The car’s indicator ticks patiently while I wait to turn right across traffic when the phone rings, I extend a finger from where my left hand rests on the gear knob and press the green button - the despatcher’s voice comes through the speakers.

“Kal? I need you on a cardiac arrest in PalaceHill, double Tech crew making from the ED.”

“Got it.”

I pull the RRU back into traffic, pushing the “999″ button on the dash that makes the Carnation system light up - halogens, LEDS, headlights and siren. Tap the horn to activate “wail” and boot it up The Neighbourhood’s main drag. A left at the roundabout and I’m shifting fast, four lanes of road are effectively empty at this time of night and I’m soon shifting down the broad street at over twice the limit, buses ahead pulling into their greenway to let me past.

Through the lights and hard on the brakes as I approach a skewed junction, the road on the left stretching away at an acute angle, almost a five o’clock I’m almost stopped as I crane my neck over my shoulder to check the road is clear before I move. The phone rings again.

“Kal - update, the caller says he can’t do CPR, he can’t get the patient on the floor. You’re going to beat the crew by about four minutes.”

“Thankyou.”

They hang up for both of us.

Ahead I see a car in my lane, pooting along at thirty or less, since he just passed the speed camera and I saw no flash. I’m moving closer to sixty and I make rapid mental calculations - has the driver seen me in his mirrors, does his road position suggest he’ll pull over smoothly and let me pass, or panic-brake in his lane?

I elect it’s faster and safer to pull into the oncoming lane and pass the car directly, watching the right side of the road intently for any emerging traffic who won’t be expecting me to come from their left hand side. I’m past the obstructions before he knows I was even there, the Honda’s all-wheel drive controlling each wheel automatically, ensuring that nothing skids or slides on the damp roads.

Outside the address there’s an old man standing at the doorstep, waving me down. Family members waving you down from the door are hardly ever good news…

I grab my bag and defib from the boot, leaving my roof lights and rear reds flashing to signal the locus of the job to the incoming crew.

“Thankyou for coming so quickly…” he begins, “…he’s in here.”

I follow his pionting finger into a living room, running lone-rescuer CPR guidelines through my head. With a crew four minutes behind me I’ll concentrate on chest compressions - balance the pressure in the chambers of the heart before we shock.

The living room is clean and tidy. So clean and tidy, in fact, that there isn’t a corpse in it.

In fact, aside from a cooling cup of coffee on the table, the place is like a shrine.

“Who am I here to see, sir?”

“Tom!”

“Where is he?”

“He’s…oh.”

The old man casts his gaze over the room.

“Well…he was here a minute ago.”

The fuck?

I’m immediately trying to work out what could cause a patient to appear dead and then recover in the space of a few minutes, giving him sufficient faculties to stand up and make off. Seizure, perhaps? Diabetic episode? Faint? None of the explanations I’m coming up with suggest a patient who’ll be tickety-boo on exam.

“Where could he have gone, sir?”

The old man begins to ramble an answer at me and I elect, instead, to search the house. Pushing doors open and flicking on lights and it’s only a matter of seconds before the house is lit up like Vegas. There’s still no sign of Tom, though and I jog out the back door into the garden.

I’m suspicious of the caller’s abilities to think clearly and beginning to suspect that this job may be simpler than it seems, but I’m still determined to search the place high and low as I envisage tomorrow’s headlines.

“Paramedics leave elderly man to die in back garden after assuming his friend was “confused”.”

I’ve got an idea, though.

Back into the house.

“Sir, does Tom live with you?”

“No.”

“Where does he live?”

“Just down the road.”

“Do you have his phone number?”

“Yes.”

“Could you call him for me?”

“Of course.”

Alarm bells ring loud and long, the man’s perfectly happy to call his friend who he believes is dead on the living room floor?

The call to Tom reassures me. He’s asleep, tucked up in bed and, yes, sometimes his friend does get a bit confused.

The crew arrive and we make the caller a cup of tea. He tells us he dozed off in his chair, woke up and “Tom was on the floor, he wasn’t breathing…I think he was dead.”

We reassure him that he’s had a bad dream, just a bit mixed up, sir. He downs his tea and agrees to go to bed.

