingers.
The slip road passes and I merge onto the motorway. There’s zero traffic and the road starts to darken as I get nearer home and the power cut zone, and of course, the van stereo chooses the same eerie moment to crackle to life, blasting me with Bing Crosby at a volume loud enough to rattle my overwrought brain.
Wrestling with it derails me from smoking more, and with the comforting buzz of nicotine already at home in my nerves, my thoughts start to even out, common sense returning.
I just missed Bhodi. He’s probably already home and wondering where the fuckI’vegone. That he hasn’t called me yet to find out is something I start to contemplate as I lower the radio to a dull boom and refocus on the road. The wide expanse of the motorway that’s no longer dark.
The frosty winter night lit up by flashing blue.
Twenty
BHODI
It’s been a long time since I last contemplated this much blood.
Iron-y red seeps into my shoes where I’m squatting on the frosty tarmac, my hands wedged to the neck of the man half thrown from the mangled SUV. He’s conscious enough to batter my eardrums with his screaming, so he’ll probably live, but as the frigid cold seeps into me, threatening the unnatural energy of a real emergency, it’s my only comfort.
You see, there’s a reason I’m not an A&E nurse and it has nothing to do with avoiding my disarming ex.
“Scoot up.” A firefighter drops down beside me. “I’ve got this one if you can give the other rig a hand? And get some high-vis on. Don’t want you getting mowed down too.”
That’s what happened, apparently. Someone jay-walked across the motorway and caused a pile-up with the four vehicles on the road at this time of night. The bad fortune is biblical, but I’m not the one hanging out of a car window, or unconscious in my lorry cab, or the victim of any of the other incidents thathave stretched the ambulance service so thin tonight, so I count my blessings as I move through the scene to the next patient.
By chance, I come across the same firefighter from the major incident a few weeks ago.
He’s as tired as I feel. “Merry Christmas,” he grunts. “This one’s dead.”
Blunt, but he’s right, and I blow out a stressed breath. I was already late home because someone died before I left the hospital. This is not how tonight was supposed to go.
How was it supposed to go then?
Now there’s a question, and I no longer know the answer. When I left the house—the annex—I was happy enough to put one foot in front of the other. Then Tam’s texts started rolling in and everything felt lighter.
I’d really love to see you.
Vicious wind whips through the accident scene, but even without the coat I’ve left hanging in Tam’s house, this time, with him on my mind, I don’t feel it. Because hope is a powerful thing, and that’s what I felt when his messages hit.
I’m not humouring you.
Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.
“Over here, mate.”
The firefighter calls for my help again. I follow him to another smashed-up vehicle, my blood-soaked shoes crunching glass, and it’s a while before I look up.
By then, it’s near dawn and the air ambulance has arrived.
I’m stood down, and I back away from the scene to sink onto a concrete barrier, the bitter temperature and lack of sleep finally catching up with me, fading adrenaline shuddering through my limbs as it peters out.
There’s no warmth in my blood and I need to find my car,abandoned on the hard shoulder when the police flagged me down and spotted my hospital ID dumped on the dashboard. I need to gohome, to Tam, but even the thought of him isn’t enough to get me moving, and he’s probably asleep now anyway.
Or just getting up.
Either way, I need to get to him, but I’m too tired to move. To drive. And so I sit there in the cold and wait for that to change.
“Bhodi!”
I’m leaning hard on my bent knees and it’s an effort to raise my head. To turn towards the sound of my own name. It starts to rain, fat drops hitting the ice at my bloodied feet. My chest. My face. I can barely see and I raise my hand to fix that feeling as if I’ve dropped a couple of benzos.
