The woman spun around in the centre of the mall. Her arms were spread wide and she looked like an elderly ballet dancer trying a final slow pirouette. Two girls passing close by turned to look at her, sniggered and moved on. Over by the Italian delicatessen, a couple watched the sluggish graceless spin. The woman’s handbag spun away to the left, hit the tiles and slid along the floor to the wall. Up above it the lights caught the Christmas tinsel and a choir of plastic angels swung their heads idiotically from side to side as they sang doleful carols.
The woman, tall and angular with grey frizzy hair opened her mouth in a silent yell. Her eyes rolled upwards until only the whites were visible and then she fell with a resounding thump to the floor. She jerked as if a savage current of electricity was discharging through her body, back arching right up from the surface. A gout of spittle coughed from the back of her throat. A dry, desperate croak rasped from her yawning mouth. A pair of boys almost fell over the skinny, splayed legs and swerved to avoid the obstruction without stopping
Two assistants came rushing out of Body Shop and reached the stricken woman. One of them, red-haired and freckled, hung back nervously. The other, short, plump and dark haired crouched over the fallen shape.
“Are you all right?” she asked, the question everybody asks when it is clear that nothing is all right.
The old woman gagged again, mouth now twisted into a grimace of pain. Her hands were clamped in against herself, one on her thin chest, the other on her belly. Her legs were spread wide, bare and bloodless, shivering and thrumming uncontrollably. The woman’s head rattled hard against the floor.
“Get a doctor,” the girl said, turning over her shoulder to her friend. “Phone an ambulance. Quick.”
The red-head hesitated, wringing her hands together, somehow dismayed and revolted at the same time.
“Come on Jeanette, run. She’s really sick.”
From another shop doorway, another woman came hurrying across from the Rolling Stock car accessory shop front.
“What’s the matter?”
“She just fell down.”
The sprawled woman’s eyes rolled downwards and for an instant they locked on the kneeling girl. Her mouth opened and closed several times. Three small moles, equally spaced in a line, marked her face like ink blots.
“She’s had a heart attack,” the second woman said. Her name was Jenny McGill. “That or a stroke. Try to get her on to her side.”
“Baby,” the word came hissing out, almost a snarl. A spray of spittle came out along with it, making the word incomprehensible.
Jenny McGill from Rolling Stock pushed at the prostrate form. “Christ, she’s stinking,” she said, not unkindly. It was true, the woman smelled pretty awful. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten in days, or washed in longer than that. Despite the smell, old sweat and damp clothes and something else besides, Jenny pushed and hauled until she got the victim on her side. She tilted her chin back to clear the airway and recoiled again. The breath came panting from between teeth that were grey and rotten. It stank of decay.
Ignoring this reek, she pulled open the thin cardigan and thinner blouse, careless of the few buttons. A surprisingly swollen breast pushed out of a grey brassiere and she pushed it to the side.
“Is she going to die?” the plump girl asked. A crowd was gathering around them. People’s voices held the hushed tones of the curious, ready to be shocked at the nearness of tragedy, the proximity of death. Up on the higher level, beyond the busy escalator, a gallery of folk, boys, girls and adults were hanging over, spectating greedily.
“Don’t know dear, let me have a listen. I’ve done first aid.”
Jenny bent right down, turning her head to the side, got an ear to the heaving chest. The skin was clammy and hot, too hot. She clamped the heel of her hand against her exposed ear, cutting off the tumult of sound, though the plastic angels still managed to get through with We Three Kings. She pressed harder until the festive music faded out and closed her eyes to concentrate.
The woman’s heartbeat was faint but fast, tripping like a woodpecker burr against the ribs.
“Fibrillation,” Jenny said. “She’s going.”
“What?” the plump assistant asked.
“It’s her heart. Is your friend phoning for help?”
The other girl twisted her head, found a space in the gathering crowd. In the Body Shop, the red-head was putting the phone down. “Yeah. I said to call an ambulance.”
