We’re way overdue a meal break and heading up town to pick up some munchies when the screen starts wailing. Officially we’re not available for the job, but the message makes us think twice.
“Patient unconcious and not breathing.”
“Fuck it - you happy to go?”
You’d have to be a hard-hearted cunt to choose your sandwiches over a cardiac arrest; Bryson punches the “Go Mobile” button on the screen, a navy line tracking across the map, leading us to a darkened towerblock.
The carpark is spread with shattered concrete, dogshit and glass, purple yellow security lights shine across the entrance from behind black mesh cages.
“I thought these were being pulled down?”
Bryce is attending, so he takes the bag and oxygen, I lift the defibrillator from its cradle and slip my Maglite horizontally across two belt loops under my jacket.
“Tooled up?” Bryson grins at me.
“It might be dark…” I answer, grimly. We both know I’m a chicken, that I want the security blanket of a big metal stick on my belt. Not that we’d ever admit to it, the line is always that “it might be dark.” It’s said with good reason, we’ve been here before.
We ride the lift, shuddering and shaking, all steel and sweat and fading council notices, up to the first floor. Our patient is apparently in 1/4, or floor one, flat four.
Flat four is boarded shut with sheet metal, rivets the width of my thumbs pounded into the concrete on either side.
“Four stroke one?”
“Could be…”
We tramp up the stairs, October’s wind hissing between the crazed perspex that passes for windows. Names are scratched into its surface, lovers and enemies, couples and hits, Croick Kirk resurrected with Stanley blades and needles.
The fourth floor has four metal doors, humming gently in the breeze.
“Nobody in here.”
“Bad pun.”
He stares at me.
“No…body?..Forget it.”
We slope back down the stairs to the vehicle, the radio boops rhythmically before our controller’s Irish tones come through the speaker, thin and sharp.
“403?”
“Yeah, nothing found at this locus. Can you call back and confirm the address for us?”
“Police are on their way, we’ve already tried to noise up the caller, phone’s dead.”
A sandwich and van pull up, five cops raise ten eyebrows at the two of us standing in the cold.
“Where’s the job?”
We explain, the unclear address, the boarded up flats. As a group we stare up at the blunt obelisk. Two windows are lit.
“Someone’s still living up there?”
His shoulder badge has five figures. Most cops have four. I’m confident he’s been working for less time than I have.
“Looks like it.”
As a group, we start up the stairs. The defib is heavy, its plastic handle starts to sweat and rub against my palm as I plod up the concrete steps.
At each floor, one or two members of our gang leave the stairwell, confirming that every flat is welded shut, prodding the doors to the bin chutes open with our feet, stepping around rusty puddles of effluent and damp, shining torch beams into dark corners where … something scrabbles down a hole away from us.
On the sixth floor we find our first wooden door, warm golden light spilling from its transom. The spyhole has been pushed out, a hole as wide as a pencil through the wood of the boundary. I close my eye to it.
A classic smack den. No floorboards, no furniture. The man of the house staggers to the hall wearing only ragged boxer shorts and a stained teeshirt in response to my knocking.
“Who is it?”
“Ambulance! Come to the door, please.”
“I don’t need an ambulance.”
“You didn’t call?”
“No. Fuck off.”
Good enough for me, I join the climbing party.
By the time we’re at the seventh floor, I’ve found myself with two officers, one male, one female and as a threesome we swing into a leapfrogging pattern. He checks floor eight while she and I climb to nine, she checks nine while I leave her to clear ten, meanwhile he passes us both and sweeps eleven.
The building is confirmed empty in minute, so the police search their database for anyone matching the patient’s name we’ve been given. His address is just round the corner, so the entourage troops round to wake him from sleep. He’s drowsy and angry at being disturbed, but clearly not in cardiac arrest.
There is nothing else to do.
We can’t reach the original caller, we can’t find the patient.
We climb back into our vehicles and drift off into the night. If the call was genuine, somebody, somewhere, is dying on a floor with an intoxicated friend staring over him.
We’ll find him some day.
We always find them in the end.
