The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away Page 3
The nurse returned at four in the morning and insisted it would actually be best to call someone, to have them there for support. ‘Martin really is very poorly.’
That was when the penny dropped, remembers Sue. ‘She was drip-feeding me. This was the first time anyone had said that it was really serious.’ But the nurse was not going to tell her just how serious it was until there was someone to hold her hand. Or to catch her fall.
The phone rang and rang until the answerphone clicked on. ‘Please leave a message after the tone.’ Sue pressed redial and listened again to the purr of the call, steady and insistent, alerting the landline in the house of her parents, Len and Joan, in Lincoln, twenty-five miles to the north. If they didn’t pick up, what was she going to do? Who else could she call? Could she get the police to go round there and rouse them?
‘Hello?’
Her father sounded startled.
‘Dad, it’s me, Sue. Listen, I need you –’
‘Who is this?’
He was confused by sleep. She got frustrated and shouted.
‘It’s Susan. Your daughter. I’m in hospital –’
‘What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Where are you?’
‘It’s Martin. He’s had a fall. I need you to come, Dad. I’m on my own …’
The confusion fell away as Len recognised what she was saying and the fear in her voice woke him up, fully. ‘We’ll be there as soon as we can.’ He shook Joan, they dressed quickly and set off in the chill of the early morning. Both were seventy-three years old.
Len was concentrating on the road but Joan was worried, really worried. ‘What did she say exactly? Come on, she must have said more than that? What do you think is wrong? Did she really give you no idea?’ The sky began to glow beyond the street lights during the forty-minute drive. The roads were empty. The world seemed calm, too calm.
They were both scared stiff but Len was trying not to think too much about what was happening as they arrived at the hospital, a huddle of low prefab buildings that looked more like an old army base. They had to press a buzzer to be let into the hospital, which was otherwise deserted.
Sue was in a back room, distraught. ‘They think he’s got a bleed on his brain. They’re taking him to Nottingham to see a specialist, right away.’
The nurse beside her spoke softly. ‘Would you like to see him before he goes?’
Sue felt giddy, fluttery. ‘Yes, please.’
‘He’s on a machine …’
Somewhere in among the nurses and the monitors and drips and tubes in a room full of people and things was Martin. Her normal instinct would have been to push everyone aside, but Sue was rattled by what was happening and uncertain of herself in that moment: the doctors must know best. So she held back, thinking, ‘I have to let them do whatever they need to do.’
But then the nurses parted and she saw Martin, under a clear plastic mask. His eyes were closed. His hair was all messed up. He was unusually still, she sensed that in an instant. She hoped he couldn’t hear all this commotion: the beeping of the monitors, the tense conversations between staff, the rattling of her own heart. He would be afraid, poor love. She moved in close, trying to reassure him. ‘You’ve had a fall. That’s all, silly pudding. You’ve bumped your head. You’ll be fine.’
There was no way of knowing if he could hear her voice, but she had to say something, even if she was struggling to believe it. Half-blind from the tears, Sue bent to give her son a brief, soft kiss on the forehead before he was taken to the ambulance. ‘It’s all right, love. It’s all right. Mum’s here. Everything will be okay.’
Five
Marc
Marc was not going to make it down the corridor. He could not survive being moved out of the ward in a swarm of medics, trailing drips, monitors and machines. If he did then he would die in the lift on the way down to the specialist ambulance or somewhere out on the City of Edinburgh bypass in the night. There was no way he would get to the airport alive, his mum and dad were convinced of that, although neither of them dared say so. They were both hoping and praying to be wrong. Linda was weeping and keening as the bed was loaded into a big, boxy white ambulance. Marc lay at the centre of an octopus of tubes and wires. The ventilator was helping his lungs, the mechanical assist relieving his heart. All of this was tricky to get into the vehicle and it was going to be even harder to move out and into the aircraft without a slip that could mean a broken connection and a nasty death. They had to get there first, though. One of the medics, a stubbled Scot who might have had a son of his own about the same age, flashed Norrie McCay a sympathetic look. Norrie hoped he would talk to Marc on the way, even though the boy was unconscious. He didn’t want his son to feel alone.
