With her mother by her side.
She tried to focus on an email she was writing on her phone, rather than them. Hearing the doors swish open Victoria moved her legs to let a trolley carrying a patient past.
The child was crying and Victoria looked at him. She was just trying to guess what was wrong with him when she looked up into the eyes of Dominic walking alongside the trolley.
Usually they ignored each other, or spoke only about their patients. Eye contact was pretty much avoided, but today his met hers and she saw that he frowned.
And well he might.
She was sitting in a children’s hospital ultrasound waiting room after all!
It hadn’t once entered Victoria’s head that it might be a problem to see him here today. It wasn’t just that she’d thought he was on holiday, more the fact that Victoria was so used to Paddington’s, so completely used to being here, that it simply hadn’t entered her head that it might be an issue for her to see him.
Yet it had become one.
He couldn’t come over—the child on the trolley was very ill—but he turned his head and gave her a questioning look as he walked past.
Victoria didn’t quite know what to do.
Dominic was speaking with a nurse and they were about to be shown through to one of the imaging rooms; Victoria wondered if she should go down to Emergency after her ultrasound and speak with him then.
As he steered the trolley he turned and looked at her again but thankfully her phone buzzed and she could legitimately look away.
And, as she did, all thoughts of babies and fathers and ultrasounds rapidly faded.
Major Incident Alert
All available staff are to report to the station.
Sometimes there were mock-ups of major incidents and you were still supposed to attend, so that staff response times could be evaluated. Telephone lines and operators could not be clogged up with calls to check if this was real or not.
And something told Victoria that this was.
She looked up at the television on the wall but there were no breaking news stories yet.
Her phone bleeped again with another urgent alert and Victoria knew that the ultrasound would just have to wait.
Victoria was a terribly practical person and so the first thing she did was go to the ladies’ room.
One problem solved.
As she came out, emergency chimes were starting to ring out as Paddington Children’s Hospital’s own major incident response was set into action.
‘Victoria Christie,’ she gave her name again to the receptionist. ‘I’m a paramedic. I have to go.’
The receptionist nodded. She herself was already moving into action. If it was indeed a major incident then all non-urgent cases would have to be cancelled, and the department cleared for whatever it was that might be brought in.
‘I’ll call and reschedule,’ Victoria said, and as she went to run off Glen called and said he would meet her at the front.
This was real, Victoria knew, for someone must have rushed to relieve Dominic from his patient because he was running out of the ultrasound department too.
‘Do you know what’s happening?’ she said as he caught up with her.
‘No.’
She was very fit but so, too, was he and he passed her.
By the time she reached Accident and Emergency, Dominic was wearing a hard hat and she realised that he was being sent out.
Hard cases were being loaded into the ambulance that would bring him to the scene and Karen was bringing out the precious O-negative blood that was kept in Accident and Emergency for days such as this.
The ambulance station wasn’t far from the hospital but Glen, having received the same text as Victoria, had come to collect her.
As she got into the car Glen told her the little that he knew.
‘There’s a fire at Westbourne Grove,’ he said, pulling off as soon as the door closed while Victoria put on her seatbelt. ‘It sounds bad.’
Victoria said nothing—she never showed her true feelings, even in the most testing of times—but her heart started to beat fast.
Westbourne Grove was a primary school, and today was a weekday...
‘Apparently there are children trapped in the building,’ Glen said grimly.
EVERY MOMENT MATTERED.
Victoria was well trained to respond to major incidents, and as soon as they were out of the car they ran to get changed.
The station was busy with many vehicles already out at the fire and off-duty staff arriving to provide backup and relief.
She went to the female changing room and took off her jeans and silky rust-coloured top that she had been wearing and then pulled on her overalls and boots. In the main station area she then collected her communication radio and ran out to the Rapid Response vehicle, which Glen was just boarding.
They hit a wall of traffic as soon as they left the station.
Already ambulances, perhaps the first vehicles at the scene, were making their way back to Paddington’s with sirens blaring.
It felt as if it was taking for ever to get there.
They had their lights and sirens on but the streets of London were gridlocked. Drivers were moving their vehicles and mounting the kerbs in a bid to try and let the emergency services through.
As well as ambulances there were fire engines, police cars and emergency response workers on motorbikes heading there too, and there was the sound of many sirens as finally they approached the school.
They could hear the chatter over the airwaves. Children were being dragged out and there were reports of firefighters going back in over and over again in an effort to reach the ones that were trapped. Most had been evacuated and, as per protocol, were lined up on the playground, far from the burning building. The numbers had to be checked and constantly updated but panicked parents were also starting to arrive on the scene and the police were having trouble keeping some of them back as they desperately wanted to see for themselves if their own child had made it out.
‘Your children don’t go to Westbourne Grove?’ Victoria checked.
‘No,’ Glen said. And then he added, ‘Thank God!’
The stretch of silence between those words felt like the loudest part of his response and, Victoria knew, Glen was picturing just that—his children trapped in a fire.
A couple of months ago, when they had been called out to a particularly nasty motor vehicle accident, Glen had started relating everything back to his own family. He took it all so personally, and it was getting worse.
Victoria had, on several occasions, warned Glen that he would soon be on stress leave if he carried on like this and had suggested that he speak to someone.
Glen insisted that he was fine and that everyone had their Achilles’ heel, and then he had turned it into a joke. ‘Except for you, Victoria.’
That had given her pause, for while Glen’s stress levels worried her, Victoria knew that she went the other way and stuffed down her feelings so that no one, not even her trusted colleague, could guess what went on inside her head.
Perhaps Glen was right and his responses were more normal, Victoria had reasoned, for there was a part of her that was perhaps a little jealous.
Not