is one of the dirtiest, most squalid council flats I’ve ever seen on any estate. Blood and excrement on the walls, floors sticky with heaven knows what. Disgusting. Empty cans of Stella everywhere, empty vodka bottles and ciggy butts wherever you look. Tobacco-coloured walls. The home of someone who’s given up – and does nothing but drink, day in, day out. It’s also cold and dark. The electricity’s been cut off, making it even more sinister and murky.
‘Is this a natural end?’ the copper asks me.
Not really. This call had came through to me an hour before as ‘male collapsed behind locked doors’. It’s quite a common call-out and usually comes after a home help turns up and can’t get any response from an older person. Tonight there were a couple of neighbours waiting for me outside the block. They called 999 because they know this guy. They led me to his flat on the ground floor. One neighbour had walked past this morning and noticed the man’s head resting against the opaque glass of the bathroom window. When she came back in the afternoon the head was still there. ‘He’s a heavy drinker, he doesn’t work – but he’s not a troublemaker,’ she tells me.
‘Yeah, but you do get a lot of ambulance and police cars turning up,’ chips in the other. I’m getting the picture.
Call-outs involving drunks are routine for any paramedic. Crews may even know the person, sometimes by first name. But I’ve never been called out to this guy. First, I bang really hard on the glass to rouse him. Nothing. I try again: bang bang. No response.
Now the neighbours are getting the message. ‘Oh no, is he dead, dear?’
‘I don’t know,’ I tell them – but I think I do. If he’s been there since morning and my banging doesn’t make him stir, it doesn’t look good. But I can’t get into the flat. I’ve arrived before the police but, as hard as I try, I can’t manage kick the door in. Getting in windows is easy, but breaking down doors is something else. I try and try – but I keep bouncing off it.
I try a final, hip-busting kick – but it still doesn’t work. Technically we’re not supposed to try to kick doors in – that’s the police’s job. When you think it’s a worst-case scenario, though, you have some justification. You just have to remember that for every door that gets kicked in in London – and there are many – someone has to pay for it. So it’s not something a paramedic does willy-nilly. Later we will discover five different bolts in the door. Clearly guests weren’t welcome, though a ground-floor flat in a pretty rough estate is unlikely to be as safe as Fort Knox whatever you do.
Just as I’m starting to get really frustrated, three police turn up. One young officer starts to try to kick the door down in his size 12s. The door still won’t budge. Another bigger one has a go – door kicking’s a real macho sport – but nothing. On cue, a man suddenly comes out of another ground-floor flat, locks his door and – magic – he’s carrying a tool kit. ‘Excuse me, mate, but you wouldn’t happen to have a crowbar in that bag, would you?’ asks one copper. Hmm. The response isn’t enthusiastic, though it’s quite obvious what we’re trying to do.
‘Yeah, but I need it for work,’ he grumbles.
‘Never mind that, we need to get into this flat,’ says the copper tartly.
Reluctantly the man opens his bag and hands over the crowbar, standing there wordless as the copper manages to jemmy the door open. He isn’t the least bit curious or concerned about the fate of his neighbour. He just wants his crowbar back.
By now an ambulance crew has arrived. And inside the flat, once we’ve established that the occupant is dead, we try to figure out what has happened.
There’s blood everywhere you look. It looks like he’s stumbled around the place, steadying himself on the walls and doorframes. There’s bloody hand and fingerprints – even footprints of blood on the floor. It’s baffling because at first glance he doesn’t appear to have any injuries. The police are thinking it might be a suspicious death, so we don’t attempt to move him about too much. If it’s a potential crime scene and he’s been murdered, we’ll have to remove our footwear for forensic elimination purposes and if anyone in the ambulance crew touch anything at all, police will need fingerprint checks from us.
When we start checking out the lounge we find the answer. It’s a broken glass. It’s lying by the sofa – which is covered with his blood. Somehow the glass has cut his arm and severed an artery or vein. An accident, it seems. And sure enough, when we check and look at the man again, we find the cut – which is actually quite small. But it was lethal. It looked as if he was sitting there, on the sofa, for quite some time, just dripping blood and the sofa absorbed it like a sponge. He was in a badly inebriated state – the cans and empty bottles bear witness to that – and he must surely have realised he was bleeding badly at some point. It looks like he’s staggered around the place, dripping blood everywhere, too far gone to do anything to help himself – and very slowly he’s bled to death.
The police finally concluded that it was an accidental death. No one else was involved. He was definitely an alcoholic – and this was the tragic outcome, a lonely death in a setting that would give most people nightmares.
Later that evening, as I’m about to finish my shift, I run into a friend, another paramedic who works in the same area. I tell her about this young alcoholic who died at home and as I start to tell her about it, she stops me.
‘Oh no, that’s Gary. I know him. I got called out to him two weeks ago.’ She’s been called out to Gary quite a few times. She says that although he was always in a very drunken state, he was never aggressive or awkward and she’d often find herself chatting to him.
From what he’s told my friend, life had been fine until he was 20, when he’d been severely beaten up in the street by strangers. He’d been left with a head injury. And that was when the drinking spiralled completely out of control. He’d told her he’d dreamed of being a songwriter. And he’d even sung her a couple of his songs while they waited for an ambulance.
‘He was better than anything you hear on The X Factor,’ she tells me sadly.
In this job you get used to dealing with alcoholics; some will dial 999 three, four times in one day – and invariably they refuse to let us take them to hospital. Over the years you watch people like this get worse and worse as they carry on with their slow suicide – we just do what we can, as do all the hospital staff. It’s a slow means of destroying yourself. The alcohol blots out the reality – because, for whatever reason, the reality’s too hard to bear. But when you think about a young man in his 20s who dreamed his dreams, had his hopes, just like we all do, well, it does stop you in your tracks, doesn’t it?
Oh no, this sounds bad: ‘Female assaulted, multiple stab wounds.’
Instinct alerts me straight away that this call-out is most likely to be a really bad domestic. Women in London worry all the time about being attacked by a total stranger. But in fact 999 calls reporting an assault on a woman are usually due to attacks by the husband or partner. Or an ex. Sadly, despite all the awareness campaigns nowadays, domestic violence still manages to wreak its ugly havoc in too many lives. ‘OK,’ I sigh to Jim, ‘on go the rubber gloves – we’re gonna need them.’
As we pull into the street, police are swarming everywhere, waving us along to a house halfway down the road. In the front garden there’s a small group of plainclothes guys too. They briefly fill us in before we can go into the house. The
