THIRTY - TWO DAYS AFTER THE ACCIDENT
THE MESSAGE went out to All Staff at the beginning of the day. It was read and passed on over and over again. Conversations were had about who could be spared and who could not. Far more wanted to attend than were able, but that was the way it was – even for this. Many of the frontline staff knew immediately that they wouldn’t be able to go. Their presence was required elsewhere. When your day job is a matter of life or death, the living take precedence. A number of people were secretly relieved to be denied permission. It felt wrong not to want to be there, and wrong to be thankful to miss it.
The corridor vigil was a St Thomas’s tradition that had started with Lenny Okafor. Nineteen years of age, cause of death: inoperable internal bleeding caused by falling from a roof. (The firm that employed Lenny was eventually prosecuted for its poor health-andsafety procedures, but that provided little solace to Lenny’s family.) Lenny’s dad, Vincent – who was a porter at the hospital at the time of the accident – was, thankfully, not on duty the day his son was brought into A&E. In fact Vincent would never work as a porter again, not in St Thomas’s or anywhere else. He said he simply couldn’t face doing the job any more, not after what happened. The honour guard for Lenny was a spontaneous gesture of support organised by Vincent’s work mates. It felt like the least they could do to show their respects to the family and the brave decision they had made.
There were probably about twenty people there for that very first act of observance, most of them porters. They stood in clumps of twos and threes, ranged along the corridor, uncertain of the protocol, which was understandable – because there wasn’t any. Robbed of their usual banter, their feet still and their hands idle for a change, Vincent’s work mates shuffled and whispered quietly – until the doors of the ICU banged opened and Vincent, the bloke with the loudest laugh and the worst jokes, wheeled his firstborn out on his last-ever journey. As the gurney passed along the corridor the porters bowed their heads in absolute silence.
Now the attendees for the vigils came from every walk of life and level within the hospital. An untimely death touched all the staff, irrespective of their clinical and professional experience. They were all mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers – all capable of contemplating the unimaginable, and humble enough to pay witness to it. Indeed, the corridor ritual for the organ donation patients and their families had become a touchstone in the lives of many of them; a way – not that anyone ever voiced it – of warding away the Furies from their own precious, all-too-fragile loved ones.
By 10.36 a.m. on Wednesday 3 April more than two hundred people were gathered in the corridor on Level B. Clerks, porters, nurses, cleaners, quite a few of the junior doctors, a smattering of consultants and even a few members of the general public who happened to be there and who bravely chose to stay and participate. Many of the faces were familiar: rivals, adversaries, subordinates and bosses. They whispered to each other or stood apart in quiet contemplation – just as the porters had done for Lenny.
At 10.37 a.m. two of the ICU nurses came out of the ward and held open the doors. That was the signal. The gathered crowd, which had been subdued before, now fell silent.
The wait lasted only a matter of seconds, but it felt, as it always did, much longer.
Those nearest the door heard it first – the mechanical sound of the life-support machine. The trolley emerged slowly, flanked by the attendant staff and the patient’s relatives. In a wordless ripple, the attendees along the corridor bowed their heads. They did so to pay their respects, but also to avoid looking into the eyes of the grieving family.
Chapter 1
THE NIGHT OF THE ACCIDENT
PETE MCKINNON was looking for his cat when he heard the bang or, more accurately, felt it deep inside his chest. There was a moment of silence. Then the screaming started – a loud stream of noise that went on, and on. Pete froze. For a split second he contemplated going back inside his house and pulling the door closed behind him, but his better instincts took over and he set off running.
According to the police report, it took Pete less than twenty seconds to get from his small, weed-filled front garden to the incident.
Pete was the first person on the scene.
The first person to call 999.
The first person to try and help.
The first witness.
And he would wish, for the rest of his life, that he hadn’t been.
For years afterwards he would dream about the blood under the girl’s fingernails and the way she’d rocked back and forth in the moonlight before collapsing face-down on the grass.
The sirens woke more people. They peered out from behind closed curtains, felt an immediate sense of shock and an irresistible impulse to see more. Bare feet were shoved into shoes, jackets pulled on top of pyjamas, and phones slipped into pockets. They emerged from their houses and crept guiltily towards the lights – moths towards the flame.
Many would later wish that they hadn’t.
The first photo was posted sixteen minutes after the crash.
The first parent to feel vaguely sick when she saw the post was Tina Walker, up with her youngest daughter: earache – again. Tina was one of the lucky ones. Lydia, her eldest daughter, answered her phone on the third ring and promised faithfully – above the noise of the party – that she was fine. Tina insisted that she stay put and wait for her father to pick her up. It was a late-night ‘dad taxi’ run that Liam was deeply thankful to be able to do. Having reassured herself that her own daughter was safe, Tina began worrying about other people’s kids. She called Steph to double-check on Becca. Steph understandably panicked and spread the gut-clenching anxiety by texting anyone and everyone who had a son or daughter of an age to be out on a Saturday night, including Kath. Kath sent a group WhatsApp, thinking it was the quickest way of getting the word out. Cheryl saw it and immediately rang Sam and Melanie and, on second thoughts, Dom.
And so it was that the arteries that ran deep within the flesh of the community spread the fear. Even parents who knew full well that their kids were safe, and in their rooms, scrambled out of bed and went to look in on their ‘children’, many of whom were awake, their faces lit by the glow of their screens.
News travels fast, especially bad news.
By 1.45 a.m. the ripples of alarm had gathered force and a tidal wave of panic was sluicing through the community. The promise of instant contact afforded by modern technology became a blight. Anyone unable to reach their son or daughter immediately assumed the worse, many incorrectly – but not all. Those who did speak to their kids directly did so hurriedly, urgently, telling them to stay put until they could be fetched safely home.
Five miles away in the home of Alice Mitcham – whose parents were away in Crete for the week – the party came to a juddering halt. The music stopped, the drinking stopped, the fun stopped. All of them suddenly felt stone-cold sober. Someone switched on the big light and the party-goers huddled together under its unforgiving glare, hugging each other. Names were whispered, roles assigned, motivations attributed. And so it was that the story of the night took root and began to grow. There was relief when the first cars started arriving to take them home. They left one by one, two by two, quietly, obediently, young adults returned to childhood by the shock. When the last person had gone, Alice sat, on her own, amidst the remnants of the party, her phone clutched in her hand, looking at the messages, wishing her own parents home.