Jenny McGill nodded. Down there against the flesh, the smell was worse. It sent a shiver through her and for an instant her own vision wavered. It was powerful and rancid, and Jenny almost turned away. The sweat stood out in strings of beads on the pallid skin. The breasts pressed upwards against the fabric, rounded and bloated, laced with dark veins. They did not look natural on the oddly wizened frame.
She leaned down again, listening to the dreadful rippling sound of a heart beating out of control. There were other sounds in there, an odd whoosh of turbulence, the sound of water leaking from a pipe, and a louder gurgle from further down, in the abdomen somewhere, as if the woman had been eating cucumbers or beans and was getting ready to blow.
Jenny knew it was more than that. Fibrillation meant that the heart, despite its frantic beat, couldn’t get the blood pumped up hard enough. It was pooling down there in the arteries and veins in the belly, a mass of liquid pressing against the bowels and bladder. Unless the woman was stabilised, she would blow all right. She’d blow herself right out of this world.
“Stand back,” Jenny said. “Give her some room.”
“Flipping hell, what’s that smell?” a boy asked. “Has she shit herself?”
The crowd pushed back a little. Jenny pushed herself up to her knees. The woman’s eyes rolled wildly in their sockets. She mouthed silent words, only managing a hoarse gurgle.
“What’s that?”
“Baby,” finally the word blurted out in a coughing his. “Got to get my baby...”
Must be hallucinating, Jenny thought. The woman had to be in her sixties. She put her hands together, one on top of the other, the heel of the left one pressing just under the ridged sternum. She pushed down hard. The woman’s head came off the ground an inch, maybe two and slammed down again with a sickening crack. It sounded like a coconut falling onto stone. Jenny pushed again.
“What’s she doing?” the boy asked.
“Giving her heart massage,” his pal told him. “I saw it in casualty. It never works. You need that electric thing. The jump leads.”
Another push. Hard and definite. The dying woman coughed once and her eyes bulged. Her mouth was working all the time.
“Why doesn’t she give her the kiss of life?”
“You try it. Have you smelt her? It’s worse than dog farts.”
Jenny McGill didn’t stop her efforts. Her eyes were fixed on the woman. She pressed down again hard, stopped, bent to listen, heard the fluttering purr under the surface and went back to heeling her hands down on the breastbone.
“Haven’t you boys got better things to do?” she snapped. “Go out and tell the ambulance men where to come.”
The expert on smells gave her a blank look.
“Get moving,” Jenny rasped at him. He saw something in the look in her eye and pushed out of the crowd towards the door.
“Can you help her?” the plump girl asked. Her name was Carol Padden. She was normally rosy cheeked and cheerful, but the woman’s plight had drained the blood from her face. Carol was fifteen and worked only part time. She had never seen anyone take a fit or a heart attack before. All she could hear was the savage, stuttered breathing and the rolling madness in the sprawled woman’s eyes and it scared her.
“Doing my best honey,” Jenny said. “Doing my bloody best.”
Her breath was coming almost as fast as the old woman’s, a panting sound of effort. It wasn’t working, she knew. The woman still writhed and twitched under her hands. There was no change in the fibrillation. Finally Jenny pushed herself up and leaned back, a trickle of sweat running down her own forehead. The woman’s breath was a dry rattle and the smell, sickly sweet and powerful as rotten meat, came rising up with it. Jenny slicked a hand across her bow and as she did so, the woman’s eyes swung round and fixed upon her.
For an instant they were pale and unfocussed and then, in the next they suddenly cleared. In that moment they were bright with life.
“Baby,” she repeated and this time there was no mistaking it. “Where’s my baby? I need to get...”
“What baby?” Jenny asked.
The woman’s hand came up and snatched at Jenny’s wrist. The fingers closed over her forearm and gripped with desperate force. It was so tight that Jenny winced as her bones ground together.
“Wha....?”
“Get it,” the woman grated. “Get the baby. Bring him.”
