been hoping in vain. How did he pick it up? No one would know. It’s a bacteria that’s normally passed on by someone carrying it if they sneeze or cough without covering their mouth. Or it can be passed on by kissing. We call it ‘pillow contact’. He could have picked it up anywhere. And because he’d been coughing while we were helping him, Gerry and I have been exposed to the bacteria too. So we have to take a powerful antibiotic called Rivampicillin, often given to people who come into close contact with a person with meningococcal septicaemia. It reduces the chances of developing the disease. Within a couple of hours of taking it, all your secretions are bright orange. Blow your nose, pee or cry – everything’s bright orange for a few days.
I did shed a few tears for that young Italian. When you’ve sons of a similar age, it’s all too easy to imagine his mother, hugging her son goodbye as he leaves home, suitcase in hand, full of happy anticipation, looking forward to his big adventure in a strange city. All her hopes and fears for him would have gone through her mind in that last farewell. And then, 48 hours later, she gets that dreadful phone call to say he’s gone: every parent’s nightmare.
This happened some time ago, before ambulance teams carried certain types of antibiotics with them in order to treat people on the spot. Nowadays paramedics can administer the drugs there and then before rushing a patient to hospital: a lifesaving development which means the public can get the right emergency treatment when they need it most.
It’s impossible to get to every job on time on New Year’s Eve. We do our best. But, for those few hours after midnight, it just goes mad. One particular New Year’s Eve call will always haunt me.
I’m working with Amanda, with whom I’ve got quite a lot in common. For a start, our partners are both paramedics, not unusual in our line of business, given the combination of shift patterns and the nature of the work. We’re just ready to start ‘greening up’ (showing a green light on your console means you’re available for the next call) at the local hospital. It’s coming right up to midnight, so there’s a big group of ambulance staff milling around in the cold night, waiting for the off. At the stroke of midnight we all rush around hugging and exchanging greetings. Within minutes Amanda and I get the first call of the year.
‘Oh no,’ says Amanda, gesturing me over. ‘Happy New Year, Lysa.’ We stare at the screen as it flashes up just two words: two horrible words you never want at any time, let alone for the first call of the year ahead.
‘One under,’ it says on the screen. That means someone’s gone under a train.
‘What kind of timing is this?’ I ask as we drive off to the station. Luckily we’re not far away and there’s not much traffic around. We get out the rubber gloves – somehow we know we’re going to need them. At the station a small knot of grim-faced staff and British Transport Police meet us. The story is, the train driver alerted them the minute he realised he’d hit something. It was a fast train and he was flying through, so he couldn’t actually stop at the station. But it had happened literally seconds after the stroke of midnight. Spooky.
‘We think he hit someone and they’re still out there on the track,’ we’re informed.
It’s a freezing-cold night with a full moon. So far the police haven’t spotted anything. We all stand there on the silent, deserted platform, shining our torches on to the track, looking for the body. More policemen join us. But it’s a waste of time. We can’t really see anything from up here.
It takes a few minutes to agree a plan of operation with the police: Amanda and I will get down there on to the track, walk along and see if we can find the person. The power’s already been switched off. There is, of course, a chance they’ll still be alive. Given the speed of the train, it’s a very slim chance – but one we still have to consider. There’s no time to dwell on what sort of state the body might be in. Hastily we don our high-viz yellow and green jackets with reflective strips. And the hard hats. We keep all this stuff with us all the time, just in case we run into situations like this.
‘This is the last time I’m working on New Year’s Eve,’ Amanda grumbles to me. A £20 note for every time I’ve said that and I could have retired to Italy by now. Though I never really mean it.
‘Yeah, this is pretty grim,’ I concur as we climb down. And so, as the rest of the world hugs, kisses, glugs down champagne and parties in the New Year on a cloud of optimism, we’re on the track looking for … what? A mutilated body? A half-dead person? We haven’t a clue. It’s actually quite surreal. It feels a bit like we’re in a movie – a horror flick. As we go along to the unlit section, the full moon shines right down on us.
‘All we need is the werewolf,’ I say to Amanda, trying to break up the bleakness of the situation. It’s chill-your-bones cold.
‘Yeah, this is just what you want to be doing tonight,’ Amanda replies, as we strike out into the darkness.
‘I’m not sure if I really want to see what I’m supposed to find.’
Then, about 100 yards along, torches trained firmly ahead of us, we stop. We’ve found something. It looks as if it may be a spleen. And incredibly it’s steaming. It’s still at body temperature but because tonight’s such a cold night, the steam is rising up out of it. A little bit further along and there’s more – this time it’s a man’s slipper. A bit further down and, oh, no! We’re looking at an intestine – it’s spilled out from the guy’s stomach. This is a horror show. We don’t talk now, we just keep going – and soon we find the rest of the man’s body, strewn along the track.
What had actually happened was, he’d thrown himself on to the line and the impact of the train had virtually split his body in half. So when we finally get to what’s left of him, the top and bottom half of his body are hanging on by skin only. And the contents of his abdomen spilled out along the track. Ironically the other slipper has remained firmly on the man’s foot. He’d been standing there in his pyjamas. But the impact of the train has ripped them off.
You couldn’t do this job if you were squeamish about things like this: you’d go mad. But seeing a human body ripped apart like that does make you feel very strange. The man had wound up face down on the track. So at least we didn’t see his face. But what a brutally violent end. How desperate can a person be, in those last seconds, standing there, all alone in the freezing cold on a train platform, to end it all like this?
But now our job is over and we’re ready for the next one. Of course we’re shaken but there’s no one needing our help and the police will organise the actual removal of the body parts from the track. Someone else has the terrible job of picking up every single bit of this man, sending it to the public mortuary and eventually the coroner. And someone else again will have the awful job of finding the man’s family and telling them what’s happened.
It was suicide, all right. He obviously meant it. When men do it, they tend to do it violently. Maybe he’d waited until just after midnight; maybe it was sheer coincidence. After all, how would someone know that the train was going to pass through just after midnight?
A week later and we find out that the man had severe mental health problems. He’d been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. He’d tried to kill himself before. But this time he was determined to get it right. And for me, the thought of that haunting walk in the stark, cold moonlight will hang around in my mind for a long, long time.