The crew return to their vehicle, we crack a joke but he hangs on my mind for the rest of the shift.

There are better ways to wake up…

1999
The same kid, having done a little extra work in between while he finishes school, lands himself a national tour. He travels around Scotland for nine weeks. He grins at people when they ask what he does.

“I’m an actor.”

He learns to sword fight, to wire plugs and pyros.

He learns to juggle.

He learns to crave applause, to push a little harder with each show to get an extra whoop of approval from the crowd.

2002
The kid moves to Edinburgh, home of golden paving slabs and slavering directors ready to hire him, to propel him to stardom.

It turns out?

He’s not the only young actor in town.

He lands a job at a local tourist attraction for the summer, in make-up and costume he performs to thousands of tourists.

He makes them laugh and scream.

The summer ends and so does his contract.

He needs to pay the bills.

He hears of a job from a colleague, her Mum needs someone to run a photocopier in a Civil Service department.

He turns up for the interview and when asked “Are you interested in government or the law?” he falters.

She smiles kindly.

“Do you need the money?”

He nods, she’s honest.

“That’s ok. We all work for money…I think you’re overqualified to do our photocopying. Have you ever worked in a library?”

He has.

He lands a job.

2006.
Four years have passed.

He’s learned intricacies of Scots Law and the cataloguing of legislation that make most people’s brains leak, slowly,down their nose.

He is taught to bow to three different depths, dependent on the context in which he meets people.

He learns a new language of legalese.

He acts a little, but accepts he’ll never be a performer.

He researches sentences for sex criminals. Child murderers.

He runs documents in and out of courtrooms in which landmark cases are being discussed.

It’s a performance, but there’s no applause.

No whoops.

Snow falls each winter into the square outside his desk, covers the statues outside, the grey block walls and ornate collonades.

He stews, desperate for a challenge.

One morning he stares at the tiles in the shower and realises that if he wants to be a civil servant for the rest of his life, he’s doing it right.

If he wants to be a paramedic, like he knows he wants to be, he’s going to have to do something about it.

He does something about it.

2008
He’s working as an ambulance technician on a pushbike at the Edinburgh Festival when he receives an emergency call.

A street performer has climbed onto railings and slipped, ripping the flesh from one side of his hand.

He cycles fast, sprays water into the wound under pressure and dresses it as best he can.

2009
He’s back on the bike. He sees a familiar face.

“How’s the hand?”

The performer shows him a jagged scar.

“The surgeon says my nerves are fucked, they’ll have to transplant.”

2010
He’s patrolling the City Centre and swings into Parliament Square, late afternoon sunshine has dipped below the high buildings that once housed his office.

He peers with interest at the windows as he passes and narrowly avoids cycling into two little lads playing with diabolos.

“Fucking Fringe visitors…” he grumbles to himself.

One of the boys neatly steps back, flicks one stick and sends his diabolo spinning into the air before elegantly catching it.

At the side sit a couple, one of them waves a nearly perfectly healed hand.

“Is this the guy who patched you up?” asks his wife.

They chat.

The two boys, their sons, turn tricks with the diabolos.

He watches them and says to his new friends.

“I haven’t thrown one of those in years.”

His patient reaches into a bag and passes him a diabolo and sticks.

“Wanna go?”

He’s torn.

He’s a grown-up, with a grown-up job.

That’s his past life, who he used to be.

What will people say when they catch a paramedic juggling in the car-park of the Supreme Court?

He takes the sticks and slowly spins the diabolo on the string, remembering the balance points, tilting the sticks back and forth.

He gets braver, whips the string around the axle a couple of times, remembering the fizzing whirr of rope of metal.

He gently hops it a few feet, catches it on the string.

“Higher…” the patient’s wife calls.

Another few feet.

“Higher…” the kids say.

Ten feet, he still catches it.

The patient loses patience.

“Go on. Just fucking throw it. Do it.”

He slams the strings apart and the diabolo rockets into the sky, above the roof level of the surrounding buildings, catching on the sunshine at its new altitude before falling back to the outstretched strings.

Three sections of his life shiver, realign themselves and fall into a new frame.