“What baby?” Jenny asked, twisting her arm, trying to free herself from the grip, but the woman’s fingers felt as if they were made of iron. The knuckles stuck out white as bone. Despite the pain in at the junction of the radius and ulna, Jenny thought it was impossible for the woman to be so strong. She was dying. Her heart was giving out right there on the floor. Nothing but a massive electrical shock would stabilise that fluttering uncontrollable beat.
“Find it,” the woman said again, though this time, it was less clear. It was as if the very act of grabbing Jenny’s wrist and speaking at all had drained the last of her strength. She raised her head up, eyes still bulging, lips drawn back over dirty, stained teeth. The smell came wafting up, thick enough to choke on, an unnatural scent that smelled of death and decay. She fixed Jenny with desperate eyes.
Jenny McGill nodded, prepared to agree to anything. She pulled back and the woman’s grip slackened. Her head went slowly back down to the floor. For another second, maybe two, the pale eyes hooked on to hers, sharp as needles.
Then the life went out of them.
It was just as if somebody had pulled a switch. The life went out and Jenny knew the woman was dead. Her whole body slumped, a puppet with its strings cut. The mouth gaped and a trickle of thick saliva slid out. It was pink.
Absently rubbing her wrist, where the bruise would later show the four blue finger marks and a deeper smudge where the thumb had pressed, the woman’s final imprint, her last mark on the world, Jenny leaned away from the slack face and the eyes which had unfocussed and were now fixed on something a million miles away, or something beyond the white light that people spoke of. It hadn’t, Jenny knew, been a slow death. At the end of the day, sometimes that was all that mattered, that death was not slow.
Slowly she got to her feet, dimly aware of the ululating sirens coming closer down Meadow Street towards the mall.
“Make way, come on, give us room,” a man’s voice bawled. The clatter of trolley wheels thrummed over the metal strip where the security door was closed at night. The crowd, already thinning, moved back further. The drama was almost over. A woman had fallen and died, unusual, but not the end of the world.
“Ambulance,” the man’s voice barked. “Coming through.”
Jenny saw the green medic’s overalls and was glad. They would take over now, relieving her of any responsibility. She raised a hand to flick away a stray slick of hair that had fallen over her eyes and she got a scent of the woman’s smell. Suddenly she felt unclean.
“Right, where’s the problem,” the paramedic said. The crowd parted wide and they came striding forward, expert eyes taking in the scene.
“Anybody know what’s happened?”
“She collapsed. I saw it,” Carol Padden told him. The colour was coming back into her pretty face. “She just put a hand to her chest and spun round and fell down. This lady said she was filigreed.”
“Fibrillating,” Jenny corrected. “At least I think so. Her heart was too fast. I tried heart massage, but it made no difference.”
“Done the course, eh?”
Jenny nodded as the man did exactly what she had done, bending down as if in penitent prayer, and put an ear against the woman’s chest.
“Not any more,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “What the hell has she been rolling in?” He turned to his partner. “She’s stopped Phil. Let’s get her to the paddles. We might make re-suss.” The first man turned to Jenny. “How long has she stopped?”
“A minute or so. Not long.”
“You don’t get long,” the man said, but he grinned, showing a friendly mouthful of good teeth. He was a technician, unfazed and unshocked. He and Phil quickly lifted the body onto the trolley. The crowd melted away. The first man winked at Jenny.
“You did your best, love, That’s all anybody can ask.” He smiled again and then they were off, heading for the doors. Jenny turned away and began to walk back to Rolling Stock where the cashier at the door had turned in her swivel seat to gawp while two small boys took advantage of her inattention to stuff their pockets with flashlight batteries. She had only walked ten paces when a dreadful scream tore the air and instantly the shopping mall hubbub was silenced. Jenny spun. A few yards away Carol Padden turned almost as quickly.
The paramedics had almost reached the big glass doors at the west end of the mall, where the smart leather shop showed mannequins that could have auditioned for a bondage movie. The lead man had his arm held out at shoulder height to straight-arm the door wide open, though that wouldn’t have been necessary because they were automatic anyway. A few yards away, tethered to a litter bin, a small yappy Yorkshire terrier went into a frenzy of high pitched barking.
