Cuckoo (19 page)
‘We need to get her to hospital as soon as possible,’ she said to Rose, pulling up Flossie’s eyelids and shining a light into her pinprick pupils. ‘She has a high fever, poor muscle tone – and look,’ she said, pulling aside the Babygro pyjamas ‘ – she’s starting a rash. It could be meningitis.’
Rose gasped. She knew it.
‘It’s OK, Rose,’ Kate said, putting a firm arm around her shoulders. ‘We’ve got it early. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to put a line in, so that they can get antibiotics into her as soon as possible. It’s not nice, but you’ve got to hold her arm down like this.’
She showed Rose exactly how to extend Flossie’s arm as she inserted a large needle into a vein by her wrist. Flossie moaned and wriggled, but Rose held her firmly. Rose saw that Kate kept looking up to check that she was all right. She wasn’t. Watching all this happen to her baby, she felt like collapsing onto the floor.
‘I’ll go and wake Polly,’ Gareth said. ‘She needs to be here to take care of the others.’
‘Rose, you go and get dressed. I’ll finish up here,’ Kate said, winding bandages round Flossie’s hands. ‘This is just to stop her pulling her line out,’ she added, seeing Rose’s concerned look. ‘Now, go.’
It seemed like an age before the ambulance arrived. Rose had followed instructions and was dressed. Kate held Flossie in a shawl, ready to carry her straight out; Gareth had come back and was making a pot of tea. Then Polly rushed in, clutching a blanket around her, wavering slightly.
‘What’s happened?’ she slurred. ‘Is she . . . ?’
‘She’s stable, but very poorly,’ Kate said.
‘Oh, when will they come?’ Rose wailed.
‘When will who come? What’s the matter?’ Polly said.
‘The ambulance,’ Kate said. ‘It takes twenty minutes. Even with blue lights, that’s how long it takes.’
‘Kate, this is Polly, our friend from Greece,’ Gareth said.
‘We’ve met,’ Polly said.
‘Yes. Hello again,’ Kate said.
‘She wouldn’t give me what I wanted,’ Polly said, smiling at Rose. ‘British docs aren’t quite as cavalier as their Greek counterparts. Oh – is that tea? I could kill a cuppa.’
Gareth handed her a mug. He sat with a pen and pad and started writing a list for Polly.
‘So, you take our bed, Polly. The kids need to be at the school by nine a.m., two pounds each for dinner money – we’ll scrap the packed lunches for tomorrow, OK?’
‘Yeah . . . I’d better set an alarm,’ Polly said.
And then two green-suited paramedics arrived. With them was a young male doctor in a tweed jacket. There were only three of them, but they swarmed into the room, seeming to fill it, making everything look small. Kate handed Flossie to the doctor, and, in an almost balletic movement, he took her in his arms and moved her out of the door, up through the herb garden and into the ambulance. Kate followed him, reciting a list of statistics about Flossie’s condition.
Rose, tagging along behind, found this ordering of Flossie’s state, this putting of it into so many words and turning the horror of it into a strategy, strangely comforting.
‘We’ve got to get her to hospital as soon as possible,’ the female paramedic said, climbing into the ambulance. ‘Come on, Mum.’ She held an arm out to Rose, to help her in. Gareth made to get in behind them.
‘No. You stay, Gareth. Anna will freak out. Please,’ Rose said, as the young doctor attached a drip to Flossie’s line.
‘But I want to come,’ Gareth said. He was pale. His teeth worked away at his lips.
‘No, no, you stay, Gareth,’ Rose said, her hand on his chest, nearly pushing him away. ‘I’ll call from the hospital. Be here for Anna. Polly: look after him.’
But Polly hadn’t come out into the cold air.
Kate jumped into the ambulance. ‘Room for one more, then. Look, Gareth, Rose is right. It’s better that you stay here for Anna. Your friend there doesn’t exactly inspire confidence,’ she said, looking down at Polly who was standing at the kitchen window – Rose’s window – hugging a mug of tea, looking up at them as if her mind were somewhere else entirely. ‘I’ll make sure Rose and Flossie here are OK, and I’ll drop by on you in the morning before surgery, to keep you posted.’
The paramedics slammed the doors shut, then the ambulance lurched off into the night, its blue lights illuminating the Annexe, the blip of its siren as it turned the blind corner into the lane surely waking the whole village.
Seventeen
They rocketed through the night. The two doctors worked on Flossie while Rose sat at her head, her hand on the small fluff of fine hair that her daughter had managed to grow so far.
Flossie was deeply unconscious now. Even the little moan she had put up in the kitchen had stopped.
‘It’s the drugs,’ Kate said to Rose as the young male doctor – who looked more like a teenage public schoolboy with his blond curly hair and bow tie – prepared a third syringe to go into Flossie’s line. ‘We’re sedating her. Shutting her down so that we can work out what’s going on.’
My poor baby, Rose thought. She had taken such enormous care to put nothing but good, honest, organic food into Flossie’s body and now all of that was being wiped out by a whole laboratory of drugs.
‘It’s not responding like a typical meningitis,’ the boy doctor was saying.
‘No,’ Kate said, moving over to sit by Rose and taking her hand. ‘Rose, I want you to think: is there any way Flossie might have eaten something unusual? Put something in her mouth? Cleaning fluid? Medicine?’
A piece of ice shot into Rose’s heart as she remembered Polly’s pills, the ones Flossie spilled on the grass.