He wraps the strings back around the sticks and hands the equipment back.

Maybe he’ll go buy one.

It’s been a while since he threw a diabolo….

While we were sitting there waiting for the ambulance a young man in a pink teeshirt walked past, stopped, looked and approached my patient.

“Excuse me? Would a puppet cheer you up?”

And from his bag he produced a kick-ass, foam headed muppet with googly eyes and waggly ears. It was (and bear in mind, I used to operate some cool puppets) a fucking awesome puppet. My patient was extremely cheered up by this, not only the puppet itself, but by the sheer loveliness of this stranger.

So it was with a big grin that I noticed a familiar, jester-hatted figure loping down George IV Bridge this afternoon.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes?”

“Didn’t you give my patient a glove puppet last week?”

“Yes!”

“That was the coolest random act of kindness ever.”

He was thrilled, really excited to meet someone else who gets the idea of being nice to people just cos. I told him about the random cake give-away of last year (remind me to tell you about that).

We parted, he dancing and jiggling, happy to have made someone else happy. I took his picture, promised him I’d big him up on here.

And so I will.

This is Eric Mutch, he’s in “Eric Mutch’s Nuts” at Jekyll and Hyde every at 12 noon. He’s a nice guy who likes making people laugh and making the world a nice place. You can find out about him at www.thefunrevolution.com

You should go see his show - it’s free!

“Might need you, mate.”

Fair enough, I swing onto the bike and free-wheel down the hill while a police van hammers past me on the right hand side. A total of six cops hair down a wee alleyway between two shops at gather at the foot of a flight of stairs in a small courtyard.

“What’s the issue?”

“Disturbance call…but they say he’s smashed some glass, so there might be an injury too.”

I look up at the building, a traditional Edinburgh tenement. Well kept, clean courtyard, one window smashed out, a black eye in its face.

“You guys crack on. I’ll be here if you need me.”

They gather at the door, ringing the buzzer, shouting at the intercom.

“Police! Open the main door.”

The door buzzes open and they tramp inside, I can hear their footsteps zig-zagging upwards, back and forth on the staircase. Police calls with injured parties are usually a paperwork exercise, they can’t discharge an IP without having them medically assessed.

I casually remove my bike gloves, slide the bags out of the panniers and am gloving up when a lone set of footsteps zig-zags back down the stairs and a police officer arrives, white faced, at the front door.

“Kal!”

He beckons me in and I follow him at a run up the stairs, onto a landing and left into a corridor. The room is about fifteen feet long, five feet across. There isn’t a clean patch of lino to be seen, the entire floor is covered in blood. It spreads a good half foot up the skirting board, splashes on the walls, shards of glass from the broken window float in it.

In the centre of this gory tableau lies a young man who appears to be doing backstroke while his left wrist squirts blood. His right hand is pinned to the floor by a cop, squeezing a tea towel onto his forearm.

I throw my bags beyond the scene into an open doorway (which doesn’t have claret all over the floor) and unzip them, grabbing a couple of large bandages. The patient’s left arm has a wide, triangular hole in the centre of it, blood pours out until I pack the dressing into the wound, wrapping the bandage around it as hard as I can, then tying a second over the top of it. It holds for a moment before a dark red stain blooms through to the surface, spreads and stops, holding its shape as a circle on the dressing.

Fair enough, that’s almost controlled.

I realise, with a fair dose of alarm, that I’ve come running up the stairs without A. an oxygen mask and B. a tourniquet, both of them are in the saddle bag on the bike and not in the main bags. This is a major issue, since I have a tank of oxygen right here, but no way to give it to the man whose entire supply of blood is trying to escape. I’m also keen to get some IV access so that once the crew arrives we can start pushing fluids into him in an attempt to , you know, make him not dead and that.

I improvise.

Looking over at the cop on the patient’s right hand, I see that the pressure he’s pushing on the arm is making the patient’s veins bulge in his lower arm - better than any tourniquet I could put on, it should be a simple matter to slip an IV cannula into that.

“Open that bag and pass me a grey needle, please?”

The police officer by my kit unzips one of my bags and looks in bewilderment at the contents, I try to explain.

“On the IV board?”

