the palms of his hands. The blue tarpaulins made a blur in front of him. They held the stiff curtain aside and he ducked between them. There were cold, bright lights here and people intently watching a knot of men clustered around something that came up into the light. Martin stumbled forward and saw Annie on a stretcher. There was a doctor supporting her head and her arm lay pale and bare where they had cut her coat sleeve away.
Martin looked down past her and saw a man lying on his side. The space where she had been was tiny. The man’s hand clenched and unclenched, on emptiness.
They were carrying Annie out of the terrible place. Martin ran to the other side of the stretcher and walked beside them, his heart thumping out wordless prayers.
Please. Let her live. Let her live. Please.
Back through the blue screen.
As they came out of the ruined store front Martin was assailed by different lights. These were the cameras, flashing after them. He felt the upsurge of anger but there was no time for it. They were into the ambulance and the double doors thudded shut. He saw the reflection of the blue light beginning to turn over their heads as they slid away.
They were working on her already, two nurses and a second doctor, but Martin found a place at her side.
Annie opened her eyes again. They were glazed with pain, but they moved and then settled on Martin’s face. He saw the flicker of bewildered disappointment. It was as if she had expected to see someone else.
He took her hand and held it, but it lay limp and cold in his.
The doors of the accident department swung open ahead of the ambulance. Annie’s stretcher was lifted out and laid on the waiting trolley. Martin ran beside it with the doctor. He felt the brief coldness of the sleet on his face and then the hospital closed around them like a white tunnel.
They were wheeling Annie away out of his reach. He stepped awkwardly forward and saw her face. It was so white, so withdrawn into itself, that he was afraid she was already dead. A little involuntary shudder of fear and grief escaped him.
A sister wearing a blue dress with white cuffs put her hand on his arm. ‘Are you her husband?’
He nodded, unable to speak.
‘Come and sit in my office. I’ll get you something while you’re waiting.’
They put him in a wooden-armed chair in the corner of the little room. The sister brought him tea in a plastic cup, and Martin sipped it without tasting it, grateful for its warmth.
She won’t die, will she? The words kept hammering in his head, but he didn’t speak them yet.
The casualty consultant and his senior registrar were with Annie.
The consultant had been off duty when the hospital put out its special major accident alert to everyone from the pathologists to the porters. He had arrived in his unit thirty minutes later, and he had been at work ever since. With his team he had treated forty-five people, and he had heard from the police that another casualty would soon be on his way. They had just confirmed that he would be the last. There was another man still buried in the wreckage, but he was dead.
‘The last but one,’ he told his colleague. He rubbed his hand quickly over his face and then pulled his gloves on to begin the examination.
Annie’s skin was pale and clammy, and her breath was coming in shallow gasps.
‘Blood pressure?’
‘Seventy over nothing.’
Her pulse was fast. One-forty.
The consultant pulled Annie’s coat open and undid her blood-stained dress. Her stomach was dark with bruising, and it was rigid to the touch. The doctors glanced at each other and then the consultant said quietly, ‘O-neg blood up at once. Urgent cross-match. Theatre immediately.’
He went to the telephone to alert the surgical team who were waiting upstairs.
Five minutes later Annie was on her way to them.
She was already gone by the time they brought Steve’s stretcher in. The pain in his leg was biting through the blur of morphine, but he twisted under the blanket they had covered him with, trying to see where she was. The accident unit looked quiet, almost ominously peaceful. Then suddenly the examination cubicle seemed full of people, their faces looming over him.
‘Annie,’ Steve said distinctly. ‘Where is she?’
They murmured amongst themselves and then someone said, soothingly, ‘She’s in good hands. On her way to theatre. Now, let’s take a look at this leg.’
The pain jabbed into him. Steve stared upwards at the bright circles of the overhead lights. They bled outwards into rainbow wheels and then contracted, hard and sharp again. He bit his teeth together to stop himself from crying out. At last the doctor straightened up and left his leg alone. ‘You’ve got a nasty fracture in the upper bone in your left leg,’ he said smoothly. ‘I think we’ll whip you up to theatre as well and get it pinned for you. We can tidy up one or two other things while you’re under the anaesthetic.’
The pain made Steve helplessly angry. He thought, Why do they always talk like that?
But he was too weary to try to say anything. He closed his eyes, thinking about Annie’s white face under the rescue lights, and waited for them to put him to sleep.
The consultant finished what he had to do to Steve and then went out into the corridor. He was stretching to ease his muscles and thinking longingly of a whisky in the bar across the road from the hospital, but the duty sister was waiting for him. She told him briskly that Annie’s husband was still waiting in her office.
The doctor looked puzzled, glancing backwards to where Steve was lying. ‘I thought he was her husband.’
The sister shook her head. ‘Her husband is sitting in my room. He looks very shocked.’
The doctor sighed. ‘Well. I’d better go and tell him, then.’
When Annie opened her eyes again there was light streaming all round her. The brightness was shapeless at first, but then it began to form itself into long rectangles with dimmer patches separating them. She tried to turn her head and found that she couldn’t. The discovery brought a cold spasm of terror that made her eyes snap wider open, staring into the light. The light was reassuring, but she wanted to see more, to see what was beside her, and she couldn’t. She tried to gather her strength to do it but all she could feel was pain, pain everywhere, as if it had possessed the air surrounding her. Annie felt a moan rise in her throat but it was stifled because there was something blocking its way.
Then someone’s face slid forward, blotting out the rectangles of light. Annie looked carefully at it. It was a man, wearing a white coat with a high collar. Like a barber’s jacket, she thought. The man’s mouth was moving, and she realized that he was talking to her. When he stopped talking he smiled, but his eyes were watching something behind her head.
She tried to ask him what he was doing. Her tongue moved, and then she felt that she would