‘Come on, son, let’s do this,’ Norrie said to himself as he got into the back of the police escort car, as if he was talking to Marc. But when they pulled up on the apron at Edinburgh Airport, he could see a problem. A really serious one.
‘Is that the plane for our Marc?’
‘Aye,’ said his driver. ‘Think so.’
Norrie had imagined a transporter plane that would open up at the back and allow the ambulance to drive right in – but this was just a small light aircraft, nowhere near big enough for the equipment, Marc and the medics. It was horrifying.
‘I’d no get in that door myself. What the hell’s going on? My Marc’s dying here!’
‘Calm down. We’ll get this sorted.’
The police officers looked uncertain as they went into a huddle with the ambulance crew on the tarmac. Norrie listened with the window of the police car wound down then called his oldest child, Leasa, on his mobile. ‘They’re saying the plane’s too small, hen.’
He was beginning to panic now. The one per cent chance of survival he had grabbed so thankfully and desperately was vanishing. ‘They’ve got tae take us by road. No, I don’t understand it either.’
Norrie remembers being told there was only enough battery power in the ambulance to keep the life-saving machines in the back going without a recharge for another two hours. The Freeman Hospital in Newcastle was at least two and a half hours away by the usual route, down the A1 through Berwick, Seahouses and Alnwick and into the city from the north. There was not enough time, even at night. This was hopeless, but the driver had a plan. They could go a more direct way, cross-country down the A68, shaving off miles. This might be a rollercoaster ride over the border hills, but if the police car went ahead to clear the way they hoped to drive smoothly enough to keep from hurting Marc. They might just make it before the power in the medical systems began to run out, or at least get near enough to transfer the patient if a Newcastle ambulance came up to meet them. Marc might not be able to survive the vibrations of a high-speed cross-country race for more than 100 miles, but then he might also have a heart attack here at the airport. There was no alternative. This was his only chance.
‘Okay, son, here we go,’ said Norrie aloud, looking back at the ambulance through the rear window of the police car as it led the way out of the airport. ‘Hold on tight!’
Six
Martin
‘You’re shivering, we’ve got to go home to get you sorted,’ said Sue’s mother as they left Grantham Hospital in the early hours of that Wednesday morning, having seen the ambulance carrying Martin set off for Nottingham at high speed. Shock was setting in. Sue only had on a T-shirt and jeans and the dawn was chilly. The ambulance driver had told her father that it was pointless to try and follow behind, so they went back briefly to her house first and Sue found some warmer clothes. Rocky, their grizzled old Border Collie, was baffled by all these people turning up in his kitchen so early, booting him out into the garden to do his business.
‘Come on, old boy, we don’t know when we’ll be home again,’ said Len, helping the dog out of the door with the side of his foot, but Rocky didn’t get it. He did what he had to do, then came straight back in and flopped back into bed.
‘Where can we put a key?’
> Len was thinking ahead. They put it under a pot in the shed and left that door unlocked. ‘I’ll phone your friend later and get her to take the dog,’ said Joan. She would also phone Sue’s office and tell them what was happening, assuming control of that side of things to help out her daughter.
Sue was barely there. She was thinking of Martin and the bleed on his brain, whatever that meant. The hospital staff had not said much more. She was thinking about brain damage. She was thinking about therapy and what that meant and what it cost and whether she would have to give up work to care for him at least for a while and whether their house would have to be adapted in some way, until he was better. He was alive, at least. Whatever happened, he was still her boy. His ambulance would have arrived in Nottingham by now. Their journey took an hour, with her father driving painfully slowly and Sue got exasperated, believing the doctors could not operate on her son without her permission.
