two, three—clear!’ she called, before again applying the defibrillator.
The team waited anxiously, all eyes on the monitor as the oxygen mask was clamped over the boy’s face. The green lines on the screen settled into a regular rhythm, this time stronger than before.
‘He’s stabilising,’ said Jack. ‘Good. Keep the oxygen at ninety-five per cent. Well done, everyone!’
He looked at Anna as he said this. He would have liked to have said more. He’d have liked to have said, You are terrific, Dr Craven, one of the best registrars I’ve ever worked with. But instead he just kept on looking at her, his eyes dancing—and even though he was wearing a surgical mask she must have known he was smiling at her.
Now that they’d stabilised the boy’s heart, the team turned their attention to his legs. Jack gently pulled back the wet dressings, revealing the young boy’s mottled, bleeding legs which had pieces of charred material stuck to them. The smell of burnt flesh intensified. But while his legs were very badly burned, the rest of his small body was mainly unaffected.
‘He must have been wearing just pyjama bottoms,’ said Jack as he set up the line for the blood transfusion, ‘and they must have been made of untreated cotton. That’s why they burst into flame with such tragic results.’
A nurse wheeled an intravenous pole across the room to the head of the trolley. ‘I thought pyjamas had to be made of flame-retardant material,’ she said. ‘I thought it was the law.’
‘It is,’ said Jack bitterly, ‘but this kid’s pyjamas were certainly not flame-retardant. Any news of his parents yet?’ He looked towards the door but no one was waiting outside.
‘I’ll go and find out, shall I?’ asked Tammy, one of the nurses whom Anna recognised from the triage desk—the reception area where patients were sorted into categories depending on medical priority.
‘Yes, please,’ said Jack. ‘There may be decisions to make about operating and we may need parental permission. Though what kind of parents must they be? People who leave a young kid alone in a house at night, while they, most likely, go out on the town! The police have been informed, I do know that.’
He watched as the first bag of blood was hooked onto the intravenous pole and the line attached to the patient. ‘Now we need to set up the intravenous antibiotics,’ he instructed.
Jack and Anna worked together smoothly and silently, each anticipating the other’s actions. He was good to work with, Anna thought. He was quick and efficient and he exuded a calmness and confidence that she found mentally stimulating and physically reassuring. He was the ideal surgeon for the kind of situations they constantly faced in A and E.
‘I wasn’t expecting to find you on the night shift,’ she said.
‘I’m not,’ he said wryly. ‘I’m on the day shift but was asked to stay on when we got the call from the emergency services.’
Tammy came back into the resuscitation room, followed by a distraught man.
‘This is the boy’s father,’ she said.
‘How’s my son? How’s Jamie?’ he asked anxiously. The medical team parted slightly, leaving a small gap through which the boy’s father was confronted by the gory sight on the surgical trolley.
‘Oh, my God!’ he said. ‘He’s not dead, is he? Tell me he isn’t dead!’
‘He’s alive but he isn’t out of danger by any means,’ said Jack, not wishing to soften the blow. His eyes were blazing. He was so mad that he wanted to put his blood-stained hands round the throat of the man who had allowed this to happen.
‘I feel it’s my fault!’ said the man, running a hand through his tousled hair.
‘I would imagine it is your fault,’ Jack shot back, ‘leaving a child as young as this on his own.’
‘But it was only meant to be for a few minutes!’ said the man wretchedly. ‘I had to go—I had to take my wife to the hospital! She’s eight months pregnant and she was bleeding and—’
‘I thought I recognised you,’ interrupted Tammy. ‘I remember you coming in with your wife earlier in the evening. You’re Mr Wyatt, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘Todd Wyatt.’
‘Well, Mr Wyatt, why didn’t you call an ambulance?’ Jack asked him, his anger barely concealed below the surface.
‘I did, but it didn’t come! I thought my wife was going to die. I went upstairs to Jamie’s room and he was asleep. I thought I’d better not wake him up and bring him along with us because there was all this blood and everything. I thought it would really upset him. So when the ambulance didn’t come I decided to drive her to hospital myself, thinking it would only take a few minutes, but the car broke down on the way back. When I finally got home the whole place was in flames, fire-engines everywhere.’
He put his hands over his face and sobbed. ‘It was terrible! I thought Jamie was still in the house!’
Anna stripped off her latex gloves and binned them before putting a comforting hand on Todd Wyatt’s shoulder.
‘We hope it’s going to be all right, Mr Wyatt. Your son’s heart stopped at one point but he’s stabilised now. He’s been very badly burned and we’re now sending him to the hospital’s burns unit. They can do miraculous things these days with skin grafts. What happened to your wife? How is she?’
It was as though the man had completely forgotten about her for the moment.
‘Oh,’ he said, trying to cast his mind back to his other, earlier traumatic event. ‘They’ve taken her in for observation. The baby might be born prematurely, they said. I’ll go and check on her when I know what’s going to happen with Jamie. I’ll have to tell her, of course. Oh, hell, how am I going to tell her?’
‘I’d like to talk to you about Jamie’s pyjamas,’ said Jack, still extremely angry with the man but accepting that he had been placed in a terrible dilemma.
‘Pyjamas?’ said the man, still in a state of shock. ‘I don’t know anything about pyjamas.’
‘One of the reasons Jamie got so badly burned was because he wasn’t wearing flame-retardant pyjamas. They’re the only kind they’re supposed to sell for children. It’s the law.’
‘I think he’d gone to bed in his new judo outfit, or just the bottom half of it. He was very chuffed with it, wanted to wear it all the time. My wife made it for him from some material she got from the market, you know, to save money. She’s very clever with the sewing machine.’
Jack caught Anna’s eye. ‘Not so very clever, as it turned out,’ he said under his breath.
The trolley, with Jamie on it, was in the process of being transferred to the burns unit.
‘Tammy,’ said Anna to the nurse, ‘would you help Mr Wyatt find out what’s happened to his wife?’ Turning to the distraught man, she said, ‘Jamie’s condition is under control now. He’s sedated and he’s in good hands, and he won’t really know whether you’re here or not, Mr Wyatt, so you