He lifts the defib and hands it to me.

“Don’t worry, just pass it over here.”

I expect him to hand me the kit, but instead he slides the entire thing across the floor and into the blood puddle. That’ll take some cleaning up.

Snagging a grey cannula from the board, I move to stick it in the patient but realise I’m going to have to secure his arm somehow before I go waving sharp pointy things about. The traditional method is to shove the patient’s hand between your knees, but I’m crouching, loath to put my bare skin on the filthy floor.

There’s nothing for it.

I splosh my knees down into the bloodbath, wishing I was wearing long trousers and not cycling shorts. The cannula slides easily into his vein and we’re able to move to protecting him against shock, lifting his legs above his head and delivering high flow oxygen therapy via a bag/valve mask, rather than a normal non-rebreather.

The crew arrives, we bundle the patient down into the ambulance and run bags of fluid into him. They take off to hospital in the wake of a traffic car escort, leaving me with a conundrum.

On an ambulance, if you get tagged by body fluids, you’re normally going to the hospital anyway. You can slide your green shirt off, or scrub the worst of it off your trousers with wipes before heading back to station to change clothes. You’re in the vehicle, nobody sees you, it’s all terribly discreet.

Out on the bike, I’ve nowhere to hide. My bare arms and legs are literally dripping with blood and though the police pull a roll of paper towels from their car with which to mop up, I’m still a ghoulish figure that walks back to the Fringe office to clean up.

The next morning I see the cop who deployed me, she laughs when I tell her I’m ignoring her next time. I’m crap with names and I tend to fall back on “Alright, mate?” when I meet the cops who populate the Information Centre on the High St (free coffee, handy loos, my favourite stand-by point!). Regardless of learning names, however, it’s another step to a closer working relationship.

My days are full, currently, of organising the Parabike and its coverage for the city centre. Last year we ran a bike through the crowds of the Fringe and Edinburgh Festival and it worked in a big way - this year we’re pushing it a little further. There’s awesome new equipment like electric bikes that pull you up the hills, pocket GPS transmitters that tell Control exactly where we are and a lights/siren system that parts crowds like a shit covered tramp with poor personal space awareness.

Sinky, another paramedic, is working alongside me so I get to share the shifts this year. The city centre bike has always been my baby and now that it’s growing up, I have a whole range of other issues to face. There are suppliers to contact, press relations to manage, operational demands to answer and requests from others within the service to field. The challenge of running a bigger project is enjoyable, but not without its stressors.

“Quiet bairns get no sweeties…” one colleague said to me this week as I negotiated a deal with an equipment supplier, but I’m also aware of what they say about tall poppies.

On top of this, I had a friend’s dog to stay while Bam and Sootie headed off to a festival. I wish I’d taken more advantage of having her here, gone for some nice walks in the park and similar but my time was short and my schedule brutal. We nipped around the block twice a day to let her avoid pissing on my carpet and I ran out the door. She was content to settle down on the sofa for hours and await my return, while I worried that she’d shit in the DVD player and eat things.

Meanwhile, our living room is being decorated. We elected to get someone in to do it rather than attempt it ourselves, so haven’t had to do much more than move furniture out of the way, but it’s one more pothole in the path.

Last night I stood on the High St and watched the afternoon’s pissing rain evaporate from the pavement as evening sunshine broke through. A woman approached with a smile and I returned it, expecting her to ask for a photo of the bike, or to have a request for directions. Instead she surprised me.

“My son’s just joined the ambulance service in Bath. Can I buy you a coffee?”

I smiled and a scale of stress fell with a “plink” between my feet.

“That would be lovely, thankyou.”

She vanished inside Starbucks, fought with the queue for a few minutes and returned with a mug of steaming filter for me. I switched my head to “polite public servant” mode, expecting her to want to discuss the job but she just smiled.

“It’s the least you guys deserve. Have a nice afternoon.”

Sipping at my coffee, I scanned the crowds and made a real effort to reset my head. I’m working in the biggest party in the world for a month, everyone’s here to have fun, to enjoy themselves. Work stress is nothing, it’s only a job. In a few days my living room will be clean and freshly painted, new curtains up, new rug on the floor, new furniture.