The scream sliced warm air, loud and high enough to shiver the glass on the leather shop window. Phil, pushing the trolley, head bent, stopped. Beside him a child, held in its mothers arms, went into hysterics.
The woman on the trolley sat upright and screamed so loud it was hard to imagine a human being could make such a huge noise.
“What on earth....,” Jenny muttered. Her heart suddenly jumped so high it was hard to swallow the sudden saliva at the back of her mouth.
The dead woman sat upright. The lead man was in the act of turning. The woman’s mouth was open in an impossible gape, ferally wide, just like an animal.
“...she was dead.” Jenny finished her sentence.
The scream went on, high and glassy and completely unnerving.
The paramedic stopped. Phil’s head was coming up. The door had started its slide open and the woman rolled off the trolley. She tumbled to the hard floor and hit it with a thump loud enough to be heard thirty yards away. Her coat flew open and a bloated breast spilled out, grotesque and rubbery, filigreed with veins. The grizzled hair sprung out in all directions. There was a cracking sound as if a bone had broken, but the woman turned, almost in slow motion. Her hand reached out, fingers hooked into claws. Her scream abruptly cut off.
“Christ on a bike,” Phil said. “What’s going on James?” He turned towards the woman who was rolling away from him, raising herself on to her knees. She crawled away from the trolley.
“I thought you said she was stopped.”
“She was. Honest to God. There was nothing there. Absolutely nothing.”
The woman ignored them. The second hallway of the mall angled away from the front door. Up on a ledge, the plastic choirboys still swung their heads in pathetic unison while the Christmas dirges implacably continued, oblivious of the drama. From here, it was clear that the sound and motion did not coincide.
The woman almost scurried across the neatly patterned tiling. A well-dressed girl came walking out of a shop, arms laden with parcels. She was oblivious to the commotion until she almost stumbled over the woman. Whatever she thought it was, it was clear that it was entirely unexpected. She screeched. All the parcels went up in the air. They came down and hit the ground with a series of thumps. The old woman scuttled past, a ragged, spidery shape with that ballooning breast dangling like a growth.
She made it half way along the walkway. Phil and his partner went chasing after her, but they needn’t have rushed. Whatever burst of strength the woman had managed to summon left her just then, when she was half way to the far wall where baby buggies and walkers and prams were parked in a line.
One moment she was scuttling on hands and knees, a grotesque, fluttering shape on the floor. The next her hands slid from in front of her and she tumbled headlong, her forehead hit the floor with a sickening crack. She rolled over, twitched twice, and was still.
The medics reached her, one of them dragging the trolley behind him. Without any hesitation they heaved the woman back on again.
“Make sure she’s strapped in this time,” James said.
“Make sure she’s dead next time,” Phil snapped back. Over by the bookshop, an old and elegant woman’s mouth fell open into a shocked oval.
“Sorry ma’am,” James said. He tried to smile but couldn’t. He had never seen anything quite like this before. The dead did not get up and walk, or crawl. Not in any of the manuals. And she had been dead all right. He’d heard nothing inside her except for the gurgle of settling fluids. She’d been dead and gone.
But she had screamed loud enough to wake the dead and she’d gone crawling like a ragged spider.
He shook his head. His partner strapped the form onto the flat and they ran for the doors. They opened in time and the medics got to the ambulance.
Inside the mall, Jenny McGill watched in stunned silence. Her heart was beating fast and she felt suddenly faint. The sight of the woman crawling, a hunched and grotesque shape scuttering across the floor, had scared her so badly her hands were shaking.
She put them up to her face and again she smelt the woman’s scent. It smelled of death.
“Step on it James,” Phil urged. “Get this thing moving.” The siren was screaming as loud as the woman had done and the ambulance rocked from side to side as the driver hauled it round a tight bend.