‘Go faster, Dad. Go faster! I haven’t signed anything, they can’t take him into theatre without my signature as a parent, you’ve got to speed up here.’ But Len wouldn’t go faster, for fear of crashing. They had to follow a map, they didn’t know where they were going and when they got to the vast Queen’s Medical Centre – the biggest hospital in the country at the time, with more than a thousand beds – and were eventually able to find the intensive care unit, the night sister had not heard of a Martin Burton. ‘Sorry, we don’t have anyone of that name. Where have you come from again? No, we’ve not had any patients from Grantham here and I don’t think we’re expecting any.’
Sue panicked then, but the sister looked at her again. ‘Hang on, what age is your son? Sixteen? You want PICU then, he might be there.’
A young male nurse who didn’t look much older than Martin himself explained in a kindly voice that the P was for paediatric, for kids. She knew that, of course, but her head wasn’t working properly. He walked them there, ten minutes away through the labyrinth of the hospital, up to the fifth floor in the lift and through corridors that confused and this time the answer was yes, they had Martin. ‘Or we will have, he’s just coming back from theatre.’ So they were already operating without asking, thought Sue. He must be in a really bad way. Her stomach twisted tighter. There was tea or coffee in the family room, but she didn’t want either. There were tissues, but she was past tears. There was nothing to do now but wait.
The hammering on the door startled Nigel Burton as he lay awake in a bed far from home, on the other side of the Atlantic and on the far side of America.
‘Yes? What?’
It was still Tuesday night there, eight hours behind Nottingham.
‘Chief Tech Burton?’
The big, bulky Sergeant Supplier with a grim look on his face clearly hadn’t come to drag Nigel out on the town. ‘I’ve had a call from the guard room at Cottesmore.’
They worked at the same base in England but were staying in apartments on Las Vegas Boulevard for ‘Red Flag’, an advanced aerial combat exercise in the skies above Nevada. Red versus Blue with live bombs, the RAF on the side of the good guys in raids and dogfights across hundreds of miles, training for serious combat. Nigel was the liaison between the pilots and the ground crews that kept the planes flying. The Sergeant Supplier at his door saw to the spare parts, but they knew each other only by sight. Whatever this was about, couldn’t it wait? Nigel had been up at half past four that morning and out to Nellis Air Force Base on the edge of town to get the first wave of Harrier Jump Jets away. He’d turned down a trip to the Strip with the lads for an early night, but clearly wasn’t going to get it.
‘One of your sons has collapsed and they’d like you to phone home.’
Nigel had served his country in wartime, and this carefully spoken man with a dark moustache and close-cropped, thinning hair was known and admired for being cool under pressure. He was trained to put other worries to the back of his mind and focus on the task in hand. This news was nothing he could not handle, although somebody at home had obviously thought it was serious enough to ring the helpline for forces families, which was how he had been traced and told. He didn’t expect it was Christopher who was poorly, Martin was the one who was always tripping over his own feet. He once fell off his skateboard and they took him to hospital then, but it all worked out okay. Fully expecting to be told that the crisis had passed, he rang home. There was no answer. Len and Joan did not reply to the phone at their house either. Nigel rang his own father, who knew nothing.
‘It’s very early here.’
Nigel told the sergeant he was not too worried.
‘These things happen. It will be fine, I’m sure.’
They sat in the apartment kitchen while Nigel kept trying to call home without success, but the next person he spoke to was a squadron leader calling from RAF Innsworth in Gloucestershire, the management centre for the RAF, who said he had been tasked with getting Nigel home. That was alarming. They didn’t pay for a commercial ticket back to the UK without a good, urgent reason, particularly if you were the only person in your unit who could do your job during an important exercise.
‘All I can tell you at the moment is that Martin has collapsed and it is serious. The earliest I can get you out of Vegas is 07.45 hours tomorrow morning. You will have to stop over in Pittsburgh for three hours, then catch the Gatwick flight from there. It’s the quickest way. We’ll have a car at the airport to take you to Nottingham. We’ll get you to your son as fast as we can.’