You can stress, piss on the carpet and chew on cables. Scratch at the door and drive the neighbours crazy while you howl at nothing

Or just turn a few circles and settle down. You can’t make your owner come home early.

-
PS - Evilontheinside? Thanks, mate.

Then flip open the headlines to catch up and feel my stomach shiver.

“Three children found dead in Edinburgh blast.”

The crack and whine of the job flying over my head is nearly audible, while I sat in my living room playing video games and drinking tea, my friends and colleagues from all three emergency services were handling something unspeakable.

Raise your glass, or mug, to families of those lost and the others who pick up the pieces.

I’ve seen how you lived.

How your parents related to you.

To your daughter.

I’ve filed reports.

Forms.

Paperwork.

Statements.

Issued.

Read.

Reread and signed.

Witnessed.

I’ve ordered reprints of your case.

Studied them.

Prepared to take the stand.

Give evidence.

I saved your life.

No doubt.

You would’ve died that night.

Tried to.

I’ve seen you naked.

Laid my hands on you.

Been your breath.

Without me you wouldn’t be here.

There’d be no story.

No scandal.

And now the press has you.

Your secrets, lies and lives.

They’ve given them to the city.

And now you’re public.

I see your photo at newstands.

In shops.

And your face flickers a bulb in my brain.

“I know that face…that person…more than most…

…and not at all.”

Volunteer first aiders train for this sort of thing to an extent and I have to say that the group I found myself inadvertently leading were slick and proficient. They did exactly what I said when I said it and stopped when instructed to do so. They performed tasks that were far beyond what they anticipated on their first aid duty.

One held a young man’s head in her lap and told him he’d be fine, to just keep breathing and try to relax.

Another was improvising dressings from a first aid kit that was never intended to treat injuries such as this and she kept her cool when I snapped at her to “just open fucking everything”.

One guy was standing over us, handling the burgeoning crowd and organising marshalls to bring an ambulance immediately to our side.

And the fourth was opposite me, kneeling in mud and piss up to our thighs. She had her hands under mine, my fingers moulding and turning hers just so and pressing them down. She was pushing onto parts of a human body she’d probably never seen before, let alone held, hot and wet and twitching in her grasp.

Aware that five sets of eyes were expecting me to know exactly what to do, I wasn’t about to let on that I’d only ever seen that body part before on an autopsy table.

The patient shipped out on an ambulance, we reconvened as a group. Reactions were interesting. One was talkative, jabbering excitedly that she’d never seen multi-trauma. Her excitement lasted half an hour before she dissolved into embarrassed tears . The coordinator was grim-faced, though the water in his drinking bottle trembled when he lifted it. My equipment specialist was cold and analytical, asking pertinent questions about her performance and the patient’s prognosis. And the fourth was silent, fascinated by her shoes.

My brain swung into “bad job” mode, automatically playing the cards that we do at work, that just a few weeks ago I’d been analysing amongst my colleagues and myself. My arms swung out, clapping shoulders, touching arms and shaking hands. I dropped my paw around the shoulder of number four and she stiffened at my touch. The team fractured into a one, two, one formation.

I gave them a minute and cracked a joke; humour didn’t go down well and I realised that the rest of the group were not only unaware of how we decompress, but that they mistook my attempts to do so as crass and degrading.

And I, recognising the offence I was causing, backed away from the process and joined them in their brooding.

For me there was no reset. I did my best to warn people about adrenaline come-down, to ensure that they would get home safe and be looked after by friends. I tried to explain about questioning your own performance and realising that finding out the patient’s outcome may be impossible. I strove to make people see that what they’d done was amazing, had probably saved the young man’s life and encouraged them to take comfort from that thought.

It was only on the following evening, when I gathered with like minded friends, that I was able to hammer through the stages, to get my quota of physical contact, to make flippant remarks about a horrendous situation and to clink beer bottles together and agree that things had gone well.

We all have our rituals, developed through years of experience, trial and error.

Until you know what works, you have no choice but to have a go at decompressing through any means you can conceive.

Find a your system and employ it when you need it.

Just realise that it’s a personal or collegiate decision.

And it may not translate beyond borders.