Phil had slit the faded blouse down the centre and got the black pads of the portable resuscitator onto the ribs under the rubbery breasts. He thumbed the node and despite the insulation, he felt the hairs on his arms stand up when the current discharged. The woman’s muscles contracted violently, back arching off the trolley despite the restraining straps. Her arm, which had rolled off the surface and had hung limply, fingers pointing at the floor, spasmed in a sudden snap. It came up, fingers now clenched into a fist and punched Phil’s left testicle with enough force to make him cry out in pain.
“You okay?” James called back.
“Bitch hit me,” Phil managed to reply.
“What?”
The fingers unclenched and the hand fell back down again. Phil bent, trying to ignore the pulsing ache, secured the arm under a strap and tried again. The body flailed once more, but the monitor line stayed horizontal.
“Trying adrenaline now,” Phil said. “Fifty. Straight in.”
He aimed the thick needle at an angle under the breastbone, pointing it upwards and slightly to the right. Without hesitation he started to depress the plunger and the hormone went straight into the heart muscle.
“Nearly there,” James said. “Got anything?”
“Nothing yet.”
The ambulance sped through the gateway, siren still yelling urgently, and ran straight for the covered bay in front of the accident unit. While Phil had been delivering the cardiac shock, James had been on the radio calling in. A crash team were waiting to take over. The brakes squealed and the Phil was thrown forward. Just at that moment the woman’s body gave an enormous shudder. Her eyes flicked open, pale and blue and faded. They looked around. Phil turned. Her hand jerked against the restraint.
“Baby,” she whispered. “Got to get my baby. He needs me.”
Phil stared at her, stunned into silence. The adrenaline hadn’t worked. The shocks hadn’t had any effect. Yet now she was alive again.
“There’s something funny going on here,” Phil said. The hairs on the back of his neck were crawling. The woman’s eyes swivelled towards him.
“My baby,” she whispered again. “Bring him.”
Phil opened his mouth to speak when another enormous convulsion arched the woman off the trolley. It happened so quickly that he had no time to react, and with such force that one of the restraining straps broke and sent the fastener flying to smack against the roof.
The door opened. Hands reached in. The woman flopped back down and the life went out of her eyes again.
Somebody unsnapped the brake and the trolley was hauled outside. Phil followed behind.
“I gave her fifty of adrenaline,” he told Brendan Quayle, the young emergency resident who was already pressing his stethoscope down against the woman’s ribs. “She came round. But it didn’t look right.”
The team trundled their package inside. James came round and the two medics followed them into the unit.
“Can’t feel a thing,” the doctor said. “Did you shock her?”
“Twice. Up to four hundred. Not a thing. The line was flat.”
“But she came round after adrenaline?”
“Not right away. It was maybe a minute, a bit longer.”
“Can’t have been. Wouldn’t take that long,” the doctor said, though not unkindly.
Phil shook his head. The sudden lurch inside the ambulance and the croaking whisper from the woman had badly unnerved him. He had seen many things on the road. Dying children, mutilated crash victims, frozen bodies in the snow. They were all part of the job. You bit down on the shock and went on and eventually you treated them like numbers because it was easier that way.
But this had been different. She had been dead twice and she had come alive and there had been a mad look in those rheumy eyes. Whatever had happened to the woman, it had not been natural. Phil didn’t quite articulate that thought, but something inside him knew. He shivered again.
It took the crash team less than five minutes to pronounce the woman well and truly dead. Phil looked through the portholes of the doors, half expecting her to come lunging up from the table. A nurse drew the sheet over her head. Nothing happened. The woman’s nose and her oddly full breasts poked at the surface of the fabric, but she remained still.
“You’ve gone all white,” James said.
“Nearly shit myself,” Phil said. “And she nearly neutered me.”
“You can’t win them all. Come on, I’ll get you a cup of tea and we’ll write the report up later.”
A tall nurse came and wheeled the gurney away down to the mortuary. Phil followed its progress until it went through the swing doors and disappeared from sight.