Fine, thought Nigel, as he started to pack his two kit bags, alone again in his room, but why the massive rush? There must be something he was not being told. Something terrible.
Seven
Marc
The police car rode the hills like a speedboat on the waves. Pushed back into his seat by the force of it all, Norrie felt sick to the stomach and gripped the hand rest with fright. He didn’t dare look at the speedometer. They were plunging into deep space, with the blackness wrapping back around them in the rearview mirror. The ambulance was just about in their slipstream, but suddenly they were slowing down.
‘What’s up? What are we doing?’
‘This is England. We have to stop.’
The ambulance passed by at speed as they pulled over and Norrie was alarmed. ‘You’re not gonna let them leave me behind?’
‘No way. See?’
Another police car sat in the lay-by ahead, this time with the markings of the Northumberland Police. ‘Come on, Norrie, let’s get you swapped,’ the officer said as he grabbed the spare oxygen bottles out from the back seat, letting in a rush of cold air. Norrie quickly tried to climb in the back of the next car but the door wouldn’t open.
‘No, Jock,’ said the driver, an Englishman on his own in the car. ‘You sit up front with me.’ Norrie would have got cross if anyone else had called him Jock, but he wasn’t going to argue with the only man who could get him to his son. The ambulance had disappeared over the hill but the driver saw him looking after it and grinned. ‘Don’t worry, Jock, we’ll catch them.’
What happened next was a shock, says Norrie. ‘I swear it was like being in a plane. We nearly took off. I thought, “My god, he’s bombing it!”’
They had been going fast before, north of the border, but this was something else and it made Norrie laugh. He was getting hysterical with the grief, the stress and the fear, but he was elated, too – they were doing something for Marc at last, going somewhere fast, getting the best help they could. At least they were trying, all these people – the doctors, the nurses, the paramedics, the cops – all on his son’s side. They were hurtling through the dark again now, but he knew they were heading down through the open country of the Northumberland National Park. ‘I could see the ambulance far off in front, but there were hills, so the tail lights would pop up red in the distance then they’d disappear.’
The lights started to get closer but Norrie suddenly began to feel really sick.
‘Are you all right?’ The driver must have heard him groan.
‘Not really. Can I have a cigarette, to settle my nerves?’
‘What? No, pal. You’re in a police car!’ The driver was concentrating on the road but he must have thought about his passenger and how there would be nobody else to clear up the sick, because he changed his mind. ‘Special circumstances? All right, you can.’
The window next to Norrie opened just a crack and the wind raged in his ear, but it was clear what he was expected to try and do. So he lit his fag, took a drag, craned his neck and tried to blow smoke out of the window. They were going at more than 100 miles an hour. The wind blew the smoke back in his eyes and the ash in his mouth, all over his face. The driver laughed. ‘Nice one, Jock.’
Norrie laughed too, high on adrenaline. It felt like seconds before they were in among houses and street lights again and the shop signs suggested they were on the edge of Newcastle, where two other patrol cars joined them. ‘My mates are going to play tag,’ said the driver, meaning that one car would race ahead and block off the road for the ambulance to pass through, then the other would accelerate away to the next junction to do the same. ‘I felt like I was in a movie,’ says Norrie, who had never seen such driving. Jock or not, he was grateful. ‘I couldn’t thank those guys enough for what they did that night.’
Still, when they got to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle the distractions of the drive fell away and he was hit again by the full force of what was happening to his son. Norrie expected to walk into the hospital and be told that Marc was dead, but there was nobody there to meet them. The English policeman led the way up the stairs, but as they were going up he saw the doctor and nurses who had ridden with the ambulance coming towards him. There were four women and the older man, the medic he recognised from before, looking exhausted now. The man’s face was wet with tears, and Norrie felt a rush of despair, as he realised what that meant. It had all been in vain. Marc had not made it.