‘Polly, our friend . . .’ she began to say, then Kate, seeing the picture, took over.
‘OK, it’s a prescription drug overdose, and possibly some sort of allergic reaction. We need to reverse the sedation. Now!’ she roared at the young doctor, who started emptying a clear fluid into a syringe. ‘And an emetic!’
‘Polly. She dropped a bottle on the grass, while Floss was there,’ Rose said. ‘But she said she’d got them all.’
‘In my opinion, your friend wouldn’t know her arse from her elbow,’ Kate muttered. Rose looked up at her sharply. ‘Sorry, but I’ve seen her in a different light.’
The doctor stuck the edge of his tongue out of the side of his mouth as he injected the new fluid into Flossie. Kate held an oxygen mask over her face. ‘I need the names of the pills right now,’ she said, thrusting her phone at Rose with her free hand.
Rose was having difficulty staying conscious, but she managed to punch her own number into Kate’s phone.
Gareth answered.
‘What’s happened?’ he said, his voice strangled.
‘I need to talk to Polly – now,’ Rose said.
‘Why?’
‘I’ll tell you later. I just need to talk to her right now, Gareth. It’s really important.’
He put the phone down. She heard the front door open, and his footsteps as he ran out of the house. Minutes later, Polly was on the phone.
‘Sorry, I’d just got back to bed,’ she said.
‘Polly, listen, you’ve got to tell me what those pills were yesterday, the ones that spilled on the ground.’
‘My pills? But—’
‘No, listen. Just get the bottle and read to me what it says.’
‘They’re back in the Annexe, though.’
‘What is this?’ Rose could hear Gareth asking.
‘She wants to know what my pills are.’
‘Just do it!’ he yelled at her. ‘Just go and get them.
Now
.’
Now
.’
There was a scuffle on the end of the line and the sound of Polly’s footsteps stuttering up the garden steps.
‘We think Flossie’s had some of Polly’s pills,’ Rose said to Gareth in a small voice. Kate was now working on Flossie, pressing two fingers onto her chest.
‘I’ll kill her,’ he said quietly.
‘We’ve got her back!’ Kate smiled up at the doctor, who cheered as if his cricket team had just scored a century.
‘How’s Floss?’ Gareth asked.
‘Not too good, Gareth,’ Rose sobbed. Then she heard Polly breathless on the end of the line, the rattling of pill bottles, and Gareth’s voice as he made Polly read out the long, complicated names from the Greek writing on the bottles.
Rose repeated the words to the woman paramedic, who wrote them down and repeated them to Kate.
‘OK, these are pretty strong drugs. Stronger than we’d normally prescribe here,’ she said. ‘And Flossie is presenting with classic overdose symptoms. We’ll do what we can to get them out of her, but, if she took them yesterday, it’s late. We’ll concentrate on minimising the effects to her liver and brain.’
Rose felt all of the blood drain from her body.
‘But she’ll be all right. Rose?’ Gareth shouted down the phone. He had heard all of it.
‘But she’ll be all right?’ Rose whispered, repeating his question.
‘I hope so,’ Kate said. ‘Can we get a move on?’ she barked at the ambulance driver.
‘I love you, Gareth,’ Rose said, and hung up as they blasted into the hospital Accident and Emergency Department.
Everything from then on was a bit of a blur. A team of doctors and nurses greeted them and whisked Flossie away with Kate still holding the oxygen mask to her face. The female paramedic took Rose to a row of vinyl easy chairs outside the room where they were working on Flossie.
‘Stay there, dear. They’re working in her best interests, but to the untrained eye it can look a little brutal.’
Rose had nothing left in her with which to protest. She sat there and shivered. Someone passed her a blanket and a cup of tea. Good old tea. She sat there for what seemed like days. She prayed. She made pacts with God: she would never take anything for granted again; she would be good forever; she would never lie again; she would go to church, wear a cross, give away money, never ever question His existence; she would award Him title case, even in her thoughts. If only Flossie could be saved.
‘D’you want a cigarette, lover?’ An older woman with an alarming black eye had shuffled along the corridor. She leaned over Rose; her breath smelled of port and tobacco.
‘I saw them bring your baby in,’ she slurred. ‘I hope he’s all right, my darling. Here, have a ciggie if you like.’ She proffered a pack of Embassy.
‘She,’ Rose said. ‘My baby is a girl.’
‘My baby was a boy, my baby was,’ the woman muttered, and wandered off towards the ambulance bay, lighting a cigarette as she went.
So was mine, Rose thought before she could stop herself.
She pulled the blanket closer around her. It was being here that did it. She hated hospitals. To her they spelled nothing but loss. She remembered sitting in another hospital, in Brighton, over twenty years ago, an empty, leaking shell. And here she was, again facing losing her baby. Again . . .
I mustn’t think about it, she told herself. It’s bad luck. She had sworn she would never let herself go back there. She folded the partly unravelled thoughts back up and stuffed them away. Why had she been so weak, though, back then?
A little later, still with no news of Flossie, an efficient, kindlooking young woman came up to Rose and took her to a side room. She offered her a low, wooden-armed chair, then she sat down facing her, on the other side of a Formica coffee-table. The woman – Rose didn’t catch her name – opened a laptop and asked Rose her name, date of birth and address.
‘That’s a lovely village,’ she smiled across the coffee-table at her.
‘Yes.’ Rose looked down at her feet.
‘Now then. Flossie – that’s an unusual name. Is it short for anything?’
‘No, she’s just Flossie,’ Rose said.
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